Today has seen a huge spike in pageviews for RR, which appears to be clicks initially checking out the most recent Quote of the Day. Much appreciated, but this page is focused on the philosophy of liberty and thoughts on a path toward realizing liberty in our lifetime. Personal stories digressive of this goal will be rare. Aside from that, welcome! There will be new content every day, along with quotes I’ve found interesting and relevant. Most quotes come from writers that have influenced my thinking the most: Hayek, Mises, Shackle, Lachmann, Shutz, and even the occasional Keynes quote. Keynes’s fame is due more so to his location in history: 1930’s Cambridge, England, rather than any original contribution to economic thought. His policy prescriptions made him famous, because they provided the hitherto lacking academic justification for massive state intervention into the market economy. Shackle is the far superior thinker and writer whose felicity of phrase articulates the strange and kaleidic world we move through without even noticing. I post quotes from these relatively obscure thinkers because their ideas contain the weapon to be used when the State’s coven of intellectual class descends into battle. Every government in history has surrounded itself with priests, shamans, and wavers of incense, to give the State an aura of consecration and protection. Modern governments are no different, but now they surround themselves with economists, historians, philosophers, to protect the rationale for total government.
That priestly class must be defeated in the realm of ideas, and for all to see, if the Oz-like mystique of the State is to deliquesce. That means a combination of philosophy and action, a combination that I’ve found to be too rare. Rare in the sense that, almost every theoretician of liberty abstains from activism, and the activists abstain from theory. There must be a fusion if there is to be success. I don’t consider myself much of an activist, or theoretician, but I am actively working to remedy both, applying equal emphasis. That involves discipline, and the development and utilization of daily systems.
I can’t imagine a greater goal, or greater endeavor, than the pursuit of liberty. It’s an intellectual pursuit foremost, but its realization in the present day should be kept always in mind. Not in some distant future, but now. The time for compromise is over, for voting for someone who might throw a bone or two to the liberty movement. It means living up to the legacy of the Ron Paul Revolution. It means dusting off the optimism and sense of limitlessness that we felt when we campaigned for him.
For me, the past year has felt like one that has been spent slowly climbing out of a dark well, one I’ve been stuck at the bottom of for five years. I was made to feel that I should be happy and content there, with every attempt to escape met with a deepening, and darkening of that well. I realized that there is nothing wrong with wanting my own freedom, and returning to my former passions, the ones I’d left at the entrance to the well. I’d found my old passions waiting patiently for me in the sunlight, along with several new faces, and one beautiful one in particular that has offered something much more than an Annie Wilkes-esque locked room.
And so this blog is a chronicle of one individual’s pursuit of liberty in the dual spheres of theory and action. Theory must precede action, but I’ve focused far too much on theory. It’s only recently that I’ve realized how powerful action can be when focused like a laser in the pursuit of liberty. Marijuana in Oklahoma, can you believe it? It was the result of action, but of philosophically focused action, with the goal in relentless pursuit. Liza Greve’s vaccine choice group single-handedly unseated an incumbent state senator. This is philosophically-focused action, and it is the key to the path to liberty reborn. To a republic, reborn. The name of this blog implies that this republic can be born again, that the spirit of liberty that created it can be revived. But philosophically-focused and informed action is the only path. Let that be our lantern and goal to lead us out of the dark-as-night well and into liberty’s eternal sunlight.
