The Enemy Within

Every libertarian would refuse to steal a ladder to save their mom from a burning building, and refuse to steal a penny to stop aliens from destroying the world, because every libertarian is a libertarian.

The moment this statement appeared on my X feed, I wasn’t so much at a loss for words as I was struck by a familiar, wearying conclusion: this person believes libertarianism to be a death cult. And sadly, they are not alone. It would seem that for a growing number of people, libertarian ethics have been flattened into a binary matter, where a strict, Spartan adherence is demanded of a “true” libertarian, even if the price is one’s own life.

For decades, it has been a perennial sport among our critics to elaborate the most absurd and specific hypotheticals designed to portray libertarianism as a cold, robotic, and inhuman philosophy. Yet, in a perverse twist, these same strawmen have become the favored litmus tests for a faction of libertarians themselves, used to police the boundaries of an already fragmented movement. The weapon once wielded against us has been repurposed by our own adherents, seemingly for our own suicide.

Murray Rothbard had a name for this mindset: the “modal libertarian.” He identified them as culturally-alienated people, detached from reality, who cloaked childish rebellion in the language of high principle. They were, in his estimation, crankish extremists who disdained all strategy for a “holier than thou” posture, quick to brand even the movement’s titans as “socialists”, for the terrible crime of engaging with the world as it is , in the absence of what it ought to be. Rothbard perfectly captured their level of seriousness with a dry assessment of their humor:

“The M[odal Libertarian]’s idea of high wit is someone being on the receiving end of a hotfoot.”¹

This mindset does not build coherent theory. Its adherents do not reason beyond the most literal and rigid interpretation of our ideals, nor do they try to bridge the gap between the real world and the ideal. Their function is not to persuade, but to police. They are the first to declare that supporting a tax cut is somehow “anti-libertarian,” or that a policeman defending a victim from a criminal is illegitimate, because this all constitutes State action. From there, it is a short leap to branding you a “socialist,” regardless of your arguments, your contributions, or your history in the cause of liberty.

By this logic, one is forced to ask: was Murray Rothbard not a “real libertarian” for taking a paycheck from a State university? Is Stephan Kinsella not one for holding a State-issued law license to practice within the State’s legal system which he criticizes? If the very architects of our modern theory fail such a rigid purity test, then what these dogmatists preach is clearly not libertarianism, but some other, more brittle and unlivable creed.

We have an old joke, known by all: “If you’ve never been called a socialist, you’re not a real libertarian.” Infighting in libertarian circles is as old as the ideology itself, but it has, for the most part, been productive—unlike the famously sterile schisms of the Randians. This new wave, however, is different. These modal libertarians have adopted that same Randian cult mentality, insisting that anyone who deviates from their rigid interpretation must be excommunicated. For them, there is no need for constructive debate; libertarianism is a hermetic, finalized ideology, a perfect system to be defended, not a living tradition to be explored.

Ironically, for all their claims to doctrinal purity, their interpretations of libertarian theory are often convoluted, arbitrary, and wildly ignorant. They style themselves “Hoppeans,” yet conveniently reject Hoppe’s deontological arguments for border control. They insist on the Non-Aggression Principle as an objective standard, only to subjectively redefine it with qualifiers like “intent” defining the category of voluntary actions. Some even go so far as to argue that murdering a military conscript is justified, claiming he is a “State enforcer” who should have chosen prison or death over service.

Naturally, all of this is justified as being rigorously “in line with the NAP.” This has led some to adopt the label “NAPtist,” a fitting term for a religious-like devotion to a single principle—or rather, to their own narrow interpretation of it. The supposed intellectual forefather of many of them, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, simply calls them “nuts.” I, on the other hand, will call them something that perfectly captures the absurd and suicidal logic at the core of their philosophy: flagpole libertarians.

Deconstructing the Absurd Hypotheticals

The central exhibit in the flagpole libertarian’s courtroom is, predictably, the flagpole dilemma itself. It goes something like this: imagine you are fixing an antenna on the rooftop of a 20-story apartment building, and you slip and fall. On your way down, you manage to grab a flagpole protruding from someone’s balcony. The owner, for reasons of his own, appears and demand you to let go and plunge to your death. You are, after all, trespassing on his property. What do you do?

This tired, wildly implausible hypothetical has, of course, never disproven libertarian theory. The answer for any sane human being is obvious: you hold on for dear life. You do everything in your power to survive, and afterward, you make the owner whole. You offer restitution for the trespass and accept any proportional liability. To do otherwise—to let go—would be not just absurd but pathological, a suicidal denial of the most basic human instinct for survival.

For the flagpole libertarian, however, the answer is brutally simple: you must let go. Your life, at that moment, depends on aggression, and therefore your claim to it is forfeit. To hold on is to violate your principles, and thus to cease being a libertarian. It is to relativize property rights. It is, in their eyes, to slide into the waiting arms of utilitarianism—instead of the ground below.

This assertion—that violating a principle in a moment of crisis means you never held it at all—is patently absurd. Does a Christian cease to be a Christian the moment he sins? Does a socialist abandon his creed by hiring a gardener? Does a statist become an anarchist by voting for a tax cut? It would almost seem as if deological labels are primarily defined by one’s philosophical commitments, not by perfect, robot-like adherence in every conceivable context.

Even if we grant that, in the strictest sense, your life at that moment depends on aggression, the flagpole libertarian’s prescription is philosophically incoherent. To argue that another person must die to uphold a principle is a performative contradiction: you are affirming the value of life by engaging in argumentation, while simultaneously demanding an action that negates your interlocutor’s life. This is not principle; it is the logic of a death cult.

Conflating Morals, Rights and Ethics

This entire dogmatic vision rests on a fundamental category error about the nature of our philosophy. Walter Block refutes this stance very eloquently:

“They misunderstand the nature of libertarianism. These arguments implicitly assume that libertarianism is a moral philosophy, a guide to proper behavior, as it were. Should the flagpole hanger let go? […] But libertarianism is a theory concerned with the justified use of aggression, or violence, based on property rights, not morality. Therefore, the only proper questions which can be addressed in this philosophy are of the sort, if the flagpole hanger attempts to come in to the apartment, and the occupant shoots him for trespassing, [w]ould the forces of law and order punish the home owner?”²

Block’s point strikes at the heart of the matter. The flagpole libertarian’s error is to confuse a legal principle with a totalizing moral code. Thinkers from Rothbard to Block to Kinsella—bricklayers of this ideology—have all stressed this distinction: the NAP is a theory of justice meant to define legally enforceable rights, not to dictate every aspect of human morality. The flagpole libertarian collapses this distinction, treating a theory of justice as if it were the entire content of virtue; as if it were a religion.

Libertarianism, as a political theory, offers no moral algorithm for every conceivable dilemma. It does not pronounce your personal preferences valid or invalid, nor does it prescribe whether you should hold on to the flagpole or let go. That choice remains in the realm of subjective valuation. Whether you ultimately value your life more than a principle, or a principle more than your life, is a question of personal ethics. Libertarianism is concerned with political justice; it does not pretend to impose a hierarchy of values or have the final word on personal virtue.

The flagpole libertarian’s misunderstanding arises from a conflation of ethics —external rules of conduct in a society³— and morals—one’s personal perception of right and wrong.⁴ Because they treat these as one and the same, their logic becomes hopelessly tangled. They correctly see that rights are derived from ethics, but by mistaking ethics for morality, they wrongly conclude that any action violating a right must therefore be immoral. Worse, they assume such an act constitutes a philosophical rejection of the right itself.

But morals, by their nature, are subjective. While they are often shaped by ethical frameworks like the NAP—which one can reasonably argue through a priori reasoning to be an objective principle—this does not erase the distinction. Even though we accept that aggression is objectively unjust, it does not follow that every act of aggression is subjectively immoral in the eyes of the actor or society. In an emergency, a person’s subjective values will almost always take precedence. Ethics can inform our choices, but they cannot override our nature. They are generally intended to guide behavior in everyday life, not in every possible edge case. Humans act based on their own hierarchy of values, not on a pre-programmed ethical script. To insist otherwise is to deny the very foundation of praxeology.

In the reductionist, jihadist-like interpretation of these “NAPtists,” no aggression can ever be moral. For them, morality is an objective matter derived entirely from the ethical rule of non-aggression. Yet their own arguments often betray a deep contradiction. They will most often posit a rule like:

“Anything moral must be ethical, but something ethical can still be immoral.”

While the first half of that statement is consistent with their objective framework, the second half shatters it. If an ethical (non-aggressive) act can still be judged “immoral,” by what standard is that judgment being made? It cannot be the NAP. It must be some other, subjective moral code.

If morality is based solely on NAP ethics, then it must necessarily be binary: aggression is immoral, and non-aggression is moral. Any judgment beyond that, such as claiming that private drug use is “immoral,” escapes this pretended objectivity. Since drug use is not an aggression, a consistent NAP-only moralist has no grounds to condemn it. To criticize a drug addict, or a degenerate who makes indecent comments about children, one must appeal to a moral framework outside of the NAP. At that point, the dogmatist has two choices: either admit that morality is ultimately subjective, or adopt a pluralistic moral system (Aristotelian, Christian, Islamic, etc.)—which is, itself, a subjective choice.

The flagpole libertarian is thus trapped. Either he must retreat to the sterile position that only aggression is immoral—and that all other human vices are beyond reproach—or he must recognize the subjective nature of morality. And if morality is subjective, then his central claim that holding onto the flagpole is universally immoral collapses entirely.

The NAP cultist’s error runs deeper than ignoring personal subjectivity ; he also fails to recognize the power of normative, intersubjective morality. In his world, to physically strike a man indecently exposing himself to a crowd of children is an immoral act of aggression, plain and simple. Yet in the real world, virtually no one would condemn such an act. They would see it as a necessary defense of the innocent, born from a deep-seated, shared consensus that protecting children is a moral imperative. The act may be an ethical violation—an aggression under a strict legal code—but it is not an immoral one by any functioning social or cultural standard. Otherwise, civilized society would be impossible to attain.

Stephan Kinsella, perhaps more than any other theorist, has formalized this crucial distinction between rights and morality. With great clarity, he dismantles the simplistic view that one is merely a subset of the other in one paragraph:

“[R]ights are best viewed as metanorms that direct us as to which laws are just, not directly to personal behavior. Most libertarians would view rights as a subset of morality; not everything that is immoral should be illegal, but every rights violation is necessarily immoral. I believe the sets are intersecting sets only. Just as some immoral actions are not rights violations, some rights violations might be morally mandatory (breaking into a cabin to feed your baby in the middle of a storm). I do believe most rights violations are immoral, though libertarianism itself cannot make this determination.”⁵

This view of rights as “metanorms” is a necessary, consistent and central part of a robust libertarian legal theory, a foundation that allows for a wide diversity of personal moral codes under a single umbrella of liberty. As Kinsella elaborates, this is precisely why our movement can accommodate both hedonists and priests:

“It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of “bourgeois” conventional or religious morality. […] That is because libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral theory.

Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that “liberty is the highest political end” — not necessarily the highest end on everyone’s personal scale of values.”⁶

Furthermore, he reinforces the point by separating the legal question from the moral one:

“[O]ne could argue it is immoral (wrong) to vote—or even that it is immoral or wrong to commit aggression; but technically speaking, the morality of one’s actions is not within the province of libertarianism. Libertarian norms are metanorms that tell us which laws are justified; they are not normal morals that directly guide human action on a daily basis. […]

Libertarianism does not directly tell us how to act morally, it only informs us as to what laws are just.”⁷

The Unreality of Armchair Justice

Having established the flagpole libertarian’s theoretical error, we now turn to his flawed methodology. He is the perfect specimen of what we have come to know as the “armchair theorist,” one who believes the entirety of a legal and social order can be deduced from first principles through contrived hypotheticals. But where a serious theorist uses hypotheticals to test a principle’s outer limits, the flagpole libertarian uses them as ideological bludgeons. He is not interested in insight or coherent application; he concocts absurd scenarios as litmus tests, designed to label anyone who seeks a humane or practical solution most aligned with deontology a “socialist.”

In his rigid worldview, only two paths exist: absolute adherence or total apostasy. The concept of a principled person committing a temporary aggression and then reaffirming his principles through restitution is alien to them. As previously stated, to justify any aggression, no matter how extreme the duress, is to take a fatal slide down the utilitarian slope in their view. This exposes a flawed and deeply inhuman anthropology. They cannot separate the actor from the act, nor can they accept a basic praxeological truth: that a self-interested human, however principled, will almost always choose life over death. It is a demand for a robotic consistency that real humans cannot meet—a demand made with deep irony, given how many of these dogmatists also claim the mantle of Objectivism, while asking for principles to override rational self-interest.

The fundamental flaw in this entire method of armchair theorizing is its detachment from reality—its utter lack of context. These litmus tests are useless precisely because real life is not a sterile, contextless hypothetical in a vacuum. On this point, no one has been more thorough or devastating than the aforementioned Stephan Kinsella, who has practically spent a career dismantling this style of reasoning:

“[T]heir hypotheticals are almost always too sparse and devoid of relevant context to permit an answer […] The problem is […] with libertarian excessive rationalism and armchair theorizing. These hypos [sic] never specify enough details, and when we answer in black and white fashion we are assuming there are none, or assuming unrealistic conditions.

I’d say in the hypo [sic] specified it’s hard to imagine this being in a real world scenario where the owner is legally entitled to let the guy fall to his death. Why? Because if something like this ever happened frequently at all, then there would be legally relevant responses to it, resulting in a hierarchy of subsidiary rules and conditions that in effect creates the common law “necessity” right but by contract etc. […] So the question is: why assume the asshole-hermit-neighbor mentality would dominate the default/background rules, instead of more reasonable and neighborly ones? In a real dispute the judge or court can find out these things and take them into account in the ruling. In hypotheticals, they are assumed away…”⁸

”Libertarians sometimes try too hard to “field questions” from the armchair, when the truth is law has to be formed incrementally based on real cases where there is a known context, custom, evidence, etc. These hypos [sic] are not real cases with a real context […] the way real law is always formed—from actual cases or controversies, not from libertarian thinkers pontificating about unrealistic, contextless hypos [sic] from their armchairs or dorm rooms.”⁹

”The solution to a given practical and real conflict is not always immediately apparent from consulting general principles alone; there are limits to armchair theorizing, rationalist deductivism, and so on. […] Another reason there needs to be a willingness to negotiate, compromise, and arbitrate is that perfect knowledge is not always possible, errors can be made, and reasonable people of good faith can disagree over facts or how a given law or property rights should be construed or applied in a given case.”¹⁰

Even Hans-Hermann Hoppe, revered patron saint of flagpolism, fundamentally rejects their entire method. He condemns the obsession with “peripheral” and “far-fetched” hypotheticals that distract from what truly matters:

“All too often some libertarians lose sight of the fundamentally important distinction between the core, the foundational principles of a theory on the one hand and its application to various peripheral—often far-fetched or merely fictional—practical problems […] Anything else would be ultimately no more than idle mental exercises: deriving wildly unrealistic conclusions from wildly unrealistic assumptions, i.e., examples of ‘garbage-in-and-garbage-out.’”¹¹

The irony deepens, as many of these same dogmatists insist on labeling themselves “Objectivists.” Yet Ayn Rand herself had no time for such senseless context-dropping. She explicitly argued that the ethics of an emergency are distinct from the ethics of normal life, and that principles cannot be derived from “lifeboat scenarios”:

“It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.

An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible […] In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions…”¹²

It is, then, plainly ridiculous to judge anyone’s ideological commitment by their response to such a contrived hypothetical. But the problem is more severe: most of these hypotheticals are not just lazy thought experiment; they are deliberately constructed lose-lose scenarios, logical traps from which no “principled” escape is possible.

The flagpole dilemma, for instance, only functions by stripping out the near-infinite variables of real life. Perhaps there is a safety net below. Perhaps the building’s charter has an emergency-assistance clause for residents. Perhaps the owner is a known trespasser himself, making an estoppel claim possible. Maybe the person demanding you let go is not even the rightful owner, but a burglar! The hypothetical demands a binary answer to a situation that, in reality, would be a kaleidoscope of legal and situational context. As we have seen, nothing exists in a vacuum, so asking one to reason in one is entirely useless.

This refusal to engage with reality highlights the dogmatist’s most appaling confusion. He takes a principle meant for the purity of theory and attempts to apply it with suicidal rigidity to the messy, compromised reality of an emergency. He fails to grasp a distinction clear distinction which Hoppe mentions: the uncompromising nature of theoretical truth is not a blueprint for every real-world action.

“[I]n theory, in thinking, compromise is impermissible. In everyday life, compromise is a permanent, and ubiquitous, feature, of course. But in theory, compromise is the ultimate sin, a strict and absolute ‘no no.’ […] Either some proposition is true or it is false. There can be no ‘meeting in the middle’ of truth and falsehood.”¹³

Life is overwhelmingly complex. In the face of an emergency, when survival itself is at stake, a principled person may be forced to act in a way that seems to compromise those principles. But this compromise in action does not negate the validity of the principle in theory. It is not a rejection of the principle, nor is it embracing relativism. It is simply a recognition of a hard fact of reality which the dogmatist willfully ignores.

The flagpole libertarian’s second mistake is to ignore the absurd logic of his own proposed solution. By his own standard, the moment you grabbed the flagpole, you violated the NAP and ceased to be a “principled libertarian.” If this is the case, then there would exist no reason for one to then also be de ceased. Your fall from grace is already complete. If death could somehow restore your principled status, why couldn’t the honorable act of surviving and paying full restitution do the same? The logic only holds if our philosophy has adopted the Bushido code of honor-suicide, and I simply missed the memo.

Even if we were to accept this feudal honor code, where death supposedly engraves “Libertarian” on your tombstone, the logic remains flawed, as it ignores the practical implications of plummeting to one’s own doom. Letting go of the flagpole can’t possibly guarantee a consequence-free outcome unless you fall into a void. You will inevitably land on something. You could crash on someone else’s balcony, their roof, their car, their pet, someone else , or even just splatter across the pavement at terminal velocity. In any of these scenarios, you have still committed a final, gruesome aggression against another’s property. Worse, you have littered their property with your remains—a biohazard of bone, blood, and gray matter that someone else must now pay to clean up.

Indeed, one could argue that the dilemma’s entire premise is flawed. Is grabbing the pole truly an aggression? Or is it a cooperative act, implicitly taken in the owner’s interest to prevent the far greater violation of having his property turned into a gore video set? From this perspective, holding on is the least invasive option for all parties. The dogmatist, of course, cannot entertain such nuance; his world admits no such thing as a lesser evil.

Either way, the flagpole dilemma is already contrived as a trap. By the dogmatist’s own logic, your status as a libertarian is forfeit the moment you grab the pole, and committing suicide by letting go only compounds the aggression. The only truly logical and principled path is the one that minimizes harm and allows for justice to be done. This means surviving, incurring the lesser aggression, and making the victim whole through restitution. After all, a dead man can pay no debts.

Ultimately, this entire angels-on-a-pin debate is rendered moot by a single, simple fact: the hypothetical requires us to imagine a world devoid of basic human decency. In reality, the vast majority of people would help. Once again, Kinsella perfectly captured the collision between sterile theory and humane wisdom when he reminisced an evening with the great Ralph Raico:

“Years ago, in the Auburn Hotel bar during a Mises event, having drinks and talking libertarian stuff with a bunch of fellow Rothbardians–we were debating the tired old issue of “if a guy falls out of his window and lands on your flagpole extending from your apartment, do you have to let him crawl into your apartment or can you assert your property rights and refuse, so that he would eventually fall to his death?”

The ancaps were batting it around, as they do. Ralph Raico was there, and had been listening mostly quietly. Then he finally commented, “Are you people insane? Of course you have to let him come inside.” We other libertarians paused for a second, and after a moment, resumed our mostly pointless angels-on-a-pin dorm-room bullsession.“¹⁴

Reclaiming a Libertarianism for Life

At its core, libertarianism is a profoundly humanitarian philosophy. It is concerned with life, property, and peace—the essential preconditions for human flourishing. Its central project is to theorize and discover the legal and social arrangements that minimize coercion and violence. It is a philosophy of the “ought,” to be sure, but one that must remain grounded in the world of the “is.” Our task, then, is not merely to dream of a perfect world, but to find the most practical and peaceful path to bridge the gap between the two.

The dogmatic stance of the flagpole libertarian stands in stark opposition to this humane vision. It is a philosophy built on a category error, fundamentally anti-praxeological in its denial of subjective human action. It prioritizes an abstract and unattainable ideal over any marginal improvement in the real world. It analyzes all of life through a detached, binary lens, utterly disregarding context and complexity. It is, in short, a death cult: a creed that declares abstract principle to be more valuable than human life, and which demands martyrdom as the only truly consistent act.

Much to my disappointment, this is not hyperbole. In recent discussions, these so-called “NAPtists” have insisted that if a gun were put to your head and you were forced to steal a penny, the only principled choice would be to take the bullet. By this same logic, and as mentioned earlier, they argue that a conscripted soldier deserves to be murdered, as he is part of the State’s apparatus. One even went so far as to claim that a policeman must not intervene to stop a rape, because his very existence is funded by coercion, and to accept his help would be to legitimize the State.

This perverse logic stems from a gross misreading of the Non-Aggression Principle. They treat aggression not as a category of action, but as a metaphysical stain attached to a person via impossibly long causal chains. If you are paid by the State, you are an aggressor—even if you never initiate force yourself. This is how they justify murdering a policeman in his sleep, even one who only ever pushed paper. Under this line of thinking, one could just as easily justify the murder of a public school teacher, a social worker, or even an ex-convict doing community service for a victimless crime.

Inevitably, the final stop of this subversion of libertarian ideology is the station of atrocity. I have seen it lead one such dogmatist to justify the Katyn massacre, arguing that the slaughtered Polish officers were merely “State enforcers” who got what they deserved. This is the dead end of their philosophy: a libertarianism that makes excuses for Stalin. At this point, one must seriously question whether these people are libertarians at all, or merely nihilists cloaking themselves in the language of liberty to subvert it from within and ridicule it in the public eye.

For our entire existence, we libertarians have fought against the statist caricature that paints our philosophy as inhumane. An entire intellectual tradition has been dedicated to proving, beyond doubt, that a society built on liberty is a society of compassion and flourishing. How deeply ironic, then, that after all this work, the most monstrous caricatures of libertarianism are now being championed by libertarians themselves. It would seem the old adage is true: our own worst enemies are found within our own ranks.

We now find our movement besieged from within on two fronts. On one side are the Gadsden-flag wavers who embrace State violence and racial collectivism—we all know who they are. On the other are these modal, flagpole libertarians, more concerned with playing the role of the Pharisee than with building a freer world. They police the ideological purity of a movement they seem to believe they own, trying to outcast our greatest thinkers, while casting themselves as a libertarian übermensch : a fantasy figure of the tax-evading, off-the-grid homesteader, 3D-printing guns in a wilderness free of compromise.

I do not for a moment believe they practice what they preach. In their rhetoric, a “true” libertarian pays no taxes. In reality, I have watched more than one of them pay for a service like X Premium—sales tax and all—using the very platform where they broadcast their impossible purity. Their principles are voided by the same act they use to proclaim them.

This Rambo-like posturing is absurd. They speak as if one can simply abandon fiat for crypto, yet forget that the supermarket does not accept Bitcoin for bread, and that almost no employer will pay your wage in Ethereum. They fantasize about moving to a cabin in the woods, yet ignore that the State will always come knocking—for its property taxes, for occupying “public” land, for whatever pretext it needs. It is a fantasy born of a willful historical amnesia, as if Waco and Ruby Ridge never happened. And while this childish delusion may be entertaining, it ceases to be harmless when its adherents mistake it for a serious political strategy, and attempt to convince others this is the only “real” libertarianism.

The final irony, of course, is their own hypocrisy. No one can meet their impossible standard of purity, least of all themselves. Let us take the strict libertarian definition of aggression—an uninvited invasion or alteration of the physical integrity of another person’s body [or property]¹⁵—, and try to apply it with full dogmatism (like flagpole libertarians apply the NAP), then you run into absurd scenarios that would inevitably render them into “unprincipled libertarians.” To provide some examples:

• To spit on the grass in a private park would necessarily constitute an ex ante aggression in the absence of a rule that allows it.

• To have smoke particles from your chimney, or pollen particles from a flower in your backyard, enter your neighbor’s property—provided they have easement for being the first occupant—, making him cough, would necessarily constitute an ex ante aggression.

• To go for a walk and bump into someone by accident or negligence would necessarily constitute an ex ante aggression.

• To be eating at a restaurant and to be forced to spit food on the ground to prevent one from choking would constitute an ex ante aggression in the absence of a rule that allows it.

These are not lifeboat scenarios; they are the unavoidable, microscopic frictions of daily life. To judge a person’s principles on their flawless, moment-to-moment adherence to the NAP is therefore not just absurd; it is to demand a standard that no human can possibly meet. It is a yardstick designed not for living men, but for automatons. Humans do not act according to if-else statements.

When confronted with their own hypocrisy, the flagpole libertarian predictably retreats into one of three self-defeating evasions:

1. “I would never get myself into that situation.” An infantile fantasy of perfect foresight, denying human fallibility in an unpredictable world.

2. “It’s not aggression unless there is a rule that prohibits it.” This inverts the very logic of property rights, which assumes that permission is required for any uninvited physical contact, not the other way around.

3. “It wasn’t my intention to aggress.” A convenient appeal to an irrelevant standard. Intent may mitigate punishment when judging an action ex post , but it does not erase the ex ante fact of an aggression. And if intent is the standard, their entire case against someone acting under duress collapses.

In the end, their philosophy is not a universalist one, but a selfish doctrine of “freedom for me, but not for thee.” They have bastardized libertarianism into a personal lifestyle cult, which they attempt to impose on others through patronizing shame and armchair psychologizing. Their imagined path to a free world is one of purification: a cleansing of the “weak” who are unwilling to die for an abstraction, leaving a post-statist paradise for the “true” believers. They believe that the masses must be convinced—no matter how impossiblbe of a task that is¹⁶—, or that they must perish. Far from being a political strategy; it is a deluded, pseudo-Nietzschean gnostic fantasy.

We must reject this mindset utterly and at once. We must reclaim libertarianism as the humane and rational philosophy it has always been. We must insist on the integrity of our deontology and principles, but equally on their wise application in the world as it is. Our task is not to retreat into the purity of the “ought,” but to find the courage, ideas and means to build a bridge to it from the reality of the “is”, until they both converge. The flagpole libertarians are welcome to stay behind in their hermetic boxes. The difficult, necessary work of liberty is for the rest of us.

Reason must win over liturgy. Libertarianism is not a religion, and it is most certainly not a death cult. If we fail to defend this movement from its own internal decay, if we abandon the difficult path to a freer world for the sterile comfort of dogma, if we allow the flagpole libertarians to become the face of our cause—then we will have done the statists’ work for them. The road to tyranny will be clear, and we will be left to console ourselves with the purity of our own irrelevance while we stare down the barrel of a gun.

Recommended Reading

• Ayn Rand - The Ethics of Emergencies in The Virtue of Selfishness

• Laurence M. Vance - Libertarianism and Value Judgments

• Murray N. Rothbard - Lifeboat Situations in TheEthics of Liberty

• Stephan Kinsella - On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing

• Stephan Kinsella - On Pushing the Button–the problem with magic

• Stephan Kinsella - Rights as Metanorms; Rights and Morals as Intersecting Sets Not as Subset of Morals

• Stephan Kinsella - Roman Law and Hypothetical Cases

• Walter Block - I’m Sick and Tired of the Flagpole Example, and The Flagpole, Parts II, III & IV

• Walter Block - The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism