Writes Stephan Kinsella: After much thought and debate about this topic over the last 25 or so years, here is my attempt at a lean, concise, precise definition of what a libertarian is: A libertarian is a person who believes that the invasion of the borders of (trespass against) others’ bodies or owned external scarce…
Tag: property
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…
The Self-Ownership of Children
Writes Free Your Kids: Self-ownership is indispensable to freedom. We teach our kids that they own themselves and that they alone dictate what happens to them. Any force, aggression, or coercion against them is unacceptable. They own themselves; this is non-negotiable. But how to teach this to a toddler or an infant? Words are relatively…
Pro-business or Pro-market?
Written by wheylous for The Voluntaryist Reader. One of the main concerns curious people have about libertarianism is that it is pro-business and pro-Big Business. If it ain’t multinational, it ain’t capitalism! But is being pro-market inherently the same as being pro-business? Do libertarians really love large corporations? These are questions that are often ignored,…
What Voluntaryists Believe And Why
Written by Carl Watner, as published in The Voluntaryist, August 1992. [Editor’s Note: The following was written by Carl Watner in fulfillment of a request by a private retail company to print their principles on their shopping bags. SJC] We believe that the following principles of ownership are self-evident: 1. Every person, by virtue of…
Liberty: The Other Equality
Written by Roderick Long, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. Equality is an ideal upheld by a number of ideologies, but nowadays it is seldom associated with libertarianism or classical liberalism. Indeed, both libertarians and their critics typically think of equality as an ideal in tension with the ideal of liberty as…
The Political Enemy Is Politics Itself
Written by John W. Deming, as published in The Voluntaryist, August 1992. The cause of the political disease is politics itself. Political means never achieve the ends sought. The goals of a sensible political state would be to reduce its presence in the lives of its citizenry to the greatest extent possible. And that’s the…
Re: Control is War
A fellow redditor asked me: “War begins…when you attempt to forcibly control someone else without their permission.” It seems believable, but could you possibly expand on how you got to this conclusion? Thanks! And I responded: It seems obvious to me, but I suppose that’s not satisfactory… A 2-person fight is, in principle, war. It’s…
Control is War
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. War is clearly destructive. Even war fought totally in self-defense is destructive; destructive to life, liberty, and property. Murray…
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.