The United States OR America?

Guest post by Carl Watner. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, July 1986. On January 10, 1776, Tom Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense. It spread like wildfire through the colonies and shattered the King’s cause as it set forth the virtues of independence and the absurdity of submitting to the arbitrary rule of a hereditary…

Living Slavery And All That

Guest post by Alan P. Koontz. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, August 1985. In various forums, at least since the birth of the [Libertarian Party], Murray Rothbard has invoked what he calls the “slavery analogy,” to point up the morality of political voting. The question is: Does the slavery analogy really help in this way?…

The Subsidy of History

Guest post by Kevin Carson. A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close inter-meshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention,…

Button Pushing or Abdication: Which?

Guest post by Carl Watner. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, August 1985. For an earlier article on this topic, with a different perspective, at Everything-Voluntary.com, see this post. In Detroit on April 29,1946, Leonard Read gave a speech to the Midwestern Conference of the Controllers Institute of America. The address, which was titled “I’d Push…

Unlimited Voluntary Exchanges

Guest post by R. C. Hoiles. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, August 1985. In a talk before the Exchange Club of Santa Ana on voluntaryism, I used the subject voluntaryism rather than libertarianism because I do not believe there is as much confusion about voluntaryism as there is about libertarianism. Libertarianism has become distorted to…

Business Keeps Business Honest

Guest post by William Vandersteel. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, February 1985. We take it for granted that the ordinary business contract — perhaps the most vital element of modern commerce — would be completely ineffectual without the vigilance of our courts and legal system. But as George Gershwin once wrote, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”…