This clip from Jon Stewart summarizes my thoughts on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. This is not an issue for government and in the process brings up the issue of individual rights vs. collective rights. The mosque property was legitimately purchased and it is up to owners alone to decide how to develop that property. For some it is a negative reminder of 9/11, while for others it is a holy place of worship. The test of liberty comes when someone wants to do something that goes against your ethics or beliefs. As Ron Paul, Jesse Ventura, and others heading the freedom movement today have said; it is not popular ideas that need protection, but rather unpopular ideas. One of the major challenges of freedom is knowing you are not going to get your way every time, as any rational human being would know after living in this world for a day. Freedom lets us do what we like but at the same time we must tolerate actions and ideas we might not necessarily connect with. Voluntary exchange in a free market joins ideas and cultures together in a cooperative way that governments couldn’t dream to achieve.

As a vegetarian I don’t necessarily “appreciate” the display of meat on nearly every fast food outlet’s windows, but it doesn’t give me or the government the right to physically prevent the restaurant owner from operating and developing his property as he sees fit. My personal preferences, ethics, and morals are not used as an excuse to take away an owner’s right of using, developing, and advertising his restaurant. Every individual has different morals and beliefs, and it is not up to government to choose one way or another. Ideas must flow free, they cannot be compartmentalized and narrowed as the state often manages to accomplish with its endeavors. If I don’t eat meat, I don’t buy meat. The store still has every right to advertise as it sees fit, and I can choose for myself whether they have a product worth buying or not. Freedom is choice, you have to be responsible and understand that not everyone sees the world as you do.

Those passionately protesting the mosque are essentially asking government to interfere in private property in order to better serve the morals and values of the people of New York City. Government is the last entity you want organizing taste, morals, and ethics. If so many people are downright opposed to the mosque, the last thing that would be necessary is government intervention to block development of the land. Obviously the only way the mosque could productively survive is if people choose to worship there. As with any business or private organization in a free society, the final regulation is up to individuals. The fate of a project lies the hands of individuals, not central bureaucrats disconnected from society and reality. If the mosque is really being put up as an “in-your-face” to America by radical Muslims and no one actually wants to worship there, it’s going to take a substantial amount of money to maintain. An organization cannot survive without support, yet these protesters believe that once the mosque is built it will be there for good. It may be there for awhile, but only if it has legitimate support and consistent worshipers. Without support, it will be a financial burden to maintain. Such is the natural process of rewarding productivity in a free market.

This is no different than if a Christian church branch opened up exclusively for one-legged peach farmers. Such a church will likely fail because there aren’t many one-legged peach farmers to go around in the first place. If there is demand for a mosque in New York City, so be it. Obviously they feel there are enough Muslims in the area to make it a worthwhile endeavor. Are you really going to get so incensed because a group of people want to worship in a particular way? Such a misguided view of intolerance and discrimination is exactly what leads to the disintegration of freedom and liberty.

With our time, labor, and money we are “voting.” We support certain businesses and groups and withhold our money from other organizations. I choose not to support meat producers and instead make the choice to spend my money on vegetarian and meatless products. In a free market voluntary exchange based on individual needs and preferences keeps regulatory power in the hands of individuals. Government regulation uses collective force to take away individual power and choice and instead give it to a select few bureaucrats who are appointed to make certain decisions for the rest of the people. Whether it be the ability to confiscate income or make the final decision on the mosque at Ground Zero, the issue at hand is one of principle. Do we really want to entrust our power as individuals to bureaucrats who haven’t even been elected by the people? In a new age of creativity how does a powerful central government help the people more than it destroys their creativity, productivity, and natural organization? Government hinders freedom. Government blocks creativity. Government survives only through coercion, and that coercion comes at the expense of our lives, liberty, and property.

It is time that we choose liberty over government. It is time that we stop treating ourselves like children and acknowledge the risk and responsibility that inevitably comes with freedom, but it is a small price to pay to be free. Without this understanding in principle, the mosque protesters cannot expect to achieve anything worthwhile. Avoid the uncreative and coercive trap of government and choose tolerance, responsibility, and freedom!

Economics professor Bernard Malamud not once but twice invited the crowd in Las Vegas to visit nearby Hoover Dam to see for themselves an example of the productive assets that were created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) New Deal. Professor Malamud was recruited to plead the Keynesian side of the argument in an “FDR’s Depression Policies: Good Deal or Raw Deal?” debate with the Foundation for Economic Education’s (FEE) Lawrence Reed during FreedomFest.

I finished my masters degree from UNLV under the tutelage of Murray Rothbard but I started my coursework with a class or two from professor Malamud, who, while being as Keynesian as they come, is at least sympathetic to the Austrian view when it comes to explaining speculative bubbles. He certainly took on Mr. Reed with good humor in front of an unfriendly, anti-FDR audience.

Malamud’s thesis is that no matter what your ideology, New Deal economics worked! The economy was in the midst of a terrifying deflation spiral. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was saying things like “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers.” The money supply was dropping, strangled by a rigid gold standard. The private sector was not eager to invest, so an alphabet soup of federal programs — like the CCC, CWA, WPA, FDIC, SEC, FSLIC — had to fill the void, putting people back to work, stimulating aggregate demand and providing for FDR’s four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. At the same time, FDR’s “playing with the price of gold” as Malamud put it, loosened up the money markets.

Recovery (or reinflation) started as soon as 1933 and was only sidetracked in 1937, when the stimulus was pulled back. The “mistake of 1937″ was made, according to the UNLV professor, when FDR’s administration went back to listening to Andrew Mellon and instituted the austerity programs FDR had promised during his initial campaign.

When his turn came for rebuttal, Reed joked that he “felt like a mosquito at a nudist camp; I know what I need to do, but I don’t know where to begin.” After his free-market case was made and the Keynesian case was destroyed, Reed quipped, “The economy recovered when FDR didn’t.”

Keynesians erect a pretty low bar when judging the productivity of government stimulus projects, but the results of the concrete monster known as Hoover Dam have been devastating. Hoover described the dam as “the greatest engineering work of its character attempted by the hand of man.” The massive structure cost $49 million (or $736 million in inflation-adjusted dollars) and measures over 726 feet in height and more than 1,200 feet in length. It took five years and 4,360,000 cubic yards of concrete to build, and was finished two years ahead of schedule. About 16,000 people worked on constructing the dam, with over 100 losing their lives in the process.

Just as the Keynesian policies of the New Deal tried to cheat the laws of economics, government’s damming of the Colorado River attempted to cheat Mother Nature by bringing water to the desert southwest — water that just isn’t and never was there. The great western explorer John Wesley Powell was booed out of the room when he told the irrigation congress, “Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.”

But 75 years ago, when the dam was nearly completed, FDR proclaimed during his dedication speech that millions of present and future residents of the southwest could count on “a just, safe, and permanent system of water rights.” The turbulent Colorado River that vacillated between droughts and floods would be tamed and become “a great national possession” and be counted on for irrigation to support a human migration seeking mild winters and new opportunities.

“The nation took him at his word,” writes Michael Hiltzik, author of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century. “Since that dedication year, the population of the seven states of the basin has swelled by about 45 million. Much of this growth has been fueled by the dam and its precious bounties of water and electrical power.”

As Hiltzik points out, the dam’s water promise gunned the growth of southern California cities and attracted farmers to the west to grow water-intensive crops like cotton despite the lack of normal rainfall required to support this kind of agriculture.

Just as government stimulus programs and artificially low interest rates that promise to spur growth and make up for the lack of private investment never work, Hoover’s promise that his dam would, as Hiltzik writes, “provide all the water their states could conceivably need to fulfill their dreams of irrigation, industrial development and urban growth” is literally drying up. The water level at Lake Mead is down 120 feet from its high-water mark, revealing a white “bathtub ring.”

Now that millions have migrated to the southwest and private industry has invested millions of dollars, Hoover and FDR’s promises have confined those living and doing business in the west “in the straitjacket of an ever-intensifying water shortage,” notes Hiltzik. And while Interior Secretary Gale Norton claimed to have stilled the “conflict on the river” back in 2003 with the signing of two-dozen agreements transferring water rights between various Indian tribes, cities, and governments, the battle for water will rage on. The supply will never catch up with the demand.

After the ten-year drought, another $700 million is now being spent to install an additional intake pipeline into the diminishing Lake Mead. Almost 90 percent of the drinking water for Las Vegas comes from the lake. The new intake pipeline, officially known as Intake No. 3, “will reach deeper into the reservoir to protect the valley’s water supply should the lake shrink low enough to shut down one of the two shallower straws,” reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

However, the cost of this project is likely to rise, because the tunnel being excavated for the pipeline unexpectedly filled with water earlier this month. But this cost overrun shouldn’t trouble Keynesians, because the additional taxpayer money just provides more stimulus, right?

Those in government never learn. They can’t print prosperity, and more water won’t magically appear if they dam a river. While the man on the street believes government infallible, politicians and bureaucrats cannot calculate the economic profits and losses of government interventions. Ludwig von Mises made the point that government interventions inevitably lead to unintended consequences, leading government to constantly intervene further. So governments will fight over scarce water, and private use is increasingly being restricted by local ordinances.

The New Deal dam project that professor Malamud is so proud of provided a few thousand jobs 80 years ago, but has spurred migration, farming, and development that is likely unsustainable and may ultimately be the biggest malinvestment in history.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1024

You’ve got to hand it to the people who really dislike free markets. They see them everywhere (under every bed?) and especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever.

Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Market opponents are having a field day. They say this finally demonstrates the need for government to run things. Private firms can’t be trusted.

But it looks more like government can’t be trusted. The central government is, in law and in fact, the owner of the part in the Gulf where BP drilled for oil. (I didn’t say it was the legitimate owner.) The owner leased its property to a private company, BP, with a bad safety record (though a good one for sucking up to the environmentalist establishment and bureaucrats) and issued permits for the drilling operation. It then failed to keep a sharp eye on what BP and subcontractors Transocean and Halliburton were doing to its property. That might have something to do with the fact that government regulators don’t have the sort of relationship to “their” property that real private owners do, and they can always be counted on to get friendly with those they regulate. The Minerals Management Service in the Interior Department has a special conflict of interest: It makes money off the drilling it permits and regulates. Thus it could benefit from decisions that are bad for the public.

So what failed here, the market or the State? The call isn’t even close. The free market was nowhere near the scene. It has an airtight alibi. It didn’t exist.

Now with some effort you might get a die-hard anti-market person to concede this. So we move to the next step. What should replace the current hybrid (government-corporate) system? I see only two choices: full government management or full market management. Full government management wouldn’t appear terribly promising, considering that the current problems are traceable back to government management already. How would things change substantially if, instead of contracting out the drilling to a nominally private company, the government instead hired the personnel itself and paid them directly from the U.S. Treasury? Who cares if the rig says “BP, ” “Transocean,” or “U.S. Government” on it? The same fallible people would be in the same position to make the same fateful mistakes. Not much would have changed.

Incentives Matter

That’s because what matters is incentives, not whether a worker is on the government payroll. Why assume that civil service employees know more or care more than people paid by corporations?

But, it will be said, the government workers will have a mandate to protect the environment and the public. Okay, let’s go with that. Let’s say the decision-makers are environmental hawks who really don’t like oil drilling anywhere. They’ll be tough: no drilling unless it’s 100 percent safe. Leaving aside the obvious problem with this standard, that policy would have costs. The risk of oil spills may drop to zero, but we might have to forgo certain important benefits in the process. Poor people, say, might have their prospects dimmed by more expensive energy.

Is the tradeoff worth it? How do we go about answering that question? Government is no help here. It can certainly impose a plan, but constructing a plan beneficial to the public would be like playing darts in the dark. What bureaucrats think is good for us may not actually be good for us, no matter how much they care. Mises and Hayek covered this in their writings on state socialism and economic calculation.

Things are sure looking bleak. Government assurances are worthless whether it contracts out for drilling or does it itself. That leaves only the free market. Can it be trusted?

First off, let’s remember that we live in the real world. There are no iron-clad guarantees. The best we can hope for is relative security. Option A can’t be perfect. All we can ask is that it is better than Options B, C, and D. But how do we decide? When people conclude that government management is the best alternative, knowingly or not they have rigged the game. They are comparing the messy real world in which free markets would operate to an impossible government-managed smooth-running utopia, where regulators have complete knowledge and total dedication to the public interest. This is the Nirvana Fallacy, and the problem with it is that utopia isn’t on the table.

What is on the table are two options: an arrangement where incentives align economic activity with the public interest and one where they don’t. Now which setup seems more promising? One where personnel risk no capital, face no prospects of bankruptcy, and procure their revenue by force (taxation) after flattering members of special-interest-serving congressmen? Or one where: capital had to be raised from wary investors in a competitive environment, insurance would be priced according to risk, products would have to be sold to buyers who are free to say no, and full and strict liability would haunt every decision, with bankruptcy always looming and no government bailout are even implied?

When you come down to it, the choice is really rather easy.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=931

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President [Leonardo] Fração, it is a pleasure to be here, at this XXIII Forum da Liberdade, whose theme is based on Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Policy book [known in Brazil as The Six Lessons].

Mises was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, a resolute and uncompromising champion of freedom. Fifty years ago, Mises came to South America and delivered those six historic lectures, which are heralded and quoted just outside, at the Forum’s exhibit.

Today, there is a great international revival of Misesian ideas — including in Brazil — which show the benefits that consumers and workers derive when they are free to venture, to chart their course, and to fulfill their desires.

This week, in Porto Alegre, there is a great concentration of intellectual heirs of Ludwig von Mises. We, from Instituto Mises Brasil, have just concluded our first conference, which was a great success, and it could not have been otherwise! The energy emanating from you is contagious. We have here today many scholars and experts of the Austrian School of economics. Tom Woods, one of the speakers at our conference and the bestseller author of Meltdown, will address you tomorrow. The legendary founder and chairman of the Mises Institute — Lew Rockwell — is also among us tonight! Without Lew, there would be no Mises Institute, no revival of the Austrian School, no Instituto Mises Brasil. Thank you, Lew. And above all, thanks to you, President Fração, to IEE [The Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies], for your support to our conference and especially for your achievements in the fight for liberty. Results come first in this contest; the results of the work of IEE and of the Forum da Liberdade are both evident and quantifiable. Congratulations, IEE!

On other occasions, I customarily speak about finance and economics, about the measures that are likely to bring about a more prosperous society; in other words, as did Mises, I usually speak about what works and what does not.

Today, for the first time, I am addressing a different subject. I speak about what moves me. I speak about where my energy, as an individual, originates. Its source is here, in this advanced and progressive libertarian community, which looks forward to real changes; not merely illusory changes from campaign slogans. I feel at home. It is a great honor to receive the Libertas Award.

The history of ethics has been a history of exploitation. From time immemorial, individuals were set apart into two groups: those that must obey the rules, and those that need not. The people must observe ethics and morals, while rulers not.

The ethics that you and I must observe correctly advocates that one should not steal the property of others, should not murder, and should not force others to do something against their will.

But note that those ethical rules do not apply to government — the government takes your money, calls it “democratic taxes,” and presto! — it is now authorized to steal.

If one enslaves another, this is considered a heinous crime. After all, slavery is the antithesis of individuality! However, in the case of government, they will draft you to “serve your nation” for a year, call this conscription “military service,” and serfdom becomes perfectly legal.

If one kills a neighbor, this is murder. However, if he is an agent of the government — particularly that of the United States — using an olive-green uniform, and invoking a “preventive” war or similar excuse, suddenly it becomes permissible to murder — legally.

Counterfeiting is a crime, but only for you and me. For the government has the money-printing machine, or more precisely, the counterfeiting machine. If it is they doing it, fine. If it is we, we go to jail.

Three hundred years ago, a substantial part of the population in the Americas was comprised of slaves. One hundred percent of the fruits of their labor were the property of their owners. Today, we are no longer slaves. However, about 40 to 50 percent of the product of your efforts and talent are not your property, but your masters’ — that is, the government and its friends. This is what you pay, whether you like it or not, embedded in the prices of the products, or through other taxes, duties, or tariffs. We are no longer slaves, but we are serfs.

Previously, the slave owner would threaten to punish with a whip a slave who refused to work. Now, if you refuse to pay the government, you are summoned and attacked with lawsuits, until you are finally thrown into jail. In both cases, the violence is of the same nature. The gun doesn’t even need to be displayed, as in the case of the customary robber. The mere threat of violence suffices. But the gun is always present, in the robber’s pocket and in the ruler’s jacket.

Theft and slavery are crimes, even if sanctioned by the majority of the people! Theft of the government, by the government, and for the government is somehow accepted and rationalized by the population at large. Why does that majority agree with this theft?

We must analyze the most misrepresented concept nowadays: the concept of democracy.

The conventional use of the term “democracy” conveys a certain disrespect for semantics. Most of us utilize the word democracy when we actually mean other concepts, such as the “rule of law,” “liberty,” “equality before the law,” “individual rights,” “solid institutions,” “justice,” and other concepts that have specific words to designate them. Democracy is, formally, the regime of majority rule, that is, the majority of voters decides whatever it sees fit. Or, as is commonly said, it is the tyranny of the majority — which in practice means the tyranny of the minority: that of the politicians who rule over our lives and property.

Look out development sprawl, the land trusts are coming.

Each year the US loses about 2 million acres of open space, farms, and forest to development. But now the tables are turning. Rather than see local green space and rugged outdoor areas gobbled up by strip malls or subdivisions, private land owners are increasingly preserving it.

Out on the east fork of New Mexico’s Gila River, the endangered Gila trout is getting help from adjacent landowners who are setting aside 48,000 acres in several land trusts to protect its habitat by preventing development.

At the same time, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, 206 properties totaling more than 38,000 acres of fragile estuary habitat for migratory birds and marine life, like the short nose sturgeon, have been permanently set aside using legal tools like land trusts and conservation easements.

It’s all part of a huge new boom in conservation of private lands in which landowners voluntarily give up rights to develop their land – often in return for tax breaks, but also to save rugged landscapes they love.

Private land set aside for conservation grew 54 percent from 24 million acres to 37 million acres– an area larger than New England – between 2000 and 2005, according to a recent study by the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington-based umbrella group of local, state, and national land conservation groups.

National groups such as The Nature Conservancy were key in this push for preservation. But the biggest drivers for growth were volunteer local and state land trusts, whose protected acreage doubled from 6 million acres in 2000 to 11.9 million acres. Meanwhile the rate at which those associations were saving land tripled to 1.2 million acres a year between 2000 and 2005.

“People are not sitting around and waiting for a Washington bureaucrat to solve the problem of strip malls in their own backyard – they’re forming land trusts,” says Rand Wentworth, president of the alliance.

Land trusts are nonprofit groups that assist in setting up conservation, agricultural, and other land-preservation easements and then act as land stewards. Over the five-year period, their numbers leaped by nearly a third to 1,667, the study shows. The focus of such trusts varied widely with 39 percent protecting natural areas and wildlife habitat to 38 percent for open space and 26 percent wetlands and water resources. Others focused on preserving farms, local parks, and urban gardens.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0426/One-farmer-acts-to-save-environment-from-factory-farms

“What, then, is legislation? It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they can subject to their power.  It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service.  It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be.  It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place.  All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed.”  – Lysander Spooner

What, then, is freedom? It is an assumption by some members of the human race of absolute responsible dominion over themselves and their property.  It is an assumption by some members of the human race, that each individual is responsible for his own condition; his/her own prosperity, or lack thereof; his/her own education; his/her own health and care of health.  It is an assumption by some members of the human race to take care of oneself; what he/she may and may not do; what he/she may, or may not, be.  It is, in short, the assumption by some members of the human race to protect, cherish, and preserve the freedoms and rights granted by the Creator as granted at conception.  It is the assumption by some members of the human race to protect the principle of human rights, the principle of justice, so that it never perishes from the face of the earth.  All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea of freedom.

An old Japanese adage advises us that the other side of a coin has another side.  Lysander Spooner was an anarchist that started his own Post Office in New York around 1850, but the Federal Government put him out of business.

Let us not always look at the negative side of the government’s intervention in our lives; let us look at what we can do to prevent such intervention.  We do have natural and inherent rights.  They are ours and they are absolutely perfect.  The power to exercise those rights is, however, imperfect.  That imperfection gives the government and other criminals the opportunity to interfere in our daily lives to the extent that we cannot spend the money we earn in the manner in which we see fit.

Do you know, then, what your rights are?  They are many and valuable.  The only way to protect those rights is to use the power to exercise those rights.  Use that power in the face of all that is evil.  My life is not worth preserving at any cost.  My power to exercise my rights is worth protecting at any and all costs.  What say you?

Consider the planet Pandora, where the “savage” Na’vi tribes have made their residence for generations. Their planet is their property. When a human corporation backed by hired mercenaries (hardly a constitutional military used for national defense) establishes itself on the planet to further the exploration and mining of a valuable mineral called Unobtanium, they face severe blowback from the tribes. One of the first scenes in the movie shows a massive vehicle returning to base with several arrows stuck in the tires. The tribes understandably felt threatened and saw the human tactics as an invasion of their property. Is this really an attack on the principles of peaceful exchange common in a free market?

The Omiticaya tribe that is prominent in the film does not need anything the humans offer in return for the mineral whether it be roads, education, medicine, etc. Is this really unreasonable? Does an owner of a product not have the right to negotiate the terms of a transaction? The Na’vi are not being selfish, the humans simply do not have a product or service that is more valuable than the land itself is already worth to the Na’vi. It is the same as if someone was offering $10 for a family heirloom that you will never give up. Just because you refuse their offer doesn’t mean they can take that item by force, as the mercenaries in Avatar did.  Once again, this reinforces peaceful and voluntary exchange in a free market.

Many libertarians who have written about the movie do not especially appreciate how the Na’vi tribes operate through a cooperative community structure. They debate if the property rights displayed in Avatar are individual or collective. Either way, it does not hurt the message of freedom and voluntary interaction. All people, this planet or not, have the right to live as they please so long as they don’t intrude on the rights of others. In other words, if I really felt compelled to I can walk around butt naked in my house but that doesn’t mean I can jump into your house displaying myself whenever I choose. Just the same, if people want to live in a voluntary community structure as the tribes on Pandora do, they absolutely have that right. They can’t force people into that structure, but on the flip side a person or collective group such as the human mercenaries can’t prevent them from living peacefully in such a structure either.

Libertarians also seem to be greatly distressed by Ewya, the “spirit in all living things” that essentially is the deity or God of the Na’vi tribe. I have even read a comment that suggested this was a “totalitarian” approach that destroys individual liberties. Is this really any different than the very libertarian concept that all individuals are from God, our Creator, and all individuals are born free? Many libertarians strongly believe that God is in all living things (all people, anyway), and this principle strengthens individual liberty, it does not reduce it. Is it inconceivable that God is in all living things on Earth as well, not just humans? Regardless, the spirituality of the Na’vi can hardly be called anti-libertarian.

I have come to disagree with many libertarians’ view of communities. I was born, raised, and currently live in an intentional spiritual cooperative community that was founded more than forty years ago. The people in the community live simply, have similar goals spiritually, but they hardly have given up their rights and abilities as individuals. Voluntary cooperative communities strengthen individual liberties and happiness by providing an environment that allows you to live with people of common goals and work together to further those goals. Cooperative communities are certainly not enemies of freedom. In fact, I believe communities will start popping up worldwide as the economy and current government structure weakens and people recognize that living and working together has its benefits on both a mental and physical level. Since I myself have lived in a cooperative community my entire life, the cooperation of the Omiticaya tribe in Avatar does not present itself as a structure that is anti-capitalist or far-fetched. Cooperative communities can and do indeed work, and libertarians should recognize this sooner rather than later.

Lastly, there are those who call Avatar something along the lines of a “typical Hollywoodized, Green crazed, environmental spew package.” Okay, maybe not that bad. I read an article that discussed this from a more liberal perspective, and the author made an excellent point: how is being pro-environment a bad thing? Those who work to protect the environment and demonstrate the beauty of nature can hardly be called crazy, anti-American, or anti-capitalist. Sure, there are many disagreements between the ideologies on the role of the environment and how to protect it. Personally, I think the environment is best protected through individual property rights (out of which can stem collective rights through individuals voluntarily joining cooperative communities) and local initiative. The Na’vi tribes demonstrate these principles perfectly. They understand, see, and interact with nature on a daily basis, thus they work their hardest to protect it from foreign intruders who do not have the same values (the human mercenaries). When libertarian-minded individuals write off environmentalists as wackjobs, it weakens the freedom movement. No one can argue against clean air, water, and land, and it should be through discussion of all ideologies that we come to a common understanding and implement strong solutions with regards to the environment. Bickering and attacking other ideologies won’t strengthen principles.

Certainly others came away from Avatar with a different feeling or message than I did. Regardless, it was easy for me to see the underlying principles of libertarianism in the film. It is not anti-military: it strikes at the principles of preemptive attack, aggressive war, lawless corporate mercenaries, and invasion of private property. It is not anti-capitalist: rather, it clearly demonstrates the right of an individual or group to maintain their property as they see fit and decline an offer that isn’t to their liking. And is it pro-Green? Certainly. But I do not call myself anti-Green, and I don’t think other libertarians do at heart either. We don’t want a dirty environment and a complete disregard for nature, do we? It is time that we productively show, through honest discussion and analysis, that we can work together with people of all beliefs and demonstrate to our best abilities the benefits of freedom. It might be crazy, but I see Avatar as a grand display of freedom’s benefits, not as its enemy.