Yea, it's tough. Most people have never even contemplated the idea of a stateless society. I was discussing it with someone yesterday and all they could say is how much I've benefited from taxes via school, roads etc. This is easily the most common thing I hear. I then point out that the money used to maintain these things are collected via force and violence, her response is "Okay...but...you've benefitted...yada". In other words no denial of the violence, but I should accept it because I've benefited. I'm like, "Wow! Some people also benefit from the violence in Juarez but does that mean we should accept it?" No way.

I believe that getting people to recognize the inherent violence of government is the first step to achieveing our goal. Asking people what will happen if they don't pay their taxes is always seems to get the idea across.

I have done many of the same things, especially the questioning about what happens if you don't pay for government services.  That one always makes clear the support for violence. One snag I ran into was with a good friend of mine who is a government school teacher.  He said he thought that there really was no violence involved in funding communized schools as they simply place a lien on your house and leave it there, thereby preventing you administratively from ever selling it.  I actually don't think this is true.  At some point they probably remove you and hold an auction, but I'm not 100% sure.  Even if it was true that they simply place a lien on it and leave it there, I would like to see what would happen if two liberty minded parties simply ignored the lien and transacted a cash sale of the home without government permission or mortgage companies.  I can imagine the guns would come out at that point!

Lately I've been studying Non-violent communication and I've started trying to move my emphasis off of moralistic arguments onto walking them through ways that their needs would be better met in a world that was not socially organized through coercion.  There is a root that is struck in NVC.  It's simply the extention of non-aggression into interpersonal communication. As I've gotten involved in more discussions about anarchy I've tried to figure out how the hell statists can accept such bad ideas, and continue to defend them when presented with clear evidence that they are bad.  When even the way we talk to each other is based on coercive techniques predicated on the idea that people are universally evil,  it follows that we are trained to accept authority and coercion right from childhood.

Here's the thing:  I find that if I go into a discussion with the intent to demonstrate to someone that they are in support of violence, murder, and theft, they become offended at my implications of their evil nature and turn their efforts to retaliatory attacks and the construction of a wall of defense against me.  This can derail the whole process and insure that they will not accept my ideas.  In people with a very authoritarian upbringing I've had this end in red-faced screaming, complete with personal attacks. 

Religious people generally tend to find scriptural justifications for implications that they are supporting violence.  That forces me to go read the scripture and tell them what I think it actually means.  I've actually had an ordained minister tell me that "Well, Jesus said he did not come to bring peace, he came to bring the sword."  What it actually means is that if you challenge the need for the individual to bow to the authority and coercion of men, the church and the state and any other "authority" threatened by this notion are going to attack you for threatening their power.  It kicks the hornets nest.   

So far I've been able to get quite a bit of movement in people, but I cannot claim any true converts.

I know you’re not going to find this helpful but I feel it needs to be said.

Not everybody is going to subscribe to the ideas of ‘complete liberty’ because many people reach different conclusions & no hatter how much you hassle or attempt to manipulate them.

I’ve typ add that I’ve often been disappointed with libertarians in how they seem to believe their perspective is the only righteous perspective & therefore are often come off being intolerant towards those who disagree with them.

Bottom line people have the right to disagree with any libertarian & libertarians need to bear that in mind far more.

"Ask yourself why that is.

I know plenty of people who are well aware that government uses force but they believe it’s justified in the cause of what’s often referred to as the common good."

As long as somebody maintains a position that the common good is served, or that aggression is needed to make this or that work, I remain in the discourse and try to offer alternatives.  It's not really that point that I find to be a source of frustration.  I'm talking about the point where you offer alternatives, they cannot form any sort of argument to refute that they will work, or they even agree that the free market could offer a better alternative and yet they maintain that the violence is somehow better or equal.  For instance "because God says that's the way it's supposed to be", or "there is no difference between coercively imposed rights protection and free market rights protection" it's the same thing and there is no moral difference.  I'm talking about 1+1=3 brick walls I've run into.  Irrationality.  

For example one friend this weekend said that he wanted the government there to keep giant monopoly companies from ruling everybody.  I asked a series of questions that led him into articulating himself that using the government is actually the only way those companies are capable of doing that.    Yet he still thought somehow the government is protecting him from big companies.  1+1=3  I think the way he rationalized it is that they must be protecting him, he just doesn't really understand how it all works because he is not an expert on such things.  It's a sort of an inpenetrable wall of fantasy that let's them sleep at night with a feeling of safety.

As far as whether voluntaryism is possible I not only think it is possible, I think it is the destiny of the human race.  Based on American and European models the democratic socialist republic has become the world standard.  It looks to me like an overall evolution toward freedom and rights is inevitable.  I see no reason why it will stop.  What the time table is and how many times and places regressions toward tyranny will commence is anybodies guess at this point.  

One source of my optimism is simply the fact that there is virtually universal understanding of basic natural law on an individual basis.  People do understand that it's not good for them personally to commit aggression against their neighbor.  If human beings did not comprehend this naturally, the species would have vanished as there would have been no reliable guide in human beings for survival.  It's simple bioenergetics.  Intra-species fighting in general is an energetic loss and not conducive to survival.  The basis is there within everybody, it's just mentally over-ridden in the case of the collective or the divinely ordained.   We think now about periods in the past and wonder how instances of slavery, mysticism, or tyrannical rule could have been the world norm.  One day the human race will look back on statism in the same way and wonder what all the idiots who supported it were thinking.

Weedwhacker/Bainbridge:

I share your optimism, but I believe that it will take a while to develop.  Unlike slavery, the violence inherent in the democratic system is not direct.  This makes it much more difficult to get the point across, even when using logic.

We had a discussion about Utilitarianism in a philosophy class I took, and the instructor used an example I found to be very useful.  In his example, he drew train tracks with an overpass, a fat man on the overpass, and a bunch of people further down the tracks. He made the situation where if you were to push the fat man off the bridge, he would die, but stop the train, saving all those people on the tracks.  Of course the majority of the class WOULDN'T push the fat man off the overpass.  The class understood that you can't take the life of another for the greater good.  He then changed his drawing, making a junction with a family member/loved one on one set of tracks and 20 people on the other, and we had to decide which way the train would go.  This scenario got all sorts of mixed responses partially because the violence was indirect.  In the overpass incident, the violence is incredibly obvious and physically required you to kill a man.  In the junction scenario you'd just pull a lever and the train(or government) does the killing(or the taxing).

This is the major hump I run into when trying to approach liberty from a moral perspective, and I have no clue why people still accept utilitarian violence even when confronted with the blunt truth of it.

Ok this board is spam filtering me again.

Here's an objection to a free society that always stops me in my tracks.  I find I never have a good answer when someone asks, Well what's to stop some father from selling his daughter's sexual services on the free market?

Does anyone have any good responses to this challenge?

I’d add that I’m sure government coercion could be lessened. I don’t believe there will never be any government coercion. The problem with idealism is that we don’t live an ideal world & nor will we ever do so.

Sophia if you were a highly productive person with adequate personal resources would you be unwilling to give something of your own wealth to help out those who are truly in need? 

It's important to remember that Humanity is constantly progressing, that mindsets today are completely different than what they were even 50 years ago.   If society moves towards more liberty, mindsets will completely change requiring more responsbility from the individual.

Ad hominem attacks are never add intellectual quality to a conversation. 

The topic is "Winning Hearts and Minds".  Some people have no heart and no mind.  I'm speaking metaphorically, of course.  But there are a significant amount of people that cannot be reached.  I've frequented a "progressive" forum, thomhartmann.com/community/forum.  While there are some reasonable people there, most of them are so hopelessly statist and suspicious of free market thinking that it is a waste of time to try to convert them.  Conservatives, despite all their free market and Constitution type rhetoric aren't much better.  They may even be worse. 

I think it would be better to work on apolitical types.  There are some honest people on the left and right that can be reached, but I guess it's hit or miss. 

I try to do two things when I talk to people.  First, I try not to be a jerk or self-righteous.  A lot of people may associate your ideas with how you present them.  They shouldn't, but they do.  Second, I try to remember that it may be the first time they are being introduced to libertarian ideas.  Rather than give them the whole package, it is better to plant seeds.

I agree.  I know Ian on FTL read a list a year ago on New Year's Eve by Harry Browne.  That list was a list of resolutions to change the ways and methods of reaching people, and understanding that some people won't change, that spending all your time on these people is a waste. The real trick is figuring out how to start a discussion and not a debate.

I agree with Lysander, Nich, and Weedwacker.  The first rule should be: Don't be a dick.  I know a guy who (over the couple of months I've known him) has been banned from every forum to which we both belong.  Granted, his objective is not the same as mine.  He sees debate as a sport, a kind of mental combat.  That's one way to approach it, but while it may be entertaining, I'm not sure how many hearts and minds are changed by his combative attitude. 

My belief is that if people first get to know you and think of you as a decent person, then they're much more apt to listen to you before shutting you off.  I must confess to submit to a snarky impulse here and there, but I generally try to first establish some credibility and then raise a point of contention.

Yeah stevo,  establishing credibility is key, and part of the probelm I have with the Keenaics and their protests.  I don't disagree philosophically with most of what they do, but I believe most of their actions hurt their credibility with average people, countering their own efforts.  Most of their actions can viewed as self-centered or petty.  Example, the 420 celebrations, they look like potheads using liberty as an excuse to do whatever they please.  It gives onlookers a reason to discredit whatever they say.  And to those people on the fence with liberty, I think it can push them in the opposite direction.

Excellent points, all.  I would like to add a couple of things I forgot.  I think the moral argument for liberty is the best for two reasons.  Most people have some kind of moral principles.  If you can demonstrate that our morality is superior to, or rather consistent with their basic principles, you'll be able to reach them.  And, secondly, it's shorter and to the point. It can be boiled down into one or two sentences. If you ever have debated a true believing Marxist or Keynesian, you'll be going round and round in circles.  Those people will only be converted by reading economics texts. 

One other observation I've made posting on www.thomhartmann.com/community/forum is that "progressives" are so suspicious of the free market because of fake and half-hearted supporters of the free market who go under the name "conservative".  The conservative movement, and not just neocons and RINO's, have so damaged the brand "free market" that we have double work when it comes to reaching the left. 

For myself, integrating the moralistic argument was a personal breakthrough.  The NAP is easy enough to accept because we generally follow it to the letter each day in our individual lives.  Then applying it to my own "conservative" notions about how the world should be "run" began anhiallating all my previous opinions and turned nationalistic sentiments to dust.  

But I did that myself.  It kicked in no huge defensive mechanism to question my own morality, but I wonder if it would kick in when another questions your morality.  I question whether another person poking the finger of moralistic judgement in your face is going to bring any response but combat. 

Our culture has taught us to think in terms of domination and hierarchy.  WIN/LOSE.  (preferably I win and you lose).  This is all based on aggression.  From this thinking flows the support of the state.  In communication this agression does not involve guns, it involves invoking guilt, duty, a sense of wrongess in your opponent with the goal of making them feel like crap about themselves.  The domination thinking is that this subtle form of coercion will punish them into accepting your will.  You win, they lose. 

Take the interplay taking place here with Sophia.  The premise is that libertarians are bad because they will support the potential starvation of the infirm.  The response is that violence to support the infirm is immoral.  There you sit.  Each side has rendered it's judgement and both sides lose.  Or often the communicative violence escalates into personal attack as occurred earlier in this thread.  Ultimately this domination culture based escalation brings nations into slaughtering each other and supporting coercive control of people's lives, husbands and wives into beating each other up. 

What NVC does is operate from the needs of both sides immediately, skipping the moralistic judgement that is intended to be coercive.  In the case of Sopia the need is for security, safety and support,  on the libertarian side the need is for choice, safety, autonomy,security.  The needs are the essentially same as all humans have the same needs.  I guess the NVC argument would skip the moral condemnation and proceed to uncovering and acknowledging the needs on the other side and explaining how those needs might be better met through a paradigm that also allows the need for freedom to be met.  Lacking moralistic combat it's natural for human beings to want to meet each other's needs to some extent.  This is WIN-WIN.  Is that going to be any more successful in speading ideas of liberty than moralistic judgement?    I cannot say so at this point.  So far I have found that it does tend to prolong the discussion and bring more civility.

There’s a mantra salesmen have

Display & demonstrate, display & demonstrate, display & demonstrate…….

The problem libertarians have is that libertarianism hinges upon theoretical assumptions & what people need to see is theory into practice before they’re more likely to buy into it.

Personally what I want to see is individuals forming their own communities/societies via vulnerary association. What I’ve tried to do on this thread is deflect some of the criticisms I got when I was far more radicalised & far less burn out & I have to say the responses I’ve got to those criticisms would not win the hearts & minds of many I know.

Yes, when we start talking about a voluntary society, which one of those are we to point to as our example?  How are needs for security, safety and order to be met without any sort of state?  Are we not indeed asking a great deal to just throw caution to the wind and expect that everything is going to work out according to these "theories"?

Right now someone might well be like: "no thank you my life is going fine, I have a house, a dog, and a paycheck, I can go where I want and pretty much do what I want." 

If it's not broke is there any reason to fix it?

Not sure if you were being sarcastic in your response?

From what I can tell from my own experience of campaigning for anything the usual response has often been why rock the boat? People seem quite content so long as they have beer & cable TV. In fact some get angry at me for not wanting the mundane of 2 point 4 children, a semi detached house in the suburbia, football on a Saturday & roast beef on a Sunday, oh & two weeks in Spain every summer. I’m not saying that the traditional familiarities of middle class life aren’t a bad thing, but there not for everybody & that’s not tolerated.