Is the free market an individualist or collectivist social arrangement? Don’t answer too quickly. It’s a trick question.
Tag: action
Freer Is Safer
Written by John Semmens for The Voluntaryist, February 1990. One of the most common delusions of our age is that government is enforcing regulations that will actually help improve safety. In the wave of deregulation that hit the economy in the last decade, many observers have found comfort in the knowledge that safety was not…
Voluntary Governance
Written by Michael McConkey for The Libertarian Standard. As illegitimate as the involuntary nature of the state is, many people consider a wide range of what the state does to be thoroughly necessary. Some people value Pareto optimal outcomes, some don’t; some are willing to absorb more transaction costs than others; some worry about free…
John Hasnas
“Toward Freedom” is an Everything-Voluntary.com series sharing personal stories about the journey toward freedom. Archived stories can be found here. Submit your story to the editor. Originally published in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians. How did I become a libertarian? It happened in the fifth grade at Public School #6 in Woodmere, New York…
A Short History of Liberty
Written by Dean Russell for The Freeman in 1955. From biblical times onward, the history of liberty and progress among various peoples seems to have followed a remarkably similar pattern. There are exceptions, of course—and the time element varies widely—but the pattern may be generally described by ten key ideas in sequence:1. Bondage. At some…
Freedom Works Both Ways
Written by Dean Russell for The Voluntaryist, June 1989. Everybody says he’s in favor of freedom. Even the Soviet leaders claim to be fighting for freedom. So did Hitler. Our own leaders are also for freedom. So was my slave-owning grandfather. But my grandfather failed to understand the fact that freedom is a mutual relationship;…
A Way Out – Victory Without Violence
Written by Carl Watner for The Voluntaryist, June 1989. Marshall Fritz of the Advocates for Self-Government recently loaned me a copy of John Yoder’s book, titled What Would You Do: If a Violent Person Threatened to Harm a Loved One… At dinner one evening, we were discussing the question of what I would do if an…
In Praise of Profit
In the last two weeks, I presented a defense of key libertarian concepts — the market, private property, and competition — in a way intended to make them palatable to people who believe in individual liberty yet have something like an aesthetic aversion to the market economy. Today let’s examine profit, another concept that has an unpleasant taste for some people who might otherwise be attracted to libertarianism.
Liberty, Freedom, and Power
Send him mail. “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” is an original bi-weekly column appearing every other Monday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by the founder and editor Skyler J. Collins. Archived columns can be found here. OVP-only RSS feed available here. I thought I would take this week’s column to explore some thoughts and ideas that have been strewing around…
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
“Toward Freedom” is an Everything-Voluntary.com series sharing personal stories about the journey toward freedom. Archived stories can be found here. Submit your story to the editor. Originally published in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians. I was always an individualist, probably because I spent my childhood and adolescent years playing competitive sports. I grew up…