Guest post by Isaac Morehouse. When children play with Legos, violence sometimes ensues. “He knocked down my tower!” “Only because she built it to look exactly like the one I made, and that’s not fair. I made mine first!” All the parents I’ve ever met handle this situation by pointing out to the aggressor that…
Author: Editor's Pick
Selected content picked by the editor of Everything-Voluntary.com.
Is Voting an Act of Violence?
Guest post by Carl Watner. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, April 2000. Hans Sherrer, a subscriber to The Voluntaryist, sent me an essay entitled “Voting Is An Act of Violence,” which began with the statement “Voting is the most violent act someone can commit in his lifetime.” How true is this? First, let us define our…
Can Voluntaryism Fix the Machine?
Guest post by Alex R. Knight, III. The much vaunted libertarian journalist and commentator H.L. Mencken once wrote: “I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.” I don’t consider it a stretch at all to say that this is how any voluntaryist worthy of…
Wrong is Wrong
Guest post by Kent McManigal. If the government passed a law tomorrow that declared that rape was now “legal,” how many of us would immediately go out to commit one?Read the full thing »
Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler
Guest post by Wendy McElroy. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, April 1997. At the last Liberty Conference, an intellectual brawl erupted during a panel discussion on terrorism. Since I consider electoral politics the milquetoast equivalent of terrorism, my opening statement was a condemnation of voting. My arguments were aimed at libertarians who consider themselves anarchists…
Re: Electoral Obligations
Writes Spencer Morgan: Saying that you have an obligation to vote and that doing so is the way to advance liberty is like saying that you should join your local street gang, go through their initiations, rise through the ranks and become their leader just so you can reduce its level of violence. Most people…
Re: Electoral Politics
Writes Ben Speers: I don’t want to “fix” government. I would rather get rid of it entirely, and the first step in that direction is withdrawing my consent. For example, I refuse to consent to being ruled by either Candidate A or Candidate B (or C or D, etc.). I also refuse to cooperate in…
Is Religion Compatible With a Free Society?
Guest post by Alex Perales. It seems to me that many of those interested in pursuing the knowledge of a free society have also come to other conclusions outside of our actual acting world. Not all of us have reached these conclusions because ultimately there is no logical deduction to be made to get there…
The “Rights” of Animals
Guest post by Murray N. Rothbard. It has lately become a growing fashion to extend the concept of rights from human beings to animals, and to assert that since animals have the full rights of humans, it is therefore impermissible—i.e., that no man has the right—to kill or eat them. There are, of course, many…
Why I Detest the State
Guest post by Clem Johnson. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, February, 1987. About a year before he died, Albert Einstein wrote this warning: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophies.” In paraphrase, such a statement could describe even dire consequences: “From tribalism…