Written by Michael Bakunin, circa 1871, as published in The Voluntaryist, June 1992. What is authority? Is it the inevitable power of the natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary concatenation and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds? Indeed, against these laws revolt is not only forbidden, it is impossible. We…
Tag: privilege
Government Undermines Social Cooperation
Here is the standard false alternative beloved by politicians seeking to justify their own violence-based power. The fallacy is clear when stated this way: Since individuals acting in isolation aren’t capable of doing many things they want done, government should take charge and see that they are done.
The Many Monopolies
Written by Charles Johnson, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. We libertarians defend economic freedom, not big business. We advocate free markets, not the corporate economy. And what would freed markets look like? Nothing like the controlled markets we have today. But how often do we hear mass unemployment, financial crisis, ecological…
A Short Dialogue from a More Civilized World
A: You know, this whole system of “ordered anarchy” and “voluntary society” leaves much to be desired. We have homeless in the streets, some people have access to much better healthcare that others, charities can only do so much to help, there are occassional gang fights going on, etc. I was thinking that perhaps it…
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…
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…
Individualist Collectivism
Is the free market an individualist or collectivist social arrangement? Don’t answer too quickly. It’s a trick question.
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.
The Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
Written by Roderick Long for Formulations in 1995. The status of intellectual property rights (copyrights, patents, and the like) is an issue that has long divided libertarians. Such libertarian luminaries as Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Ayn Rand have been strong supporters of intellectual property rights. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was ambivalent on the…
The Virtues of Competition
Differing attitudes about market competition divide people needlessly. An appreciation of what competition makes possible could prepare the ground for a convergence between libertarians and those we might call latent libertarians, that is, those who value individual liberty but don’t yet see the market as its natural home.