Posted by elkingrey on 11/25/09
Last updated 11/25/09

Hello CA 4th District CFL,

You may have noticed my inactivity over the last couple of months. The fact is, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the direction of our movement and what role I will be playing in it.

My entire life I've been raised a libertarian and Constitutionalist. I've felt that the maximum role of government was the protection of life, liberty, and property. My strategy for returning to Constitutional government was education, which in turn would lead to electing liberty minded candidates.

Three main grievances led to my disillusionment and eventual feelings of hopelessness towards that strategy. 1) The fact that over 50% of the legal voting population does not vote. 2) The fact that 95% of the voters continue to vote for fascism and utterly refuse to educate themselves on all things liberty. And perhaps the most demoralizing 3) The complete lack of motivation of a large part of the liberty movement and CFLers to mobilize in any significant way.

These three facts led me to the hopelessness of our cause to return to limited government. Fortunately, I've come to the conclusion that a return to Constutionalism is not only impossible, but undesirable. Thanks to the Mises Institute, correspondence with Tom Woods and Walter Block, and authors such as Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, I've come to regard the State as the greatest enemy to freedom, under any form. That is to say, I now believe the state to have no legitimate function, including those of courts, police, and military. I believe that the free-market can better serve our needs in all aspects of life, including, but not limited to, the functions I previously thought to be best served by government.

Having come to this conclusion, my next step was to figure out how best to serve the freedom movement without legitimizing the very institution I hope to destroy. I visited strike-the-root.com, voluntaryist.com, read many works regarding non-cooperation, and reread On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau(an essay I had read a decade earlier but only now fully appreciate its wisdom).

My goal is still to create a free society. However, my strategy now is to do this by delegitimizing the state through non-cooperation, i.e. civil disobedience. This road will surely not be easy, and may include jail time. But I cannot in clean conscience continue to tacitly approve of state action through submission.

I am sorry it has taken me this long to come to the same conclusion that others have long ago come to, but fortunately I do believe that our numbers are growing. I have hope that in my lifetime we will see the destruction of the state and a growing resurgence of freedom in America.

Education will still play a strong part of my strategy. My goal is to convert non-libertarians to the freedom movement, and those already in the freedom movement to see the legitimacy in the Anarcho-capitalist/voluntaryist/abolitionist position.

As for my role in the CFL, I still intend to resign my post as District Coordinator by the middle of 2010. If Matt Heath sees fit to dismiss me early, I completely understand. But until then I will continue to serve CFL District 4 in at least the limited fashion I have for the last several months. For anybody interested in better learning the stateless philosophy, feel free to contact me for learning material.

In freedom,

Seth King