Some of my academic work deals with international issues. As a result, I read a lot about the philosophy of human rights. It’s hard to read this literature without noticing the nearly complete absence of libertarian input. This post is my call for a libertarian take on human rights.

The issue of humanism is vita for several reasons. Although fundamentalist religions will likely always be part of human life, there is also a growing awareness that ethics and morality, including our sense of justice, must gain a footing apart from theology or religion. The reason is that faith is ineffable, ultimately. It is too personal, too subjective, and thus it tends toward schism rather than harmony. Whereas the humanist idea that an understanding of human nature, based on science and ordinary human reason, holds out promise.

Which gets me back to my political beliefs. I prefer to believe that people are fundamentally rational and benevolent, where by the latter I mean that they would, on the whole, prefer that good things rather than bad things happen to other people. I think it is clear that some people are like that and reasonably clear that practically everyone is to some degree like that. But it is not a full description of human beings, and I have no good basis to estimate how good a description it is, how many people to what degree fit my preferred pattern. My political beliefs come in part from modeling the world on the assumption that rationality and benevolence are the norm, the signal, everything else something more like random noise.

Which is to say that they come in part from wishful thinking.

I for one believe property rights are natural rights. The reason is simple: I believe rights to property are justifiable on grounds that make no essential reference to the existence of the state or civil society. But I also believe that such property rights need to be specified. In our world, this is usually done by law. What this means is not that these rights are not natural (or no longer natural). Rather, it means that in order to respect our neighbors’ property rights we need to pay attention to facts about the world, including facts about the law. Such is life.

The problem with this is that there is no reason to think that we are any better at rationally determining what natural duties we have than we are at determining what natural rights we have. What exactly does our duty to support just institutions require? Must we pay our taxes? To our state? All states? Must we obey the law? All laws? These issues are just as indeterminate as the claim that one has a natural right to bodily integrity or to freedom.

If group-rationality failure is ubiquitous, does that mean it can’t serve as an argument for the market over the state? No, it does not. As Friedman says, while such failure can be used as an argument against laissez-faire, it’s an even stronger argument for laissez-faire. How so? The key lies in the issue of externalities, that is, in the question of who reaps most of the benefits and bears most of the costs of actions: the particular actor, or the public?

The consistent application of Rothbard’s absolutist principle of non-aggression thus seems to require a prohibition on all forms of non-consensual pollution. But the prohibition of all non-consensual pollution would, it seems, mean the end of most forms of industrial production, driving, wood-burning fires, radio transmissions…in other words, the end of life as we know it. Perhaps, then, the most consistent form of Rothbardian libertarianism is a kind of very, very deep ecology. This is not, of course, the conclusion that Rothbard himself drew. And it is not the conclusion that most libertarians who follow in Rothbard’s footsteps have drawn. The more reasonable conclusion, it seems to me, is that one that David Friedman drew, and the one that contemporary philosophers who have considered the issue like Peter Railton and David Sobel have drawn—that we should reject Rothbard’s absolutist version of the non-aggression principle. I shall defend this option myself in my next essay here.

Many of you think Aggression is found only in certain groups or organizations that obviously operate on hateful premises, those which openly advocate the “rightness” of Aggression. But the most virulent strains of Aggression are most easily acquired in the most innocuous of places. It’s often found in family gatherings (with the well ones sometimes being the “black sheep”); religious doctrine, stances, and churches; all political activity (many who claim to be well, but who are infected, will be found there); lots of “politically correct” causes, etc. It’s also found in those who cloak themselves as teachers of such things as peace and liberty. In families, as I said, it will take the form of the parent who believes in punishment and manipulation (for the ‘good” of the child, of course), in religion often the one who is most vocally vile, condemnatory, judgmental or dogmatic (for the “good” of the followers, of course), in any other area – any who (and often with excellent vocabulary) advocate any action which is forced on another – for all sorts of “good” reasons – all those safe, secure, compassionate reasons – because – GAG – they care about you.

Collectivists devise one-size-fits-all schemes and care little for how those schemes may affect the varied plans of real people. Any one flake means little or nothing to the collectivist because he rarely looks at them; and in any event, he implicitly dismisses the flakes because there are so many to play with. Collectivists are usually reluctant to celebrate the achievements of individuals per se because they really believe that, to quote President Obama, “you didn’t build that.”

Take individuals out of the equation and you take the humanity out of whatever you’re promoting. What you’d never personally inflict on your neighbor, one on one, you might happily sanction if you think it’ll be carried out by some faceless, collective entity to some amorphous blob on behalf of some nebulous “common good.” The inescapable fact is that we are not interchangeable. Cogs in a machine are, but people most emphatically are not.

Any idiot can manage to follow orders. It takes a real human to evaluate those orders, and decide if they should be followed or ignored. Or even to decide if the one giving the orders needs to be stopped in his tracks.

Imagine, you don't like the hamburger you just received. Maybe you ordered it without onions, but it came with them. You can complain. In business, the customer is right. Maybe they apologize and replace the order. Perhaps they discount your bill. Even then, you have the choice to never darken the door of the establishment ever again.

On the other hand, how many IRS agents or FDA regulators say, "The citizen is always right?"

If one is willing to live and let live, to accept that each party may go its own way and deal with its perceived problems as it prefers, provided only that it allows equal latitude to every other party, then all political problems as such evaporate. The difficulty arises from some parties’ insistence on having their own way, however objectionable that way may be to other parties. To return to Cleaver’s dictum, adding appropriate amendments: You’re either part of the solution (by abandoning participation in politics) or you’re part of the problem (of endless political conflict).

What I don't understand are "legal borders". I mean the kind that derive from governments saying "We have these laws over here, and they have those laws over there. Our laws are better than theirs." That includes saying that "You live here, so we are entitled to a percentage of your money." And, really, that's all "national borders"- and even "state borders"- come down to. "Our laws are better than their laws" and posturing to be the "legitimate" thief.

To this day when I encounter echoes of this point of view, my blood starts to boil. Now and then I find some support for what I mostly felt and thought only in primitive terms but each time I witness the propaganda against individualism, against egoism and self-interest, I recover my resolve to combat the ideas with which it is expressed, be that in a simple sitcom or a movie or a piece of classical literature or a vicious political speech. In other words, I have internalized the view that human beings are not evil but very capable of doing and being good in all their endeavors, even if they do often go astray and betray their better nature.

Since we need freedom to live fully human lives, it can’t be the case that our freedom may properly be curtailed whenever a legislature or the majority of the voting public decides that we don’t need some particular thing, such as a greater quantity of our own money or a particular kind of weapon, the mere possession of which violates no one else’s freedom. Quite the contrary: Freedom requires precisely that each of us gets to decide what we “need” and then to pursue it in peace. The only constraint is that we not infringe other people’s freedom to do the same.

If we now replace the word protectors with the word states, the word producers with taxpayers, and the word taking with taxing, we get something that looks much like the world in which we live. The protectors that maintain the latent fear of foreign or internal aggression are nation-states with their military and police forces that acquire resources by taxing the taxpayers, while the taxpayers[5] are all those within these nation-states earning their resources through productive activities and voluntary exchanges with others.

In the end, some people specialize in taking, while others specialize in either producing or protecting the producers against the takers. Since takers rely only on taking for acquiring resources, they do not directly enjoy the benefits of entrepreneurial discovery. Entrepreneurial discovery is a feature of the producers and those who engage in voluntary exchanges with them. The takers are always the secondary users of the producers' creative work. They are always the second movers.

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 the rich or in a reversal to a state. This belief has led to a widespread dismissal of the stateless society paradigm.

My study of personality psychology makes me one of the doubters. On the popular Myers-Briggs personality test, there is a huge Thinking-Feeling gap between men and women. For men, the breakdown is roughly 60% Thinking, 40% Feeling. For women, the breakdown is roughly 30% Thinking, 70% Feeling.

This Thinking/Feeling disparity explains a lot about gender gaps in college major and occupation. There's every reason to think that this disparity can help explain gender gaps in political and social views.

The idea of a slave-contract is what Ayn Rand called “the fallacy of the stolen concept” – the act of using a concept (slave-contract) while denying the validity of other concepts upon which it logically depends and from which it attempts to derive meaning. In short, a slave-contract is a self-refuting idea.

Atheism is simply the lack of a belief in God and a divine morality. Libertarianism is simply the lack of belief in government and a mandated morality.

A silly episode on Facebook recently underscored one of the tensions in the liberty movement: many people are attracted to libertarianism because they simply don’t like rules. This attitude stands in contrast to conservatives who also disdain big government but who don’t reject authority per se — their problem is with illegitimate authority. Although many types of individuals are united in their opposition to military empire abroad, the drug war at home, and confiscatory taxation, their underlying philosophies of life are vastly different.

Is the free market an individualist or collectivist social arrangement? Don’t answer too quickly. It’s a trick question.

There is a phony conflict afoot that statists are fond of bringing up when they try to discredit the free society. It is about the individual versus the community. Champions of human liberty are often mis-characterized as denying the significance of human community life. As if individualists advocated that people live like hermits, apart from their fellows, in solitude.

Of course, individualists do not advocate anything of the kind. What they insist upon is that human beings be understood as choosing their associations instead of being simply herded into groups that some of them prefer to be part of.

At its heart, libertarianism is the radical idea that other people are not your property. What could be more self-evident than that?

In contrast, rational, objective ethics begins properly with the axiom -- the undeniable premise -- of self-ownership, then reasons that goodness must be what enhances the self, not what abnegates it. Even though many of their practical actions and outcomes may be closely similar, such rational ethics are opposed directly to the altruist ethics of sacrifice. There is no moral obligation on anyone to help anyone else; there is, however, an obligation on everyone to help himself.

The nature of goodness, therefore, is to enhance one's own enjoyment of life by whatever actions one judges will do the job, and so 100% of everyone has ample access to virtue.

I compose an avant-garde, dissonant ballet entitled, say, The Right in Autumn (its subject matter being the decline of the American conservative movement). I copyright the work by registering it with my protection racket agency. But you, as mentioned, have no truck with copyright, and you decide to put the work on at your venue, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which you have just opened.

There's really only one way: If the government - and not landlords, employers, and merchants - is the true owner of the nation's homes, businesses, and stores. If the government is the legitimate owner of all the property in the nation, then and only then do you become a trespasser simply by entering any piece of property in the nation without the government's consent.

The individualism or egoism forged most fully by Norton, as well as by Ayn Rand in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (1967), and others, stresses an Aristotelian idea of the human individual, not a Hobbesian one (which is found mostly in economics). An implication of this is that virtues such as generosity, kindness, gregariousness, etc., are entirely compatible with seeking to flourish as the human individual one is and self-interest is understood by reference to what is proper for a rational animal, not a beast driven to seek power over others.

This development, though not yet widely acknowledged, puts an end to the charge that egoism or individualism, as a central element of free market capitalism, must be a crass, anti-social viewpoint and must generate a social climate of mutual hostility and alienation.

Once you start the what-if game, it's hard to stop. Name any political system. I can generate endless hypotheticals to aggravate its supporters. The right lesson to draw: Every political perspective eventually has to say "Tough luck" when confronted with well-crafted what-ifs. There's nothing uniquely hard-hearted or cruel about libertarianism. Defenders of democracy, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, the American Constitution, and social democracy all eventually sigh, "Life's not fair," or "Well, what do you want me to do about it?"

In other words, both classical and welfare liberals affirm a right to welfare, but offer different interpretations of it. Classical liberals think persons have a right to employment, in that government should remove restrictions on seeking employment. In contrast, welfare liberals think the right to employment requires that the government provide jobs to persons directly. This is not a disagreement about whether there are welfare rights, but rather the form they take.

A fractionated society, divided along cultural, ethnic and other lines, its people estranged from one another, is not necessary or ineludible. We can mitigate or escape entirely most of the attributes of the splintered, political society by embracing a philosophy mutual respect and non-coercion. Market anarchists are upholders of this philosophy.

People who would leave their neighbors in peace, who would trade on a voluntary basis, who would refrain from forcing their views on others through politics, are all already anarchists. Libyans ought to oppose not any particular political ideology or regime, but the state itself; only in its final abolition can legitimate law and order come to fruition.

Suitable for nailing to an appropriate door near you...

agora (1) - n. A place of congregation, an ancient Greek marketplace.
agora (2) - n. A market free of forceable regulation, taxation, and government
(The) Agora - The aggregate of all such markets of any size.

It is in this spirit that C4SS would like to present its first Palaver and because it is a continued point of contention, curiosity and controversy, we have directed the first volleys of this discussion towards the questions: What is capitalism and is it compatible with anarchism?

Rather than solve a social problem, the ruling class had a devastating effect on the welfare of common people, who became “a puzzled flock of sheep waiting for the sheepdog to drive us through the gate.” Ironically, by claiming the collective was greater, the few were able to assume control over the many. The “greater good” devolved to whatever served the interests of the ruling class.

But the process can be reversed. It requires “individualizing” the collective and the nation so that “will, conscience and judgment” can return to every person.

You say, "Williams, you're just old-fashioned and out of touch with modern society." Maybe so, but I think that a society's first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms – transmitted by example, word of mouth, religious teachings, rules of etiquette and manners – represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important legal thou-shalt-nots – such as shalt not murder, steal, lie or cheat – but they also include all those civilities one might call ladylike or gentlemanly behavior. Police officers and courts can never replace these social restraints on personal conduct. At best, laws, police and the criminal justice system are a society's last desperate line of defense.

For the past century in the United States of America, the dominant ideology has been progressivism. This belief system has not been static, of course, and its specific elements, emphases, and outlooks have changed substantially since the early twentieth century. For example, whereas the early progressives were generally racist, hard imperialist, and eugenicist, today’s are generally multiculturalist, soft imperialist, and more inclined to favor killing off the human race (to save the environment) than to improve it by eliminating the biologically “inferior” people. Nevertheless, through all its emotional and intellectual ups and downs, progressivism has retained one central element: its abiding faith that the state can and should act vigorously on as many fronts as possible to improve society both here and abroad.

These kinds of arguments try to establish that you owe a debt to society, and then try to establish that paying more taxes is the right way to repay this debt.

The problem is that they assume–without argument–that the society to which you owe a debt just happens to be the nation-state. There is no reason to assume that. In fact, it’s more plausible that my debts, if I have any, are both more local and more global than the nation-state.

There's no such thing as a social contract. Authority must be explicitly granted, and few people living today have explicitly granted power to those who exercise authority over them (and dissenting others). Every state today is illegitimate for the majority of the people it rules over. Only when their laws, already criminal, become obviously criminal do people see the illegitimacy of the state. Don't wait for that. It could be too late.

I am convinced that any emerging life-sustaining renaissance will have its primary focus on the liberation of the human spirit. It is the confrontation between individualism and collectivism that will be the focal point in efforts to civilize and humanize an uncivilized and dehumanized world. As such, extend your inquiries into areas with which many libertarians are unfamiliar or uncomfortable: poetry, art, music, dance, depth psychology, and other spiritual dimensions of what it means to be human.

But beyond these more obvious examples of a culture in entropic collapse is to be found its most vulnerable trait: the spiritual depletion of a politically-dominated society. Because the state is defined as an institution that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory, such power is dependent upon having no impediments to its exercise. The idea of a "limitation" on the exercise of state power is purely illusory, offered to give Boobus the feeling that his liberty and individuality are bounded by a cushion of inviolability. But the reality is to the contrary: a limitation on state power is necessarily a denial of its monopolization of the forces of violence. Almost by definition, then, the state must treat its human subjects as assets to be exploited on behalf of the purposes of the state and its institutional owners.

Libertarians have a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate – both from reasoning and empirical evidence – that human beings are capable of organizing and creating ways of accomplishing whatever they value and to which they are willing to commit their own resources. All that the state can accomplish, in this regard, is to (a) restrain such efforts in order to protect the interests of those who enjoy access to state power, and/or (b) shift the costs of providing such goods or services to those unwilling to pay for them. The history of privately-built roads, alternative schools, early 20th century health-care systems, private fire companies and security firms, are just a few examples of how men and women can resort to voluntary practices to accomplish what politically-conditioned minds believe can only be done through state coercion.

Respecting the rights of others can always be construed as something costly. Your private property rights in your home require me to walk around when I want to get to the other side of it! If you refused to clean my front yard, I will need to hire someone to do it. If an airline company doesn’t provide me with free air travel, I will need to purchase the service. If farm workers refuse to work without pay, those wanting their services will have fork out wages. And on and on it goes.

So the allure of mandating services from others has to be resisted in the process of respecting their rights. This is supposed to be elementary in a free society. And the laws of such a society must not yield to such allure, lest it violates, betrays the principles of liberty on which it is supposedly founded and the securing of which is its government’s central task!

So then which is it? Do people own themselves and have the right to choose between living and dying or do they belong to their country and have no such right? You cannot have it both ways. Which is one reason that any talk of human liberty coming from the political Left is hypocritical. Freedom is entirely meaningless unless it means the individual can exercise choice without being interfered by government or anyone else. The only interference that is acceptable for free men and women is that which amounts to retaliation to initial interference by others, as in self-defense.

The right to privacy includes the freedom to give it up if one so chooses, just as the right to property means the freedom to give it away. These are VOLUNTARY actions.

But it is CRIMINAL for others to invade your property OR your privacy. That's why there are laws against burglary and voyeurism.

And it is TYRANNICAL when The State invades and steals your property and privacy.

In order to save the innocent civilians of LessJustia, wouldn’t it be better for God to kill MoreJustia’s unjust invasion force and MoreJustia’s leaders, rather than for God to allow MoreJustia to kill so many innocent people in LessJustia?

The state and all of its predatory appendages like the corporate and military industrial complexes, are not groups of people with weapons who need to be overthrown, they are just bad ideas that can very easily be rendered obsolete with the right combination of good ideas. The only battlefield that the revolution can be won on is in the mind. To destroy the problems that were created with violence the most effective weapons are good ideas and nonviolent solutions, not violence and politics.

This is what the state does. This is what the state always does. The state is the political means to wealth. Every state has been, and every state will be, a class state that enforces transactions in which one privileged party benefits at the expense of an unprivileged other. The state puts a majority of us in a position of accepting exchange on terms which nobody would willingly accept absent restrictions on the alternatives available to us.

The state, in short, forces us to feed a monkey on our backs in return for the right to live at all, in return for the right to feed ourselves.

Opposition to privilege is simply the corollary of libertarian equality. If all are equal in authority, then no one may live at the expense of others without their consent. The word privilege is often used equivocally, but it has its roots in the idea of legal favoritism. It is composed of privus, meaning single, and lex or lege, meaning law. Thus a privilege is a government act that (forcibly) bestows favors on one person, or the few.

How does a person come to hold the belief of absolute nonviolence? What about this belief draws people to it? Is nonviolence the logical conclusion of non-aggression? These are the question that I have been asking myself as of late, because there is a growing number of people within the liberty movement who are latching onto the belief of absolute nonviolence. I’d like to explore this idea, and try to lay out an argument as to why I think it is not only wrong, but also dangerous to adopt this belief.

My prescription: Ethicists should reallocate most of their effort to microethics. Start with simple cases where right and wrong are obvious. Is it wrong to punish an escaped murderer by torturing his infant child? Is it wrong to welsh on a $20 bet? Is it wrong to steal an alcoholic's liquor? To refuse to give all your surplus income away to needy strangers? Then build from there. Once you've got these conclusions under your belt, you can move on to slightly harder cases - like movies. Last night I saw the surprisingly watchable Assassination Games, and I'm still pondering the ethics.

In an admirably accessible manner, Oppenheimer's The State explains the dynamics set in motion by the political means. It is in the nature of parasites to multiply and drain ever more of the hosts' resources. As the political means comes to dominate, those using the economic means see diminishing return from their productivity and, so, they have little incentive to produce beyond subsistence. Why should they labor to feed a thief? Society stagnates, leaving less for the parasite to siphon. And, so, inherent within the State is its own demise.

A big error has haunted humanity for centuries: it’s the equivocation between generosity and altruism.

Libertarians have a number of public relations problems. Some are the result of people not understanding our ideas. Others, however, are our own fault: We sometimes fail to express our ideas clearly or attractively. In particular, we have a habit of emphasizing what we’re against rather than what we’re for .

2) Our position is cosmopolitan: everyone has the duty not to interfere with personal projects. Persons have natural moral rights that correspond to those duties of noninterference. A legitimate state is one that respects these moral rights. No actual state meets this test, so no actual state is morally legitimate.

All of this may indicate why so many people in public life don’t really argue about the merits of ideas or positions on various issues but focus, instead, on the motivations and character of those advancing the ideas. And to undermine those ideas, then, will not require better ideas, sound criticism and so forth but, instead, the calling into question of the motivations and character of whoever defends them. Never mind if an idea has merit, ask, instead, what explains that someone holds it and is the motivation benign. Besmirching the thinker is what works, not criticizing what he or she thinks! So as to impugn Ron Paul’s or Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich’s position, link it to some kind of questionable motive. He holds his foreign policy views because he has loyalties to certain foreign countries since his parents or associates were born there! He opposes the Federal Reserve Bank because he hates bankers who help his adversaries, not because the ideas are right and those who oppose them are, well, wrong.

The writer was named Frederic Douglas and this little tirade about being selfish was in a letter he wrote to Thomas Auld. Auld and Douglas had a difference of opinion. Douglas felt he should be allowed to live for his own sake. Auld felt Douglas should be required to live for the sake of others—in particular for Auld, who legally owned Mr. Douglas, and from whom Douglas escaped to freedom in the North.

Responsibility means that one is accountable for one's actions, but this is impossible if the authority for decision making does not lie with the actor himself. In its fullest sense, responsibility means the acceptance by the actor of the full burden of this accountability, an awareness that he cannot pass the buck, so to speak, but alone must bear the moral weight of the consequences of his actions. A society of responsible citizens, then, is not one in which the masses play follow the leader; rather, it is one in which, as a rule, the individual makes no attempt to place outside himself the locus of accountability for his own decisions, nor asserts the right to have others relieve him of it. Responsibility is therefore strongly associated with such qualities as maturity, self-control, and intellectual autonomy, while it correlates negatively with dependence, subservience, and social conformity. This is why it is axiomatic in libertarian philosophy that liberty and responsibility must necessarily go together, and why Viktor Frankl said that the Statue of Liberty in New York should be offset by a Statue of Responsibility in California.

The bottom line: noble cause corruption — and thus, teleological ideologies in general — dramatically increase the likelihood of a serious situation that could easily turn horribly messy, ending your career in law enforcement and, potentially, scarring or ending the lives of you and/or others.

Logic drives us to conclude that government should never compel anyone to act against his or her moral convictions. The good sense of this becomes clear when we get down to particulars. If a Catholic may not be forced to pay for birth control in violation of conscience, why should that Catholic — or anyone else — be compelled to finance mass murder in violation of conscience? No one can reasonably insist that personal convictions should be disregarded in the case of mass murder.

The violent actions of the state deserve to be evaluated using the same criteria by which we judge the morality of the violent actions of any other grouping of individuals. Alexander Berkman, in “The ABC of Anarchism,” argued that the death and destruction caused by the institutionalized violence of the state was many times greater than that caused by anarchists or other revolutionaries. Who do you think has thrown more bombs — anarchists, or government military forces?

A global superpower founded on the principles of information control and fear and distrust of its own people cannot long endure. We already saw one superpower so founded collapse from the weight of its own internal contradictions. I expect the second one to fall within our lifetimes. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

However, with all of that said, there are some differences between political systems which tend to respect peoples' civil liberties, and those which routinely violate them; and while there are plenty of people who simply try to keep their heads down and get along as best they can, there are also some people who actively prefer tyranny. In order to fight them and keep them from accomplishing such things, it would be of a great help to understand them.

If Professor Alperovitz wants to defend socialism or some hybrid of true capitalism and true socialism–whatever that might be–he should do this up front. He should acknowledge that socialism involves state coercion, especially on the economic front, and capitalism doesn’t. The various non-economic human associations he misidentifies as socialist do not involve coercion, which makes them fit within a capitalist but not within a socialist political economy.

1.1.1.1. Minimal State Theorists or Minarchists: A family of “Right” Libertarian views that take government to be an element of the state that should be used only to protect negative liberty.

1.1.1.2. Anarchist Libertarians: A family of “Right” Libertarian views that believe negative liberty is better served with the absence of government than with its presence.

***

1.1.2. BHLs: A family of libertarian (and hence liberal) views that also share a deep concern to prevent suffering (and perhaps promote at least minimal individual well-being). Some in this camp may approve of limited government interventions to end suffering; all agree that allowing individuals extensive (negative) liberty is likely to create the least suffering possible. Some may favor pretty strong, if not absolute property rights (the latter is more likely with 1.1.2.2 than 1.1.2.1).

Going deeper, things become even messier. How does one measure the value of the good that a piece of legislation imparts on society? What if that good is a bad for some? What if the good is not as good for everyone to the same extent? What if people change their minds? What if they change their minds right after an election? Were it subject to quantification, what if one person has 100 units of displeasure and 99 people have one unit of pleasure each? How can we measure the greater good? What is “the” good? These might seem contrived questions, and yet they are the core of it all.

From a radical libertarian perspective, however, the main problem with decentralization is the same problem that haunts secession; it never seems to go far enough. Carried to its proper and logical extreme, decentralization should result in government of the individual, by the individual, for the individual, and not merely in acquiring a better master. Equally, secession should allow not merely states or cities to withdraw from a centralized government but also the individual.

In either case, the concept of "We the People" is a powerful obstacle to both secession and decentralization. Until the concept is thoroughly discredited and disgraced, the US government will draw upon the legitimacy being transmitted by the concept. It will pretend to be in a partnership with "the people" who will render to it obedience and respect. Under "We the People," true political change cannot occur.

A key obstacle to freedom is the ideas that oppose it, ideas that are now entrenched into society as a form of dogma. "We the People" is one of them.

As I’ve pointed out before, the problem here comes from failing to distinguish means from ends. By claiming that only they possess the moral high ground because only they are concerned with the “country” or with helping the poor, the critics of classical liberalism assume their policies (their means) are the only ways to achieve the morally valued goal (the end). Anyone who disagrees about the means therefore must reject the end. Or in political terms, anyone who disagrees with their policy preference must not care about achieving that policy’s stated goal. This refusal to assume one’s interlocutors are arguing in good faith is a failure to respect the principle of reciprocity necessary for civilized discussion.

Liberty encompasses the individual right to choose your own culture: those ideas, customs, and traditions you freely choose to accept, and with which to pursue your own life. But the rabid proponents of unbridled government Authority are not content with controlling their own lives. They demand control over yours; and they want to regulate your culture too.

Do you feel any of the following: A loss of community with political society? Anger at being taxed out of existence, while getting nothing worthwhile in return? Growing hatred and contempt for politicians and their bullying hangers-on? Irritation at all the pap and spin you get from the media? A desire for world peace? A feeling that there ought to be more to life than this? If so, congratulations; you have started the sea-change. You are moving towards the new way of thinking.

Those early tribal chieftains, I think, would have shared the feeling expressed by the author of Genesis. They would have felt a sense of dominion or mastery over their surroundings. Most of them would have been stronger and cleverer than those around them. So they would have come to feel themselves masters of those they ruled. They would have had no scruples about controlling people by violence when they thought it necessary. Nor would they have had qualms about making wars on other tribes, to enlarge their spheres of mastery. Thus was born the state - institutionalized violence and aggression.

In day-to-day life, we aren’t out there shouting our philosophy. Libertarians are not screaming in your face, demanding that you worship our symbols or historical figures. We are not threatening to cage you if your lifestyle differs from ours. We are simply going about our business without attacking or stealing. This illustrates how “libertarian” most people are in their daily lives. People behaving decently are indistinguishable from libertarians.

International law (or “the law of nations”), though, offers important lessons and guiding principles regarding how the law might be formulated in a free, stateless society. Since, as Joseph Stromberg noted, international law “involv[es] relations between theoretically independent actors answering to no superior,” we can employ it as a template for how the law might manifest itself in a society where individuals themselves were — like states are today — sovereign and self-governing. Through these analogical analyses, we can begin to develop a picture of the law in free market anarchy, of how we might constitute it without the state.

To be a bleeding heart libertarian means to be willing to take up a new research agenda. That agenda, it seems to me, has two parts. The first involves our developing a distinct and rival normative vision of what free societies owe the poor. The second invites us to consider new ways of defending core ideas of traditional libertarianism: most notably, the importance of private economic liberty. More soon on each of these points.

Libertarians are different from statists. Unlike them, we believe in freedom, free markets, free enterprise, private property, private charity, freedom of choice, and a limited-government, constitutional republic. We place our faith in ourselves, in freedom and free markets, in others, and in God. The statists place their faith in militarism, empire, socialism, interventionism, and the coercive apparatus of the state.

Or, to come now to the first point of this article, should pubs be at liberty to turn away customers who are not committing any breach of the peace, but whose conduct is offensive to the management or staff? Pubs are licensed. Some of their profit is gained from the limiting of competition. Should they be treated as if they were operating in a free market? Or should they be required to serve any customer?

Oppressed people everywhere ought to be our natural allies in advocating the extension of liberty. But for that to happen we have to prove ourselves advocates for the extension of their liberties as well. As long as issues that impact WMASM take precedence over all other groups libertarians will send the message that they don't want allies who aren't like them. I note that young libertarian groups, who often speak of libertarianism as it impacts others, are more racially diverse, have a lot more females (which ought to please straight males) and attract more support from their gay peers.

Listening to those libertarians who only see liberty as important to them infuriates me. I realize that their false perceptions of what it means to advocate liberty actually makes it harder to achieve liberty. First, they routinely exclude oppressed people from the liberty movement because they aren't like them.

I don't mean they actively tell women, gays, blacks, immigrants, Jews, etc., that they are unwelcome. They usually don't go that far. But what they do is routinely dismiss the concerns of these people as trivial and unimportant. That sends the message that only what impacts WMASM is of importance.

Some self-styled "freedom" lovers have stated that von NotHaus deserved to be convicted since he obviously did break the law. If he was not convicted, then "anarchy" would ensue because the "rule of law" would have been ignored. But morality trumps that which is merely "legal." The "rule of law" is a valid principle only within a moral framework. Otherwise, we should vilify those who broke the "law" to oppose state-imposed segregation; who ignored the Fugitive Slave Law; who engaged in jury nullification to state that slavery itself is wrong.

No one is under the least bit of moral obligation to obey an unconstitutional, immoral "law." As Jefferson said, such legal sleights-of-hand have no validity or force. Morally and legally, it is as though they did not exist.

What makes me mad is the dishonesty of people pretending that wrong acts are good just because they believe they are necessary. They are not. Wrong acts are still wrong even if your survival depends on committing them. Even if they are "legalized".

Both lessons underscore the critical importance of educating for liberty. If enough people understand freedom and withdraw their consent, an oppressive regime will topple under its own weight, as Étienne de la Boétie described so eloquently.

Yet to put something durable and superior in the old regime's place, the common man must also know more than mere slogans like "liberty" and "democracy." It's not necessary that the majority become formally trained in political science and economics, but it is necessary that "conventional wisdom" is indeed wise on such matters. Unfortunately, too many "freedom fighters" around the world seem to think the problem with oppressive governments is the specific personalities at the top, as opposed to the institutions themselves.

9. To conclude. Enough of pure theory. Let us now get down to practical reality. It is entirely legal under the present laws of the land for you to apply for, and receive, wealth from the government of the sort you describe, so all of this talk of "theft" is beside the point from the pragmatic perspective. I urge you to apply for all of the grants you possibly can. Murray Rothbard said that a man’s contribution to society is proportional to the profits he earns. I say in similar vein, other things equal, the more money you take from the coffers of the state the better libertarian you are.

In Hans-Hermann Hoppe's writings on problems with democracy, he points out that one advantage of monarchy over democracy is that there is a clearer distinction between the ruler and the ruled; so that if the monarch starts to become despotic, he can at least in principle be killed or removed from power. At least the people know who to aim their ire at. In democracy, the state is bureaucratized and distributed, and the line between ruler and ruled is blurred-because citizens can vote, they accept the propaganda that "we are the government."

Libertarianism is more than merely a political philosophy. It is a way of life. We need to be it and live it. We need to stop worrying and reacting and start telling and doing. We must focus on telling people what we stand for and showing them who we are.

Our focus should not be to win arguments, or lay blame, or rant against the evils of the State. And we certainly can’t open people’s minds by waging war on everything in sight. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, I believe in liberty, but I do not believe in it strongly enough to force it upon others.

Our focus should be on the positive expression of how liberty and freedom can bring about peace and prosperity. Our lives should reflect the belief in this positive expression to serve as an example for others. Our message must be, stop all war. Stopping the wars is the first positive step toward our return to the peace and prosperity we all desire.

A society that's fit for human habitation must not have policies that prevent citizens from exercising moral judgment. Assume, for example, that we should devote ourselves entirely to serving other people, to serving the public good. If, however, all of this is accomplished through governmental coercion – taxation, regulation, regimentation – there can't be anything moral about it. So Krugman's so-called moral stance leaves no room for morality because it makes all purportedly moral conduct involuntary, imposed by rulers.

In morality or ethics, also, we may well have certain very basic principles that we all need to heed and practice–such as “Think things through before you act,” or “Be honest with yourself” or “Don’t deceive anyone,” “Do onto others as you have would have them do onto you,” or “Pursue excellence in life.” (I leave aside now which might actually be those few sound and universal guiding principles–that takes a lot of figuring out.) But as applied to particular, individual persons, what specific guidance would emerge from such basic principles will not be the same from one person to the next.

Yet something very important about both the concerns expressed by my students and many others would be satisfied in so understanding morality: there would indeed be something absolute or invariant about how we ought to act; yet this wouldn’t amount to an artificially detailed one-size-fits-all code.

4) Everyone must run their own cost-benefit analysis on any particular strategy. When I yanked the Amazon links from my homepage, it cost me next to nothing; I also expect that its impact on Amazon was next to nothing...but I removed the links nevertheless because millions of 'next to nothings' can do real damage. For my friend, the cost was immense and the expected return remained negligible. Boycotting Amazon would have been a poor choice for him.

Libertarianism is NOT just a political philosophy. It is a moral code that applies first to the individual and then applies to the State as well. Before libertarians try to cure the society around them they had been make sure they are in good shape themselves. The slogan, “Physician, heal thyself” applies to libertarians as well.

Political parties, I expect, would cease to exist, since they serve to gain freedom or advantage for themselves and or their ‘clients’. A libertarian society will give people freedom and those people will not take advantage, since to do so would not be libertarian! I suspect that some readers will be surprised by my summary dismissal of political parties. To them I pose the question: In a society where people are free, what would be the raison d’être of political parties? The same must be asked of international organisations, and probably even the nation state—and answered, in my view, in the negative.

Charity, voluntarily given, is inherently libertarian. It is also, I believe, one of the most subversive means available to undermine the coercive structures that are harming our world. Anyone can talk about healing our world, but it takes individual compassion to actually do it. Even if we were to successfully change the structure of the world, to one of entirely voluntary interactions and exchanges, it would take decades, perhaps centuries, to undo the misery and harm already inflicted. Long after a utopia is implemented, if such a thing is even feasible, there will be need for human compassion and charity.

To charge individualism with this kind of narrow-mindedness is a trick. Individualists themselves belie the charge in their very own lives, given how they are party to multiple rich relationships—familial, fraternal, professional, political, economic, artistic, recreational, etc. The point is not difficult to demonstrate in the case of every individual’s life. And individualism implies only that these relationships exclude treating people as subjects, as the victims of others’ imposition and coercion. But as to voluntary relationships, all those are perfectly compatible with individualism and are, indeed, demanded by it. Nothing else is more fitting for human relationships than being involved in them because one wants to be instead of because one is made a part of them by some others who presume to have the moral authority to decide how people ought to choose to live.

Not all government laws are wrong, of course. As I stated, laws that correspond with the rights of individuals are not wrong. But the bulk of legislation is no longer about respecting the rights of others. Those issues were dealt with long ago. Law today is about the selective imposition of harm on third parties. Various lobbying groups work with the political elites to secure legislation that will harm someone for the benefit of the lobby in question and the political elites who help them.

I would go so far as to argue that there have been strong cultural shifts in America toward libertarianism. The political process, however, is not showing that shift. The political process is going to be the last place where this shift will be noticed, at least in the US where bureaucratic inertia will keep the statists in power for a long time. The double-blow of hardcore authoritarians like Bush and Obama, one from the Right, the other from the Left, will hurt freedom. But the shift, at the ground level, has already taken place.

We are not the government. The private sector and the government are two separate and distinct entities. When the government sector goes wrong, it is incumbent on the private sector to stand up and oppose the wrongdoing and do what is necessary to get the government back on the right track. As the Founding Fathers and the members of the White Rose showed, that is what genuine courage and patriotism are all about.

One of the greatest impediments to the growth and preservation of liberty is the accepted legitimacy for the government to commit acts for which individuals would be jailed. When theft and government subsidization are morally equated, it will mark a turning point in American history. The important battle for libertarians is not a political battle; it is a moral battle. Winning elections or overturning laws is irrelevant when any state action is still viewed as legitimate and morally sanctioned.

That the socialist/progressive movement became so extreme in their worship of state power, something they adopted from the conservatives of their day, was the reason for a temporary alliance, in opposition to Marxism, between true liberals and conservatives. But that temporary alliance didn't mean conservatives and libertarians shared any real values, just a common opposition to Marxist authoritarianism. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Conservatives are not now, never have been, and never will be the allies of classical liberalism, libertarianism or individual rights.

But just as my thoughts went in that direction I realized I was engaging in another fiction, one not dissimilar to the assumption of a deity. We can’t do anything. There is no us. There is just me, at least in my case. In your case there is just you. There are only millions of “I’s”.

There is no collective brain, no one body shared by the many. If action is taken then someONE takes it. SomeONE wills it. SomeONE encourages others, who cooperate but each of them chooses to act as another ONE. Working in harmony does not negate the fact that individuals, not collectives, choose to act.

But there is one avenue of recourse against the market agents who act irrationally, namely, to work very hard and vigilantly to educate them and to condemn them whenever their irrational discrimination comes to light. The trouble is that there has emerged such a heavy dependence on fixing moral failing by way of the law that such non-governmental approaches are not even explored, let alone practiced.

As anyone can see, fairness is a mess and insisting on it is futile in all but very restricted contexts. Nonetheless politicians and pundits and theorists of all sorts keep harping on how people are being unfair, how countries are engaging in unfair trade, how some people’s good looks or brilliant minds gain them fame and fortune while others get very little, etc., and so forth.

Voluntary exchange turns selfishly motivated actions into mutually beneficial ones. Markets allow people to benefit one another without every knowing each other and without caring for one another. If you consider it loving to benefit others then voluntary markets are a great means of spreading the love to people who otherwise wouldn’t experience it.

More than announcing what we oppose we libertarians need to be vocal about what we support. Our agenda is not primarily a negative one, but a positive one. I am a libertarian because I believe in peaceful, voluntary cooperation. I believe in the sanctity of the thinking individual and their right to grasp reality as best they can and express their views, without anyone having the right to sew they mouths shut. I believe in a tolerant society where all are equal before the law. I believe in a world where individuals are free to travel and trade as they wish, where people are allowed to keep what they produce, and where no man may use violence against man except in self defense. I believe that individuals have clear, distinct rights and that no other individual, or collective of individuals, should have the power to violate those rights.