Have you ever had vegan food? I'm completely serious. If you haven't find a vegan restaurant or potlatch nearby and try some. They are some of the most creative cooks and most amazing food engineers I know of. Without milk, cheese, or eggs they can make superior mac and cheese, cookies, brownies, you name it really. These are people that come up with solutions to problems, and that's why I admire them and their cooking in spite of being a mere vegetarian myself.
So what's the relevance to left-libertarianism and the libertarian movement in general?
Well, you see for the same reasons I really admire the anarchists I know. These also are people that create solutions to problems. Because they are not expending their time, energy, and resources on political action (which offers little direct return in investment), they are able to craft work arounds and solutions to real problems.
Bit Coin, Silk Road, Agorism, Counter-Economics, Pirate Bay, Food Not Bombs food kitchens, Wiki Leaks; these are all anarchist inventions or are anarchic by nature. These are the tools and the stones which are building the foundation of the free society in which we want to live.
Minarchists are doing plenty of this too, but their time will always be divided between invention and the latest Ron Paul or Gary Johnson.
Where ever you fall on the libertarian spectrum, we can all learn from the anarchists and others who are building the real world tools of freedom. It is these tools that make the biggest difference in the level of choice, agency, and freedom for individuals throughout history. The invention and proliferation of the printing press, the internet, and now 3-D printing bring whole new paradigms that state oppression must catch up to in order begin the suppress again. Political action while it does have it's uses, mostly is able to slow down the machine or keep the society open or closed by up-down vote. The libertarian world we desire will not be voted in, but be constructed in spite of those that oppose it.
From the vegans and anarchists we can learn how to build that world.
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