Guest post by Spencer Morgan. How Can Free Markets Guarantee Freedom in the Absence of a Strong Central Power? Freedom can’t guarantee anything. It’s not a top-down system or a mechanism that we can evaluate by a comparison to the various models of centralized control. By definition, it is the absence of that control. The…
Tag: society
Voluntaryism is a Vehicle
Doug Kendall wrote in a Facebook group, “Voluntaryism is the vehicle, not the destination.” As long as I’ve identified as a voluntaryist, I’ve never looked at it quite like that. I’ve always considered voluntaryism as a less-controversial synonym of “anarchism”. Really, though, as Doug points out, voluntaryism is the vehicle, anarchism, the “free society”, the…
How Can a Free Market Provide What the State is Doing Now?
Guest post by Spencer Morgan. It’s a trap! The question “show me how the free market will do this” is usually just a desperate attempt to create a diversion from the moral issue surrounding the use of force, and it is most likely not being presented to you by a sincere person likely to accept…
Should Voluntaryists Vote?
Guest post by Spencer Morgan. Earlier this week, I was asked a question by a local libertarian who is taking a close look at the philosophy of voluntaryism. His question as follows: “Should voluntaryists vote? The issue, as I see it, is that on the one hand, voting could be construed as a tacit recognition…
Thou Shalt Not Steal
Says Veresapiens, If the guiding principle shaping a society was “Thou Shalt Not Steal” (TSNS), what kind of government, legal, and social systems would the society have? Before we begin to answer that question, we need to review one important aspect of TSNS. If you ‘own’ something, it means that you have total control over…
Voluntaryist Trials by Jury
People claim that “trial by jury” is a right. Well, obviously, rights can’t require a service from someone else to qualify as a right. “Trial by jury” is no right at all, traditionally understood. However, that doesn’t mean that one cannot have a trial by jury. Wendy McElroy shares some interesting thoughts on how a…
Re: An Article to Pass On to Priests, et al
Christian Prophet, great article. This is something I’ve thought a lot about. The Israelites in the Old Testament were told what sorts of atrocities a king would inflict on them, yet they demanded one anyway. A clear showing of whom it was they were placing their faith in, and who they wanted to provide for…
Government is Force
Some pundits really don’t understand why libertarians dislike government and therefore want it to do little, if anything at all. Unable to grasp the reason, the pundits assign bad motives to those who disparage government: They don’t like poor people, or workers, or the sick, or education. But what’s so hard to understand?