Written by Robert Higgs for The Independent Institute. Libertarians divide into two broad classes: those who espouse a free society because it gives better results than an unfree society, and those who espouse a free society because they believe that it is wrong to deny or suppress a person’s right to be free (unless, of…
Category: Voluntaryism
Nuclear Weapons in Libertarianism
Written by Wheylous for The Voluntaryist Reader. The point of this article is not to make bad jokes about the nuclear weapons in Iraq Iran, however, but to answer a question posed to libertarianism from time to time: “In a libertarian society, are you allowed to own nuclear weapons?” I will first address the ethical…
Reject the Initiation of Violence
Written by Ron Paul, as published at Mises.org. Restraining aggressive behavior is one thing, but legalizing a government monopoly for initiating aggression can only lead to exhausting liberty associated with chaos, anger, and the breakdown of civil society. Permitting such authority and expecting saintly behavior from the bureaucrats and the politicians is a pipe dream.Read…
Rights That Aren’t
Written by Wheylous for The Voluntaryist Reader. Initially, the [American] Founders formulated the Constitution not to delineate the rights of the individual, but to restrict the powers of government. Soon thereafter, it was decided that the Constitution indeed needed to list some individual rights, so greedy was government for power. Hence, the Bill of Rights…
Personal Anarchy
Written by Michael Ziesing for The Voluntaryist, August 1991. Tell people you’re an anarchist and you’ll probably get a reaction. Maybe they’ll back away and/or run in sheer terror. (You may have a bomb and know how to use it, after all!) Or maybe they’ll spit in your eye and/or try to lock you up.…
American Children and Foreign Children
Written by Jacob G. Hornberger for The Future of Freedom Foundation. If there is a more emotionally painful experience than a parent’s losing a child, I can’t imagine what it would be. The emotional wound is raw and goes down to the deepest recesses of a person’s heart and soul. And as we see with…
Intellectual Property as a Form of Slavery
Written by fifth_imp for /r/Anarcho_Capitalism. I say that the notion of claiming an idea as property is absurd, and in fact constitutes a form of slavery. So, let’s break this down. What is an idea? Is an idea a tangible object? No, of course not. An idea is a pulse of electricity in your brain.…
Social Action and Social Norms
Written by Clayton for The Voluntaryist Reader. Every acting being has a morality, that is, has preferred ends and acts on those preferences. The ultimate end which lies behind every action is that end which is never a means to any other end – this ultimate end can be called satisfaction, happiness or pleasure.Read the…
A Critique of Leftist Anarchism
Written by Neodoxy for The Voluntaryist Reader. If communism, syndicalism, egalitarianism, and democracy are all as natural and positive as…the radical left claim, then they should be happy to remove the state and allow society to spontaneously flow into its “natural” shape. Let’s stop playing these name games and work towards disbanding the state. Then…
Thoughts on Violence
Written by Clayton for The Voluntaryist Reader. Violence is related to voluntaryism in that we can roughly define choices influenced by threats of violence as non-voluntary. Violence is not a uniquely human experience. In fact, human social interactions are remarkably non-violent by comparison to the rest of the natural world. Violence between biological organisms manifests…