On Rights

The concept of “rights” can mean different things to different people, but what does it mean etymologically? Right comes from riht (West Saxon) or reht (Anglican), and has several meanings. In the context of voluntaryism, it means “what someone deserves; a just claim, what is due; correctness, truth; a legal entitlement, a privilege,”. It seems…

A Lesson in Semantics

I attended government run schools, but I don’t remember much of specifics that I learned there.  However one particular lesson has stayed with me very vividly since I learned it almost 30 years ago. We were doing a unit on semantics – the study of meaning in language.  The teacher stood in the front of…

Re: A Modest Evaluation

Nobody asked but … Let us be sure that we understand how these observations are verifications of natural law, not as statists would have us believe, demonstrations of how voluntaryism does not work.  Both Detroit and Somalia are wreckage left by the failures of statism.  Voluntaryism works everywhere that statism does not intervene.  People are…

Somalia

Nobody asked but … Statists often cherry-pick Somalia as proof that statism works or that voluntaryist doesn’t.  What are the territories of the war lords if not states?  Obama is a warlord.  Putin is a warlord. Neither honors his agreements,  neither obeys his own laws.  We already live in vastly expanded and severely more complex…

Religion and Voluntaryism

Send him mail. “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” is an original column appearing most Mondays at Everything-Voluntary.com, by the founder and editor Skyler J. Collins. Archived columns can be found here. OVP-only RSS feed available here. What is the relationship between voluntaryism, the philosophy based on the voluntary principle, that all human relations should happen voluntarily, or…