Achieving freedom: part one how not to achieve freedom

1. CTIR Literature Series 3 Achieving freedom: part one how not to achieve freedom

2. Founders intended to create a system to restrain the “terrible master” (government). Checks and balances = failure. problem

3. Triple threat • Political action; • Academic education; and • Religious partnership.

4. If average citizen smart and motivated enough = natural democracy would limit state. If only Ron Paul could win! Political action

5. Academic education • If knowledge of the free market can be understood, researched, and communicated clearly, citizens will support limiting the state.

6. “Religious faith is the very bedrock of the anti-government movement.” • Ron Paul = fundamentalist Christian who rejects evolution; • Mises Institute = Catholic; • Bob Barr = fundamentalist Christian. Religious partnership

7. Political action

8. Real money in libertarian circles from religion. • Americans gave $93 billion to religious organizations in 2005. • “If the funding of libertarian groups increases as the size of the state increases, then we can reasonably assume that those who run libertarian groups are actually being paid to increase the size of the state.” • NOT intended; but people respond to incentives. Common theme: money

9. Rejects theoretical proclamations. Supports tangible, real world empirical evidence. Libertarianism

10. Reduce the size and power of state. • Tens of millions devoted time and money in supporting the goal. • Over $20 million for Ron Paul presidential run. • Never completed. • Indeed, it achieves the exact opposite. ITS goal

11. Two methods used to get money: • Ron Paul will win! • But if not, opportunity to educate. The Ron paul run “sleazy pattern”

12. Politics = polite violence. “We should use violence to reduce the growth of violence”?! Use violence to fight violence?

13. Becomes president, decides to privatize Post Office, with majority support. • Unions will stage protests. • “Society as a whole will shut down.” • What if they choose not to leave? • Will force be used? What about politics? Images? • What about the contracts? • Are all government contracts void? • Economic crisis! • = The end of libertarianism for centuries! How does a libertarian president reduce government coercion?

14. Attempting to control the power mechanism of government to work against its purpose. • If done, AT LEAST do it locally. Test it out! • Maybe invade the KKK, and use it to promote multiculturalism. Infiltration

15. Concerned about liberty; he feels unfree. “Choosing to project his lack of freedom onto society as a whole.” The average libertarian

16. Academic education

17. If education is paramount, why are there no tests or surveys to determine its success? • Never done! • What about the people it turned off? NO Testing!

18. Goal = to preach free market economics. • But he uses the “violent and corrupt environment” of the university (a “coercive monopoly”). • Gets salary NOT from students, but from approval of other academics and politicians. • If so, then couldn’t the government spread this message? If just the right people were put in place? Academics

19. I didn’t invent it. But couldn’t other special interest groups say the same thing? If you teach others to “voluntarily forgo the evil material advantages of state power”, you must live it. Go on strike! But it’s the system!

20. “Education alone breeds neither virtue nor integrity – but, almost inevitably, stimulates only the corrosive spectacle of pompous hypocrisy.” If a parent screams at child: “Don’t yell at others,” he is discrediting that advice through action. Do as I say, not as I do

22. “When a man claims to dedicate his life to the pursuit and dissemination of virtue, and is criticized for moral hypocrisy – and the charge sticks – he is degraded to a far lower ethical position than if he had never entered into the arena of moral philosophy in the first place.” Hypocrisy

23. If A wants to be a professor, he must kiss ass to get to the “Holy Grail of tenure.” • Tenure = “unjust privilege of a statist monopoly.” • Once given the unjust privilege, A will use it to get more power from the state. • “Six figure salaries, no shortage of time off, a dozen or so hours of classes a week…almost impossible to get fired.” • But must sell their souls! Kiss the ring

24. Price can NOT be ascertained in the presence of a coercive monopoly. • Don’t use the state. • Academics should “submit their goods and services to the iron discipline of the free market.” • Freedomain radio successful! • “Even freer market.” • “Hypocrites have been the scourge of mankind since its inception.” • If you use the state, “shut up about the free market…You are an embarrassment.” Free Market applied to academics

25. “If people know enough about the free market, they will reject statist solutions and pursue free market solutions.” • But the “very existence of free market academics utterly destroys this premise.” • It rejects free market solutions to education. The failure of the academic approach

26. “Even if everyone in the world got a PhD in free market economics, the world would only become less free, since an advanced degree in Austrian economics only promotes the pursuit of state unions and the evil protection of an unjust monopoly.”

27. Religious partnership

28. Since its inception, libertarianism, “has been tightly wed to – and dependent upon – the financial support of fundamentalist Christian religious organizations.” Christian fundamentalists believe “government should be limited because there is no authority but God.” The witch doctors have all the money

29. Premises: • Intellectual integrity demands that we attempt to derive conclusions from principles and rational arguments. • Conclusions: • “A smaller state is better” is a conclusion, NOT indication of knowledge. • “If you can teach a parrot to say it, it cannot be considered knowledge.” Premises and conclusions

30. Only benefits the least rational. • “At the expense of that which is higher, more logical, more noble, more honorable, more true.” • “A noble woman who marries a corrupt and vicious man does not elevate him; she only debases herself – or rather, reveals her own unconscious corruption.” The Tragedy of compromise

31. “Religion…is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder – which forms around the fears of abandonment and punishment that children experience if they dare to question the superstitions of their elders.” PTSD = Religion

32. “No rational moralist can demand of others that which he is not willing to do himself.” • Give up financial benefits received from state. • But refuse to give up financial benefits they receive from religion. • Give up illusions about state. • But refuse to give up illusions about religion. • Needs the illusions to feel loved. • “A man becomes interested in the love of ghosts because he feels fundamentally unlovable as he is – the reality is that he cannot be loved.” Failure to act

33. Both are cults. • “Exploit people’s desire for freedom and virtue for the sake of money, saying whatever is necessary to get that money.” • Fraud! Worse, “moral fraud.” • “To sell the hope of real freedom in the future for the sake of petty riches in the present.” Libertarianism = christianity

34. Root causes

35. “A man cannot be responsible for knowledge he does not yet possess.” • If NOT know about NAP, no problem! Gray Area

36. “The first step to doing something is to recognize that we are in fact doing less than nothing.” “If I can at least get you to not join the post office, I have certainly done something worthwhile.” Solutions

37. Why is it so universally rejected? • Because libertarians accept the superstition of religion. Taxation equals force (TEF)

38. Three basic principles: • “Early childhood experiences have an enormous impact on personality and brain development; • Significant aspects of the mind remain unavailable to our conscious ego (the unconscious); and • Constantly avoiding or repressing your own thoughts and feelings results in bad mental health.” Psychology

39. Understanding the difference between who you are and what everything else is. “The slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is.” Example – “patriotism is a collective delusion – the theft of the pride of virtue through the accident of geography.” Self knowledge

40. “Maturity demands that when we do not know the answer to a question, we state with direct honest: ‘I do not know.’” • NOT a religious approach. • “Muuuuch easier to just cash in all those juicy Christian checks and go write another useless article about the Fed.” I don’t know

41. Thank you!!!