There’s a certain group (who are such radical individualists that even referring to them as a group insults them) that I used to identify with that operates under the assumption that when it comes to the State, politics, governance, etc., they have the solution to any problem as it relates to said organization and/or concepts. Whether you consider yourself to be on the left, right, or center of the political or cultural spectrum; everyone can agree that the government we live under has severe problems. I will continue to operate under this assumption without detailing or giving examples as to what concerns the left, right, and center find most pressing as specifics are not relevant to this Substack.

The one group I am addressing would, for the most part, tell you they exist outside of the trio of political categories I mentioned above. This group—who commonly go by the terms anarchist and voluntaryist—judges politics and any interactions within society (another word many of them would eschew) upon whether they are “moral” or not. Commonly, their opinion is that no person has the right to initiate force upon another; therefore, since the government taxes the individual—to use their most common example—the government’s very existence is immoral. The people who believe this are so invested in this belief that any words I type here to challenge that dogma puts me in the class of the oppressor, according to them. If you’ve ever encountered one of these anarchists/voluntaryists, (again, I used to be one of them), you were most likely left dumbfounded and unable to forget it.

I will again ask the question raised above: Is it immoral to initiate force against another person? My answer: I would have to say yes to every occasion in which this would happen. However, the qualification must be made that imposing violence or force upon someone whom you—being the only witness—just saw commit rape is not initiating force.

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