What do libertarians mean by the terms statist and statism?

Statists and Statism

Some people seek to use The State to impose their personal preferences on others. Libertarians call such people statists, and their philosophy statism.
Statists believe…

By comparison, libertarians believe governments must obey the Zero Aggression Principle. They must not initiate force. They must only use force defensively. 

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Jim Babka

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Jim Babka

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Jim Babka is co-founder of the Zero Aggression Project and President of DownsizeDC.org, Inc. He’s an author and former talk show host.
Previously, he was the President of RealCampaignReform.org, Inc., defending free press rights all the way to the Supreme Court. He and Susie are the proud, home-schooling parents of three teenagers. He enjoys theology, UFC, target practice, and Tai Chi.

Perry Willis

About the Author

Perry Willis

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Perry Willis is the co-founder of the Zero Aggression Project and Downsize DC. He was the National Director of the Libertarian National Committee on two occasions, and ran two Libertarian Party presidential campaigns. He has an extensive background in marketing and fundraising, and has ghost written direct mail appeals for numerous luminaries, including Karl Hess, Ron Paul, Charlton Heston and Harry Browne.

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  1. It would be beneficial to know why the 2 people strongly opposed this article – not to castigate them but to learn. Did they misunderstand? Without knowing why they strongly opposed the article it might be that they are just trolls out for a bit of ‘fun’..!

  2. The problem I see is what I’d call a mass conditioned propensity to divide the totality of economic and political issues in two. This conditioning is mainly propelled by an overbearing respect and promulgation of two team sports as a supposed relief activity from the banality of the curriculum of force education. Instead of the at-liberty model of a library, mandatory public education is the antipathy of the free choice that libraries operate by.

    The totality of Polidrome however, while minding that liberty is exclusively for humans and not corporations, is a multifaceted geometry wherein the polar duality of axis of any single issue is found among the polar dualities of axis of many other issues.

    The huge loophole of defensive exception is what beleaguers this otherwise brilliant philosophy. The state as it is defined in the ZAP can easily be defended by simply pretending that everything it does is defensive. The confiscating tax industry, pretending to be voluntary, is a foreign corporate agency that must exist because we the people are collateral against a dept that can’t be paid to the same foreign agency who made us collateral in the first place. If someone has their hands on our throat, is it sensible to think that we can persuade them to stop? No, we must pay what they say we owe them merely because they are far more powerful and the individual is far more not.

    The definition of self defense and violence are dominantly unseparated in popular parlance. It is very common to hear that violence is justified if it comports with self defense. The abortion-on-demand issue can be used to illustrate this since many people of either gender argue that denying access to abortion is an assault on the liberties of the pregnant. So abortion-on-demand is then considered as self defense. But if the fetus is given the microphone you can bet she would say, “oh hell no! what about me?” The morality that admits the humanity of the hidden in utero is separate from the division of pro or con. It matters not what the origin of that morality is, whether from God or from a study of consequences.
    Persuasion and cooperation is an ideal that I subscribe to as value that must be considered as a moral precept entirely independent of any exigency that demands decision in Polidrome. Without agreement about what principles apply, we get absurd notions like a bipartisan ruling committee where neither party can create a consistent platform. Two parties without guiding principles are hardly better than one. We get one party for abortion-on-demand and another against it, and only morality can say, apart from the polarity, that the third necessary party is the unborn.

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