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Foot in the door

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wombatron Posted: Thu, May 1 2008 11:10 AM

I have found, in several discussions with friends and family, that non-libertarians have become disillusioned with the Fed and with fiat money in general.  I can talk for hours about gun rights, health care, private defense agencies, natural law, you name it, and they will just stare blankly.  However, if the conversation comes to money, people start to agree with me.  Many see that the current system is falling apart, and are open to the idea of free-market money.  I think that this is our foot in the door.  Has anyone else noticed this?

Market anarchist, Linux geek, aspiring Perl hacker, and student of the neo-Aristotelians, the classical individualist anarchists, and the Austrian school.

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Ego replied on Thu, May 1 2008 12:38 PM

If you get them interested in monetary policy, that's good enough! I have full faith that once they find themselves using free-market rhetoric to discuss monetary policy, they'll eventually see the light and slowly begin to apply free-market principles to everything else.

Don't allow leftists to play games with definitions! Some of the libertarian-leaning leftists at this forum will try to redefine "left-wing" back to its original defition (Third Estate, limited government, free-markets, laissez-faire reforms, etc.). Fine! We non-leftists can't stop them from using their own personal definitions; they can use whatever labels they want to describe any concept they want.

However, they have the audacity to then use their personal definition of "left-wing" (remember, the original definition, which is no longer valid) to prove that modern leftists are more libertarian than modern rightists! They will say that libertarianism is "inherently leftist" (again, using the original, no longer valid definition), and use that to insist that we should prefer and side with modern leftists over modern rightists.

Question their motives.

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I have noticed this as well. It's somewhat remarkable, isn't it? I'd guess that, for most of us here, we came slowly to a free-market perspective, and only after a time digesting it all came to believe that there could be a free market in money - last of all for many was likely security. Yet, because of what is happening in the world, people are realizing the practical failing of non-free market money - and abstracting from there to free markets in general. I had this conversation with several people last Friday night over Shabbat dinner - sparked by gas prices.
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