Everyone loves learning. The thing is that not everyone likes studying and what’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see the blatant problem with it – the deprivation of freedom that prevents the flourishing of precisely those who have the most potential in society; children.
Tag: privilege
David Hume on Self-Coordinating and Correcting Market Processes
David Hume emphasized that commerce and trade were among the most important avenues to offer opportunities to raise people’s standards of living, and to bring refinement and cultural betterment to a growing portion of a nation’s population.
So-Called Intellectual Property
Property ownership is central to liberty and civilization. Property rights prevent conflict over the use of scarce resources. Ironically, the term “intellectual property” (aka “IP”) represents a hodgepodge of concepts that generally introduce artificial scarcity and needless conflict.
The Five Institutions of the Market Economy
Let us see what the basic institutions of the market economy are. We may subdivide them for convenience of discussion into (1) private property, (2) free markets, (3) competition, (4) division and combination of labor, and (5) social cooperation. As we shall see, these are not separate institutions. They are mutually dependent: each implies the other, and makes it possible.
Seize or Build the Means of Production?
You often hear left anarchists (anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, etc.) promoting the idea of “seizing the means of production” and smashing corporate hierarchy, and whatnot (regular communists and syndicalists, too, of course). But aside from corporate hierarchy that persists as the result of political privilege, why should anyone seize the means of production rather than building the means of production for themselves?
Who Benefits From Upper Class Wealth?
Many a social democrat and left anarchist decry the existence of wealth inequality, considering it evidence that a crime somewhere, some time has been committed, and that justice must be made through violent confiscatory and re-distributive government programs. To them such is perfectly just because it is the righting of a wrong. The state is a tool that may used in this way, just as for small government libertarians it may be used in self-defense. This is a type of self-defense by the have-nots against the haves. It make me wonder, however, just how beneficial wealth is to the haves, and even to the have-notes? Let us count the ways.
The American Left’s Crushing Defeat By the Global Alt-Right
The disgraceful and shameful rhetoric coming from the anti-Trump left has been telling. Thankfully not many of my friends have participated in it, and that is appreciated. Keep it classy. But the vile, and hate, and violence I have seen geared towards not just pro-trump people, but white people, males – especially “straight white males”…
12 Articles Every Aspiring Economist Should Read
Nothing stirs up controversy in the digital age quite like a list. But lists, especially ones that provide an easily accessible way to learn essential information, have their purposes. Below, I offer 12 articles that I think every aspiring economist should read. Before we get to the list, let me say a few things about how I created it.
We All Acknowledge Rights
Send him mail. “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” is an original column appearing sporadically at Everything-Voluntary.com, by the founder and editor Skyler J. Collins. Archived columns can be found here. OVP-only RSS feed available here. I wanted to provide some more clarification on my recent writings on the concept of rights. I wrote in “On Rights II”…
Facts
Nobody asked but … If “might” makes “rights,” then they are “privileges” not “rights.” This raises the problem that we have no concrete definition of “rights” in a statist context. I really like Skyler’s idea that might includes reason, which has as much power to create structure as does coercion. I guess I don’t really adhere…