As an objectivist (not an advocate of any form of statism, limited or otherwise) I hold that the primary reason that most anti-state movements, such as they were or are, have had little if any effect on the continued existence of Statism is that those movements usually shared some more fundamental ethical or philosophical belief structure witht their enemies. Too many anti-statists take on the Statist via “economic” or “civil libertarian” level arguments, seldom denying the validity of the more primary and unproven tenets that always undergird Statisms. Primarily ethical, but also epistemological and metaphysical tenets that imbedded within any argument for government – these notions are not attacked as invalid. HOWEVER, I do think that Rand changed that. She built (despite her anti-libertarian protestations) or rather discovered a structure of concepts, a philosophy, that undercuts Statism – below the knees. Objectivism has provided modern anti-libertarians (some of them anyway) with a means of attacking the more fundamental or underlying assumptions of statism. Only when one gets beneath the economic arguments and provides a potentially anti-statist person an understanding of the real and deeper error of statism, does one then set in motion a person and perhaps a movement that is not deterred or fooled by the “moral” arguments of the Statists – namely that they are always workign for the common good, that the collective needs outweigh those of a mere individual etc. For example, the utilitarian sort of “libertarian” who attacks statism on the “it does not work” basis finds himself constantly trying to explain how the market would do this or that chore or project better. An incremental and superficial attack on Statism at best.

What libertarianism needed was not provided by English libertarian writers of ages gone by, nor by the anarchists of the late 1800′s and early 1900′s (who with few exceptions were collectivists at root), nor provided by finely reasoned and quite accurate Misean arguments against Statism and the non-economics of statism. But what was needed was a philosophy that provided a foundation on which these lesser arguments can and should stand upon.

If one is my age (60) then one lived through the 60′s and knew all the names of “prominent” philosophers of that day – you know the deep thinkers that undergirded the mindless collectivists of that era – Marcuse, Sartre, etc. But pause a moment and look around – except for some classes run by ex-hippies of the 60′s at state run universities, those names are no longer on everyone’s tongues. But Rand and her thoughts have persisted and I argue grown in their audience – an observation that I think is beyond debate.

Her ideas were correct and in reality being correct (with reality) lends itself to success and duration. As one in the financial “community,” as it were, I see the rise of much much opposition to Government now. Oh yes, much of it is still girded in utilitarian premises – that “capitalism” works better than Statism,etc, but very much at the front of the opposition is coming from those who see beyond just the “economic” arguments and who are openly citing Rand and her philosophy (not the orthodoxy) as their reason for now understanding and opposing the new power grab by Statism. And it is explicit. One minor example was Stephen Moore’s article in the Wall St. Journal a month ago that pointed out that Rand (via Atlas Shrugged) had foreseen just such a collapse – based on philosophical errors that dominoed into political actions then economic consequences. That article prompted more positive responses than the WSJ has ever seen, and the ripples continue in those pages today. Even today’s editioral in WSJ cites a “strike” by those (individuals and businesses) who will not commit their personal assets now in an “economy” that is headed where ours is headed. They recognize that it will be a dead-end and instead have shifted their time preferences to “saving” or protecting their would-be investments from being committed to a failing situation. Cries of “mutual self sacrifice” have no effect on them.

As for this being a crisis that is historically pivotal, that is my conclusion as one who saw the dominoes falling as of summer of 2007. Who understood the why of the collapse and who now sees a political trend that will only take the process to yet another level of hell. While as a stock market and commodity market analyst I see potentials for rallies in these markets (counter trend) that might slow or stall the decline in the more obvious markets in 2009, the real world collapse – on Main St. as they say – will persist and worsen in 2009, and that sort of further collapse – in State revenues, etc. – will hasten an even greater power grab by government. A spiral. But this time the opposition will not be “loyal opposition,” because now the opposition is forming around a deeper set of concepts than mere “economic” criticism of Statism. This time I expect the crisis to be historic, the reaction by the state to be historic and revealing, and the opposition to have an underlying philosophical backbone this time. This time – it is different. Regards and good bye. – Mike Oliver (not to be confused with the prior well-known Mike Oliver of decades ago who sought to create “free countries” here and there around the world, never successful).

Well “it depends”.

If the Republicans (sorry but the L.P. just is not a player) produce a valid anti bailout candidate, for example Mark Samford, at the elections of 2012 then the voters will face a choice.

And they will be voting for a new House of Representatives and a third of the Senate.

But the work must start NOW – no more extra spending, no more “deals”.

“But Obama and co will force it into effect anyway” – let them.

Let it be their wild spending, and their wild spending alone – and let them take the consequences of its failure.

But there will only be political consequences if an alternative from principle is argued – and argued NOW (not wait till 2010 or 2012).

“But what if the people are so brainwashed that they relect the Democratic Congress in 2010 and reelect the Congress and Obama in 2012″.

Then the game changes.

One would have to stop thinking about saving the whole country – and go for saving some of it (as an example of freedom to the world).

“But that is Stars and Bars talk”.

No it is not – there is no slavery, so “you are Confederates” would not only be BS it would be seen to be BS.

Especially if States like Alaska (rather far north) leave the Union.

The chances of convincing the American military to go and keep States in the Union by force are close to zero – as there is no great moral issue of slavery to use on those seeking to leave the Union.

But let us hope it does not come to that – work for victory in 2010 and 2012, but victory will only come from “clean” candidates who have always opposed bailouts and deals.

I am sure there are many more cases where a currency and the government that depended on it collapsed and opportunities were lost for lack of preparation or knowledge. I stand by my statement. Tyranny does not follow collapse, but chaos often does. We will have one shot at an open goal. If we haven’t laid our groundwork now we will lose that chance.

Between the czars and the communists, there was another government unprepared for either the opportunity or the threats it faced.

My statement that you quoted is not optimistic, it is a recognition of limited options. Your apparent determination to stake everything on saving the United Socialists of America in the hope that they can be reformed is what is optimistic. The dollar will fail. Redistributive vote buying will fail along with it. That will be our one and perhaps only opportunity to restore the federated governments of the states that still exists as a formality underneath this national beast.

Unlike all of those other places that have had their opportunity and failed because they could not fill the void quickly enough, the US and the UK have both retained underneath their government’s socialist shells the constitutionally restrained structures, symbols and capabilities of previous free market, property respecting governments. When our window comes, we have an almost insurmountable advantage over the socialists. Our US national government rules through extorting states to follow orders. The UK is simpler yet, it extorts MPs to follow orders and replaced real hereditary lords with sock-puppets. Both of those things can be undone in seconds.

When the national government is no longer capable of paying off its minions and puppets, the state governments will resume their function as it was before income taxes were taken and held for ransom. Will every state be ideal? Of course not. But there will be 50 different states not 50 uniform states. In the UK, MPs will once again poll their constituents and vote their will. Not ideal but a great improvement, unquestionably. When governments collapse, they tend to reincarnate to an earlier form. The earlier form of US and UK is a millennium expanding the recognition of individuals’ life, liberty and property.

When people can no longer get OPM from the government, they will defend what is rightfully their own all the more tenaciously.

That’s very optimistic. Collapses of this sort are always, always followed by tyranny. If we can’t head off the collapse by pruning the state back to some functional size we’re in for some dark years.

However, Bernake was carrying on the principle of Alan Greenspan – if there is a danger of a collapse, issue more money. Although, yes, Bernake even seems to have regarded a big decline in the stock market as cause to throw in more money (but then so did Greenspan as far back as 1987).

I do not doubt that Bernake invented lots of new tricks (he prides himself on that sort of thing), but the principle was that of Greenspan – Ayn Rand was right to throw the plate in Alan Greenspan’s face all those years ago (nonaggression principle violation though it may have been).

And, of course, each time there is a bailout the problem is made worse.

It became huge – and the statists were right to say that allowing the banks to collapse would have created great suffering (even if the depositors, under 100, 000 Dollars, had been paid off).

What the statists did not say (because they do not know?) was that increasing the money supply (including the massive increase in the Monetary Base in order to support the “broad money” bank credit) will cause even more suffering.

However, Bernake was carrying on the principle of Alan Greenspan – if there is a danger of a collapse, issue more money. Although, yes, Bernake even seems to have regarded a big decline in the stock market as cause to throw in more money (but then so did Greenspan as far back as 1987).

I do not doubt that Bernake invented lots of new tricks (he prides himself on that sort of thing), but the principle was that of Greenspan – Ayn Rand was right to throw the plate in Alan Greenspan’s face all those years ago (nonaggression principle violation though it may have been).

And, of course, each time there is a bailout the problem is made worse.

It became huge – and the statists were right to say that allowing the banks to collapse would have created great suffering (even if the depositors, under 100, 000 Dollars, had been paid off).

What the statists did not say (because they do not know?) was that increasing the money supply (including the massive increase in the Monetary Base in order to support the “broad money” bank credit) will cause even more suffering.

Creating new centrally synchronized economies out of whole cloth takes time. It is the Fed system that will collapse. Can you think of any way the redistribution state can survive without a central currency? In order to survive, statists will have to build a new medium of exchange and compel everyone to use it without any exceptions. That will take time and be against the will of a lot of seriously disillusioned people. Even the most determined socialist central statists will demand that the currency they are bribed with have value.

The way the Federal Reserve System was created was an illusion called ‘the gold standard’. I say it was an illusion because almost everybody was deluded into believing is was gold backed. It was not. It was merely pegged to gold and confidence in the state to run a safe and sound economy. They wrung 1/2 century out of that confidence game before it failed. We spent ~10 years on a totally fiat system before going to (under Reagan!) the ‘US Gov Debt‘ standard, ie T-bills. Check that graph in the link. The Fed System is now about to burst just like every previous ponzi scheme.

The system is finished. No options left, it is done. But that reality is both terrifying and a unique opportunity.

No, I am not specifically confining myself to the US. Obviously, the $ is the reserve currency of the world. Scary enough, it is also the soundest one capable of being a reserve currency. No other currency could handle the inflow of ‘investment’ without becoming a bubble as well. The Euro is trying, though.

There is no zealot like a convert, there is no anti-smoker like a former smoker, there is no scorn like a lover spurned. The people who have been accepting all of the promises from the statists will be the first in line with rope when the statists fail. It is the way it always has and always will be. Building the ‘new’ meta-context is what we are doing here and now. It truly astonishes me the number of people, even very smart people at the top of society, don’t understand what is going on and are scared s-less. We have their attention.

And I must confess, your grasp of the certainty about the collapse of statism heralds a confidence in an understanding I lack. Presumably you are confining your remarks to the U.S?

When you say…

“The state cannot rewrite the laws of nature or of mathematics. We do not need to destroy the redistributionist totalitarian state. It cannot possibly survive.”

… you skirt around two terribly large aspects of the problem which are that although particular institutions may be destroyed, the thought (and more specifically, anti-thought) of a great many people, and the culture in which such thought has been nurtured will remain. Unless those two aspects are also tackled, then statism will simply continue albeit with a different set of institutions.

I understand that you see this as an opportunity to try to do something about those two other aspects of the problem, but the scale of the task is simply enormous.

I’m all for getting on with it, but I do want to be sure I’m using the right tools in doing so.

No. Look here: ‘the final wave of statism’ – since when did ‘final’ mean ‘less’? And in any case, even if the wording was changed slightly – the claim that we will soon see ‘less state intervention’ requires more justification than that the chairman of the Federal Reserve did something wrong or that some ghastly trend-following hedge-fund managers lost a lot of money.

In short what is required is an actual explanation with the use of plain English and stipulation to defined terms for that claim to be taken as anything more than a pretty kite. Vague, Nietzsche-redolent prophecies of the imminent demise of statism are of no use unless they are backed by explanations commensurate to the nature of the problem.

As it happens, I believe that for all that the crisis of regulatory statism has been unmasked, there aren’t enough people even in the right places looking at the ugly thing, never mind being able to recognize it as ugly.

“There are already too many in the financial markets and in the financial press who realize the sequence of events, and who will not be fooled.”

Excuse me, that may be true to some extent in the U.S. but it completely ignores the existence of newspapers such as the Financial Times in England, which, as Paul Marks often points out, is run by the same sort of people who occupy government departments – to put an ethical name to them ‘collectivists’.

The entrenchment of the State in civil society is not temporary in a sense relative to the time span of a few generations, and it’ll take an awful lot more than a bit of ‘unmasking’ here and there to remove or at least reduce it by any significant degree.

So many commenters here are depressed at the futility of waging war against the state. While I admire and respect many of them (ie Ian B, Paul Marks) they are worried about the wrong thing.

The state cannot rewrite the laws of nature or of mathematics. We do not need to destroy the redistributionist totalitarian state. It cannot possibly survive. Our biggest personal concern (certainly mine) is to minimize my own injuries when it collapses. But I certainly don’t need to worry about how to collapse it. It WILL fall.

The question is ‘then what?’ That is really the only thing we need to be worried about. We will be greeted with a vacuum and only one shot at an open goal. Fretting about how to achieve something that is inevitable is a serious distraction from preparing for the one opportunity we will have.

I would like the (now totally unpreventable) collapse of the Federal Reserve System (which enables the Income Tax system which enables the redistribution socialist state) to be a decisive one. It most certainly will be. Everybody on the planet needs to understand and fear the combination of politicians and currency. I can think of no case in which fiat currency did not ultimately end in tragedy. Unemployment will (already is in my area) go through the roof and all of the Weimar dollars in the world won’t be an anesthetic. After we have made that case to all of the people who until the collapse have been too busy living day to day to think about it, I hope we can go back to a constitutionally restrained government. I could see us restarting the constitution if a trans-apocalyptic SCOTUS is willing to strike down some preposterously rationalized precedent. If they are not, we may end up starting anew in a rather messy place.

The GM assembly plant in my neighborhood just shut down at an upfront loss of about $300,000,000/year in local payroll receipts alone. That doesn’t include all of the feeder plants owned by sub-contractors. No amount of unemployment payed in Weimar dollars will fool anyone. This is a once in two life-times opportunity and so many of us are still worried about how to bring down nationalist (as opposed to true federal) government or worse yet, how to save it.

What exactly are you predicting?

More state intervention followed by less state intervention. Succinct enough?

“The Charade has reached its zenith.”

“The seemingly perpetual ascendancy of the State is in fact a paper tiger. Yes, the State will appear to rise as The Saviour, but its salvation and credibility will not weather the storm that it has itself created.”

Could I be so rude as to ask for those sentences again without the aesthetically pleasing language? What exactly are you predicting?