Power

Power

The fundamental difference between zeroth positionists and third positionists is how we believe power ought to be structured and applied. The state power structure that zeroth positionists favor is decentralized and competitive. The structure that third positionists favor is centralized and monopolistic. The application of state power that zeroth positionists favor is limited primarily to the keeping of the peace. Third positionists oppose limits on the capacity of the state to intervene in the peaceful affairs of others. What follows is an explanation of why the zeroth positionist model of power is imperative for the nation.

In arguing against zeroth positionism third positionists often assert “there has always been a state and always will be”. As the introduction makes clear, however, the argument is not about whether the existence of states is the norm, it is about how they ought to to be structured and apply power. Their argument is one of fatalism, a naturalistic fallacy in the raiment of argument from the authority of antiquity. Let us temporarily define “state” in the way that third positionists (and all non-libertarians) functionally do: A national-scale organization with a monopoly in the industry of security, which we libertarians identify as a protection racket. Perhaps such states have always existed. That does not mean they always will, and even if they will that does not mean we should not resist their criminality however we can. As it happens, their premise is false, not only under their own definition of a state but under any definition, false in history, false in the present, and false in future plausibility.

Almost the entirety of humanity’s existence as a species has been in a condition of anarchy, which is defined here as absence of formal law or formal institutions of law enforcement. It was in such a condition that whites came into being, while it was not until the rise of the state that jews did, so from a purely survivalist standpoint the state is not an obvious essential. The state’s emergence may have coincided with the rise of civilization, but given the nature of statism described in detail further on, it was the abundance of civilization that made statism possible in that parasitism cannot exist without a host. Both the Indo-Europeans and the panoply of peoples they conquered (mostly other Europeans) had states, however, the Indo-Europeans’ succcess owed to both the innate superiority of their people and also that their state was less statist than those of their conquests. The United States of America were founded with one of the smallest states in history and America experienced its period of greatest growth, dynamism, and heroism when it remained small. It was during the period of statist consolidation of the Progressive Era that America began to go into decline, and now the moribund empire is run by the one of the largest and most predatorily statist states in history. Most of mankind, in fact, did not experience regular tax collection until the the 17^th century A.D (Scott 2017). In state of anarchy there was still tribal hierarchy of course, but of relatively low power distance. The leader of the tribe was almost always known personally to all tribesmen, which created a good measure of accountability. Accountability means the degree to which leaders were incentivized to protect rather than violate the property norm. The property norm is the value judgment that peaceful resolution to problems of scarcity is preferable to violently aggressive resolutions. This norm is not an exclusively human value either; other apes such as chimpanzees display a sense of it developed to the point where one will refrain from swiping food perceived to be in the possession of another, even if that other is a subordinate individual (Kummer 1990). This gives lie to the third positionist claim that the property norm is something that can only exist with a state to protect it. Here it must be noted that the very way in which they define a state is one that necessitates violation of the property norm, so at best they can try to claim that some amount of violation is necessary to prevent greater violation. That which defines third positionism is not the view, however, of a statist minarchist who believes that a state should commit violent aggression only to fund its enforcement of laws protecting property and contract, but the view that any amount of violent aggression against anyone is justified as long as it serves a “national interest”.

The third positionist concept of “national interest” or “common good” smuggles in subjective and parochial desires (such as Hitler’s hysterical hatred of smoking) for the nations’ aims with the objective interest of protecting the nation’s property holdings. The latter is what the zeroth position limits the state to, rejecting the anti-concept of “common good” in favor of a “common bad” that all well-adjusted people of a nation seek to protect themselves from, which is violations of the property norm. The fascist combination of subjectivity and unlimited state power results in the “national interest” being merely whatever those in control of the state say it is. All manner of skullduggery may therefore be perpetrated just by saying the magic words “national interest”, especially when a jingoistic spin may be put on it. Unaccountable militarism and protectionism, which benefit a handful of the state’s corporate cronies at the expense of the nation as a whole, are prime examples. Even it we make the unrealistic assumption that a polity premised on the third positionist concept of national interest is free from graft, the more fundamental problem with their concept is its subjectivity itself. The fact is that within even an ethnically homogeneous nation there will always be wildly different aims as to what the nation should aspire to. Should it have a space program? If so how ambitious of one? Should it be isolationist or imperialist? If the latter should it seek to enslave or to uplift? Should there be an official national church or religion? If so which? When the state is a monopolistic decision-making apparatus the result is national squabble for control of that apparatus, which saps the nation of its strength. Third positionists reply to this contention with platitudes like “life is not peace; it is in struggle that men find purpose”. This ignores the problem of scarcity: The more resources brothers expend fighting one another the less they have to defend their country against their enemies. While struggle between various factions to increase their power and influence in society is inevitable, even healthful sometimes, the violence inherent to a monopolistic state specifically and the struggle for control thereof costs the nation a hugely unnecessary amount of blood and treasure.

Monopoly vs Sovereignty

A monopoly in the security industry is equated by statists with the concept of sovereignty, however there is a highly significant difference between these concepts. It is here we introduce some definitions of concepts that will be used throughout this article:

Power: The ability to make someone pay a price for defying your will. Physical force is one type of power that we call “hard power”. Soft power, like that which media, finance companies, and 4chan memesters wield, is all other power.

Government: A subset of total of hard power in society; the subset of the population that can systemically affect the behavior of that population with hard power. A state is the organized subset of government.

Sovereignty: Having enough power to impose a price for defiance of one’s will that no one is willing to pay.

Monopoly: The coercive suppression of competition.

There is clearly overlap between the concepts of sovereignty and monopoly in that defiance of someone’s will is a type of competition and that successful monopoly is sovereignty against competition. The crucial difference between them, however, is this: While sovereignty is total suppression of competition at the level of will itself using hard power, soft power, or some combination, monopoly is some degree of suppression of competition at the level of a certain industry using hard power alone. Whence the difference in the type of power employed? The reason is that monopoly is an economic concept, and in economics monopoly is said to be achieved when a firm is able to raise the price of its product by restricting output. If free competition exists however, it would be the price-raising firm that would go bankrupt because why would anyone pay one firm a higher price for a good they can get at lower one for the same good from any other firm? Because such a discrepancy represents increased profit opportunity for the non-price-raising firms, the only way to achieve a monopoly price is to forcibly bar competing firms from operating in the industry. Statism in its mechanical aspect is monopolization of the security industry on a national scale, which necessitates violently aggressive suppression of would-be competitors in that industry. Third positionists make specious arguments for the application of anti-trust law against alleged corporate monopolies while championing what is by far the most destructive monopoly in history, which is the modern state! The libertarian property norm, by contrast, is sovereignty over only that which is peacefully acquired. A nicely succinct definition of this norm, in fact, is: “non-aggressive sovereignty”. As mentioned in the immigration article, the libertarian property norm assigns to the homesteader absolute control of property so acquired to exclusion of all others in the world who want it, which can be considered a highly localized monopoly. To maintain this monopoly the homesteader seeks sovereignty over his property, as does any successor he authorizes. At the same time, however, he has no monopoly over property not his, and all industries in his society are not monopolized but competitive because a critical mass of the population is sovereign in their will to free competition. The Propertarian Eli Harman calls such a system a “distributed dictatorship of sovereign men”. Libertarians call it a “free society”.

No matter what we call it; zeroth positionists of all stripes recognize such a system as superior to a fascist one, and one reason for this is quite fundamental: The economic calculation problem. This problem was identified by Ludwig von Mises in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Mises showed that under a system where the property norm is weak, economic decision making is an exercise in futility. Economic decision-making is dependent on the price system, where prices provide signals as to how resources may be deployed in way that optimally satisfies wants and needs. The price system in turn depends on the freedom to transact, and freedom to transact depends on how well-defined property rights are. After all, why go to all the trouble of calculating a price for something when a customer can easily appropriate that good from you without paying, seeing as you have no special claim to control over that good’s disposal? Economist Jonathan Newman summarizes Mises’ thesis with this syllogism:

Without ownership, there is no exchange.

Without exchange, there are no prices.

Without prices, there is no economic calculation.

Without economic calculation, production decisions are made in the dark.

When that happens, basic needs go unmet.

Mises uses the extreme conditions of full-blown Marxist socialism to illustrate the extreme importance of property and the price system, however his intellectual heir Murray Rothbard recognized that the calculation problem was not limited to a fully socialist (i.e. economically monopolized) society but applied at the industry level as well (Man, Economy and State pg 613). In applying the problem at the industry level he showed that economic calculation was just as much of an obstacle to complete vertical integration of an industry (i.e. one firm operating the whole production chain, voluntarily or coercively, the latter being a monopoly) as for an entire economy. For a production market to function there must exist at least two firms whose production scope does not overlap for at least one of the production chain’s stages. This is because to set a price that efficiently allocates resources toward that stage, the producer at that stage must be able to compare the value of possessing their product with the value of obtaining something else for it that the producer does not currently possess. Put simply, there is no economic sense in selling something to yourself. Rothbard’s insight has a profound political implication: That statism (even “minarchist” statism) in its mechanical aspect of the security industry’s monopolization, is as such inherently inferior to competitive government for its inefficient resource allocation. What is profound about this is that it demolishes the notion that the only important determinant of the quality of a state is the moral character of its personnel. A monopolistic concern composed entirely of perfect angels cannot function as well as a competitive market for want of the essential price signals that only the latter can provide. With regard to third positionism in particular Rothbard’s insight is devastating to two of its tenets: (1) That national socialism is a completely different kind of socialism from Marxist socialism and that the problems of the latter do not apply also to the former. (2) That a homogeneous, high-quality population is a more important determinant of the quality of the state than the structure and policy of the state itself. Empirical data shows that degree of economic freedom is close to IQ in predicting economic output per capita (Fraser Institute 2023; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002). A popular anti-libertarian meme is sarcastic reference to Somalia during its period of statelessness as a “libertarian paradise”. This is debunked by the fact that Somalia in this period was safer and more prosperous compared both to before its state’s collapse and to its neighbors whose states remained. Ironically enough, the case of Somalia is an important reminder that even total anarchy is preferable to many instances of statism, especially the statism of today. Third positionists believe in effect, that having the “right” population or the “right” people in charge magically transmutes bad things the state does into good things. Not only does the calculation problem smash this notion to bits, one can make the argument that state tyranny is actually exacerbated when the state is composed of homogeneously high-IQ, high-trust people because they are cleverer, more cooperative, and more efficient in running their protection racket (for an instance of this on a smaller scale all one has to do is compare the jewish and Italian mafias). Andrew Anglin has pointed out that poor countries are significantly freer in a number of areas than rich ones because their states, despite their corruption and litany of oppressive and self-serving laws on the books, have few resources to actually enforce their racket. The bad things that a third positionist state does specifically will be addressed later in this article and critiqued in detail in later articles.

Competitive Government

Fortunately there exists a mechanism for peacefully resolving a nation’s subjective aspirations which is neither anarchy nor monopoly. It is competitive government. Competitive government is a system with strong historical precedent in the feudal monarchy of early Medieval Europe. A feudal king is the literal owner of the land he rules. In having the ability to sell his kingdom he is incentivized to be a good steward of it so as to increase its value. When many such kingdoms exist the king is made accountable to his subjects not only by the external economic incentive of a competitive marketplace in land but also by the internal pressure of his subjects themselves, because it is easier for them to escape as no subject is ever very far from from a border. Medieval Europe had a great many independent political units indeed, numbering in the thousands at the beginning of the second millennium (Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed pg 107). This is because the median kingdom size in such a marketplace will necessarily be small, which keeps power distance as described in the second paragraph relatively low. Even monopolistic states cannot rule indefinitely without a critical mass of consenting governed, and under competitive government this number is significantly lower. Monarchy’s explicit singularity of command provides additional accountability, as there is minimal ambiguity as to who is to blame when administration of the realm fails. This is in contrast to fascism, which, although autocracy has been a historical feature thereof, has substantial capacity to submerge blame in the expansive bureaucracy of the modern state. The latter feature is one that not only defines fascism but also differentiates it from other reactionary worldviews.

Liberals and third positionists are incidentally correct that monarchy per se by no means guarantees good governance. Monarchy describes a state structure, but describes nothing about the state’s activities, i.e. whether or not it behaves monopolistically and what types of policies it enforces. The optimal polity is one that many libertarians call “stateless”, although what they mean precisely by this is a non-monopolistic state. Multiple societies closely approximating this have existed and thrived in the past; the most notable examples being Breghun Ireland, Saga Iceland, and the American Old West. Each provides compelling examples of how core governmental services such as dispute adjudication, law enforcement, and national defense can be provided on a bottom-up rather than top-down basis. Breghun Ireland had non-sovereign kings whose role was limited to presiding over the tuath (an association of free men) in its assembly and leading it in war. Separate from this was a legal system of professional jurists called filid who handed down law and their jurisprudence as a hereditary oral tradition and worked in tandem with surety guarantees from ordinary citizens to hold one another to their contracts and punish wrongdoers (Peden 1971). Saga Iceland’s highest authority was an assembly of chieftains who provided law enforcement and dispute resolution not with taxation but on a fully fee-for-service basis with no territorial exclusivity for any individual. Saga Iceland was a shorter-lived society than Breghun Ireland but it still lasted for more than 300 years, and it was only when taxation in the form of a mandatory church tithe was introduced that the competitive governance system eroded and the country collapsed into civil war. The American Old West had a tribunal system of criminal justice under which violent crime rates were lower than in the eastern half of the country, which is especially impressive considering how transient much of its population was at the time. Medieval Europe on the whole, on top of the competitive monarchical feature described in the previous paragraph, had other features that set it far enough apart from the modern state to be considered effectively stateless. Breghun Ireland was far from alone in limiting the power of the king to that of an enforcer, rather than an issuer of law. Neither the king nor the nobility had the power to unilaterally expropriate their subjects (McIlwain 367). Law itself was polycentric; the church, universities, and guilds had their own systems of law, and each these institutions were weighty centers of power in their own right, serving as both a check on the power of the king and on one another. This horizontal array supported each tier in the society’s well-stratified vertical array: the king, nobility, knights, vassals, and serfs. This system is an example of a naturally tiered society as described by the Dutch political philosopher Johannes Althusius, whose work is a rebuke of his statist contemporary Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes envisions society as a monocentric system in which a sovereign state rules over a largely non-differentiated mass of subjects. In essence, a two-tiered array resembling a millstone rolling around a wheat field rather than being integrated into a serviceable mechanism in the millhouse. The Hobbesian model is of course that of third positionism. The insufficiency with which third positionism recognizes societal differentiation and the problems resulting from this will be dealt with later in this article.

Third positionists reply that a similar system cannot/ought not be instituted because “that was then and this is now; those societies don’t exist anymore.” So what though? Countless more statist societies have come and gone as well, and their ends have been much bloodier and more destructive than those of any of the societies mentioned above. In confusing proximity to the status quo with realism about what is beneficial third positionists commit a categorical error, as the superiority of competitive government is not particular to any time or culture, but derives directly from universals of the human condition such as scarcity and corruptibility. In confusing such proximity with desirability they commit another naturalistic fallacy. The modern state is the necessary institutional engine of white genocide and its other abuses in combination are just as monstrous. There is no sane option for government that is not radically different from the status quo; our radicalism as zeroth positionists is what recommends us to take over when the modern regime collapses. We should not accept the third positionists’ implication that there is little in the present day and age to support competitive and unobtrusive government either, however. Even though most of us live under the largest states in history today, the portion of our lives we spend interacting with it directly is still quite small. When we do it is almost invariably unpleasant, and in relatively recent history was at least as unpleasant for those who opposed the considerable excesses of German National Socialism or Italian Fascism. The US Federal Government is the largest state in history yet under it there are, according to Dr. Bryan Caplan, still more private security personnel than there are police officers. People overwhelmingly opt for private arbitration over government courts when given the chance. The most prosperous and pleasant places to live today are small countries with limited governments such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Liechtenstein is almost a fully libertarian state (Liechtenstein Constitution, Paragraph 2 of Article 4). An instance of competitive government can be seen in the tax havens such as Monaco, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands which provides a check on larger states looting their most productive holders of capital. The documentary The Monopoly on Violence cites two locations in the world that are currently similar to the aforementioned “stateless” societies of the past. These include the hill country in southeast Asia, where the people who fled the state-dominated lowlands have largely prevented the formation of anything close to a monopoly state where they live now. The people of Churan, Mexico abolished all political parties and disbanded the police. Thanks to concealed carry, crime was well-deterred following this, and in 2014 the Mexican supreme court ruled their arrangement constitutional.

Some third positionists ignore the fact that zeroth positionists do not wish to replicate feudal monarchy or other competitive systems exactly as they were but implement a similar system enhanced by developments in technology and political philosophy. One such system was proposed by Curtis Yarvin in Patchwork when he wrote under the screen name of Mencius Moldbug. In this system civilization comprises tens or even hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous polities (Yarvin’s term is “patches”), whose states (“realms”), while sovereign, are also pure profit-maximizing entities whose revenue is solely the taxes upon their realm’s properties. Under such a system there is neither the pretense of the state being anything but a corporation¹ nor the pretense of any “national interest” that rulers can smuggle their subjective schemes into. The people have no more and no less of a say in government than voting with their feet. Because the states are dependent on demand for residency in their patch to operate as going concerns, however, this system, like feudal monarchy, fosters an immense amount of governmental competition to make their realm the most pleasant possible place to live. A key feature that differentiates it from feudal monarchy, however, is another powerful check on tyranny: cryptographic weapon locks whose key is in possession of the sovereign corporation’s (“sovcorp”) shareholders. Such locks are not a speculative technology, they are what restricts the ability to launch a nuclear strike to the President of the United States whose aide carries around the launch codes (cryptographic keys) to the nukes. Yarvin is of the opinion that just about any weapon mechanism including bullet cartridges can be safeguarded with such locks. If the CEO or any of his subordinates go rogue the shareholders (or their elected board of directors) can instantly disable his weapons. It is possible for stock to be made available to any willing buyer, in the real world it is likely that sale of stock in a real world sovcorp would be restricted to those of the same nation as the sovcorp’s employees. It is also likely that residents of a patch would be prohibited from owning stock in that patch’s sovcorp to prevent conflicts of interests among them. Residents sign a literal social contract with the sovcorp wherein each party agrees to certain standards of behavior, one of the most important of which is the sovcorp is refraining from geopolitical merger with other realms. The substrate for such covenants in the real world would be likely the systems of English Common Law or Continental Law. Disputes over contracts would be resolved by arbitration as is already common today. The ultimate arbitrator is the CEO (“Delegate”) of the sovcorp. Although as sovereign he can suspend a contract at will, abuse of this power is sharply curtailed by the checks of profit competition and cryptographic chain of command as described above. In Yarvin’s view competition for supremacy in the providing of security would result in an extremely high level of surveillance and tracking. Regardless of the accuracy of this prediction, the same checks would curtail abuse by a surveillance state of whatever size. Tracking systems such as individual RF tags mitigate the issue of frequent border crossings attentive to a world of small countries, which corroborates the case for the superfluousness of country walls I made in the immigration article. Because war is costly for governments, those operating under an explicit profit motive in a system like a patchwork would operate with a foreign policy of neutrality, going only to war to neutralize the aggression of the irrationally belligerent. Alliances of whatever size necessary for such neutralization would coalesce quickly and organically and disappear just as quickly when the danger subsides. Such is the efficiency of a free market of sovereign states.

An alternative system has been proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and other libertarian theorists: Defense insurance agencies (DIAs). This system will be discussed in greater detail in the article on national defense; here we highlight features that define it specifically as an integral part of a zeroth positionist state. The DIA is a model of how national defense can be incentivized on a purely for-profit basis which exploits the natural complementarity between wargaming and actuarial science. Both security and insurance are highly scalable industries, and while there may exist a local optimum for the former at a level approximating that of the size of the average Western military today, insurance is already an international industry (the world’s largest in fact), which means that the operating territory of a DIA’s parent company could serve multiple different macro-nations. As pan-european nationalists tend to be of strong third positionist leanings, this benefit is something they ought to appreciate. This system treats disturbances of the peace as a problem that transcends the borders of any one country, which shifts the friend/enemy distinction away from “France vs. Germany” toward “French and Germans vs violent criminals.” In contrast with the blood-soaked history of european brother wars, especially the total wars of fascist and other modern states, this shift is the opposite of trivial. This system has an advantage over the Patchwork in that it exploits economies of both scale and scope to a greater degree and is more conducive to standardization on an international scale. Another advantage is that under such a system all policies not pertaining to security strategy are made entirely by individual landowners, which keeps conflict over social engineering to an absolute minimum.

The Anarchist Stupidman

As we have seen above, power directed toward the maintenance of a free society is the opposite of anarchy in terms of how anarchy is conventionally defined: Lack of laws, rules, institutions of enforcement or hierarchy of power. Murray Rothbard may very well be the greatest political philosopher of the 20^th century but he chose poorly in labeling his philosophy “anarcho-capitalism”. Each of the terms in the label mean something quite different to most people than they do to Rothbardians. In using the term “anarcho” he limits the focus of the philosophy to the question of government. Rothbardian libertarianism, however, has nothing to do with government per se. It merely does not make an exception for people who happen to be part of government in its condemnation of violent aggression. In using the word “capitalism” he limits the focus of the property norm to capital. Because most people just use “capitalism” as a catch-all term referring to everything that big businessmen and financiers do, “anarcho-capitalism” give the impression of a society where big business and finance get to run amok without any rules. Some libertarians, especially the Beltway types, reinforce this impression in their apology for deplatforming of dissidents by large media and financial firms, saying that that it is simply “the free market speaking”². This apology is simply false. The Federal Reserve, Operation Mockingbird, the bailouts of 2008, and the Twitter Files are just a few examples of the extensive collusion between the state and such industries. Even if no such collusion existed, virtually all companies, even bad ones, have a means for customers to submit complaints. Customers submitting complaints about deplatforming is as much the free market speaking as a firm’s refusal to associate with them, and the same is true for boycotts.

A charge leveled at libertarians by third positionists is that we are allergic to the use of state power. The question the latter fail to answer satisfactorily is: Power used for what? Libertarians have pointed out a litany of instances where the use of state power as a cure for a social ill turns out to be worse than the disease. Power, like most other things, is a scarce resource. Squandering it on counterproductive interventions leaves us all with less capacity to apply it where it is useful and productive: The suppression of violent aggression. To this end libertarians believe we should use all the power we have. While it is true that in most white countries today hard power is highly concentrated in the state, America is a great exception. Of the approximately 400 million guns in the country 98% are not in the possession of the state. While obviously hard power is much more than a 1:1 function of gun stockpile, what is indisputable is that if heritage Americans turned their guns against the System they would do an immense amount of damage to it. If third positionists truly believe that power lies only in the state, things look very bleak indeed for them because there is no way for them to take control of the federal government in America or any Western European country for the foreseeable future. Libertarians however recognize that “no political solution” really just means “no democratic solution at the federal level”, that politics is violence, that freedom needs to be fought for, and that in the war for freedom you have to pick your battles wisely. One worthwhile battle is seeking local political office for key positions such as sheriff and Republican precinct chair. A notable libertarian movement that is particularly attuned to the necessity of attaining political power is the Free State Project in New Hampshire (of which this writer is a participant), whose unofficial tagline is “taking over New Hampshire and leaving you alone”. The fact that the a quarter of the New Hampshire houses of congress are now either Free Staters or FSP-endorsed is testament to the commitment of Free Staters to the attaining of political power. The pro-liberty legislation that has been passed since the project’s migration trigger point such as constitutional gun carry, educational freedom accounts, phasing out of the dividends tax, and nullification of Federal vaccine status mandates and Second Amendment infringements is testament to Free Staters’ willingness to use political power. An excellent initiative from the constitutionalist wing of the liberty movement is found in Tactical Civics, which is reviving independent grand juries and militias county by county in these not-so-United States. A notable historical example of the effective use of power in furtherance of freedom is found in the military junta of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was much more of a pragmatist than an ideologue, and in the first few years after taking power from the Allende regime he did little in the way of dismantling the suffocating institutions of his socialist predecessor. When Chile’s economy failed to improve, however, he decided that it was time to try something different, and a group University of Chicago-educated free market economists among his countrymen just happened to be in position to catch his ear in the right place at the right time. Even as his reforms bore fruit many communist agitators tried to stymie his efforts, and thanks to his creative approach to physically removing them we now have an irrepressibly hilarious meme to convey the concept.

At this point third positionists and a minority of libertarians called agorists object that it is hypocritical for a libertarian to participate in politics in the first place. This objection confuses politics, which is the struggle for power generally, with statism, which is supporting the use of power in the state to commit violent aggression. Because the polity we live in is statist already, seeking to attain power within it to mitigate the state’s violent aggression is a legitimate act of self-defense. What about the fact that state jobs are currently paid by taxation, which by definition is expropriation? Doesn’t seeking them create higher demand for such expropriation? No, because state jobs are currently created by coercive fiat rather than by the market, seeking them does not create the same kind of wage-raising demand pressure. The openings for state jobs once created are effectively a given in the short-term, if libertarians don’t take them others will, including our enemies. Not even agency directors have the ability to abolish their own agencies, so it makes sense for us to have people on the inside to mitigate the harm such agencies do and to use whatever power such agencies have to mitigate the harm that predators outside the state do, especially predators of the statist persuasion. Such predators include anyone who so much as votes for statism. Libertarians by and large regard the use of lethal force as a proportionate defense against burglary. Democracy is millions of people each burgling you of pennies. Mitigating statism’s harm therefore can take the form of state measures going as far as the state execution of democrats. This does not mean that it is acceptable, however, for a libertarian to seek any kind of career with the state. Agencies that are outside libertarianism’s acceptable scope of government such as welfare and education, bureaucracies that are necessarily parasitic, cannot in good conscience be depended on by a libertarian for his lifetime’s bread. Working for such agencies can only be a temporary measure taken to sabotage them. What constitutes acceptable length of a mission to sabotage an inherently parasitic agency is a judgment call resulting from full context cost-benefit analysis. A saboteur who is independently wealthy enough to give away his government salary (as Trump did) is in a better position to act as one than one just starting to make his way in the world, for example. Abolition of parasitic agencies can be pursued by those of us within the state who are in a position to effect that change. There are certainly non-libertarian reasons to avoid working in the state we have, but collective efficacy as libertarian activists demands that we use all means at our disposal to further liberty, which means some of us working in the state however suboptimal the state currently is.

Statism may be “the most dangerous superstition” as Larken Rose puts it, but agorists (and Rose himself to a degree) suffer a form of it only in reverse where they regard government as a demonic rather than beneficent deity with which any association results in possession, providing yet another cautionary instance that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. This is false, both in its implication that the amount of or absoluteness of power in society ever varies much, or that people change much when given absolute power. The truth is that people are who they are; money and power does not change us but merely makes them more of who we already are. Government is a tool which can be used for good or bad ends. Government is best when it is used to protect property on a voluntary basis. That it often does the opposite means we should strive to the fullest to obtain property in government to the exclusion our competitors, who comprise both the left-progressivists who currently rule us and the right-progressivists who seek to supplant them.

The Red Herring of Natural Rights

Third positionists go beyond attacking anarchist stupidmen and attack libertarianism’s most popular foundation itself: Natural rights. This attack varies in nuance depending on the sophistication of the attacker; in its crudest form it does not even rise to the level of an argument but is simply a threat of violence for blaspheming their statist religion. Their actual argument, however, goes as follows:

It doesn’t matter how strenuously one invokes rights because violence, not the abstract concept of rights, is the ultimate arbiter of human behavior.

As Liberty+ co-founder Blood Wealth Soil points out, however, there is by this token no more substantive basis for the national duties of third positionism than for the natural rights of libertarianism. A duty is not something handed down from heaven but simply whatever the strongest gang around can violently coerce you into doing. Neither libertarianism nor Objectivism nor BWS’ ethics of actualism rejects either; the first merely rejects duties as justification of violent aggression, along with all other purported justifications. The latter reject the existence only of unchosen duties. We may not choose our parents, but the duty of caring for them in their dotage (the question of duty is not applicable to children, who are incapable of moral autonomy) is something we choose to assume so as to reciprocate the decency with which they treated us as children. We may not choose the government of the territory we are born in but how we reciprocate that government’s behavior is entirely our choice; there is no moral “duty” that government qua government can demand. Rights, like duties, can be broken down into positive and negative rights, which is explored later in terms of effectively contrasting these subsets. First however, we will defend natural rights on their own terms. A key term in the third positionist argument is “ultimate”. Although sometimes used colloquially to mean “total”, “ultimate” really means “final” or “last”, which in this context means that violence is a last resort. No one can deny that violence or direct threat thereof is an extreme aberration in the everyday lives of civilized people, when they experience it at all it is in a state of desperation. What third positionists really mean in their argument is that all else equal, someone who applies force³ to those who defy his will be more successful than a pacifist, which is trivially true, however in implying that libertarianism is pacifist they commit an egregious strawman: Libertarianism places no limit on the amount of force that one may apply in self-defense as long as it is proportional to the threat confronted⁴. Although it does not prohibit an individual from being a pacifist, it strictly forbids forcible interference in the efforts of non-pacifists to defend themselves. It is likely even that in the most sustainably libertarian societies participation in defense organizations would be a requirement of the covenants on which such societies are premised. In the anarcho-tyranny of today, white people are actually prosecuted for defending themselves from violent crimes their governments decline to mitigate. Libertarianism condemns this forcible imposition of pacifism as strenuously as it does all other violent crimes. What third positionists majorly fail to address with their critique regarding force and will, however, is will to what? By definition all non-libertarian ideologies are wills to something other than maximal peace for a given society. Because aggressive violence is an extreme aberration, the onus is on the third positionist to justify its use by an objective standard of nationalist value.

Third positionists hearken at something true with their critique, however, which is the subjectivity of rights. A right may be defined as “A scope of action within which it would be immoral to interfere”. Because morality is subjective so too are rights. Most third positionists are however, like most people, deniers of this subjectivity, taking the fact of variance of a distribution of moral sentiments⁵ to mean that such a distribution is also uniform, i.e. serial killing is as normal as volunteering at a food drive. They are more hypocritical than most people however, in the nihilism they tactically project at the inherently moral nature of rights while at the same time self-righteously anointing themselves as guardians of “objective morality” and denouncing libertarianism as morally nihilistic. Their denial of moral subjectivity refuted by the simple fact that the word “normal” is simply the adjectival form of “norm”. “Norm” refers to the hump of a distribution where most of the observations typically lie, and by definition a humped distribution is not uniform. It is therefore meaningless to describe any measure of central tendency of a uniform distribution as “normal”. The extreme error that “objective morality” believers commit is to equate recognizing something as subjective with trivializing that thing. There is nothing more subjective, and nothing less trivial, than love. The same can be said of natural rights. “Objective morality” is coach speak, a cope for a person who lacks the objectivity to accept that certain other people are hardwired differently, and sometimes in a way that makes that person an object of deadly, implacable hatred. Good and evil are the spiritual adjectives of friend and enemy. Because morality pertains to existential status itself, there is a certain fitness in groups that desire so strongly that their enemies not exist that they regard their enemies’ morality as already non-existent, which, from the former’s standpoint, renders the former’s morality metaphysically invariate, or “objective”. While this conflation of ought and is is usually good religion it is always bad philosophy. Natural rights proponents who are religious, in fact, refer to such rights as “God-given”. Because the boundary between religion and philosophy is sometimes blurred, natural rights proponents have a vulnerability to guilt by association on this count. Although premising one’s political philosophy on natural rights does not entail belief in the oxymoron of “objective morality”, there are very few natural rights proponents who do not also hold such a belief, which renders them vulnerable on this count as well. Morality is an emotive phenomenon, and the reality and intensity of emotional belief in collective or positive rights is no less than belief in individual or negative ones like natural rights. Consider the following hypothetical exchange between a capitalist (a negative rights proponent) and a socialist (a positive rights proponent) as an illustration:

Capitalist: Controlling the prices doctors and insurers choose to charge for their services is a violation of their natural right of controlling one’s own labor and patients’ natural right of choice in disposal of their own property.

Socialist: The right to life-saving care irrespective of one’s ability to afford it trumps any right to maximum choice therein. I choose compassion for the nation’s less fortunate.

An effective⁶ response here on the part of a capitalist, regardless of whether he accepts the socialist’s altruist premise, is:

“Maximum economic freedom in healthcare is necessary for providers to be able to come up with solutions that are affordable even for the nation’s least affluent. This is seen in outcomes for the least affluent in nations that have such freedom as compared to ones with socialized or regulated healthcare systems.”

Note the complete sidestepping of “rights” in the riposte. The capitalist may be a complete egoist privately but has still refuted his opponent in terms of his opponent’s own humanitarian values, without invoking any that his opponent does not share. The capitalist’s individual rights, however, are still defended in his support for a policy that is consistent with them. It is collectivist, in fact, to demand validation of one’s moral premise, individualist or not, in the hearts of other people. Getting the results that you want is all that matters. The capitalist has also deprived his opponent of the opportunity to employ sophistry that argues for socialized medicine in terms of individual or natural rights. Natural rights are real but only as robust as belief in them. They are useful rhetorical shorthand when preaching to fellow believers but due to their subjectivity they are not a practical premise for normative political discussion among decent people with differing values. No productive policy discussion can be had without a focus on the actual consequences of such policies, rather than their “rightness” or “wrongness” per se.

Libertarianism is justified entirely in terms of the consequences of its policies, which renders natural rights, notwithstanding its popularity among libertarians, a total red herring of a premise to attack libertarianism with. Libertarian policies are often presented by both its proponents and opponents as being a systematic derivation of an absolute moral axiom (i.e. the non-aggression/non-invasion principle), which is valid. What is not valid, however, is when its opponents attack such an axiom for being “abstract” as opposed to “practical”, as if the very concept of practicality is not also an abstraction, which all concepts are. Also invalid is when opponents attack its moral absolutism⁷ as “rigid”, a term with which they smear those who are more principled, once again in opposition to what they call “pragmatic”. What they fail to realize is that pragmatism that comes from anything but rational principle is the opposite of practical. The principle of internal peace is eminently rational for a nation, for conditions where violent destruction is minimal are by definition the most efficiently productive, all else equal. For this reason a policy-by-policy productivity analysis using objective standards of value such as economic output per hour of labor is no less valid a justification of libertarianism than axiomatic derivation. This justifies libertarianism from both an individualist and a collectivist standpoint, but a standard that is strictly subjective to the individual, i.e. the thrill derived from a general condition of absolute liberty as distinct from the specific consequences of that freedom, is also a valid justification, and perhaps the most reactionary one of all: “Liberty is no more and no less than my unshakable will, and may God have mercy on anyone who contravenes me.” Emotivism does not necessarily compete with consequentialism either, as the effect a policy has on one’s psyche is the ultimate consequence by which that policy may be judged. Natural rights are a real and valid foundation of libertarianism but can only be properly defended in terms of their consequences or one’s spiritual investment in such rights. Consequentialism and emotivism, however, have no need of rights.

Further buttressing of natural rights’ superfluousness is found in Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. Hoppe points out that the very act of arguing against libertarianism, i.e. arguing for the commission of violent aggression, is a performative contradiction. A presupposition of argumentation is that during the course of such an act an arguer regards dialogue as preferable to physically assaulting his opponent. Even if an arguer regards the dispute as a mortal one it is still in his self-interest to at least attempt to persuade his opponent, even if the chance of persuasion is small, due to the risk that violence poses to the former. In putting the word before the sword so to speak, he has provided tacit support for the primacy of peace as a value. Even the most ardent militarist views the objective of waging war as to bring about its end through victory, which results in a state of at least a provisional sort of peace. In Hoppe’s paradigm the brutes on the internet who dispense with the pretense of good faith argument by threatening libertarians with the rope and gas chamber are actually the more honest exponents of their ideology. Libertarianism may be thought of as the consistent application of basic standards of morality but even basic standards of morality are too great of an ask for many people, especially fascists and communists. What zeroth positionists have in common with these enemies of ours is recognition that argumentation is highly limited in its persuasiveness where political ideology is concerned and that such ideology must be physically fought for if it is to be realized.

The Real Enlightenment Liberals

Third positionists’ attacking of natural rights is part of an attempt to smear libertarianism by associating it with Enlightenment liberalism, implying that nothing about the Enlightenment is good. We have seen in the the previous section already however, that the liberal ethic of natural rights is good when judged by the fruits it bears when a polity is premised on it. When we examine liberalism further, in fact, we discover that libertarianism has very little in common with it overall and what commonalities there are concern liberalism’s virtues, and that third positionism, notwithstanding the sincerity of its reactionary impulse, actually has a significant amount in common with liberalism, which is disturbing because its commonalities concern liberalism’s worst features. Before exposing this dark kinship between the Enlightenment and third positionism we should give the Enlightenment its due rather than accepting the premise that nothing about it is good, as well as critically examine the claim that libertarianism is a mere subset of classical liberalism.

The Enlightenment’s most valuable contribution to the history of ideas is its recognition that primitive heuristics do not by themselves make a rational society. Religion is a motivational memeplex of such heuristics, and as such works well in prescribing prosocial behavior. It works poorly compared to science, however, in making accurate predictions describing reality. If libertarianism can be said to be fully agreement with the Enlightenment about something religion-related it is rejection of the divine right of kings. Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu recognized that the state is not some inexorable force of god or nature but a mechanism that can be engineered, and that design decisions have significant effects. That the specific redesigns recommended by thinkers like Montesquieu happen to be defective does not invalidate their basic insight. We have shown the superiority of the competitive mechanism earlier, here we explain the relationship or lack thereof between libertarianism and Enlightenment liberalism. In reality, the relationship is thin at best. The only other relation libertarianism bears to liberalism besides rejection of divine right is the similarity of its property homesteading theory to that of John Locke. Locke’s property norm is somewhat crude, based on mixture of labor alone with virgin land. If mixing labor is all that is required, after all, one could homestead the whole Pacific Ocean just by dumping a can of tomato soup in it, as Robert Nozick pointed out. Libertarianism, however, sidesteps the significance of labor entirely through its criterion of non-aggression. Whether people labor all day or simply lounge about on virgin land, what legitimizes their use of it is simply that they did not violently seize it from anyone else. If others regard you as such an awesome guy they will voluntarily accord you full use and disposal of literally all the virgin land you do nothing but visually survey, libertarianism accords full sanction to such subjective deference. Laboring on virgin land and eventually bumping up against others doing the same is incidental. The ultimate and objective determinant of libertarian legitimacy in land is whether at that point all interested parties proceed peacefully or not. Richard Spencer in a podcast once characterized libertarianism as “extreme liberalism” for its having in Locke’s property theory an ancestor of one of its foundations. This however, is like calling a bird an “extreme dinosaur” by dint of mere descent. As a point of fact, libertarianism’s true origin lies much more in Late Spanish Scholasticism than in the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as Vitoria, Navarrus, Covarrubias, and Molina anticipated the economic foundations of modern libertarian thought by more than 300 years. On the relationship between value and price, they are much closer to the mark than Adam Smith, whose failure to recognize the former’s subjectivity led him to a proto-labor theory of value that Ricardo would go on to develop fully and Marx would popularize. Murray Rothbard himself takes Smith to task for this in An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Unlike liberalism and all its squishiness, libertarianism is an absolutist and reactionary philosophy; if it has any sort of familial relation to liberalism it is like that between Zeus and Cronus, and we see this in libertarianism’s rejection of all liberalism’s defining features (other than those discussed above): The social contract, the “pre-societal individual”, and self-limited government, to name a few. The pre-societal individual is an especially ridiculous concept, not just because such a person has never existed, but also because political philosophy as such can only apply to a society. This by itself renders the characterization of the libertarian political philosophy as one of “atomized individualism” an absurd strawman. Furthermore, libertarianism’s necessary economic aspect of laissez-faire capitalism is not something that defines liberalism, as Dr. Ricardo Duchesne points out.

How does third positionism fare in differentiating itself from liberalism, especially from the French Enlightenment that was much more noxious than the English one associated with libertarianism? Compare the following quotes:

In a well-ordered society, there is no tension between private and general will, as individuals accept that both justice and their individual self-interest require their submission to a law which safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violence and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway. In practice, however, [I believe] that many societies will fail to have this well-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if private individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and therefore refuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the collective interest requires.

I define from the word ‘social; meaning in the main ‘social equity’. A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual, or individual effort, of efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community.

The first is from a summary of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s concepts of will in The Social Contract. The second is from a speech given by Adolph Hitler on December 28^th, 1938⁸. Note the similarity in how each believes in a “common good” that is something other than the sum total of society’s individual interests. The commonality compounds as we learn how exactly Rousseau intends to harmonize instances where such conflicts arise. For Rousseau, laws are only legitimate when agreed upon by an assembly of citizens and only good citizens can make good laws. How then, does one ensure that only good citizens assemble? By making the citizens good. Who makes them good and how then? Rousseau’s answer is the figure of the “legislator”. This figure “has the function of inspiring a sense of collective identity in the new citizens that allows them to identify with the whole and be moved to support legislation that will eventually transform them and their children into good citizens.” In terms of “inspiring a sense of collective (or at least collectivist) identity” there are few figures in history better suited to the role of legislator than Hitler himself! Small wonder then, that Bertrand Russell once remarked “Hitler is the outcome of Rousseau”.⁹

Hitler was not the only third positionist outcome of Rousseau however. His most formative ideological influence in Gottfried Feder is also an unmistakable intellectual descendant of Rousseau. In the very beginning of his seminal work The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation, he starts by echoing the above superstition of collectivist interest:

“Public interest before self – interest” is the first law of National Socialism.” (pg 15)

Feder goes on to echo another one of Rousseau’s key ideas, which is that regarding property:

The extreme still ruling among us of an unlimited right to property, on the other hand, has led us already to the last step before the temple of the god Mammon, on whose door stands in golden letters: “Everything belongs to the One” . Even this frightening economic form must equally lead to a depersonalisation of property — only in another way — in that, finally, all of working mankind is here pressed into a frightful debt slavery to an anonymous financial power.

(ibid)

The parallel in Rousseau’s work is found in Discourse on Inequality:

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture and metallurgy and the first establishment of private property, together with the emergence of inequality between those who own land and those who do not. In an unequal society, human beings who need both the social good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth, etc. become enmeshed in social relations that are inimical both to their freedom and to their sense of self worth. Subordinates need superiors in order to have access to the means of life; superiors need subordinates to work for them and also to give them the recognition they crave. In such a structure there is a clear incentive for people to misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attain their ends.

(ibid)

Feder and Rousseau both believe that the property norm leads to lies: Worship of Mammon and misrepresentation of true self; respectively. They also both believe that because certain types of inequality result from property there is something inherently flawed about consistent protection thereof. The type of inequality they find problematic is not the inequality of fisherman A, who has one fish, stealing from fisherman B, who also has one fish so that A now has two fish and B none. The inequality to which they object is where A has more fish because he is a fisherman and B is not (or less of one). Feder makes this explicit earlier on the very same page:

In spite of the doubtlessly existing agreement that the considerations of the public interest have to go before the private interests, remarkably there has been, according to the legal ideas valid among us, precisely with regard to the form of the use of property, no moral limitation determined beyond the criminal.
It is, to be sure, forbidden to act with violence against one’s fellow man (extortion — murder — manslaughter — betrayal and illegitimate enrichment, etc.), but it has never and nowhere been forbidden to pile up immeasurable wealth

Here Feder has juxtaposed extraordinary economic success, which he explicitly differentiates from fraudulent gain (“illegitimate enrichment”) with extortion, murder, manslaughter, and betrayal. But don’t worry, Feder isn’t some rabid Red like Marx or Proudhon. Only two paragraphs later he denounces Marxism for going “so far as to explain property as ‘theft”. He’s a sensible centrist who associates productive use of property with murder, not an extremist who associates it with theft, understood? Rousseau also positions himself as such a sensible man, for in Book 1 chapter 8 of The Social Contract he justifies statism as a perpetual necessity for the protection of property; which precludes treating his political economy as congruent with that of Marxism, which sees the state withering away after it has abolished property. However, when combined with the fact that Rousseau explicitly differentiates individual will from general will as something that the state needs to ensure conforms to the latter, he confirms his belief that the state needs to limit property, as individual will cannot be expressed without property. Because Rousseau sees inequalities as mundane as landlords over tenants and employers over employees as to some degree deviant from the general will, the necessary conclusion is that the state must limit property to promote the general will. This voids the property norm as something the state serves to faithfully protect for its maximizing of societal peace and renders it something that is merely permitted protection insofar as the state sees protection as pursuant to the general will. By the same token however, the state may violate the norm to any degree in this pursuit. “Your” property under the ideal regimes of both Feder and Rousseau is whatever table scraps the state deigns to let you lick off the floor. Both are communists without conviction, but at least Rousseau has the excuse of living before communism was philosophically formalized by Marx et. al.

Another parallel between third positionism and liberalism is observed by Duchesne in same article referenced above. In that article he points out that the thinker regarded as most influential in the 20^th century and beyond is not Karl Marx, whom many third positionists believe cannot have any affinity with them because he was jewish, but John Rawls, who was not. Duchesne also notes that many on the dissident right (he does not refer to third positionists or paleoconservatives by name but these are who he is referring to) desire a liberal society, one with belief in “civic virtues”, party politics and government by representation, but for white people only. What they fail to realize is that when principles like “representation” are taken to their logical conclusion, globalism is the result. After all, what could be more civically representative than making citizens of the whole world?

Yet another trait third positionists share with Enlightenment liberals is the belief in a self-limiting state. Unlike for liberals, the basis of this belief is not in internal checks and balances but a more religious kind of faith that the leader of a fascist state will simply “do the right thing” through his special ability to commune with the “national will” or similar. It is clearly a very delicate balancing act that the leader must perform in his statecraft, for third positionism accepts no limits on the means he may employ so long as his end is “limited” to the “national will”. In reality for a liberal state, the separated powers within the state will mostly just collude with each other to expand the states’ power at the people’s expense. A historical example is the Reichstag granting the newly elected chancellor in Hitler dictatorial powers. As Hitler and the NSDAP would do go on to then do, a third positionist ruling party will invoke “national interest” whenever it wishes to expand its power at the nation’s expense. Under third positionism the state does not serve the nation; it merely pretends to so as to force the nation to serve it. The state is not the nation. The nation is what families do, and under zeroth positionism families coalesce in a mass militia culture that provides a real check on state power (in addition to the already considerable check that is the profit motive) that incentivizes the state to serve the nation.

Serious Problems

Thus far we have been primarily counterattacking third positionist criticisms of zeroth positionism, which should have by now made clear the former’s inferiority. We now focus on why third positionism is not only inferior but utterly intolerable for the nation. Murray Rothbard provides a useful framework for this in the “Power and Market” part of Man, Economy, and State (pp 877-878). Here he presents a typology of violent aggression in society. Rothbard labels such aggression “intervention” when committed by a state. There are three types of intervention:

1. Autistic intervention: When the state restricts or compels the behavior of an individual that does not have any material effect on other parties. Examples are flag-burning bans and mandatory salutes.
2. Binary intervention: When the state restricts or compels interaction between an individual and it. The prime example of compelled interaction is taxation. An example of restricted interaction is the sealing of records concerning state malfeasance.
3. Triangular intervention: When the state restricts or compels interaction between non-state actors. Examples are minimum wage and anti-discrimination laws.

Autistic intervention is an instance of statist tyranny in its petty aspect. Petty tyranny is far from trivial either, as forced acceptance of small indignities conditions the nation to accept large ones. An analogous example is keeping kosher in Judaism. The purpose of kosher according to rabbis is that if ordinary people are occupied with the minutia of rules concerning dress, diet, etc, they are less likely to commit a serious sin. Ironically, third positionists behave quite jewishly themselves in their support for the autistic intervention of flag burning bans. Third positionists may try to claim that this is proportional because a flag can also symbolize a nation, which in their view would mean that the demonstrator intends a genocidal holocaust in burning it. This ignores the fact that a fascist state wraps itself in the nations flag which allows such a state to use the symbolized nation as a human shield when someone decides to demonstrate against that state’s abuses of the nation by burning the amalgamated symbol. It also ignores the fact that the demonstrator might very well intend the flag to symbolize the nation as well as the state but their symbolic immolation of the nation is intended as an admonition against the state’s genocide of their nation. Evidence indicating that the reason third positionists support bans on flag burning is not to defend the nation but the state lies in the fact that under the Third Reich it was a crime not only to burn the German flag but the NSDAP flag as well. On the whole, how brittle does a state have to be to threaten with death someone who vandalize its logo or refuses to salute it? A truly secure and competent regime either simply shrugs off such demonstrations when they are baseless or, to the extent the people’s grievances are genuine, uses them as feedback in improving the quality of its service. The desperation of autistic interventions strongly suggests that deep down the people of a state committing them know how lacking their regime is in legitimacy.

The binary intervention of taxation is expropriation. As we have seen in the section on monopoly and competition, when a state forcibly suppresses competition it hampers the price system necessary for optimal service provision. The same is true when a state steals from its clients. While it is technically possible for a monopolistic state to refrain from treating its clients this way, as many people would “voluntarily” subscribe to it having no competitors to turn to, obviously the kind of state actors who would would fight a turf war against other would-be state actors are not the kind of people who would pass up the opportunity for additional spoils by directly extorting the nation after securing victory. The payment of “taxes”, therefore, is of protection money. When a state does a bad job of providing its services, the very first thing one ought to do is stop paying. The easier to stop, which is to say, the easier it is to economically punish bad state actors, the better the quality of state services provided.

While obviously the enrichment of mobsters at the expense of others is dysgenic by itself, Hoppe has pointed out that that the reduction in taxpayer’s income raises taxpayer time preference (Democracy – The God That Failed pg 10). The more tenuous our existence, economic or otherwise, the greater value we attach to present experience. This runs counter to what Hoppe calls the “process of civilization” which is effectively labor in the economically rigorous definition of the term as used above. In laboring, we express low time preference in committing our present experience to performing activity that is not what we wish to do most. We are rewarded with an increase in wealth and existential security. In trading the fruits of our labors we increase wealth and security further, which permits us a longer-term view to how we consume. It is only with sufficiently high wealth and correspondingly low time preference that we can undertake projects whose completion will not occur long beyond our lifetimes. The process of civilization is therefore maximized when people are free to labor and dispose the fruits thereof unmolested. Criminality represents extremely high time preference behavior whose destructive effects are not limited to the trauma of seizure; such effects include increase of victim time preference as well. A monopolistic state is therefore massively criminal and de-civilizing of the nation.

Triangular intervention is where the state makes voluntary interaction between mentally competent people its business. Third positionists believe that this is justified where “national interest” demands it. The domains intervened in can be broadly categorized as “economic” and “social” as on the political compass. Each domain and the case against intervention therein will be treated in detail in its own article. We can succinctly steelman third positionists here using an example combining both. Recreational drug use is categorized in political compass quizzes as a social issue but it is also big business, including for the state. Setting aside for the moment whether statist prohibition actually works, any prohibitionist policy of the state will have costs both explicit and implicit. Explicit cost is primarily the budget of the enforcement agency or agencies. Implicit costs include law enforcement opportunities foregone by diverting enforcement resources to prohibition instead of property protection. Also included are innumerable other opportunity costs imposed by tax increases to the extent prohibition enforcement is in addition to rather than instead of property protection. Other implicit costs are those attentive to struggle for control of the state apparatus resulting from the sheer subjectivity of preferences concerning prohibition’s scope. Statist prohibition agency A, by dint of its monopolistic, violent aggression, necessarily imposes a cost in its prosecution of degenerate B on normie C that is greater than what C entails when voluntarily attempting to rehabilitate or refusing to associate with B. To put this in terms of a concrete example, what is less costly to an ordinary person who is not a druggie? A national drug enforcement agency or landlords simply declining to renew leases with druggies and their dealers? Even if a prohibition agency is funded solely through fines of degenerates, this creates a horrendous incentive to frame innocent people for degeneracy. This in turn creates an incentive (on top of the cartelized price) to retain rather than destroy confiscated contraband or manufacture its own. Third positionists love to point to knock-on effects of vice as supposed justification for prohibitionism but fail to realize that prohibitionism has knock-on effects of its own that are much more costly!

Prohibitionism is a triangular intervention concerned primarily with preventing certain interactions but triangular intervention can also take the form of compelling interaction. The forced racial integration of civil rights is a noxious instance familiar to all reactionaries, yet authoritarian reactionaries accept a related forced interaction that is comparable in destructiveness. This is the welfare state. Economic historian Robert Higgs has written a comprehensive explanation of just how destructive coercive resource transfer by the state is. Presented here is a condensed version:

1. Taxes for the purpose of income redistribution discourage the taxpayers from earning taxable income or raising the value of taxable property through investment. People who stand to lose part of their earnings respond to the altered personal payoff.
2. Transfer payments discourage the recipients from earning income now and from investing in their potential to earn future income. People respond to a reduced cost of idleness by choosing to be idle more often.
3. Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget—or never learn in the first place—how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness.
4. Recipients of transfers set a bad example for others, including their children, other relatives, and friends, who see that one can receive goods, services, or money from the government without earning them.
5. Because some transfers are more generous than others, some classes of recipients come to resent the “injustice” of the distribution of the largess. Hence arise political conflicts.
6. Just as recipients engage in internecine warfare, so do taxpayers, who resent disproportionate burdens in funding the transfers.
7. As a result of the preceding two consequences, the entire society grows more divided and pugnacious. People lose their sense of belonging to a common political community with collective interests and joint responsibilities.
8. Among the recipients of transfers, self-help institutions languish. When they are gone, people who need help have nowhere to turn except to the government, [yet] private associations have much greater success in making sure that people who recover their capacities then resume taking care of themselves.
9. Just as self-help institutions wither among the needy, so do charitable institutions among those who are better off. When government agencies stand ready to attend to every conceivable problem in society, people whose sensibilities incline them toward helping the less fortunate have less incentive to organize themselves for doing so. Hence, government transfers crowd out private transfers.
10. As citizens drop out of their involvement in charitable and helping institutions, letting the government take over, they become less self-directing and more accepting of all kinds of government activity. What was once a prevailing suspicion of the enlargement of government becomes a resignation to or an acceptance of its continuing expansion into new areas.
11. Facing less opposition, those who support the new programs are more likely to triumph politically. New government programs proliferate quicker, restrained somewhat by budgetary limitations but not much by fundamental ideological objections. [M]ost people resent paying for the programs, but they have no objection to the programs themselves.
12. Redistribution involves more than T who pays and R who receives. In between stands B, the bureaucracy that determines eligibility, writes the checks, keeps the records, and often does much more, sometimes intruding into the personal lives of the clients. The mediating bureaucracies consume vast resources of labor and capital, accounting for much of the gross expense of the transfer system. For the government to transfer a dollar to R, it is never sufficient to take just a dollar from T. In addition a hefty “commission” must be paid to support B. From a societal perspective, one must recognize that labor and capital employed by the bureaucracies cannot be used to produce goods and services valued by consumers. Again, society is poorer.
13. Once a bureau is created, its personnel become a tenacious political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and make a case for expanding its activities. A bureau often constitutes one side of a political “iron triangle,“ joined with the organized client groups that form the second side and the congressional committees with legislative jurisdiction or oversight responsibility that form the third side. When the bureau becomes politically embedded in this way, as most do, its impoverishment of society can continue indefinitely without serious political challenge.
14. Taxpayers do not simply cough up money to fund the transfers without resistance. Many of them devote time, effort, and money to minimizing their legal tax liability or evading taxes. Society is poorer, and will remain poorer as long as people continue to devote resources to tax resistance.
15. Even if no one tries to resist the taxes or alters his behavior in supplying labor and capital, the cost to taxpayers will be more than one dollar for each dollar taken by the government, because it is costly just to comply with the tax laws.
16. Just as taxpayers do not passively submit to being taxed, recipients and potential recipients of transfers do not just sit quietly waiting for their ship to come in. They also act politically. Society is poorer and will remain poorer as long as people continue to devote resources to seeking transfers.
17. Just as taxpayers must employ resources to comply with the tax laws, so recipients of transfers must employ resources to establish and maintain their eligibility to receive the transfers. In each case, more resources are squandered, and society is that much poorer.
18. By adopting programs to redistribute substantial amounts of income, a nation guarantees that its government will become more powerful and invasive in other ways. Because government itself is the most menacing interest group in society, nothing good can come of this development, and much evil may come of it.
19. Creating a more powerful and invasive government means that the liberties of citizens will be diminished. For a long time American citizens enjoyed extensive rights in the negative sense—rights to be left alone by governments or other people as they went about their lives. As…entitlements have grown, therefore, liberties in the sense of negative rights have necessarily diminished.

Attempting to provide a social safety net is one instance among many where the state oversteps its core functions of security and dispute adjudication. Although the problems of monopolization apply to these “extracurricular activities”, monopolization is not the only problem for such instances. Whether it funds the provision of such services by “taxation” or not, the state simply isn’t very good at them, which is why we don’t see private security firms today sharing a parent organization with say, agribusinesses. At core, their business is cracking skulls, and even if one is exceptionally judicious in deciding whose skull should be cracked, this skill set does not transfer well to other areas of human endeavor, mainly because violence, as we pointed out above, is highly aberrant within a civilized society. The economic term for this problem is “diseconomy of scope”. This problem is mitigated in the real world by the application by financial analysis of a “conglomerate discount” to the valuation of companies comprising subsidiaries in unrelated industries due to negligible synergy and material bureaucratic overhead. Third positionists sometimes attempt to justify socialist interventions like the welfare state by pointing out that services like police, courts, and the military are already accepted as socialized ¹⁰. Given the problems of economic incentives and calculation alone, this actually argues in favor of privatizing, or to be more accurate, voluntarizing the core services. Taken as a whole their argument constructs an intellectual package deal using a false continuum fallacy and appeal to the popularity of the status quo: Even if we pretend for the sake of argument that coercive provision of the core services is optimal it does not at all follow that such provision of other services is not a catastrophic failure, let alone even close to optimal. On top of the massive damage inflicted on the nation by triangular intervention as Higgs lays out, one of the very worst consequences of both binary and triangular intervention is dysgenesis. Only inferior people have need of expropriating their brothers. When more resources go to the inferior at the expense of the superior, the former proliferate more. Laissez-faire capitalism, meanwhile, is a eugenic system where more resources flow to the intelligent and industrious.

Third positionist integrationism goes beyond economic, however. A deeply problematic feature that defines the worldview is forcible and large-scale territorial integration. At a minimum this integration is along macro-linguistic lines, e.g. all Bavarians, Prussians, Saxons, Silesians, and Austrians under a centralized German state. Third positionists treat all members of the same macronation as brothers who owe filial piety to their adopted father so long as he desires to instill the right values in them, regardless of the means he uses to do so. The macro-linguistic criterion is an incredibly foolish one, as there are hugely divergent cultural, religious, and kinship differences within such a nation, differences that are often lethally opposed. Civil wars within such European nations are common throughout history, however their frequency is not ultimately because such differences exist per se, it is because by definition a civil war is a struggle for control of a state, especially a monopolistic one, and such states are common through history. From the War of the Roses to the Roundheads vs the Royalists in little England, from the Gracchian civil war of the Roman Republic to even the Sonderbund war in Switzerland of all places (Kemp 1999), european nationals have butchered their brothers with abandon. Though it was not in fact a civil war, what is vulgarly referred to as the American Civil War is another poignant reminder of just how lethal intra-national clashes can be, for more Americans were killed in that war than in all other wars combined. Although Americans are originally an almost all – English nation, the country was settled in different places by four disparate cultures who each came from different regions of England: The Puritans from East Anglia, The Quakers from the north Midlands, the Cavaliers from southwest England, and the Borderlanders from the north. The War of Southern Separation was a flaring up of atavistic hostility between these cultures (Fischer 1989).

Like the moralistic northern aggressors of 19^th century America, third positionists also have strongly imperialist tendencies due to their violently aggressive impulses and their desire for the state to force a high degree of national self-sufficiency. The greater the tendency toward centrally-mandated autarky (as distinct from private prepping), the greater the impetus for the state to expand its tax base geographically due to the reduction in domestic product such autarky imposes. Another driver of third positionist imperialism is their monomaniacal racial preoccupation. In their simplistic framing of the struggle for the west as “whites versus jews” they imply an unrealistic standard of white unity. In the immigration article I described the religious strife in Northern Ireland as “petty”. I did so from the perspective of pan-european nationalism, with which I sympathize personally but reject strategically. While coordination of activism between members of the family of european nations is eminently rational given the threat we all face in common, the overwhelming majority of nationalists are not and will never be rational in this sense. The minority who hold the pan-european perspective may be more natural leaders among us but not even the most able leaders can overcome the tribalism that has been conditioned by millions of years of evolution. We all recognize ourselves as tribal for this reason but many third positionists, especially those of a spiritually pan-european bent (most are), fail to recognize how provincially tribal we are. There is a well-known statistic from anthropology called Dunbar’s number, which refers to the maximum number of people with whom an individual can maintain a stable relationship. The eponymous author of the original study put the figure at 150 based on extrapolation from the neo-cortical size of other primates. Others put the figure lower based on nutritional constraints. Stable relationships within this limit are formed along a communal culture such as religious sect, recreational pastime, or, for a minority, political ideology. The complexity and intensity of communal bonds is beyond kaleidoscopic, and the nature of these bonds are such that they are at odds with attempts to forge similar ones at scales well beyond Dunbar’s number. Certain anthropologists extrapolated similar conclusions, positing that societies of larger size require more restrictive enforcement of laws, norms and rules to remain stable and cohesive (or at least to appear that way). The greater degree of forced integration; the greater degree of authoritarianism. The pan-european religious aspiration and its associated means of a fascist state threaten the local bonds that form a bulkwark against grandiose racial schemes. Although patriotism entails a certain nationalism, nationalism per se, when it impinges on the flourishing of the individual, his community, and his country, is the opposite of patriotism.

A historical instance of third positionist imperial hubris can be found in Hitler’s squandered opportunity to restore Germany’s norm of confederation, choosing instead to yoke Austria to the Reich rather than recognizing it as an independent country as Putin has at least purported to do with the Lughansk and Donetsk regions of modern Ukraine. In his sheepish acceptance of the Anschluss plebiscite he laid a single noose around nearly all German necks. This ultimately resulted in Austria being placed under Allied supervision from 1946-1955 where it was forcibly reconstituted as a democracy, and even when the Allies “released” Austria with the treaty of 1955 Austrians were denied the right to own or manufacture nuclear weapons or guided missiles and forced them to give the Soviets part of its crude oil output (Kemp 1999). The Austrians have never recovered South Tyrol either. Swiss Germans, it must be noted, experienced comparatively less in the way of Allied brutality for having retained their independence in the Swiss Confederation. For those would would counter that this would have happened anyway, the war would almost certainly never happened in the first place had Hitler restored German confederation to all of German-speaking countries, devolving power back into a military order along the lines of the old Hanseatic league. The Allied powers would, being swept up in the fad of consolidationism, perceive this as a dissipation of German power when in fact it would have been be an augmentation of it via the benefits of political and military competition attentive to decentralization. Consolidation of German-speaking countries into the Reich instead increased Allied paranoia and eagerness for war. A parallel instance of consolidationist folly can be found in the Soviet Union’s relocation of large numbers of Russians to the Baltic States in a deliberate effort to undermine nationalist resistance to its pan-slavic imperialism. The deliverance of the ethnically Russian Donbass to the Ukrainian satellite government served a similar end whose brutal repercussions we are palpably experiencing today. The latter instance shows that it is not just central planning of the movement of people that is a scourge but also the central planning of borders themselves.

Third positionists claim that their integrationism is necessary to prevent warlords from wreaking anarchy. This is, first of all, rather unfair to our Indo-European ancestors, whose state can be accurately described as an aristocracy of warlords. That aside, even the large modern nation-states of the world exist in a state of anarchy with respect to one another, so if we accept the premise that territorial monopolization by the state is preferable to anarchy of any sort, we must also accept the world state of globalism. Perhaps third positionists will then concede that the categorical rejection of anarchy is too strong, but there still exists a local optimum at the level of the macro nation. In that event they would be hard pressed to make such a case given the problems presented in the preceding paragraphs. Moreover, the system we zeroth positionists favor is one based on economic incentives, and wars of aggression at any level under such a system would be prohibitively costly in materialistic terms. The strongest argument against integrationism, however, actually arises when we consider the fact that there will always be power seekers who are not materialistically rational, including those who are downright evil. True reactionaries recognize that it is inevitable that evildoers will gain power somewhere. It is clearly preferable, therefore, that wherever that is be small.

At this point the rare third positionist who is objective enough to change his mind regarding power in an ideal society might still protest that because the current system is far less than ideal, to the point of being an existential crisis for our civilization, that fascism is necessary if only as an emergency measure¹¹. This is false because as stated near the beginning of this article, the supreme virtue of liberty is inherent in aspects of the human condition that are universal, i.e. scarcity and value subjectivity, which do not lessen one bit in an emergency and actually increases in the case of scarcity. Freedom must always be fought for, only the degree of kinesis varies. When a genuine emergency is accepted as a rationale for the state increasing its control over the nation, the state will simply manufacture emergencies to further increase its control and in ways that enrich it at the nation’s expense. The con that fascists try to put over on libertarians is to pretend that the former’s emphasis on the martial virtue constitutes a monopoly on such virtue; this way they can claim that in wartime emergency the only viable regime is theirs. As explained in the section on competitive government, however, a free market in the cultivation of martial virtue will foster a substantially greater amount of it. The only way we will truly conquer our current crises, rather than merely trading them for fascist-flavored ones, is through voluntary, organic martial action that resurrects the spirit of the Minutemen.

Fascism’s aspiration to a strong military may be one of its defining features but achievement thereof is not, and in reality the low level of accountability faced by the military-industrial complex in such a regime causes runaway military quantity (especially in terms of expenditure) at the expense of quality. What defines fascism is authoritarianism, and authoritarianism can be defined as: The belief that where authority and liberty conflict, authority is to be deferred to. In a political context, the authority in question is a monopolistic state. Because such a state is a massively criminal enterprise, deference thereto is both pathetic and perverse, and even more so to believe that an authoritarian state would ever relinquish power to liberty lovers. “Libertarian fascism” really is, on both a philosophical and strategic level, an oxymoron.

The Stakes

Third positionism is a classic instance of what Ayn Rand called the intellectual package deal: If you agree with part of a proposition then you must agree with the whole. Third positionists demand that if you agree that the authoritarianism of globalism is to be opposed you must accept their own authoritarianism. Third positionists hide this behind appeals to the inevitability of power and hierarchy generally, what they omit is the fact that their position is differentiated from ours by its preference for the use of power for predation and the establishment of a hierarchy of the expropriators over the expropriated; a hierarchy that is unnatural and must be imposed with violent aggression. Such a hierarchy runs counter to fascism’s eugenic aspirations because life itself thrives through differentiation into hierarchies in the absence of external and artificial impositions. Only the incompetent and genetically defective have a need to use violent aggression to create a hierarchy where they are on top. Even if such defectives have a right-wing will toward hierarchy; their behavior is in effect no different from that of left-wing defectives who will toward equality: The result is an egality where the undeserving are at a status equal to that of where the deserving ought to be. In a system of absolute freedom by contrast, which is pre-civilizational biological evolution, it is the fittest who ascend to the upper echelons in the hierarchy of survival. Herein lies the difference between what Jared Clarke incisively terms “artificial vs natural hierarchy”. Because libertarians oppose authorities of artificial hierarchy who loot property but support those of natural hierarchy who protect it, it is appropriate to redefine the “authoritarian/libertarian” axis of the political compass as “artificial hierarchy/natural hierarchy”. The zeroth positionist system is survival of the fittest bounded by respect for property, which fosters a eugenic hierarchy where beneficent leaders rise to the top through free and open competition for followers and funding in the manner of our Indo-European ancestors. Free competition is eugenic because it is in conformity with the natural law of evolution. Herbert Spencer may have been a liberal but his ideal of social Darwinism is as reactionary as it gets: The uncompromising application of a principle as old as life itself toward the civilizing of our inborn savagery.

Arguments by third posititionists from the false inevitability of statism are a form of gaslighting. Rather than make a positive case for statism they simply attempt to demoralize their opponents into submission to it. They attempt to impose their value judgment that violent aggression is desirable by cloaking it in the white lab coat of value-free political science, much in the way that left-progressivists do with “climate science”. “It’s just the science! Are you saying people don’t commit violent aggression? Are you saying the climate doesn’t change?” It is the classic conflation of “is” and “ought” mentioned in this article’s discussion of natural rights. Unlike ordinary religionists, however, whose conflation is mostly an innocent misconception, third positionists, being by and large scheming political ideologues, are playing a malicious shell game. “Can” no more equates to “should” merely because the latter is a subset of the former than “is” equates to “ought”. We can even pretend for the sake of argument that statism is inevitable and that the third positionist conclusion from that premise that we should accept their version of statism is not just gaslighting but an argument in good faith. Such an argument is tantamount to saying that we should not resist the crime of violent aggression because it will always exist. If third positionists then resort to tactical nihilism in saying that crime is merely whatever the state proclaims illegal, then by their logic they must accept white genocide because the states we currently live under have legalized it. Their only defensible position at this point is to say that it is moral to resist the violent aggression of an enemy state but immoral to resist the violent aggression of theirs. In doing so they have affirmed morality’s inherent subjectivity, which negates their fundamental premise of objective and unconditional moral duty to the nation that requires a monopoly to enforce. Even if one believes in the oxymoron of “objective morality”, what is indisputable is that there are some people who will never come around to whatever standards of morality others believe objective, which makes morality functionally subjective even to such believers. Hoppe proved the optimality of competitive government given such subjectivity in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property and chronicled the gradual abandonment of this system in From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy. At the expense of brevity of the latter’s tile he could have added “to oligarchy”. America and by extension Europe became much less truly democratic in the early 20^th century in the rise of an oligarchic technocracy whose expertise was not in protecting property but manipulation of public opinion in a way that justified continual expansion of their bureaucracies at public expense. The third posistionist regimes of interwar Europe were neither a return to democracy nor to aristocracy, though they sometimes purported to be. They were reactive appropriations of these bureaucracies that resulted in further expansion.

Third positionists’ commonality with left-progressivists goes further than commission of the naturalistic fallacy. The reason they commit such a fallacy that ordinary religious people are liable to is because they themselves are adherents of a religion, which is statism. In the section on monopoly and competition we differentiated a state, the organized subset of government, from statism in its economic aspect, which is monopoly. The essence of statism however, is not economic but spiritual. Statism is a religion whose god is the state. Sometimes this is literal: The despots of cultures such as ancient China and Egypt were literally worshipped as gods, and the emperor of Japan was officially regarded as divine up until 1945 when the American state forced him to renounce that claim. Literal deification is not essential however; what defines statism is at minimum the functional deification of the state. What this means is that the state is treated as a supreme being who gets to do things beings who are not it cannot. God and the state alone provide order in their dominion; we mere mortals would be guilty of “pride” or “anarchy” if we dared compete in such provision. Where the Lord or lord giveth, he also taketh away: Even though plague is part of the universe that God created, we call plague not “mass murder” but simply “an act of God”. When states commit mass murder we call it “making war” instead. Whatever the literal truth of ordinary religious beliefs may be, it is clear that ordinary people benefit from a moral framework presented as a metaphorical narrative. Statism, however, is the exploitation of the religious instinct to impose the morality of altruism.

“Altruism” is a much-misunderstood word. Most people use it to describe an act of kindness or beneficence, but in using it they do not consider whether the benefactor himself benefits from the act or not. What truly defines the word in the terms its coiner specified, however, is that the benefactor intends to benefit another without any consideration as to whether he himself benefits from the act, including psychologically. The psychological stricture makes this moral standard impossible to achieve willfully and is therefore evil to the man of self-esteem. The enforcement of this standard requires the commission of violently aggressive coercion, which makes statism the natural religious carriage for altruism. Altruism can be imposed on a collective level as much it can on an individual level. The Great Replacement is the all-time instance of this. We see this in excuses like “they just want a better life!”. While sometimes self-interest is also appealed to in terms of economic and cultural enrichment, these very much take a back seat to altruistic moral bludgeoning. The main reason for this is simply because moral appeal is the most powerful form of persuasion, but another is that unlike economic and cultural enrichment, a better life for third worlders has the advantage of being true. White people have a singularly strong will to both the morality of accommodating the Other and to reasoned truth. This combination proves too much for most, and we see evidence of this in how conservatives, even some on the dissident right, think they “own the libs” by pointing out that most migrants aren’t “real refugees”, allowing for the possibility that a third worlder is entitled to access the west if his claim to refugee status were genuine. Victimhood is not virtue. Bad things are at least as likely to happen to rapists and murderers as they are to everyone else. A refugee is by definition someone who is associated with something to be fled from and is therefore to be treated with suspicion rather than sympathy. All third worlders are ipso facto refugees. The only consideration white people of self-esteem can countenance is whether someone seeking access to our land makes it a better place for us to live, with special concern given to the potential cost their presence potentially imposes on the purity of our ethnic aesthetics. All “wretched refuse of the teeming shore”, however, can never be admitted. If such people eventually cleanse themselves through eugenics some of our people may condescend to give them an asylum hearing.

Third positionists are selective altruists. The believe that altruism toward non-whites is bad¹² but altruism among whites is good. This is obviously perverse because altruism is defined by self-denial and whites no less have selves than do non-whites. What whites do have that is almost unique, however, is recognition of the absoluteness of the self in a certain aspect, i.e. the fact that the only life that a man can live is his own. This is commonly called “individualism”, though an even better term is from Liberty+’s own Blood-Wealth-Soil, who coined the term “actualism” to describe his moral philosophy, which he shares with the author. Actualism is the antithesis of altruism; it recognizes the total superfluity of external validation of individual or shared values, including validation by denial of an individual’s values in favor of external ones. While most core values, being the products of deeply-ingrained biological instincts, are widely shared with others, an individual’s value set in its totality is as unique to that individual as his DNA. His means of survival, of actualizing his values, is his nervous system, a system that is entirely atomized from those of others. Very little of anything an individual, even a creative genius, think or feels is original, however his actual experiencing of these phenomena occurs entirely through his own individual nervous system. It is in this sense that one can live only by one’s own mind and judgment. It is only external hard power that blocks or terminates this life process. In the case of criminality this is beneficial to peaceful people, however the defining core of the third positionist agenda is forcing their own criminality against the values of the latter, and only against other criminals insofar as there is a conflict in values. Such as conflict is often not the case because under their system there can be only one adjudicator to bribe, thereby harmonizing the values of one class of criminal with another. The most brilliant achievements of creative genius of our race were realized because geniuses had the liberty to actualize their values of inquisitiveness and inventiveness, and the geniuses who achieved greatness despite living under totalitarian regimes such as National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union did so because they were given much more liberty to produce than most of their countrymen. Zeroth positionism is superior to third positionism in our recognition that liberty benefits not only the great but also the small. In a libertarian society the fruits of productive success in actualizing our values are exchanged across classes to the greatest mutual advantage. It is therefore in liberty that we do not merely survive, but thrive.

“Liberty” is used intentionally in the previous paragraph rather than “freedom” because although these terms can often be used interchangeably, they are not synonymous and often maliciously conflated by third positionists in contexts where distinction is essential. Consider the Marxist slogan “a hungry man is not free”. Freedom is an abstract term that means “scope of possible action”, so the slogan when taken literally is true. The subversion Marxists intend with it, however, is have the word “freedom” taken to mean “liberty”. “Liberty” is a type of freedom, the freedom to act given a certain rule or standard, as in “at liberty to divulge information”. For a libertarian, that standard is peace. A libertarian society is one that maximally actualizes the value of peace within the parameters of the property norm. Peace here is the same as natural order, an order resting on natural hierarchy as described earlier. A hungry man in such a society may not be free in a certain respect, but he still has full liberty. Every decision in life involves trade-offs and these trade-offs include the trading one kind of freedom (or restriction thereon) for another. In laboring we exchange hunger’s impingement on freedom for an impingement on the freedom with our time. Third positionists, however, strawman the zeroth positionist standard of liberty as seeking a utopian state of “absolute freedom”. What is truly utopian is their belief that absolute freedom for the state, purportedly bounded only by a subjectively-defined national interest, is in any way healthful for the nation.

The toxic consequences of an unlimited state animated by the third positionist worldview were manifest in the polity held to be a paragon of that worldview, National Socialist Germany. A comprehensive expose of these consequences in that state will be provided in a future article. It will suffice here to say that when one looks past the advertising brochures and examines hard data concerning the actual quality of life of ordinary Germans from that period, such as protein intake and children’s heights, the Third Reich is revealed to have been a catastrophe (Baten & Wagner 2002). A fortress can also be a prison, and however mighty the socialist fortress of the Reich may have been against its rival socialist regimes for a time, it ultimately fell, in no small part due to the chauvinist folly of its ruling party. The Reich really was a prison and not just due to the state’s restrictions on emigration. The Reich retained and expanded institutions that were already ruining Germany: The welfare-warfare state, central economic planning boards, state-run schools, and central banking. It was both insult and injury inflicted on a country that had already experienced more than its share of both. Benevolent nationalism respects the individual rights of one’s compatriots; malevolent nationalism violates those rights and undermines the nation as a whole. National socialism is nationalist treason.

Statism is cancer, and the unlimited statism of third positionism is an aggressive form of it. This disease is passed off by its proponents as a cure for diseases of other kinds. The violent, reckless aggression of its police state and military-industrial complex is represented by its proponents as manly vigor, but such behavior is the opposite of manly. It is the behavior of a man who at heart is nothing more than an angst-ridden teenage boy, whose failure of emotional regulation results in failure to produce for his own household, leaving crime his only course of survival. It is grosssly ironic therefore that third positionism, an inherently criminal ideology, is represented as the only means for the white race to survive. What this claim amounts to is saying that we need to put all of the nation’s eggs in one basket held by a mafia of callow clods, provided that mafia is sufficiently hostile to certain foreigners. We simply are supposed to sit and hope that mafia will just keep “doing the ‘right’ thing” indefinitely and will never be subverted again because reasons. As demonstrated early in this article, we could even grant third positionists for the sake of argument a monopoly state staffed entirely with perfect angels in perpetuity, and such a state would still be inferior to a competitive one for efficiency reasons alone. Survivalism is a terrible standard of value anyway, one that is anathema to the Faustian spirit that animates our race. Had survivalism been Edmund Hilary’s standard of value, he never would have climbed Mount Everest. In hiring a Nepalese sherpa Hilary was clearly no chauvinist either. This is not to say that third positionism’s best proponents are chauvinists in the way that many hostile foreigners are, but when they make racially-relativist arguments like “a welfare state works just fine in a homogeneous white population” they directly imply it, as if white people have superpowers that supersede the basic laws of economics. In their support for such communist institutions they contradict their claim that third positionism is a system different in kind from communism, rather than different in degree. The truth is that third positionism is communism, a communism driven merely by misshapen masculine instincts rather than feminine ones. The hundreds of millions killed by communism in the 20^th century can have added to its tally the tens of millions of Germans and Italians who died in the pointless war their states embroiled their people in against rival communist regimes.

Just as the historical instances of third positionism’s implementation were betrayals of white nations, third positionism as a philosophy applicable to any white nation is a betrayal of our race. The fundamental fact that third positionists ignore is that white genocide is possible only because of the existence of the kind of power structure they favor: a monopolistic and centralized state. A state that has the power to force integration between people within its nation also has the power to force integration between that nation and others, which, given the type of people who are attracted to a position holding that type of power, is a significant likelihood. We have exposed their gaslighting fallacy representing the frequency of statism as inevitability or desirability thereof. Their appeals to the fallen nature of man backfire on them badly: It is because man is so much more depraved than even they realize that statism has been historically common. Having witnessed the ultimate human depravity in the ongoing torture of our people to death by the modern state and its minions, unable to escape by the very nature of statism, it is inexcusable for any of our people to continue sanctioning such an abomination. The reason they sanction such evil is because they themselves are evil. They are not evil because they seek power; the seeking of power is inherent to life itself. They are evil because they seek power for the purpose of preying on their white brothers. They resent jews not primarily because of they are victims of abuses in which jews are over-represented, but because they envy the vastly greater amount of abuse that jews get to commit wielding the weapon of mass destruction that is the modern state.

We have covered much ground in this article and explored certain topics such as monopoly, competition, and natural rights with the complexity of analysis such topics demand. The heart of the matter, however, is simplicity itself: How should power be used? Our answer is commensurately simple: For protection. The third positionist answer when shorn of its sophistry is just as simple: For predation. As the liberal world order crumbles it opens up a power vacuum, and the struggle between the pro and anti-liberty forces of the reactionary right to fill it represents the next great political struggle of our age. This article was written not primarily to win the argument against third positionism, which was won long ago, but to provide morale to prevent the wicked, grasping, authoritarian hyenas among reactionaries from ever gaining power again. The system of free competition in protection that we are advancing is the greatest liberation the white race has yet experienced, and the amount of power it will endow our people with, individual by heroic individual, built from the bottom up to a state of global hegemony, will steady the world for ages to come.

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1 The US Federal Government literally is one: https://freedom-school.com/the-united-states-is-a-corporation.html

2 Which is ironic because they often countersignal Rothbard as being too much of a free-market extremist in other areas.

3 “Force” is used interchangeably by most people, if not most libertarians, with “violence”. Due to its etymological relation to “violate”, libertarians often use “violence” negatively to mean “violent aggression”, which causes accusations of pacifism. This is the reason that the term “violent aggression” is used throughout the article where such specificity is called for.

4 There is subjectivity within libertarian thought concerning how much force may be considered proportional. For Ayn Rand, who considered collateral damage in war to be entirely the responsibility of the aggressing state, the optimal amount was however much maximizes the physical safety of the defenders only, which removes any limit an amount that can be considered acceptable. Murray Rothbard was of a more humanitarian bent, contending that due to diminishing returns to force in increasing the defender’s own safety, there was a limit beyond which the application of additional force constitutes an act of aggression on the defenders’ part.

5 The very definition of “norm” as in “moral norm”, implies a distribution around that norm, and such a distribution has variance. The existence of moral norms is an objective fact but the concomitant variance is what defines morality as subjective.

6 Assuming the socialist is arguing in good faith, i.e. cares about the actual consequences of the policies in question. Most do not and should not be argued with for this reason. That they are violently opposed to natural rights does not at all invalidate such rights, however, for what such rights entail is the opposite of pacifism as explained in the body of this article. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is about protecting one’s natural rights from a society that violently rejects them.

7 Moral absolutism is far from the same as belief in “objective morality”. My set of moral values in its totality is subjective to me and the individuation of this set is absolute. In recognition of the fact that I cannot live anyone’s life but my own I do not compromise my life’s values as ends in seeking to actualize them; I only adjust the means as I learn. My values themselves do not change in the course of this pursuit or with respect to the values of others. In this regard also my morality is absolute.

8 It should be emphasized here that Hitler was attempting to pander to the political center in his public repudiation of Marxism. His privately expressed views on society were actually well-aligned with those of Marx: https://odysee.com/@martinezperspective:2/hitler-communism:3?lid=a4f16738-6d73-4ffb-824c-1ca812ab3155

9 The full quote is “At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke”. From A History of Western Philosophy, 1945

10 It was such an argument made by a liberal that sparked in Murray Rothbard the epiphany that anarcho-capitalism was the only way to consistently operate from a volantarist premise.

11 There are some otherwise “based” libertarians who also believe this.

12 The better among them do at least, however a great many others’ hearts bleed for arabs, as seen in their white-knighting for Palestinians against the Great Satan of Israel.