Written by Gary Chartier, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. Being a libertarian means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. That doesn’t mean it should be understood as involving support for capitalism. Whether this claim makes any sense at all depends, of course, on what you mean by…
Tag: society
Mark Thornton
“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. Geneva is a small town in the Finger Lakes region of western New York State. I was born and raised…
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.
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 Businessman
Wrote Edmund Opitz: In a genuinely free society, a laissez faire society in the early sense of this much abused phrase, the businessman is a mandatary of consumers; the customer is boss. Consumer sovereignty! Is this the way the businessman likes it? Of course not. Our businessman would like to think of himself as the…
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…
Agorism and Nazism: A Study in Polar Opposites
Written by Neil M. Tokar, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. Perhaps one of the most impressive examples of the counter-economics idea in action is that of what businesspeople did in order to evade the price control laws of Nazi Germany. It also gives me the opportunity to bring to light an…
Men Act, States Don’t
Written by Chris Bassil for Duke’s The Chronicle. There is a tendency, in contemporary political and economic discourse, to reduce conversations to the level of the aggregate. Thus, we speak in terms of “labor” seeking goals, “nations” taking action and “society” handing the president a mandate. Such a way of looking at the world, as convenient…
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 Largest Perpetrator of Violence
Writes Free Your Kids: A quick welcome to those of you who have just joined us. We talk mainly about peaceful parenting, unschooling, and the abolition of the state. Wait? Abolition of the state? What’s that doing on a page devoted to freeing children? It all melds together seamlessly, I think. We’re anti-violence, anti-coercion, and…