Liberty Lovers’ #MondayMotivation

This week’s quote is from Jeffrey Tucker, a man whose writings are most accessible and often very inspiring.

He’s right. Anarchy is all around us. Anarchy is love, friendship and peaceful association. Capitalism, the system of spontaneous order that has enabled the majority of humanity to have a standard of living greater than the minorities who used to rule the world, is anarchy built on the foundation of property rights.

It has catapulted humanity out of the mud and into space because it is the only system of society that humanity has discovered which maximizes the freedom for the creative use of human energy whilst minimising freedom for the use of force.

Capitalism, as we know it today, has not yet been allowed to function entirely freely anywhere in the world. It has only ever functioned under the restraints placed upon it by some form of centralised and coercive Authority, which, when you think about it, makes humanity’s rapid progress since the Industrial Revolution even more remarkable.

I agree with Jeffrey. The only hope of ending poverty and war in the world, and the only hope of survival for humanity beyond Earth, lies in diligently removing or making obsolete the State’s restraints on capitalism one by one. Less control = more human thriving. History tells us that this was true of the past. Reason tells us that it will be true of the future.

Another thing he said recently was that “free markets are the revolution.” If we think revolution and human progress is fighting capitalism, then we unwittingly fight for the State; we lend our strength to the only force capable of regressing humanity and causing untold death and human suffering.

To paraphrase a singer named Jewel, who once wrote a thoroughly inspiring song entitled Life Uncommon, the key is to no longer lend our strength to that which we wish to be free from. And the first step is wanting to be free from it.

After all, as famed American abolitionist Harriet Tubman regretfully came to realise, you can’t free a slave who doesn’t know he is one.