Alternet Offers Up More Drivel on Firefighters Fee Story, Attacks Libertarians

Chris | InformationLiberation
Oct. 05, 2010

Alternet's Joshua Holland responded to my piece on how idiot liberals are twisting the firefighters story.

Deeper in the fever swamp, “Chris,” an “an anarcho-capitalist and voluntarist,” writes that ”Idiot Liberals” — linking to yours truly — are “[Twisting the] Story of Firefighters Letting House Burn Down Over Unpaid $75 Dollar Fee.”

[...Quotes from me saying how government taxes are through the barrel of a gun... - Chris]
Yes, it was a government-run fire department making you pay for all the services you need for protection, so it can’t be anything at all like “a libertarian society where you pay for all the services you need for protection.” And the “taxed at gunpoint” line is always an entertaining bit of melodrama. Fun fact: if you don’t pay your taxes, you get a letter in the mail informing you that your wages will be garnished or a lein [sic] is being placed on your property. No guns involved!

Tell me Joshua, what happens if you don't go along with your wages being garnished and you don't go along with the lien being placed on your property? As one poster said, do you think the police will come to your house with muffin baskets?

The government goons would kill you if you resist, and they'd do it with a righteous moral indignation. That's the reality you'd love to avoid. I wouldn't pay one dime to this government if the penalty wasn't being thrown in a cage or murdered. Because they do threaten me with guns, I pay them their protection money like a good little sheep pays the local mafia.

I also go [sic] an email from someone over at LewRockwell.com (who focuses on the sorrows of empire, and whose work I like), insisting that, “in a real free market … no provider of services would sacrifice any potential customer.” I felt the need to explain that according to the libertarian ideal, they’d have no choice but to let the fires of those who didn’t pay the piper burn out of control, or they’d create a market-busting case of moral hazard.

Ah, the old moral hazard defense. I guess because there would be a minor contradiction we need to have a state with goons running everything. In a free market, everything would be cheaper because services would be based off actual demand. Instead of a monopolist government deciding how much protection everyone needs, private individuals would buy services from competing agencies based off actual demand.

Take the war in Iraq, which Joshua at least used to write about voluminously, it never would have happened if people actually had to pay for it. Instead, the government says they'll subsidize the whole war and we're trillions in the hole with seemingly no end in sight. Instead of paying for it directly through taxation, we pay for it through inflation because the government just prints the money up. That's the miraculous self-regulation of the monopolist government, and Joshua wonders why things are so bad!

Interestingly, Joshua Holland neglected to link to my article despite linking to everyone else. I guess he doesn't want his readers to actually get the whole story, he only wants them to get one out of context quote, yours truly of course linked directly to his whole article in order for people to laugh at it. Our logic can stand up to scrutiny. Our principles apply across the board. Don't steal, don't kill. That's libertarianism. Statists think stealing is fine so long as you ascribe good intentions to it. Then they wonder why they're living under a repressive regime where they're merely pawns in the game.

The reality is, in our libertarian society, Joshua would be free to live under a benevolent dictator whom his neighbors voted to rule over him. If he wanted to be forced at gunpoint to pay taxes, he could voluntarily contract to be under such a police state.

Yet in Joshua's utopia, we libertarians, who want only the freedom to be left alone, are forbidden from moving out into the woods and being left to live or die by ourselves.

Why?

Because if a state allowed even one person to live freely without taxes, more people would follow. Soon, every company in the world would relocate so they could keep the products of their labor. There would be the biggest capital migration the world has ever seen, all to our little plot in the woods! The state would be starved of taxes and it's empire would collapse. That's why statists hate freedom and can't stand the idea some people want to merely be left alone. They need to keep up the myth the state is providing us all services voluntarily, "no guns involved!"
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Chris is an anarcho-capitalist and voluntarist who runs the website InformationLiberation.com. He links to his sources because he is actually capable of defending his principles. You can read more of his commentary here.