There are no such things as “positive rights”. Rights, by definition, are universal, meaning that everyone can exercise them, even simultaneously. But since exercising a “positive right” means coercing another to provide one with a specific good or service, everyone attempting to exercise a “positive right” simultaneously results in no one being able to exercise…
Tag: rights
Notes on War and Freedom
Written by Ramsey Clark, as published in The Voluntaryist, August 1992. War is more destructive of freedom than any other human activity. Any violation of civil liberties is easily justified in times of war and the threat of war, however unnecessary for security, harmful to its victims, irrational, unfair, or even detrimental to the war…
Natural Law and Authority
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…
For Reasons of State
Written by Michael Bakunin, circa 1867, as published in The Voluntaryist, April 1992. We shall now examine what the State, thus constituted, should be in relation to other states, its peers, as well as in relation to its own subject populations. This examination appears to us all the more interesting and useful because the State,…
The Contradiction of Collectivist-Anarchy
Writes buffalo-samurai: It should probably be stated that every sensible man has in their heart the ultimate desire and wish for a condition of infinite abundance with peaceful harmony for their fellow man. It is my personal belief that the cause of all discord among men is the belief in how this situation can be…
The Stateless Equilibrium
Written by Predrag Rajsic for Mises.org. The stateless market society—a peaceful social arrangement based on voluntary relations among individuals in which the state is not present—is not a popular idea. Many people believe that this society would lack the capacity to define and enforce property rights, and that this would result in chaos, tyranny of…
Spencer W. Morgan
“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. The story of how I “arrived at liberty” is a long and gradual one. It is one thing to understand liberty and self-determination in general, but it is quite…
The Open Society
Written by F. A. Harper, as published in The Voluntaryist, April 1992. The advantages of an open society on a world basis have been explored to only a slight degree and would seem to deserve much more thought as a solution for solving major international problems. To see its potential, one might think of how…
Andrew P. Napolitano
“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. Winston Churchill, of whose Big Government values I have not been fond, did have a great gift for words. He…
How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition
Written by Kevin Carson, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. Any consideration of “intellectual property rights” must start from the understanding that such “rights” undermine genuine property rights and hence are illegitimate in terms of libertarian principle. Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course…