Written by Mark Thornton for Mises Daily. Regulation simply does not work. It is designed with hopes of success, but with no mechanism to achieve this success. We hope for efficiency, but what we get is bureaucracy. We hope for effectiveness, but what we get is rules and red tape that serves neither producer nor…
Tag: rules
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…
I Let My Children Do Whatever They Want
Guest post by Dayna Martin. No school, no exams, no bed time, no meal times, and certainly no rules. It sounds like every child’s wildest dream, but for Dayna Martin’s four children – Devin, 13, Tiffany, 11, Ivy, seven, and Orion, four – it’s a daily reality. The controversial 39-year-old mum and her husband Joe,…
Make Money, Not War!
Guest post by Lorne Strider. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, June 1988. I have argued that business people, those who create and produce wealth, are acting morally, and that people who pretend to act in the public interest, i.e., government people, are the bad guys whose actions not only create no wealth, but actually destroy…
The Inflation of Rights
Guest post by Sir Alfred Sherman. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, April 1987. In this essay I wish to argue that the inflation of rights, in the sense of hypertrophy of claims on society that the state is responsible for levying, is inherently self-defeating. It is bound to generate conflicts of rights that will end…
The Fundamentals of Nonvoting
Our rulers know they are illegitimate. Voluntaryists know they are illegitimate for a myriad of other reasons, but what I wanted to examine here is the voluntaryist’s position to abstain from electoral politics. The following arguments are the fundamentals of the nonvoting position.
Re: Our Moral High Ground
Writes Skyler J. Collins: In response to my claims on the immorality of voting (of granting immoral power to someone however they intend to use it), some have said that voting is a violation of a lower law in obedience to a higher one. Well and good, my point remains, voting is immoral, irrelevant is…
Larken Rose
“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 The Voluntaryist, 1st Quarter 2012. I was raised in a conservative home, in a conservative town, with some libertarian leanings. I grew up thinking the good…
Why I Would Not Vote Against Hitler
Guest post by Wendy McElroy. Originally published in The Voluntaryist, April 1997. At the last Liberty Conference, an intellectual brawl erupted during a panel discussion on terrorism. Since I consider electoral politics the milquetoast equivalent of terrorism, my opening statement was a condemnation of voting. My arguments were aimed at libertarians who consider themselves anarchists…