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…
Tag: change
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.”…
A Shift in the American Mind
Guest post by Geoffrey Pike. I have detected a shift in the American mind and it is a good thing. I see more and more people awakening to the fact that government is not there to look after people. I see more people realizing that these ongoing wars are ridiculous, unnecessary, and quite harmful. I…
Voluntaryism Transcends Anarchism
Post by Skyler J. Collins: I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve had, and some ways that my mind has compartmentalized concepts and ideas relating to voluntaryism. Watch a video exploration of these ideas here. In my humble opinion, voluntaryism is more than just a political philosophy, as I explained in the introduction of my…
Spankings, Surplus Crops, and Infant Schooling
Send him mail. “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” is an original weekly column appearing every 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. As mentioned in the inaugural edition of this column, I will give my voluntaryist perspective on “two or three” popular…
Do We Overestimate Our Intelligence?
Guest post by KantLockeMeIn. I’ve always been in love with nature. Growing up I spent my time in the woods and as I have grown older, I choose to spend my vacations in the mountains rather than at resorts. I’m the unapologetic conservationist who values raw nature. But that statement would lead most people to…
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 Case for Radical Idealism
Guest post by Murray Rothbard. Every “radical” creed has been subjected to the charge of being “utopian,” and the libertarian movement is no exception. Some libertarians themselves maintain that we should not frighten people off by being “too radical,” and that therefore the full libertarian ideology and program should be kept hidden from view. These…