I'll have to double-check on "Mein Kampf," but I do know that Communist theory was against all government, not just the current one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_a...

Thanks for the link.

I just did a search for "The Stones Cry Out," and I found this:

http://vimeo.com/64301886

But something tells me that isn't what you're referring to...

I agree that basing morality purely off consequences is problematic because we don't always know what the consequences of our actions will be until after the fact. That's why I called myself a consequentialist libertarian rather than simply a consequentialist. History has clearly shown us that giving people freedom and protecting private property have had the best results for producing successful and productive outcomes for all members of society.

Anarchy, on the other hand, has tended to be the gateway to totalitarianism. "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf" were both heavy anti-government screeds.

What kind of philosopher are you? A deontological one or a consequentialist one?

Look up deontology vs. consequentialism.

Anarchists tend to say our current system is screwed up because government exists, which I think is a faulty premise. That seems to be the message of this video.

I haven't heard Stefan's description of Karl Marx's life, but I was under the impression that Marx spent his entire life in poverty.

As a consequentialist libertarian, I reject the idea that there can be any such thing as morality without pragmatism.

Honestly, I've heard all these arguments before. The basic rundown goes like this: society evolves through different stages over time, the current society is a slave system in which people have no freedom and therefore it needs to be violently overthrown or dismantled, and we will replace it with a perfect utopia in which everyone will be happy and there will be no problems. It all sounds nice and dreamy, but it's essentially the same set of arguments that Karl Marx used to support Communism, except that in this case, those arguments are being used to support Anarchism instead.

Fun fact: Communism, as it was described in its initial theories, was actually supposed to be a form of anarchy. Yet it ended up being totalitarianism in practice because most Communists spent a vast majority of their time criticizing the current system rather than trying to actually find or implement solutions to the social problems they were so fond of using to ridicule society and government. Karl Marx wrote three volumes of "Das Kapital," each of which was a massive tome over a thousand pages in length, all focused on analyzing and criticizing the economic system of the mid-1800s. That's over three-thousand pages of criticisms directed at the existing social order of the day. By contrast, "The Communist Manifesto," in which Karl Marx describes his theories for a potential alternative, is only a scant 45 pages in length, and contains only the most general outlines for a new social order. And when the Communists finally gained political power in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, they came face-to-face with the fact that they had very little idea what they were actually fighting for, and didn't really know what they wanted to achieve. They had to confront the reality that the utopian society which they had imagined was never clearly explained in any of their writings, and so an ad-hoc system had to be cobbled together using the few vague and generic explanations they did have. The result was a slapstick, dysfunctional social order far more oppressive and controlling than the one they had just overthrown, and far more destructive.

The habit of criticizing without proposing solutions is a common human characteristic which we're all guilty of from time to time, but we should be extremely wary of those who want to tear down our existing society without telling us exactly what they're going to replace it with. High level theory is easier to write and more fun to read, but in the end, it is the low level implementation – that is, the place where the rubber meets the road, the nuts and bolts of how things are going to actually work – that really matters.

I've watched a few of Stefan Molyneux's videos and skimmed excerpts of his writings, and one thing he said which makes me totally distrust him is his claim that anarchists don't need to describe what their hypothetical, no-government society would actually look like or how it would function. This is the exact same mistake that the Communists made prior to their revolution, and I fear that if an Anarchist revolution were to occur, its results would be no different.