The Federal government of the United States today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Dec… - Karl Hess

Narrator: What's your relationship with the IRS these days?
Karl Hess: [laughs] Miserable. Terrible.
Narrator: And why's that?
Karl Hess: Well, you know, they ask every now and then when I'm going to behave myself and I tell them never and I...
Narrator: Are you not paying federal taxes?
Karl Hess: Yeah, nothing.
Narrator: I guess they don't take too kindly to that?
Karl Hess: No, they think it's terrible.
Therese Hess: On the other hand, they're not being very active about it right now.
Karl Hess: Well, no, the last time he was here...
Therese Hess: It's like it's no fun anymore or something.
Karl Hess: Something like that. The local people seem to take more of a kindly view as though they really think it's a rotten thing. I'm not doing anybody any harm. And...they seem to be more sensitive. [laughs] Or decent somehow. I don't...I don't know, the federal people are...
Narrator: What can they do?
Karl Hess: Put me in jail.

The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.<p>Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.

[A]fter I got evicted from the Republican Party, I began reading considerably more of the works of American anarchists, thanks largely to Murray Rothbard...and I was just amazed.<p>When I read Emma Goldman, it was as though everything I had hoped that the Republican Party would stand for suddenly came out crystallised. It was a magnificently clear statement. And another interesting things about reading Emma Goldman is that you immediately see that, consciously or not, she's the source of the best in Ayn Rand. She has the essential points that the Ayn Rand philosophy thinks, but without any of this sort of crazy solipsism that Rand is so fond of, the notion that people accomplish everything all in isolation. Emma Goldman understands that there's a social element to even science, but she also writes that all history is a struggle of the individual against the institutions, which of course is what I'd always thought Republicans were saying, and so it goes.<p>In other words, in the Old Right, there were a lot of statements that seemed correct, and they appeal to you emotionally, as well; it was why I was a Republican—isolationist, anti-authoritarian positions, but they're not illuminated by anything more than statement. They just are good statements. But in the writings of the anarchists the same statements are made, but with this long illumination out of experience, analysis, comparison...it's rock-solid, and so I immediately realised that I'd been stumbling around inventing parts of a tradition that was old and thoughtful and already existed, and that's very nice to discover that—I don't think it's necessary to invent everything.