I said that addressing the imminent collapse is the first aim. I would never say it is the most important aim, only the most urgent. Triage says you address the most immediately threatening wounds first. The cancer you have may kill you more certainly than the bleeding gash in your leg, but you address the gash before the cancer.
Perhaps I have not made myself clear.
I am a believer in morality. If you do not share my moral world-view, stop reading now because I'm definitely not going to persuade you. In my worldview, when legislators (and voters) vote - for example - to ban marijuana, then - effectively, 51% [or 90%, I don't care] - are pointing a gun at the people who do want to consume it, and threatening them with violence. We live in a society with a free press. The people who do this are morally complicit.
They share the moral responsibility. Because they know - after all, it is not a secret - and they keep doing it. It is not like we live in a society where the prisons for drug users, and dealers, and the brothel owners, and the sawed-off-shotgun owners are secret.
The nine-to-five working, black-tie-wearing, middle-class fellow who voted for McCain (or whatever equivalent to McCain exists in the British, French, and Japanese political systems) is morally responsible for what is happening. The fellow's parents who voted for Johnson over Goldwater are morally responsible for what is happening. The fellow's grandparents who voted for FDR are morally responsible for what is happening.
You want me to focus my entire effort on figuring out the debt obligations (every Western country has massive debt obligations) created before I was born by the people who gave us - in America, the NFA, in Israel the Firearms Licensing Act, in Europe - the European Union? Because there might be an economic crisis? Rather than on the fact that
innocent people are in prison? Please understand: In my view it is as moral for the state to imprison people who refuse to obey its ban on attaching shoelaces to semi-automatic rifles as it is for a bank robber to shoot a teller because they refuse to open the vault.
The very
point of libertarianism is that it is a
political and moral system revolving around individual liberty. If it were about settling the national debt it would be called debtarianism. Therefore, the primary moral role of the libertarian is to oppose violations of individual liberty.
This is, thus, my only and primary moral role. I am opposed to the monetary system as it exists because it helps maintain control over every individual's bank account, and create money to fund the prisons and judges and enforcers. But the system would be as evil if it balanced its books.
So there's going to be a default? So the black-tie-wearing middle-class fellow is going to be unemployed for a few years before the economy gets itself back on track*? There is such a thing as payback.
These people built a system around a series of tiny regulations, and laws, and rules, all of them seeking to encourage us to be only one thing: little tie-wearing drones, working the nine-to-five and arguing what we're supposed to be afraid of. They've encouraged this system. They siced the governemnt on people who owned a gun that was of the wrong type, smoked the wrong grass, made the wrong food, tried to steal our children for schools that would make them into more tie-wearing drones. Because of people exactly like these, I live in a place where I cannot own a rifle, cannot carry a knife, cannot go shopping without having people pat me down. The exact list of indignities is different where you live but it still exists. In Europe there's still another list of indignities. It doesn't matter.
And now their system is running out of steam and they might be out of a job? Why do they not deserve it? Is it not the form in which God - if there is a God - makes justice on their system, with its truancy officers, with its reporters, with its SWAT cops and chain gangs and whatever other form of violence there exists against the human spirit and dignity?
Let me put it to you in the most honest and brutal form I can:
I hate them all. I look into the eyes of the reporter, the pundit, the economist, the politician, every single person who holds a position of power. The more power you have, the more moral responsibility you have.
They have created this system, they have run it off the cliff pedal-to-the-metal. It does not deserve to be saved, nor do I care if it is saved. It is evil and immoral. They are evil and immoral.
I care about the political struggle inasmuch as it is a political struggle of liberty versus slavery. If tomorrow a politician wins who fixes the budget and maintains the system, I have won nothing. If they deregulate some minor industries around the corners (for a while), and enough economic growth has been generated to take them back from the brink (as I think they will) I have won nothing.
That's all I am here for. And if they do it wrong - if they miscalulate and they are taken, hurtling, to the abyss of economic disruption and 20% unemployment, and they lose their ties and second cars? Well, they have had it coming. The people they've hurt have had it worse.
*That's the worst thing that's going to happen. Anybody inventing ideas of civilization ending? they're just scaring you. Probably for profit.
