Why I Had to Become My Own Father

Send him mail. “Insight for the Young and Unrestrained” is an original weekly column appearing every Thursday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Gregory V. Diehl. Gregory is a writer, musician, educator, and coach for young people at EnabledYouth.com. Archived columns can be found here. IYU-only RSS feed available here. My journey toward the voluntarist philosophy of a…

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…

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…

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.

Being An Individual

Written by Charles Curley and Campbell Chandler for The Voluntaryist, December 1988. In order to truly be an individual, one must claim his or her inherent birthright to be happy and free. It means taking responsibility for one’s own condition, as opposed to blaming external forces; be that force a government, an unforgiving deity or…

The Myth of Political Freedom

Written by Carl Watner for The Voluntaryist, December 1988. How is it that citizens of the Soviet Russia become imbued with the political ideas of the United States Constitution? Why are Americans knowledgeable about the political freedoms outlined in the Constitution of the U.S.S.R.? The answer to these two questions is relatively simple. In both…

Re: Free Your Mind

Writes T. K. Coleman: Frederick Douglass wrote: “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” An awakened mind makes an autonomous man. Our experience of freedom is directly proportional to our quality of perception and the world’s capacity to make us feel powerless is no greater than the ignorance we have of our own…