Guest post by Chris Brown. Government antitrust laws have caused significant damage to consumers and businesses, all in the name of “consumer protection” and “promoting competition.” Unfortunately, government views on antitrust come from a fundamentally flawed understanding of economics – neoclassical economics, the view that is taught in most university economics courses today. In this…
Category: Editor’s Picks
Libertarians for Redistribution
Guest post by Gary Chartier. Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition. Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But…
Education
Guest post by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By…
Do You Hate the State?
Guest post by Murray Rothbard. I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important…
Scope and Scale
Guest post by Larkin Rose. Why would anyone ever give up his freedom, in favor of having a master? Because aspiring tyrants are very good at deceiving people into thinking that it’s for their own good. It’s sad that this ever works, since it’s akin to a slave-master convincing a slave that the purpose of…
Why Objective Law Requires Anarchy
Guest post by Roderick Long. While libertarians all agree on the need for a drastic reduction in the size and power of the state, the libertarian movement has long been divided between the anarchists, who believe that the state should be done away with entirely, and the minarchists, who wish to reduce it to a…
The Voluntary Good
Guest post by Lou. A question came up in the comments section of a previous article. “Do businesses always have the best interests of the nation in mind when making business investments or do they have the best interests in their business?” My answer came quickly, “No. Businesses do not always have the best interest…
The Fear of Terror
Guest post by Kyle Blizzard. “Terrorism,” the word that will make anyone OK with whatever the government does to anybody. “Terrorist” no longer applies to just “brown people”. It’s now everyone–your friends, your family–who may not like everything the government does. It’s considered suspicious by law enforcement to take photos in public in Los Angeles.…
Markets Make Us Smarter and Better
Guest post by Isaac Morehouse. Airlines are loaded with passengers who surf the Internet while soaring through the air, chatting in real-time to anyone else on the globe, posting in social media, shopping, and downloading and reading books on a wide variety of readers. Such a scene would have astonished a person living 50 years…
The Grayness of Children’s Rights
Guest post by Wendy McElroy. Children’s rights confuse me. But, then, children’s rights and the issues that surround them, such as parental responsibility, have confounded a great many otherwise clear minded theorists. Some libertarians reach definitive conclusions that directly contradict each other. For example, in an article entitled “Taking Children Seriously & the Future of…