I think I lack the ability to create freedom for myself and am instead reliant on dwelling in the second hand freedom great individuals and groups create. I do advocate ways to

Re:
Perhaps the collectivist manner in which the abolition of slavery was imposed on freemen is itself one of the roots of where we went astray from individualism. I am not pro-slavery but am hard pressed to explain why a man is not free to deal with his children in what is right in his own mind. As long as there is no inhumane mistreatment of individuals or kidnapping, as long is there a finite time for this contract, why must it be forbidden to pay in advance for a child or man’s labors.

I’m not speaking of the actual way that this human trade was conducted, but in the theoretical way it could be a legitimate form of labor agreement, and a way out of poverty for some families.

I wonder how many men would accept money today for their prepaid labor. I.e. give me $100,000 today and I would owe 7 years of labor to the payor of this money.

Why are American children forced to waste their most productive years on the family couch playing video games and talking on cell phones when they could be working under a capitalist and learning a valuable trade and skill? As long as the servitude selectees were non-discriminatorily selected it may be something to consider.

Ironically your perceived “right” not be a slave and for no other man as well might be the right that is breaking society’s back and causing us to become bankrupt.

All men are created equal but a good many develop into something unable to maintain this equality and fully provide for themselves and their progeny.

Terrible epistemology and metaphors. How can someone who appears to espouse the virtues of freedom be so far off base as to couch his defense of it in the language of slavery?
“We do ask for a submission to the invisible hand of market competition. The productive labor of free men and capitalists should be afforded reverence and awe.”
“Submission” is a servile act. A truly free man demands or grants submission to nothing and no one, much less some imaginary concept. He will, however, transact business with you for a mutually agreeable price. The “invisible hand” is nothing more or less than shorthand for the exercised rational self-interest of multiple intelligent individual humans. A is A. Recognizing that fact does not require submission of any kind, on the contrary, it (merely) requires exercising human consciousness. The “productive labor of free men and(?) capitalists should be afforded reverence and awe”. Festering heaps of excrement! It should be afforded whatever it will bring in exchange in a free marketplace, unfettered by the evil machinations of Attila, the Witch Doctor, or their servants and minions. The entomological metaphors are ridiculous as well, and smack of historical (attempted) justifications for collectivism. One cannot build a road to individual liberty through that fetid swamp.

-Abolitionist

The following link, takes you to a “utopian” article, entitled “Home of the Brave?” which I wrote and appeared in the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm

John Steinsvold

We do ask for a submission to the invisible hand of market competition. The productive labor of free men and capitalists should be afforded reverence and awe.

I teach my children to highly value the production of goods and provision of services freely
bartered for.

I teach them to see no value in the ransacking and redistribution of productive resources. Social security, medicare, national weather service, unemployment benefits, the whole rotten lot.
See those collectivist products as forbidden fruit, the more we eat of it, the more we are cursed.

Many of us are still like hardworking ants. The greatest of us capitalists and businessmen are honey bees. When the productive organisms create a land flowing with milk and honey you can be assured that the progressives will arrive, starting as grasshoppers. Hopping nimbly around promising amazing new rights and entitlements.

Soon they become locusts, and will fully devour America and then await the birth of a new place such as India to arise as the leader of the free world, a land flowing with the abundance a free market provides. Unavoidably their people start to heed the sweet promises of the “fair and just” pests come to roost and devour them.

“Stand by the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in them, and find rest for your souls.”
Jeremiah 6.16

Funny thing old testament prophets tended to subsist off diets of wild honey and locusts.

The answers are in the Declaration of Independence.

For the first time in history Americans fear the Government.

http://www.themoneyforlifeblog.com/for-the-first-time-ever-americans-live-in-fear-of-the-government.html

This view is nihilistic in the extreme, the ultimate extreme of which is a form of purge akin to genocide. Once it is accepted as self evident (meaning, no longer needing to be proven) that overpopulation is a real problem, then the discussion will shift to focus on how to bring about the desired population. This can only result in a group of elites deciding who can have babies, and imposing punishments for those who break the rules. It should be asked of all those who support this view, do they see themselves as contributing to overpopulation, and are they willing to take the necessary steps to prevent their impact? Better they voluntarily remove themselves for their beliefs rather than force others to follow their edicts involuntarily.

At root, this view defines a fundamental difference between how collectivists and free peoples look at life. For collectivists of all stripes, another birth is another person that must be supported by the state, and so is a burden. Therefore, it is a privilege given to you by the state to be allowed to exist at all.

For free peoples, people are the greatest resource that a society has. They represent the future wealth that they will bring to society if allowed to freely pursue their own interests, and the society is privileged to have them.

And progressive? The term has today re-emerged to once again denote any person, organization, or idea left of moderate. It was the centrist liberalism of the Clinton Administration — e.g., the (proposed) neo-Progressive cartelization of medicine, the intervention in the Balkans, the North American Free Trade Agreement — that brought forth self-designated “progressives” who opposed anything less than full socialization of all medicine, the deployment of U.S. troops anywhere, and the rise of the global economy. The only real change in the term is how commodious it has become. It encompasses everyone from an ever-leftward social democrat to a Communist-without-a-Party to such relatively recent arrivals as the colorless “radical feminist” (i.e., white bourgeois female) fighting the Patriarchal Occupational Government, the Queer activist fighting “heteronormality,” the multiculturalist fighting Western civilization, and the Deep Ecologist fighting all civilization. It even includes ideologically exhausted leftists-without-an-ism such as philosopher Richard Rorty, who allows that the “best we can hope for is more of the same experimental, hit-or-miss, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back reforms that have been taking place in the industrial democracies since the French Revolution.” What’s left is a “progressive” Left that can progress in any number of directions — or with none at all.

Which raises the question of just what progressive really tells us. Something that means everything, means nothing. Even as a synonym for all things leftist, can it logically include, for example, the Marxist crucifixion of Malthus and the Green resurrection of him? Or both pacifism and militarism (the “armed struggles” of socialist forces)? How can we speak of as “progressive” striving for a Communist future that is already past – or yearning to drive humanity “back to the Pleistocene” (an Earth First! slogan)? And exactly how long can a concept sit on the shelf until you can’t continue to market it as “progressive”? Presumably, labeling one’s position “progressive” endows it with the virtue of being forward-looking, “relevant,” while conversely rendering any opposing position backward, “reactionary” – all in all, a superficially more sophisticated alternative to “good” and “evil.” In a public square increasingly devoid of common referents, forward-and-back, much like left-and-right, reveals neither where someone is coming from nor what he’s going after. For the mere honesty of the debate, what we need is a political vocabulary whose terms actually describe the ideas on the table – a proposal evidently more daunting than its modest tenor would suggest.

There is no doubt that Americans are in for a very rude awakening. Jobless, homeless and clueless is not where one wants to be.

On the other hand, someone in desperate straights is more likely to open his mind to why he finds himself in such a predicament. Hunger and despair have a way of concentrating the mind.

Whether people rightfully conclude that the state is the source of their troubles is not assured, though they will at least be asking the right questions. That alone is a positive step.

The danger, of course, is that decivilization is so extreme that we end up with another Hitler or Napoleon running the show. Revolutions are fertile ground for egomaniacs and demagogues. The alternative is that we revert to our country’s founding principles. Either way, we’re in for some interesting times.

What you say is true, but I find little comfort in the fact that statist policies are inherently self destructive. The problem being that a great many people, through no fault of their own, will not be able to escape that destruction when it finally comes about. Hopefully there will be enough of us left to pick up the pieces and start over.

The only benefit of statist ideologies in general and Progressivism in particular is that they are inherently self-destructive. One look at the fiscal and monetary insanity of the current regime is all the proof one needs. Once Obama and Bernanke get done destroying the economy and our money, maybe then we can pick up the pieces and rebuild a vibrant society. To expect that we can reform the current system is sheer folly.