People deficient in empathy and emotion are not going to be good at persuading others. They will have no idea how to persuade others in effective ways. They will keep on thinking that the answer is to preach abstract ideas. But the average person wants practical answers, not theory. They respond best to emotional appeals, not rational principles. If you don’t believe me, read The Political Brain by Drew Westin. It’s based on solid research. His conclusion: emotional appeals are the one that work best. If that makes you balk, let me point out here that emotional appeals can be based on reason. Even Ayn Rand thought the two could be compatible.

If you want to make an emotional appeal, it helps to show that you’re willing to do something yourself. It shows you aren’t all talk, even if your talk is ultimately correct. Compared to libertarians, left wingers have been much better at this. They have started food coops, worker‐​owned companies, nonprofits that help women start their own businesses, health care collectives. There are hundreds of examples. What do libertarians do that is comparable?

Libertarians need to be more actively involved in creating, supporting, and participating in private alternative solutions. Some are helping already through volunteer work or charitable contributions. A few do it through their own organizations, like the now‐​defunct Mothers Institute, which used to give out scholarships for home‐​schooling parents, or the Morefield Storey Institute, which has a small microloan program. The new Seasteading Institute is trying to provide a complete model community. Some left libertarians and anarchists are starting small mutual aid organizations such as SMART (“Sovereign Mutual Aid Response Teams”). There are even a few practical institutions, like The Institute for Justice (“IJ”) and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (“FIRE”), that many movement libertarians are likely to know about already.

What can libertarians do? Here are a few suggestions for helping foster the private alternatives we claim will work better than the government.

Promote private social services.

Inform yourself. Then get active in your local community promoting these ideas. Here is my reading list for getting started. Promote libertarian work alternatives

Get involved in your local community. Help organize or contribute to food, health and job coops, or even worker‐​owned companies. Contribute to and/​or volunteer for private alternatives to government social services.

I hope I don’t have to convince anyone here that benevolence is a good thing, but it’s a topic worth exploring at some length.

Here is what the late libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan has to say about the virtue of benevolence. Speaking from the viewpoint of what philosophers call “virtue ethics,” he wrote in his book Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society (published by Cato):