Your responses were accurate and concise.

I always laugh at the encouragement to “organize and campaign,” which is a fancy way to say, “beg your self-appointed masters.” Why should I go through all that time and trouble to convince someone to just leave me alone, stay out of my wallet and out of my life. I don’t need to jump through all those hoops in the free market- I just change providers.

Voting with your money and your feet is always more efficient and certainly more peaceful than relying on ballots backed by bullets.

Oh yeah, that is a great speech. That and Larken Rose’s. For example, when he said the revolutionaries were tax cheats and cop killers it caught me off guard, but right he was.

Thanks for your comments.

You’ve probably already seen this, but it’s always good to brush up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3_E0juInuA

He (like all of us) has never experienced a free market. All left-statists believe that the notion of a free market is just a con that the rich (a small group of extremely powerful, god-like people) are constantly trying to foist on “the public” (whoever that is), so as to improve their exploitation of the public. In other words, there is a presumption of evil, against anyone who wants a free market. In still other words, exploitation is natural, and the more you own, the bigger your exploiting power.

We need to hammer home the connection between exploitation and actual violence. One approach would be, instead of debating back and forth in one or two paragraph sound bites, to allow the person to truly imagine, for a moment, what it would actually be like if there were no government. I’d like to let that person paint their picture of the modern-day “robber barons” (whoever they are!) exploiting “the poor” (whoever they are). Let them start to flesh out this vision.

What this will do, is allow a different level of their presuppositions and guiding principles to come to the surface. Another approach would be to pick a single industry, any industry, and start to explore with them how government helped concentration of power in that industry to arise, by violence. And then to think, with them, about what would happen in that industry if all government stuff disappeared.

This would (or might, anyway) help this individual start to get a grasp of how intrusive, bullying and irrational government is, because they might start to see what it’s like to be a business person trying to stay afloat with the government breathing down their necks and micromanaging their business, and sucking such large amounts of their revenues away.

And finally, you need, eventually, to get to their understanding of what “moral” and “ethical” means. A la Ayn Rand. Who is “the poor”? What is a “moral” attitude, vis a vis “the poor”? You need to find out what animates a person– because it is personal experience melded with intellectual framework, that you are confronting. Not just a machine whose logic needs correction.

And by the way, I highly, highly applaud this post of yours. :- )