5 things that can greatly help jumpstart the libertarian revolution.
Let’s go over 5 things that can greatly help jumpstart the libertarian revolution.
- Identify the real “enemy”. Massive economic ignorance and act accordingly.
- Ideas spread based on many factors like how viral they are which includes things like how motivated to spread them people become once they stumble upon them and realize their importance. There are two key concepts that are extremely important and have huge viral potential and should be as efficiently and passionately spread as possible, they are 1) a basic understanding of inflation and 2) the vital importance of economic competition and the role that freedom plays in it.
Inflation is easy to teach and understand, and places the focus and blame on the FED/ ‘central bank’ which is obviously the biggest enabler of all the government damage and militarism we have. If 10 people in an island each have ten dollars so there is a total of $100, can anything sell for $200? Of course not, because even if they all combine their money the transaction can’t take place. What if each person has 1 million so there are now 10 million in total. Can something now sell for $200 or $1 million? Yes. So what is obviously needed for prices to rise, more money. Who creates the money that allows this, the FED. The very fact that most libertarians know this is a testament to the viralness and power of this simple idea. It seems like the perfect initial bit of info which can get people to open their minds so that the rest of the econogospel can transform them. AND THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT HENRY HAZLITT ADVISED US TO FOCUS ON!
“This brings me, finally, to one more single issue on which all those libertarians who lack the time or background for specialized study can effectively concentrate. This is in demanding that the government provide an honest currency, and that it stop inflating.
This issue has the inherent advantage that it can be made clear and simple because fundamentally it is clear and simple. All inflation is government made. All inflation is the result of increasing the quantity of money and credit; and the cure is simply to halt the increase.
If libertarians lose on the inflation issue, they are threatened with the loss of every other issue. If libertarians could win the inflation issue, they could come close to winning everything else. If they could succeed in halting the increase in the quantity of money, it would be because they could halt the chronic deficits that force this increase. If they could halt these chronic deficits, it would be because they had halted the rapid increase in welfare spending and all the socialistic schemes that are dependent on welfare spending. If they could halt the constant increase in spending, they could halt the constant increase in government power.”
Economic competition turns every brain in the social order into parts of a global supercomputer which motivates everyone to both innovate and to copy the innovations of others thus helping spread superior knowledge and order through society. Why do BMW, Ford and Honda continuously strive to innovate and copy innovations from each other as best as they can? Because the public is FREE to choose among competing alternatives. Freedom is what “turns on” economic competition which in turn leads to the creation and spread of superior knowledge and order throughout society. As cost-cutting ideas emerge leading prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas arise and spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation/innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. Due to our tribal nature and maladapted social concepts, when we think of competition we think of the “I win, you lose” tribal world. But competition in our modem market-process-coordinated world is not a battle that harms people, it is a battle between ideas and ways of doing things, and the winners get to guide our actions in the most productive and technologically advanced way for our benefit. Governments are MONOPOLIES which are immune from competitive knowledge discovery so they are inefficiently ordered leading to increasing waste and destruction of wealth and prosperity. Government regulations are knowledge, which unlike the superior knowledge which arises through competition and is constantly being replaced/refined in the voluntary/competitive/private sector, it arises in a central bureaucracy and is then forced upon the entire social order via the law, and can only be changed slowly via lawyers, lobbyist, etc. The more the government regulates, the more it paralyzes competitive knowledge discovery which helps explain why progress and competition move so fast in the relatively unregulated IT/Software sector, and so slow in the heavily regulated/paralyzed healthcare sector. In IT there is no American Medical Association-like central planning bureaucracy dictating what knowledge people must learn and at what institutions to be IT pros, no central planning bureaucracy like the FDA dictating how to test software… Hardly any central planning thus paralyzing, so competitive knowledge discovery and subsequent order evolves at breakneck speeds. With our focus on ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ we have a relatively simple and yet profound way of understanding how the social order is built and the key role that freedom plays in “turning on” the market process, which in turn is what truly coordinates/creates the social order instead of the top-down paralyzing/consumptive bureaucracies the economically clueless public believes. It is very simple. If it is superior knowledge we are after, the only way to get it in our modern market-process-coordinated world is via economic competition which requires FREEDOM.
3) Ensure that there is a passionate individual who is well versed in the econogospel running in every political office! Join the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus which will help put such a person in every race (I hope). With thousands of mini-Ron Pauls or mini-Miseses spread out across the country AND world (a simple online database to learn about every misesian running for office in every election in the world), positioning themselves where people look and all the free electoral publicity… So many beacons of econogospel will bring enlightenment to the entire world in one election cycle. In 2008/12 we painted America Ron Paul. Regardless of whether you are a Randian, or Rothbardian, or Hayekian or Hoppean, etc. There is one man, a sort of common root whom we all love, upon whose shoulders we all stand on whose charming face we should paint the entire planet with, Ludwig von Mises.
“Less Marx More Mises!” It also helps that he is Jewish! :-) Which will come in very handy when our growing austro-libertarian revolution and its strong respect for freedom, fanatical anti-war position, and real history inevitably collides with dangerous ideologues over the Israeli/Palestinian issue.
4) We should network to try to reach and educate famous people. If we can make austro-libertarians out of famous stars like a LeBron or Kobe, rappers, etc…. Perhaps set intellectual bounties. If just 10,000 people pledge to give $10 to whoever can make a huge megastar a passionate libertarian that would create a huge incentive for this to happen. We could use some kind of intellectual online guerrilla. We can also try to fish people high up in industries, many of the world’s top software pioneers like Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto are misesians. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin is also a huge fan of Austrian Economics “I thought Austrian economics was like the world” We could be just a small coordinated effort from a massive IT coordinated intellectual Coup d’état that can quickly transform the world.
5) Shun, ostracize, disassociate with, and if violating private property norms, physically remove anyone who arrogantly attempts to make the case that other human beings who are intelligent enough to learn something as difficult and complex as a human language, are somehow incapable of appreciating and feverishly working towards a libertarian order. I’m sort of kidding here, these people should just be persuaded to focus on the econogospel and overcome the race-realist and other related fallacies which currently drive their thinking.
