Here's something I thought of last night after I posted this diary:

One does not have degrees of anarchism. Either you support the existence of the state or you do not. The modern liberarian, or minarchist, will go right up to the edge but stop short of anarchy. This in many ways mirrors the relationship between the authoritarian socialist and the totalitarian communist, the former may allow for some freedom from the state in a few areas. The question is if you can really define where libertarianism begins on the other side--when is government intervention too much?

If you oppose the existence of a state, period, I think you have to be called anarchist. And I can see the value of a term for someone who favors a very limited state, but still a state, and I can see how that is commonly called "libertarian." As I've often said, borrowing from bloggers like Brad Spangler, the extreme anarchist is the new red, the moderate libertarian the new pink.

I had another thought about the spectrum on which to place anarchism and libertarianism. We can view anarchist as the absolute zero, no state. Libertarianism is some degree of the state, primarily to protect the individual from others who wish to invade his or her rights-theft, murder, etc. etc.

As we add more and more state intervention, we get two forms of state intervention. On the one hand, you have the "Thou shalt not" commandments that prevent an individual from doing something that supposedly harms themselves, not others. Like drug use, or eating fatty foods. You also have the "Thou shalt do" commandments that force an individual to do something, like the draft.

I don't know if it's possible to really calculate the precise line of where libertarianism ends and something that we can generically call "statism" begins, but when you start shifting telling people what they have to do, or start people that they can't do things that would hurt no one but themselves, you've left libertarianism.

Logan-

where would you put Nock who called himself and anarchist yet drew a distinction between the state and local governance as legitimate authority?

the state hands out privilege (law-based property) without any corresponding obligations to those being excluded to benefit class interest (landowners, bankers, capitalists, IP, etc.) which sanctify the plunder of the labor-based wealth of the excluded.

local governance as legitimate authority requires an obligation to those being excluded by privilege in order to uphold their absolute right of self-ownership.

in anarchy where all land is in private hands the landless will have a gun pointed at their head by private thugs to hand over the economic rent.

so FORCE can not be the issue!

the only issue is whether or not force is legitimate and just.

it is only legitimate and just to use force to protect the life, liberty and LABOR-based property of individuals.

requiring the sharing of economic rent in exchange for the privilege of exclusive use backed by force is just because it upholds the absolute right of self-ownership of those being excluded by the privilege.

it doesn't violate the absolute rights to self-ownership of the landowner because:

1. they don't produce the land via labor
2. they don't create the "unimproved" land value via their labor.
3. they don't pay to acquire land from the fruits of their labor because there is no purchase price to land.

where exactly is their absolute right of self-ownership being violated by being required to share the economic rent in exchange for the privilege of exclusive use of what starts out originally owned in common (land) as an INDIVIDUAL equal access opportunity right?

But it isn't true that local governance doesn't hand out privilege as well.

what makes local governance legitimate authority vs. the state is if the privileges that are handed out (we have to have exclusive use of land) have a corresponding OBLIGATION to those being excluded from what is rightfully their to occupy - the natural commons - in order to uphold their absolute right to the fruits of their labor and thus self-ownership itself.

bg

What prevents a national state from doing the same, privileges tied with obligations?

the obligation that is created for the privilege is administered at a local level because that is where the backing of the title by force is going to reside...the state national guard or the US military is not going to back your title.

I was getting some serious trackback spam that Drupal was unable to block, and to filter through it I have to delete each trackback individually, there's no way to "select all" to get through the hundreds of spam trackbacks I get. You have an interesting response, one I'm going to get to once I post some of my newer thoughts from today.

The collectivist question should not be up for consideration under the tent of libertarianism. Collective action is perfectly acceptable, in a voluntary, non-coercive manner; but this is not collectivism. For the most part, Proudhon had it right. Collective ownership or collective decision-making is not the answer. As for the statist-individualist question, we need to determine whether we are discussing normative or descriptive theory. Normatively, the state is indefensible because it is (again) non-voluntary in nature. As Logan suggested, from a descriptive standpoint, one may choose to use the state because it is the appropriate decision at the time (given that the state already exists) and it is well within that person's rights to do so. Disclaimer: my points were borrowed heavily from Roderick Long since his views are very much in line with my own.

Anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and the like, are they "collectivist" even though they are non-coercive and anarchist?

I think you're getting at that they are collectivist, even though non-coercive, but they aren't libertarian. Individualist ideologies, be they the anti-state anarchism or the statist classical liberalism, have the possibility of voluntary, non-coercive collective action, but they do not rest much of their ideology on such activities.

I'm viewing the statist-anarchist spectrum as a spectrum in which anarchist is absolute zero, while libertarianism is everything up to that absolute zero, with a fuzziness as to when it starts.

many people on the left and right mix this two up!

common ownership is an individual equal access opportunity right that does not require prior approval to access/use but only is conditional upon infringing upon any other indivdual's equal rights to the same...if the economic rent as an obligation in exchange for exclusive use is retained in common, then it has to be collected and distributed to the individual neighbors within a local community (directly and equally).

collective ownership is a group right (or joint) where one needs to get permission from all of the other joint owners (consensus) prior to access or use and when the authority is delegated to representatives (elected or otherwise) the right inevitably becomes unequal.

If someone has reason to think that's wrong, I'd like to hear it. That sounds quite obvious to me.

Sometimes it helps to state the obvious so it is easier to understand why "libertarian" means what it does in today's American culture.

What did classical liberals feel was the best role for the military, proactive or defensive? Is there a classical liberal concensus on the question at all?

Is there a classical liberal position on antitrust law?

How about environmental law?

Without knowing better what you mean by "classical liberal," it is tough to say whether libertarianism is similar to it or not.

Sfranklin - I think you are asking the wrong question about classical liberals and defense. The classical liberals among out founding fathers answered the military question when they gave the power to declare war explicitly to the legislature, not the executive - making the use of force a popular decision. I'm perfectly fine with the United States initiating war, as long as Congress is willing to make the call on when it starts and stops and Americans are willing to hold their legislators accountable. These two factors act as organizational bulwarts against the potential for wars of choice.

The problem is that the two factors listed above have almost completely broken down. Even though Congress effectively abdicated its role as war arbiter when it passed the War Powers Act, it still had tactic control over the use of force because it held DOD purse strings. During the Cold War, anti-communist rhetoric made it near impossible to oppose policies promulgated by the Defense Department because politicians learned how use that against one another for political gain. This constitutes a defacto hand-off of power to the executive and it is a really threat to the future of America.

Other than that, I would say a classic liberal is willing to accept limited regulation of markets and the commons, but generally only to prevent harm. I will leave it up to Logan to characterize this notion better, I'm just the foreign policy/defense guy.

What did / would John Locke have said about the taking of land from Native Americans in the United States?

What was the classical liberal position on what the Europeans did in Africa, militarily, in the 1800s?

I am not asking about the procedure or procedural safeguards, or the democracy aspects. Rather, I am asking whether classical liberals thought these kinds of military activities were just and otherwise cool. Maybe they simply had no opinion on that kind of thing, or no concensus. However, if there was a mainstream classical opinion on aggressive use of the military, then I am curious as to what it was.

First, I imagine Rohrabacher's erratic political behavior and flip-flopping on the Taliban in the 1990s is the reason why most libertarians keep their distance. He was incredibly naive to think that the muhjahdeen or the Taliban would continue to serve U.S. interests once they pushed the Soviets and the Afghan monarchy out.

Second, I dispute your claim that Rohrabacher is the founder of some notional "modern libertarian movement." He may have been involved in relative popularization of libertarian politics during the era of Goldwater's presidential campaign, but wasn't the birth of American libertarianism.

Where would politicians like Rohrabacher and Goldwater have been without Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom? Heck, the entire Chicago school of libertarian economic thought had been churning for nearly 20 years before 1966.