Editor’s Pick. Written by Jacob Lyles. Imagine that you were entertaining a business deal with a man with an supernatural ability to make two kinds of promises: 1) promises that are impossible for him to break and 2) ordinary, breakable promises. Why would you accept anything other than the unbreakable promises from him? If he…
Tag: jurisdiction
The Paradox of Imperialism
Editor’s Pick. Written by Hans Hoppe. The State Conventionally, the state is defined as an agency with two unique characteristics. First, it is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction). That is, it is the ultimate arbiter in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself. Second, the state is a territorial monopolist of…
Reducing Conflict
Randy Barnett said it well: Libertarianism, though it may be radical, is far from extreme in comparison with its principal alternatives: the social justice of the Left or legal moralism of the Right. Social justice posits that everyone should get a certain amount of stuff; legal moralism posits that everyone should act in a certain…
Do You Really ‘Owe’ Those Taxes?
Written by Anonymous, as sent to Voluntaryist.com. “The question is not whether or not theft is wrong but what is considered to be theft; in the same way, murder is universally forbidden but there are great differences between peoples as to what killing is considered to be murder.” – Garrett Barden and Tim Murphy, Law…
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…
Non-Voting as an Act of Secession
Guest post by Hans Sherrer. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, 3rd Quarter, 2002. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence made it plain that in America, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive…, it is the Right of the…
The Fundamentals of Nonvoting
Our rulers know they are illegitimate. Voluntaryists know they are illegitimate for a myriad of other reasons, but what I wanted to examine here is the voluntaryist’s position to abstain from electoral politics. The following arguments are the fundamentals of the nonvoting position.
The Proper Role of Government and Electoral Politics
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. This column was originally intended to give my perspective on current events, but I think I’ll modify it somewhat. I’d…
A Voluntaryist Approach to Abortion
I wrote this as a response in a Facebook discussion. I thought I’d share it here. There’re two ways to approach libertarianism: 1) legal philosophy, and 2) political philosophy. 1) is *what* laws should be made, and 2) is *how* those laws should be made. Liberty, hence libertarians, hence the non-aggression and self-ownership principles, demand…
Chapter 9 – For Conscience’s Sake
Table of ContentsPrevious – Section Two – Chapter 8 – “The Historical Origins of Voluntaryism” by James Luther Adams 9 For Conscience’s Sake by Carl Watner George Smith, in his essay “Philosophies of Toleration,’’ reviews the history of freedom of religion and identifies the moral axiom of “righteous persecution,” which has been part of most…