“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. The story of how I “arrived at liberty” is a long and gradual one. It is one thing to understand liberty and self-determination in general, but it is quite…
Tag: defense
James Ostrowski
“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 suppose I could best be described as an independent, middle-class, populist, radical libertarian. How I got that way is…
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.…
Roderick Long
“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’ve been fortunate enough to have spent over half my life in the libertarian movement, and I am very grateful…
The State Versus an “Anarchist Society”
Written by Mark Stovel for On the Mark. The State asserts a “coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area” which is said to give the State the “right” to have the monopoly on all legitimate use of force in the given territorial area. This leads to…
Social Stability, Rule of Law, and the Free Society
Written by Wheylous for The Voluntaryist Reader. Democracy has been hailed as the great system of governance that keeps a nation balanced on the thin line between authoritarianism and lawless anarchy. The voluntaryist’s suggestion that the core responsibilities of the state – provision of courts, police, and national defense – be demonopolized (that is, allowed…
Which Shall We Treat, the Problem, or Symptoms?
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. Voluntaryists are not pacifists, though they do encourage strategic pacifism on many fronts. In regards to the private ownership…
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…
Will the Police Protect You?
Written by Wendy McElroy for Laissez Faire Today. For years, I have declared a preference for taking my chances with criminals rather than with the police. Criminals usually want my property, not to control my life or to cage me like an animal. With criminals, I can pull a gun in self-defense. Until lately, however,…
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…