Written by Suppose there was a button you could push that would abolish the State. Suppose that button has no other information, no other warning label imposed by the FDA.
Would you push it?
As Murray Rothbard put it, I would blister my thumb to push that button. To take it a bit further, if the button were inside my skull, I would push that button with a bullet. I would raise an army and wage a war and lay down my life and the lives of others, to set eyes upon that button, just to get a mere glimpse of it, for nothing more than that I might die with the knowledge that the button were possible, and might someday be pressed by another.
According to Stefan Molyneux, he would not push that button if it were sitting on his night table. The guy that spends a great deal of time talking you about how horrible the State is. The guy who tells you that peaceful parenting is going to lead to the end of the State. He literally wouldn’t lift a finger to end it.
Well, it’s not that I don’t understand that there might be some disagreement in human society that such a button should be pushed. Some of that disagreement might well be very reasonable. People might ask questions like “Well, what happens to statists if I push that button, are they killed?” or “Is the State abolished by the extinction of the human race” or they might be less reasonable questions like “Who will build the roads? Feed the poor? Equality? Muh Feelz?” Blah Blah Blah…
But Stefan is a pretty smart guy. He knows the button is an exercise in fiction, and as such, the conditions for the abolition of the State might be anything one’s imagination could conjure. It really is a simple question. “Do you or do you not seek the abolition of the State?” and for any right thinking anarchist, hell, for any moron who’s glanced at a newspaper in the last decade or two, the answer should be “Of course!”.
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