From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 10:10 AM
To: 'Anthony Gregory'
Cc: 'Mark W. Stroberg'; 'marketliberal@yahoogroups.com'; 'jae4free@aol.com'
Subject: RE: libertarian analysis of Iraqi liberation

AG: The "Iraqi liberation" — presumably meaning only those Iraqis not murdered by US warplanes and occupation forces —

As I wrote in the aforementioned links:

BH: I simply disagree that sovereignty is more important than liberty.  If you want to argue that being sovereigntarian is more important than being libertarian, I advise you to avoid transparently clumsy tactics like calling all fatalities "murder" when the most collateral-damage-averse military in human history liberates a nation from a tyrant who literally (not metaphorically) murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens.

BH: The killing of aggressors is never murder, nor are unintentional collateral deaths caused by those fighting aggressors while seeking to minimize such deaths. You can bleat "murder" all you want, but in doing so you're preaching a conclusion to your choir, rather than arguing for that conclusion.

AG: is tautologically unlibertarian, since it involved the initation of force, in the form of taxdollars extracted from the American people, and innocents killed in the war.

If anything that risks the death of innocents is unlibertarian, then e.g. driving a car is unlibertarian.

Taxation is tautologically unanarchistic, but it's not tautologically unlibertarian.

AG: Libertarians do not believe in the initiation of force as a means of achieving political and social goals

You're apparently misinformed about the meaning of the pledge that David Nolan wrote for the LP in 1971. See http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=171.

Brian Holtz
Yahoo! Inc.
2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley) http://marketliberal.org
blog: http://knowinghumans.net
book: http://humanknowledge.net