Editor’s Pick. Written by Laura Markham. The inner critic’s goal is to protect us. It thinks its job is to constantly scan for threats so it can keep us safe: future dangers, past problems we keep reliving to prevent their recurrence (or prove we were right!), defects in others that we need to control and…
Author: Editor's Pick
Selected content picked by the editor of Everything-Voluntary.com.
When Does Discipline Begin?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Kelly Bartlett. Parents often ask, “When should I start disciplining my child? At what age is it appropriate?” It is a common question of when it’s time to transition from the nurturing parenting of babyhood to using more of the “discipline” tools of toddlerhood and beyond. To answer this, we first…
The Right to Ignore the State
Editor’s Pick. Written by Herbert Spencer. As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes…
Is Pot too Potent to Legalize?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Mark Thornton. During alcohol prohibition (1920-1933), alcohol consumption went from a beer, wine, and whiskey market to one of rotgut whiskey with little wine or beer available. The rotgut whiskey could be more than twice as potent of the normal whiskey that was produced both before and after prohibition. The product…
The Most Basic Freedom Is Freedom to Quit
Editor’s Pick. Written by Peter Gray. In general, children are the most brutalized of people, not because they are small and weak, but because they don’t have the same freedoms to quit that adults have. Anthropologists tell me that this is not so true in hunter-gatherer cultures, because children there, to a considerable degree, can…
Bitcoin: Roller Coaster of Love
Editor’s Pick. Written by Thomas L. Knapp. It’s up, it’s down. It’s the future of commerce one day, just another Internet bubble the next. It’s the end of government-controlled currency and banking … but wait, the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has something to say about that. It’s Bitcoin, and you’ve almost certainly been…
9 Ways To Transform Bratty Behavior
Editor’s Pick. Written by Laura Markham. There is no such thing as a brat, only a child who is hurting. When our starting point as parents is a close bond with our children, we are their North Star, the point around which they orient. They want more than anything in the world to protect that…
Are Individuals The Property Of The Collective?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Brandon Smith. Mankind has faced a bewildering multitude of self-made catastrophes and self-made terrors over the past few millennium, most of which stem from a single solitary conflict between two opposing social qualities: individualism vs. collectivism. These two forces of organizational mechanics have gone through evolution after evolution over the years,…
Public Schools: The Battleground Of Ideology
Editor’s Pick. Written by Homie Freemarkets Lebowski. The belief that we don’t want anyone else deciding what our kids are taught is one of the principal reasons libertarians, minarchists, voluntaryists, and other small-government types oppose the very idea of government education. If we want to teach our kids x, and someone else wants to teach…
Educational Freedom
Editor’s Pick. Writtin by Arnold Kling. Most of us went to school when we were younger, and we cannot imagine otherwise. However, it may be worth contemplating radical alternatives to the notion of school. The conflict between schooling and libertarian principles appears to me to have widened in the age of the Internet. On the…