Dear Editor:

I am a newcomer to the Voluntaryist audience after having recently discovered your website.  It was a great joy to find it, because the voluntaryist philosophy your publication espouses is certainly the closest to my own.  Plus, it is always a relief to find others who agree with you, that you are not entirely isolated.

This relief is all the greater, because I have increasingly felt that other libertarian and radical free-market sites were failing the cause of liberty.  I will refrain from naming names, but the leading outlets for such ideas, in my opinion, are generally unwilling to draw out all of the implications of their philosophical conclusions.

For example, they believe in the sovereignty of the individual in some fashion, but refuse to consider the political principles that we would have to then assume.  Instead, they confine themselves to economic considerations and pontificate on rather abstract economic analyses in isolation from broader cultural and political questions.

Related to this failure to draw their principles to their logical conclusions, they never advocate initiating any action.  Well, perhaps in some roundabout way they do.  For example, they recommend home-schooling or make vague allusions to what they may do with their guns in some remote future, perhaps when things get "really" bad.  I do not mean to disparage home-schooling at all or to advocate violent revolution (far from it), merely to point out the limited fashion with which they are willing to consider the questions before them.

Perhaps the most popular site still engages in debates about whether or not to vote Republican, only occasionally on whether or not they should vote at all.  The legitimacy of the current government is questioned rarely, if ever.  At best, they advocate a return to pristine constitutionalism.  Considering all the evils they attach to government, especially the current one, their lack of interest in real political action or political thought is perplexing and, ultimately, demoralizing. 

Another popular site, perhaps more radical, takes a more active stance on these questions and tends towards "anarcho-capitalism," but the price it pays for its radicalism is to adopt an excessively propagandistic and alarmist tone.  It tries to depict the current system as one already given over to the worst attributes of the police state, while failing to address the more dangerous, if more subtle, characteristics explored by your site.

This is the only reasonable and articulate site I have found that advocates "attacking" government, i.e. by withdrawing one's consent from it.  The rest are apparently committed to nurturing a sense of alarm and resentment without any means of redress.  I applaud your site for this.  Although I am not entirely sure that civilization is quite ready to completely abolish the state (I still have some hope that there is something like a consensual state), I am encouraged by your insistence upon the principles of consent (supposedly this is a principle universally accepted in democracies) and of non-violent change.

Why these two ideas are not embraced by the entire libertarian world is an utter mystery to me, and I hope the Voluntaryist is successful in solving it.

Regards,
J Tavis Overstreet
Chiayi, Taiwan

Man must strive, and striving he must err. -Goethe