I agree with you on all points, except either you are unfamiliar with the Rothbardian meaning of the term "aggression" I am using here and have misinterpreted it to mean force, or you believe in a contradiction. I presume it is the former.

In as much as states act in either protection of property rights or leaving people alone, they are not aggressing. It is the monopolization of this power through abuse of rightful property, such as theft, fraud, slavery, kidnapping, et c., that sustains the state (in addition to the lack of personal responsibility and the gullibility of its purported citizens). This is why I consider states to be inherently antagonistic against the protection of property rights and to be in all cases worse than a voluntary system of property protection, all else equal.

Aggression means the initiation of conflict over the control of a property, be it your body, your brain, your house, your car, your privately guarded nsec, etc. This can generally be observed whenever consent is breeched, as a rule of thumb.

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I agree with that definition of aggression.

Then you are admitting a number of unfortunate empirical facts into your analysis of the necessity of a state for our practical purposes, which kind of go without saying and muddy up the core of the message of classical liberalism if permitted to make us shy away from the logical conclusions of our normative stance.

Aggression is bad. Simple as that. You are taking the stance that attempts to behold things one can only behold if one is omniscient, of "well, it may be necessary for this thing to be here in an ultimate sense." I do that a lot of the time too, I try to think of things from a very holistic perspective. But regardless of whether the conclusions you are drawing from that necessitate some uncertainty regarding the technical or ultimate necessity of the state within that narrow subset of possible future particulars, our goal is to generally reduce aggression.

You probably agree that we want to do that as one of our top goals, through means consistent with our principles and in light of our own epistemological uncertainty, so the strategy of working to eliminate - or educate reasonable people about - state aggression within these bounds, and the ontological truth that aggression is always bad, are things we should agree on and perhaps be more clear about when presenting our desire for freedom and our practicable solutions toward that end. It helps us communicate to others who may join us on this journey or who would be amenable to alternatives to the authoritarian nightmare normies have been leaning into.

Rothbard has a number of essays about why radical, unrelenting consistency with the principle is crucial, and a large part of it is the efficacy of the message and the sustainability of the movement, and of the cause. Or you can just ask me my thoughts, I've thought a lottt about strategy, communication, and the interactions of sustainable individual libertarian lives keeping the movement going.

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