--"Citations/Links Between Political Books" Image taken from Mark Newman's Speech "What Networks Can Teach Us About the World" 
Let me state right off the bat that if I could abolish the current US government, I would do so. I would press Murray Rothbard's "red button." With respect (or maybe disrespect) to this government, I am an "anarchist." I also like the historical movement called anarchism, including left-leaning anarchists Bachunin, Czolgosz, Goldman, and Kropotkin. (Many of today's anarchists don't know that Bachunin wanted to form a United States style republic in Siberia, deeming that to be a step towards proper anarcho-syndicalism.)
In any case: I talk to about 100 people every day, as a libertarian activist. I place candidates and pro-freedom initiatives on the ballot(in the 23 viable initiative States).
It pains me to say this, but I'm forced to make the metaphor that the freedom movement is a toddler, and the police-state is a 200-pound man in body armor, carrying an AK-47, who has full access to the toddler's email, laptop, and bitcoin private keys. In "fights to the death" between toddlers and the aforementioned 200-pound man, how often do you think the toddler will win?
The correct answer is never.
The reason for this is simple: anarchists have a set of ideas that are near and dear to them, but those ideas fail miserably to map onto material reality in any meaningful fashion.
The point of this is not to demean the libertarian movement. It's to give it the wakeup call it sorely needs. There are now a sufficient number of "libertarian-enough" network nodes (voters) in America to result in a libertarian America within 4 years. ...But it's my belief that this will not happen, unless we learn basic political strategy ...as it pertains to voluntaryism. I'm going to mention ideas that intersect with network science and cybernetics(the study of feed-back controlled, goal-directed systems comprised of simple nodes that exhibit complex emergent behavior) in this essay, as a means of encouraging scientific thinking about the problem of tyranny, and why this problem is resistant to solution.
Consider this: Whenever I tell someone I'm a minarchist (often in response to them telling me they are a constitutionalist, republican, libertarian, capitalist, "classical liberal," "small-government" person, etc.) they often readily agree with me. Additionally, the coversation goes the same way when someone agrees that we need to restore the Bill of Rights. Often, they thank me for making them think about a few of the contradictions they had held, because I "kill them with kindness."
For a brief period of time, I would tell people in similar friendly conversations that I was an anarchist. The polite people would say "I don't know if I'm quite there yet!" whereas the ruder people would say, "Good luck with that." or some variation of "It can't work" or even "that's delusional/crazy/un-American." I would give them Konkin and Rothbard's logic, combined with emotional appeals (the very same thing that gets me major agreement when I encourage them to nullify victimless crime laws as a self-described "minarchist"), and I would leave them completely unpersuaded.
Now, every so often, I would persuade someone. But it was approximately one person per day.
Contrast that with the approximately 30 to 60 people per day that I currently persuade. (Note: This number is sufficient to nullify every law, if even one of these people were to be called for jury duty.)
Why mention network science here? Because networks only "work" when the nodes are within a certain range of each other. For example: Democrats tend to talk to independents, socially-tolerant republicans(like Justin Amash and RandPaul), libertarians, and other Democrats, but not to punishment-minded Republicans. Punishment-minded Republicans tend to communicate effectively with other "fiscally-responsible but socially intolerant" peers. This communication is "back and forth," and determines how much a node will "move" from the previous position they held, prior to the communication.
The phenomenon I'm talking about is similar to the fact that neurons will communicate with tiny electrical pulses under 100 hertz, because those are the frequencies which normal human neurons fire at. Unlike most metals in the body, which are pushed outward by scar tissue, electrode metal is pulled into the nerve (1, 2), if it is firing pulses in a range that nerves can process. The point: networks can be shaped, but the science of networks(cybernetics) must be employed to shape those networks in a gradual/incremental/feedback-and-control manner. Similar nodes in overall dissimilar networks can shape those dissimilar networks if they communicate in feedback pulses those networks are wired to process/accept.
I am not a "Gary Johnson / Bill Weld" type of libertarian. I am a Henry David Thoreau or John McAfee type of libertarian minarchist. I am a voluntaryist, a libertarian radical. I recognize that radical libertarianism is actually more popular than "moderate libertarianism" AKA "insufficiently radical libertarianism." (Insufficient to do what? To abolish the IRS, Federal Reserve, DEA, ATF, EPA, FDA, etc.) Proud Americans in all 50 States are bordering on supporting outright civil war.
...But they don't want to stop the few intelligent minarchists in the FBI from arresting serial murderers. (John Douglas, the originator of the FBI serial killer profiling department labeled the ISU, has strongly stated his opposition to "victimless crime" laws. He actually has given the libertarian movement its strongest ammunition against the victimless crime laws, by pointing out that voters who enforce the victimless crime laws unwittingly kill women and children.) They want the police to respond if they're being attacked. ...And a great many of them have been helped by an appeal to government force in a time of need (when being threatened by a low-level sociopath). Often, these "gang-bangers-with-badges in blue" helped women who were in danger of being killed by their ex-boyfriends or husbands. This is far more common than "anarchists" would have anyone believe.
My minarchy actually looks identical to most "anarchists'" anarchy. We have vastly too many laws! I would just as soon strike every legislator dead tomorrow (possible exceptions for Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and Justin Amash). I would love to abolish the U.S. Congress and restrict the presidency to civilian control of the military, after a possible declaration of war with a clearly-defined exit. Ideally, war itself could be made totally obsolete by requiring a greater-than 90% civilian vote threshold, with nonvoters counted as "no" votes. (Or a distributed system that paid military retirees to act as an organized militia, with zero gun laws preventing them from accessing military ordinance and training grounds.)
There are many ways to make "voluntaryism" work. This commonly raises a legitimate primary question.
- Do you think we will transition to "anarchy" all at once?
- Do you think we will transition to anarchic systems that supplant illegitimate portions of government gradually?
If you answer #1, you're delusional.
If you answer #2, you're actually in favor of voluntaryist minarchy, and I can prove it.
How so?
If you would abolish all victimless crime laws, you must be in favor of abolishing the marijuana laws. Abolition of the marijuana laws has been accomplished through the conventional government means in 4 States. Each of those battles was hard-won, and had huge opposition among law enforcement. The primary mover in Colorado (the first state to legalize marijuana), was a very well-spoken young man named Mason Tvert. Without him, the initiative would not have passed. He knew, very well, that political technology was needed to make the initiative pass, and he employed this political technology expertly. The next three states that followed CO imitated him.
The result of this is that, while anarchists were making zero progress in reducing the number of people sent to prison for victimless crime offenses, those wimpy minarchists reduced that number by thousands, using the much-despised electoral process.
How can this be?
The average person on the street does not, and will never, understand how the people in the FBI who are now arresting serial killers will be able to continue doing that, under "absence of government." After all, the FBI is a government agency. Moreover, because this is the definition of the term that is in their Webster's dictionaries, and because they don't draw a distinction between that definition and "absence of rulers" (after all, the FBI "rules" people like Bittaker and Norris).
I believe that quasi-private security systems like Dale Brown and Threat Management can incrementally move us toward minarchism, or the "Night Watchman" state described by Frederick Bastiat in his book, "The Law." After all, they follow the same law that anarchists often refer to in a positive manner: law that prevents the initiation of force and fraud. (The Law being "solely a collectivization of the individual right to self-defense.")
But political and social systems are governed or "controlled" by a subset of cybernetics known as "network science."
Nodes in a network must all be conditioned to respond in a similar manner, or the network will fail to exhibit emergent intelligence, sometimes just called emergence.
The network nodes relevant to this discussion are potential US voters.
Those network nodes do not receive, respond to, or pass on messages sympathetic to anarchism.
However, they do receive, respond to, or pass on messages sympathetic to minarchism.
Even more significantly, they contain nodes suitable to nullify all victimless non-crimes via jury nullification in every county in the USA. If this were to happen, then voluntaryism will have become the system we live under, having gradually moved toward that system, one jury trial at a time.
And this is the nature of feedback-oriented cybernetic systems or "social networks" that actually exist in reality.
The change that I propose arrives at voluntaryism incrementally, and has measurable and correctable benchmarks along the way.
The change proposed by agorists has no measurable and correctable benchmarks along the way, until it comes into harsh binary "all or nothing" violent conflict with state apparatus.
Arguably, the DEA and local drug police are the most violent and predatory arm of the U.S. police-state. Yet their mission was truncated by incremental successes had by Mason Tvert in Colorado.
Those same incremental successes can be applied to:
- Getting greater and greater numbers of jurors to nullify in one's local political district(s)
- Electing State Legislators, who can then nullify unjust federal laws, simply by letting the major parties know that they will lose more and more seats until they address the issues of "compassionate sentencing" advocated by voluntaryists. (As the four elected big-L Libertarians did in Alaska between 1978-1986. Those four were: Dick Randolph, Andre Marrou, Ken Fanning, and one other caucus-member who has since rejoined the GOP.) Note: This effort in Alaska was ultimately defeated by superior cybernetic systems that favored theft (major party/ FBI / CIA / combination / unknown).
- Electing sheriffs who can refuse to enforce unjust laws, and who can arm everyone in the county with police-grade weapons, as "deputies"
- Placing pro-liberty initiatives and constitutional amendments on the ballot that repeal unjust laws.
- Endorsing activist efforts like those of Marc Stevens and Barry Cooper which serve to "set people free" or "nullify the law in court," and giving those efforts a name in common with the prior electoral efforts.
- Electing mayors and voting in local initiatives that pressure/mandate the police chief to enact a LLEP stance toward victimless non-crimes (Lowest Law Enforcement Priority) ...such as the one that de-legitimized the marijuana laws in Colorado in 2007.
- Educating children and adults about the common law standard that requires all jurors to find a valid "corpus delicti" in order to find a defendant "guilty."
All of the prior large incremental steps toward voluntaryism map onto a minarchist voter/ network node's view of reality.
But if you claim that those prior steps are "anarchist," you've simply alienated the vast majority of voters/network nodes.
Now, calling them "network nodes" might sound demeaning, but it's simply done to make an important observation: network models that treat voters as "nodes/points" in an "edge-based" network model are highly predictive of political outcomes, in reality. This constitutes a scientific view of politics, and one that allows us to honestly assess our progress toward voluntaryism.
I, for one, would be screamingly happy with a system in which zero people were prosecuted for victimless non-crimes, even if there was still a police force and FBI that continued to prosecute rapists, murderers, and sophisticated thieves.
Keep in mind that tax-nonpayment is a victimless non-crime, as is "violating the legal tender laws" or "architecting an alternate currency system."
Anarchism may not be a viable or transmissible thought construct in the USA, but voluntaryism is. This is true even if 2% of society is sociopathic, and a portion of that 2% is outright violent and aggressive (psychopathic).
Moreover, even if anarchism is viable and transmissible, it is less viable and transmissible (and thus more costly to viably transmit to populate a network) than minarchism.
Now sure, we've all met young republican douchebags who think legislation is legitimate because a bunch of elected sociopaths wrote it. These insufficiently radical people give minarchism a bad name. They're the reason the term needs to be qualified with "voluntaryist" or "libertarian." ...But that's OK.
Anarchists need to stop claiming those who favor making "all taxes voluntary." ...But most people don't mind applying the new word "voluntaryist" to themselves, because it has a root word that they understand. Most people will also agree that the common law doesn't allow the categorization of acts that lack a corpus as "crimes." That's part of our English common law heritage, and it's a definitional part of it.
To communicate with network nodes, you must have a common interface or common protocol with them. If you don't you are approaching your political goal from a position of certain failure.
I'm tired of seeing this failure in the Libertarian Party, and in delusional independents. I'm tired of Democrats and Republicans being vastly more strategically competent than libertarians. I want to see real liberty in my lifetime, and I recognize that the chattering peanut gallery of anarchists online, and the "I'm more radical than thou because I'm really an anarchist" big-L Libertarians have sabotaged freedom in the USA.In fact, I'm convinced that the infiltrators of the Libertarian party view these people as "assets to be left alone or encouraged." Unlike radical minarchists like Rick Stanley, who struck a nerve in Colorado in 2002. This method of "destroying our networks by populating them with dead/ineffectual nodes" has been highly effective in the past. We know this because of the numerous times that FBI infiltrators have gone "on the record" having "successfully disrupted "anti-government" political organizations. If you're unaware of this history, you can read all about it in the folowing links. (1,2,3,4, <ahref="http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=us_domestic_terrorism_tmln&us_domestic_terrorism_tmln_specific_events=us_domestic_terrorism_tmln_freemen_fbi_standoff">5)
Imagine returning to the drug, income tax, and gun laws of 1905 (there were none). Wouldn't that be a vast improvement over what we have now? Such a system, if it kept everthing else the same would still be far from the optimal minarchy, much less, "anarchy." Imagine a system with a middle-sized government where most laws were nonetheless simply unenforceable! (Precisely what Alexander Hamilton argued in favor of in 1804, when he argued that a jury should nullify the seditious libel law that Harry Croswell was charged with breaking). The prior positions don't require a rejection of previously-held ideals in the common voter; they don't require a "domain shift." They simply require a willingness to go further at each incremental step (with each step getting easier, until "all crimes require a jury finding of both parts of the 2-part corpus delicti").
Come, take a step with me toward minarchism. (It's also a step toward anarchism, but it's a step that can actually be taken, given the structure of the currently-existing human social networks in the USA.
Jacob C. Witmer is a traveling libertarian jury rights activist who has seen, and continues to see, great opportunities in this life.
anarchy, minarchy, anarchism, minarchism, libertarian, libertarianism, jury nullification, classical liberalism, jury independence, cybernetics, freedom, science, singularity, networks, network science, mark newman, mason tvert, LLEP, initiatives, referenda, constitutional amendments, jake witmer, jacob c witmer, jacobcwitmer*