Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, "The Libertarian Case for National Military Service", Cato Unbound, Sept. 9, 2013. Intra-publication reply by Jason Kuznicki, "There Is No Libertarian Case for National Military Service", Cato Unbound, Sept. 11, 2013.
The following is my reply to Gobry's foregoing article, which I posted to the Cato Unbound website circa 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Sept. 10, 2013 on Gobry's above article page. The blog software stated that my post is being held for moderator approval. Many other replies have been posted to Gobry's article that were submitted after mine. Hopefully my reply will also be posted at Cato Unbound. But even if it does not get posted there, I can nevertheless post my reply elsewhere. (I also posted it on Kuznicki's above article page on Sept. 11, 2013--replacing "present article" in my text with "aforecited article"--and it also as of yet has not been approved.)
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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's present article is extremely muddleheaded. Gobry keeps using the word "libertarian" without ever defining what he means by the word, while attributing positions to it that are antipodal to what the leading libertarian theorists--particularly Profs. Murray N. Rothbard (known by the sobriquets "Mr. Libertarian" and, while he was alive, "The Greatest Living Enemy of the State") and Hans-Hermann Hoppe--have explicated as being libertarianism.
Gobry's problem in his article is that to him, libertarianism is just a vague idea of desiring more freedom, instead of a rigorously logical system with definite truth or falsity values on the legitimacy of the entire range of possible human interactions. With Gobry's nebulous conception, "libertarianism" could be anything, since even the most totalitarian of governments maintain that their subjects are free (e.g., "Arbeit Macht Frei"). Furthermore, libertarianism in the sense of Profs. Rothbard and Hoppe is not only a logically rigorous ethical system, but one which is apodictically true, in the sense that the truth of rigorous libertarianism cannot be denied without assuming its truth in the denial. One who disagrees with rigorous libertarianism is logically wrong in the same degree as one who argues that they cannot argue. For more on this, see my following article: James Redford, "Libertarian Anarchism Is Apodictically Correct", Social Science Research Network, Dec. 15, 2011, doi:10.2139/ssrn.1972733.
Nor, contrary to what Gobry states, is the United States a free country. Currently the US government maintains that it can kill and indefinitely imprison anyone anywhere in the world based upon nothing more than the US president's say-so, including US citizens arrested on US soil. And the US government maintains it can do all of this in secret. So no such thing as a human right exists in the US vis-à-vis the US government. Moreover, the US has the highest prisoner population of any country in the entire world. This is both in terms of absolute numbers, as well as on a per capita basis (see Roy Walmsley, "World Prison Population List (ninth edition)", International Centre for Prison Studies [King's College London--School of Law], May 2011). Many of these US prisons and jails are hellish torture-pits where boys and men are gang-raped without condoms for years and decades on end, and where mutilation and death is an ever-present reality.
Moreover, the US government routinely mass-murders is own subjects in staged terrorist attacks in order to have a pretext for usurping ever more power, such as with the 9/11 attacks, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Pearl Harbor attack, etc. Regarding the US government's Gulf of Tonkin false-flag operation, some 58,000 US citizens died in the Vietnam War which directly resulted from said false-flag. This was nothing less than mass-murder by the US government against these US citizens, since their deaths were the result of malice aforethought by the US government: the US president and the US's highest military leaders involved in staging this false-flag operation cannot coherently claim that they are not responsible for these US citizens' deaths, no more than one who throws a person into a lion's den can veridically claim innocence in the victim's resulting death. Such an abuser is fully guilty of murder.
For a much deeper examination into the aforesaid three US government-staged pretext-attacks, see Sec. 8.2.1 of my following article, in particular pp. 70-86: James Redford, "The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything", Social Science Research Network, Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708. This article concerns physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything; however, it also analyzes the societal implications of said, particularly the implications of the exponential advancement of technology and hence also the coming radical life-extension technologies (i.e., transhumanism) in light of a world dominated by a callous oligarchy.
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The following are the two articles of mine which I cited in my above reply:
James Redford, "Libertarian Anarchism Is Apodictically Correct", Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Dec. 15, 2011, 9 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1972733; PDF, 118091 bytes, MD5: e6de8181ad84c9d96400bb9582311c79.
James Redford, "The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything", Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708; PDF, 1741424 bytes, MD5: 8f7b21ee1e236fc2fbb22b4ee4bbd4cb.
