Mikhail Svetov has released another introductory video about libertarianism.

Apparently, the very first video on the SVTV channel, “Five Minutes About Libertarianism,” through which many people indeed first learned about this ideology, had ceased to satisfy him in some way.

Let’s compare what has changed.

The old video is a tongue-twister of tightly edited libertarian talking points, weakly linked into a single logical line. Key points: libertarianism is about the fact that the end does not justify the means, about the victim’s right to protection from violence, and about the right to love and hate. Libertarianism is a moral compass. The video contains mentions of Mikhail’s personal tastes, which are unrelated to the topic.

The new video is read in the measured tone of a storyteller, equipped with simple but quite captivating animation, and is far more logically precise.

I, of course, do not like the very beginning of the video, where self-ownership is presented as something inherent and given by someone unknown, while the non-aggression principle is for some reason called a contract. Why not the other way around: a contract on self-ownership and an inherent natural right to resist violence? This is, in general, important, because according to Mikhail, violating the non-aggression contract removes a person from the legal field, and here the question arises: what exactly is the legal field?

By the way, the visuals in this part directly contradict the text. An aggressor threatens violence, thereby supposedly exiting the legal field; an external defender appears, and what does the aggressor do? He drops the knife and surrenders. That is, he resorts to a legal procedure! He demonstrates that he is no longer an aggressor, and that shooting him from all barrels is no longer so attractive in the eyes of an outside observer. In other words, the aggressor does not exit any legal field. Or rather, he exits it precisely at the moment of aggression, when it is permissible to pump him full of lead. At least, that is how it can be understood from the video.

In short, Svetov has never been distinguished by the rigor of his conceptual framework, but for a politician, this is an excessive requirement; his job is to attract an audience. The video should presumably handle this quite well, and I can boldly recommend it for distribution.