I just wanted to take a moment and demonstrate how loving your neighbor as you love your own mother would result in the abandonment of the State. Our innate human morals preclude us from punishing our friends and family when they have harmed no one by their actions, nor damaged anyone else’s property.
Author: Editor's Pick
Selected content picked by the editor of Everything-Voluntary.com.
Why Children Protest Going to School
Why all this protest? Education is a good thing, right? Children need to become educated to do well in society. Society goes to tremendous expense and trouble to provide schooling—lots of it!—for every child (whether they want it or not). Are these kids just spoiled ingrates?
Key To Conflict Resolution: Property Rights
The association of humans with their subjective choices is only natural, and identifying how these choices fit in as a part of social cooperation leads to reciprocity and a mutual recognition of property rights and human rights. Both human rights and property rights are understood in that context of reciprocity.
Why Does the Minimum Wage Debate Never End?
Has any science ever devoted so much time, effort, and cleverness to elaborate attempts to determine whether or not a central and indisputably correct tenet of that science – a tenet used without question to predict outcomes in general – fails to work as an accurate predictor for one very specific, small slice of reality as has been devoted by economics over the past two decades to determine whether or not the law of demand works to accurately predict the effects of minimum wages on the quantity demanded of low-skilled labor?
Ten Fundamental Laws of Economics
In the midst of so many economic fallacies being repeatedly seemingly without end, it may be helpful to return to some of the most basic laws of economics. Here are ten of them that bear repeating again and again.
Why Our Coercive System of Schooling Should Topple
I’ve been called a crazy optimist, a Pollyanna, a romantic idealist. How can I believe that our system of compulsory (forced) schooling is about to collapse? People point out that in many ways the schooling system is stronger now than ever. It occupies more of children’s time, gobbles up more public funds, employs more people, and is more firmly controlled by government—and at ever-higher levels of government—than has ever been true in the past. So why do I believe it’s going to collapse—slowly at first and then more rapidly—over the next ten years or so?
Minimum Wage? Won’t Someone Think of the Children!?
I was quite proud of my 12 year-old recently. She bought her own iPad with money she had saved from babysitting her younger sisters (a joint-effort with her 13 year-old sister) on the nights that I have class. It reminded me of my first job working at the gun range where my dad shot skeet & trap. I earned about $55/week, paid the same way; in cash. I would do simple stuff, like load targets, ‘pull’ for shooters, maintain the grounds, etc. At its core, the minimum wage is a coercive extraction of resources from one party to be given to another.
Spanking As a Prejudice Against Children
It’s been said that kids benefit from a good spanking. Some people justify this practice by claiming that today’s kids’ are getting out of control, and need to be punished more severely. Some folks might be surprised to learn that this generational view has been expressed throughout our history with regard to a number of specific populations of people within our society.
The Leftist Apparitions Who Shook Down Scrooge for Money
Who knows what housing, stores, railways or other benefits to society Scrooge had made possible through his wise judgment? How many thousands of jobs had he created? Dickens is unjustly silent on this. Whatever Scrooge had financed, we know it was something the public wanted or needed enough to pay for voluntarily. Thanks to Scrooge, however crusty his demeanor, the common people of London were far richer than they otherwise would have been without his services.
Sudbury: Autonomy in Community
More and more people are coming to know the power and flexibility of letting young people learn the way our species evolved: relying on their innate curiosity and drive to explore and engage meaningfully with the world. What’s more, within the world of Self-Directed Education there is a variety of approaches. This makes sense, really, given that self-direction implies a diversity of individual beliefs and preferences, but it means you have to dig a little deeper to get a sense of what self-direction entails.