Writes Free Your Kids: When I talk to people about government, they’ll often readily agree with me that the state is violent. They recognize that the state performs certain violent activities – like waging wars, jailing people for victimless crimes, and other overt aggression. But that’s not what I mean. Not entirely. Every action taken…
Tag: aggression
Government, a Force of Nature
Written by Paul Bonneau for Strike-The-Root.com. When I go outside this time of year, I get cold. I compensate by getting a coat on, and then go about my business. This is the standard way of dealing with forces of nature. I don’t spend a lot of time lying in bed wishing it weren’t cold.…
Voluntaryism as a System of Values
Send him mail. “One Improved Unit” 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. OIU-only RSS feed available here. I will own this interpretation, but I think that all voluntaryism really comes down to is a system of…
Re: Are Children Self-Owners or Slaves?
As an update to this post: After all of the discussion I’ve had on this the last few days, it seems the above is incomplete. I will add this, from Debbie Harbeson, “If one accepts that the principle of non-aggression is valid, there is no need to put children in a separate category of discussion…
Initiation of Force
Written by Harry Hoiles, as published in The Voluntaryist, October 1992. The initiation of force against peaceful people is always wrong. Yet most citizens of our country support this initiation of force when it is used to collect taxes. Why do they do so? Is it because they can’t visualize a government which is voluntarily…
Are Children Self-Owners or Slaves?
Children’s “rights”* is a topic of confusion and uncertainty among libertarians. I’d like to solve this once and for all, but not right now. Perhaps someday. Today, I only ask libertarians to consider the logical conclusions of either 1) children owning themselves and therefore possessing all the “rights” associated with ownership or 2) children are…
Who is a Libertarian?
Writes Stephan Kinsella: After much thought and debate about this topic over the last 25 or so years, here is my attempt at a lean, concise, precise definition of what a libertarian is: A libertarian is a person who believes that the invasion of the borders of (trespass against) others’ bodies or owned external scarce…
The Self-Ownership of Children
Writes Free Your Kids: Self-ownership is indispensable to freedom. We teach our kids that they own themselves and that they alone dictate what happens to them. Any force, aggression, or coercion against them is unacceptable. They own themselves; this is non-negotiable. But how to teach this to a toddler or an infant? Words are relatively…
Stop Walking Into the Abyss
Writes Free Your Kids: The first step is the toughest… Mama told me things had to change. We couldn’t continue this way. We had ceased spanking years before. We were still using a combination of yelling, isolation (in the form of a “naughty step”), and shaming to control the children’s behavior. We were drowning. Our…
Can You “Enforce” Your Limits Without Force?
Written by Laura Markham for Aha! Parenting. This is a terrific question: How can we “enforce” our limits? The short answer is, we can’t force anyone to do anything. All we can do is help our child WANT to meet our expectations and help him develop the emotional regulation so he’s able to do so.…