November 3, 2011 essays

The eight books on this list offer a thorough but accessible introduction to libertarianism.

Libertarianismits theory, its practiceis an awfully big topic. This reading list gives you a place to start. A combination of newcomers and established classics, these books offer accessible introductions to variety of libertarian thought, from philosophy to history to economics.

Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz

Boazs book provides exactly what its title promises.Libertarianism: A Primer is a quick and easy read, but its also a remarkably thorough introduction to libertarianism. It covers the historical roots of libertarianism and the basics of libertarian political philosophy and economic thinking. Boaz then applies these ideas to major policy areas, showing how free association and free markets, not government coercion and bureaucracy, can solve our most pressing social issues.

The Law by Frdric Bastiat

Everything this 19th century Frenchman wrote is worth readingand The Law is a great place to start. Bastiats knack is tackling head-on, with great wit and clarity, the fundamental errors and hidden interests behind much economic and political thinking. With The Law, published in 1850, his target is legal plunder or state-authorized confiscation of property. The law exists to protect our basic rights, Bastiat argues. When it instead becomes a means of coerced redistribution, the law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others.

The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Libertarianism represents a spectrum of political philosophies, all sharing a general presumption of liberty. These philosophies vary in how much of a role they grant the state. Classical liberals, for instance, allow government to tax for the provision of many services, including education and social safety nets. Minarchists see governments only legitimate role as providing rights protection in the form of police, courts, and national defense. At the extreme are the anarcho-capitalists, who would abolish the state altogether and replace it with purely private and voluntary provision of services, including for the law itself. David Friedmans The Machinery of Freedom offers an introduction to anarcho-capitalism, arguing from a consequentialist perspective that the state is both unnecessary for achieving a desirable society and that it in fact makes the world worse through its actions. The questions Friedman raises and the analysis he offers will benefit any student of liberty.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman

Published as the companion volume to the 10-hour documentary of the same name, Free to Choose was one of the bestselling books of 1980. Here Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, give a spirited and readable critique of the interventionist state, focusing on concrete examples and explanations. Free to Choose is an excellent introduction to the productive power unleashed by freedomand also a primer on the economic analysis of public policy. The Friedmans examine the workings of markets, look at how well-meaning policies like the minimum wage hurt the poor, and explain the causes of the Great Depression. Covering much the same ground as the documentary series, though in more depth, Free to Choose is a perfect introduction not only to the thought of Milton Friedman, one of the 20th centurys foremost champions of liberty, but also to the under-appreciated and often misunderstood benefits of laissez faire.

Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics by P. J. ORourke

Proving that economics need not be a dry, textbook affair, P. J. ORourkes Eat the Rich sets out to answer the critical question, Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck? ORourke, one of Americas premier humorists, travels the world, visiting Wall Street, Albania, Sweden, Cuba, Russia, Tanzania, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and uses his experiences to untangle the relationship between markets, political institutions, and culture. While Eat the Rich is a breezy and hilarious read, it is far from facile. ORourkes explorations and the insights he draws from them make the book live up to its subtitle, A Treatise on Economics. If youve never taken Econ 101 and the thought of supply and demand curves makes you want to nod off, Eat the Richis a perfect book.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

A perennial bestseller since its publication in 1957, Ayn Rands mammoth novel Atlas Shrugged has probably turned more people on to libertarianism than any other book. Atlas Shrugged explores a dystopian future, where the government has enthusiastically embraced collectivism in the name of fairness and equality and leading innovators, industrialists, and artists have begun disappearing. The book served as Rands platform for promoting Objectivism, her comprehensive philosophy of rational selfishness. While Rands philosophy remains deeply divisive to this day, it is impossible to deny the enormous impact shes had on promoting the benefits of free markets and dynamic capitalism.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

The newest book on this list, Matt Ridleys The Rational Optimistemploys the grand sweep of human history and pre-history to argue for the incredible significance of free tradeand against those who would seek to restrict it. In so doing, Ridley offers what amounts to a book-length answer to the question, Why are people rich? Most humans who have ever lived did so in unimaginable poverty. It was only recently that standards of living began their remarkableand acceleratingclimb. What happened? Free exchange. Just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, Ridley writes, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men and women discernible beneath the chaos of their actions.

Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell

While the libertarian vision is much more than just free markets, economic thinking greatly informs the libertarian approach to public policy. When youre ready to move beyond the brief introduction provided by P. J. ORourkes Eat the Rich, Thomas Sowells Basic Economics is the ideal place to turn. Sowell presents the fundamentals of economic reasoning in clear, jargon-free prose. He addresses everything from incentives and the role of prices, to international trade, monetary policy, and the banking system. Sowell shows how so many government programs, enacted with the best of intentions, run afoul of simple economic truths and, as a result, often do far more harm than good.

Aaron Ross Powell is a research fellow and editor of Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute. Libertarianism.org presents introductory material as well as new scholarship related to libertarian philosophy, theory, and history. Powells writing has appeared in Liberty and The Cato Journal. He earned a JD from the University of Denver.

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Introducing Libertarianism: A Reading List ...

There are a number of standard questions about libertarianism that have been periodically resurfacing in the politics groups for years. This posting attempts to answer some of them. I make no claim that the answers are complete, nor that they reflect a (nonexistent) unanimity among libertarians; the issues touched on here are tremendously complex. This posting will be useful, however, if it successfully conveys the flavor of libertarian thought and gives some indication of what most libertarians believe.

The word means approximately "believer in liberty". Libertarians believe in individual conscience and individual choice, and reject the use of force or fraud to compel others except in response to force or fraud. (This latter is called the "Non-Coercion Principle" and is the one thing all libertarians agree on.)

Help individuals take more control over their own lives. Take the state (and other self-appointed representatives of "society") out of private decisions. Abolish both halves of the welfare/warfare bureaucracy (privatizing real services) and liberate the 7/8ths of our wealth that's now soaked up by the costs of a bloated and ineffective government, to make us all richer and freer. Oppose tyranny everywhere, whether it's the obvious variety driven by greed and power-lust or the subtler, well-intentioned kinds that coerce people "for their own good" but against their wills.

Modern libertarianism has multiple roots. Perhaps the oldest is the minimal-government republicanism of the U.S.'s founding revolutionaries, especially Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the "classical liberals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were another key influence. More recently, Ayn Rand's philosophy of "ethical egoism" and the Austrian School of free-market capitalist economics have both contributed important ideas. Libertarianism is alone among 20th-century secular radicalisms in owing virtually nothing to Marxism.

Once upon a time (in the 1800s), "liberal" and "libertarian" meant the same thing; "liberals" were individualist, distrustful of state power, pro-free- market, and opposed to the entrenched privilege of the feudal and mercantilist system. After 1870, the "liberals" were gradually seduced (primarily by the Fabian socialists) into believing that the state could and should be used to guarantee "social justice". They largely forgot about individual freedom, especially economic freedom, and nowadays spend most of their time justifying higher taxes, bigger government, and more regulation. Libertarians call this socialism without the brand label and want no part of it.

For starters, by not being conservative. Most libertarians have no interest in returning to an idealized past. More generally, libertarians hold no brief for the right wing's rather overt militarist, racist, sexist, and authoritarian tendencies and reject conservative attempts to "legislate morality" with censorship, drug laws, and obnoxious Bible-thumping. Though libertarians believe in free-enterprise capitalism, we also refuse to stooge for the military-industrial complex as conservatives are wont to do.

Libertarians want to abolish as much government as they practically can. About 3/4 are "minarchists" who favor stripping government of most of its accumulated power to meddle, leaving only the police and courts for law enforcement and a sharply reduced military for national defense (nowadays some might also leave special powers for environmental enforcement). The other 1/4 (including the author of this FAQ) are out-and-out anarchists who believe that "limited government" is a delusion and the free market can provide better law, order, and security than any goverment monopoly.

Also, current libertarian political candidates recognize that you can't demolish a government as large as ours overnight, and that great care must be taken in dismantling it carefully. For example, libertarians believe in open borders, but unrestricted immigration now would attract in a huge mass of welfare clients, so most libertarians would start by abolishing welfare programs before opening the borders. Libertarians don't believe in tax-funded education, but most favor the current "parental choice" laws and voucher systems as a step in the right direction.

Progress in freedom and prosperity is made in steps. The Magna Carta, which for the first time put limits on a monarchy, was a great step forward in human rights. The parliamentary system was another great step. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which affirmed that even a democratically-elected government couldn't take away certain inalienable rights of individuals, was probably the single most important advance so far. But the journey isn't over.

All Libertarians are libertarians, but not the reverse. A libertarian is a person who believes in the Non-Coercion Principle and the libertarian program. A Libertarian is a person who believes the existing political system is a proper and effective means of implementing those principles; specifically, "Libertarian" usually means a member of the Libertarian Party, the U.S.'s largest and most successful third party. Small-ell libertarians are those who consider the Libertarian Party tactically ineffective, or who reject the political system generally and view democracy as "the tyranny of the majority".

By privatizing them. Taxation is theft -- if we must have a government, it should live on user fees, lotteries, and endowments. A government that's too big to function without resorting to extortion is a government that's too big, period. Insurance companies (stripped of the state-conferred immunities that make them arrogant) could use the free market to spread most of the risks we now "socialize" through government, and make a profit doing so.

Enforce contracts. Anarcho-libertarians believe the "government" in this sense can be a loose network of rent-a-cops, insurance companies, and for-profit arbitration boards operating under a shared legal code; minarchists believe more centralization would be necessary and envision something much like a Jeffersonian constitional government. All libertarians want to live in a society based (far more than ours now is) on free trade and mutual voluntary contract; the government's job would be strictly to referee, and use the absolute minimum of force necessary to keep the peace.

Most libertarians are strongly in favor of abortion rights (the Libertarian Party often shows up at pro-rights rallies with banners that say "We're Pro-Choice on Everything!"). Many libertarians are personally opposed to abortion, but reject governmental meddling in a decision that should be private between a woman and her physician. Most libertarians also oppose government funding of abortions, on the grounds that "pro-lifers" should not have to subsidize with their money behavior they consider to be murder.

Libertarians believe that every human being is entitled to equality before the law and fair treatment as an individual responsible for his or her own actions. We oppose racism, sexism, and sexual-preference bigotry, whether perpetrated by private individuals or (especially) by government. We reject racial discrimination, whether in its ugly traditional forms or in its newer guises as Affirmative Action quotas and "diversity" rules.

We recognize that there will always be bigotry and hatred in the world, just as there will always be fear and stupidity; but one cannot use laws to force understanding any more than one can use laws to force courage or intelligence. The only fair laws are those that never mention the words "black" or "white"; "man" or "woman"; "gay" or "straight". When people use bigotry as an excuse to commit force or fraud, it is the act itself which is the crime, and deserves punishment, not the motive behind it.

Consistently opposed. The revolutionaries who kicked out King George based their call for insurrection on the idea that Americans have not only the right but the duty to oppose a tyrannical government with force -- and that duty implies readiness to use force. This is why Thomas Jefferson said that "Firearms are the American yeoman's liberty teeth" and, in common with many of the Founding Fathers, asserted that an armed citizenry is the securest guarantee of freedom. Libertarians assert that "gun control" is a propagandist's lie for "people control", and even if it worked for reducing crime and violence (which it does not; when it's a crime to own guns, only criminals own them) it would be a fatally bad bargain.

Libertarians are opposed to any government-enforced limits on free expression whatsoever; we take an absolutist line on the First Amendment. On the other hand, we reject the "liberal" idea that refusing to subsidize a controversial artist is censorship. Thus, we would strike down all anti-pornography laws as unwarranted interference with private and voluntary acts (leaving in place laws punishing, for example, coercion of minors for the production of pornography). We would also end all government funding of art; the label of "artist" confers no special right to a living at public expense.

We believe the draft is slavery, pure and simple, and ought to be prohibited as "involuntary servitude" by the 13th Amendment. Any nation that cannot find enough volunteers to defend it among its citizenry does not deserve to survive.

That all drugs should be legalized. Drug-related crime (which is over 85% of all crime) is caused not by drugs but by drug laws that make the stuff expensive and a monopoly of criminals. This stance isn't "approving" of drugs any more than defending free speech is "approving" of Nazi propaganda; it's just realism -- prohibition doesn't work. And the very worst hazard of the drug war may be the expansion of police powers through confiscation laws, "no-knock" warrants and other "anti-drug" measures. These tactics can't stop the drug trade, but they are making a mockery of our supposed Constitutional freedoms.

Libertarians would leave in place laws against actions which directly endanger the physical safety of others, like driving under the influence of drugs, or carrying a firearm under the influence.

First of all, stop creating them as our government does with military contractors and government-subsidized industries. Second, create a more fluid economic environment in which they'd break up. This happens naturally in a free market; even in ours, with taxes and regulatory policies that encourage gigantism, it's quite rare for a company to stay in the biggest 500 for longer than twenty years. We'd abolish the limited-liability shield laws to make corporate officers and stockholders fully responsible for a corporation's actions. We'd make it impossible for corporations to grow fat on "sweetheart deals" paid for with taxpayers' money; we'd lower the cost of capital (by cutting taxes) and regulatory compliance (by repealing regulations that presume guilt until you prove your innocence), encouraging entrepreneurship and letting economic conditions (rather than government favoritism) determine the optimum size of the business unit.

Who owns the trees? The disastrous state of the environment in what was formerly the Soviet Union illustrates the truism that a resource theoretically "owned" by everyone is valued by no one. Ecological awareness is a fine thing, but without strong private-property rights no one can afford to care enough to conserve. Libertarians believe that the only effective way to save the Earth is to give everyone economic incentives to save their little bit of it.

No. What favors the rich is the system we have now -- a fiction of strong property rights covering a reality of property by government fiat; the government can take away your "rights" by eminent domain, condemnation, taxation, regulation and a thousand other means. Because the rich have more money and time to spend on influencing and subverting government, such a system inevitably means they gain at others' expense. A strong government always becomes the tool of privilege. Stronger property rights and a smaller government would weaken the power elite that inevitably seeks to seduce government and bend it to their own self-serving purposes --- an elite far more dangerous than any ordinary criminal class.

No, though abandoning the poor might be merciful compared to what government has done to them. As the level of "anti-poverty" spending in this country has risen, so has poverty. Government bureaucracies have no incentive to lift people out of dependency and every incentive to keep them in it; after all, more poverty means a bigger budget and more power for the bureaucrats. Libertarians want to break this cycle by abolishing all income-transfer programs and allowing people to keep what they earn instead of taxing it away from them. The wealth freed up would go directly to the private sector, creating jobs for the poor, decreasing the demand on private charity, and increasing charitable giving. The results might diminish poverty or they might leave it at today's levels -- but it's hard to see how they could be any less effective than the present wretched system.

This issue makes minarchists out of a lot of would-be anarchists. One view is that in a libertarian society everyone would be heavily armed, making invasion or usurpation by a domestic tyrant excessively risky. This is what the Founding Fathers clearly intended for the U.S. (the Constitution made no provision for a standing army, entrusting defense primarily to a militia consisting of the entirety of the armed citizenry). It works today in Switzerland (also furnishing one of the strongest anti-gun-control arguments). The key elements in libertarian-anarchist defense against an invader would be: a widespread ideology (libertarianism) that encourages resistance; ready availability of deadly weapons; and no structures of government that an invader can take over and use to rule indirectly. Think about the Afghans, the Viet Cong, the Minutemen -- would you want to invade a country full of dedicated, heavily armed libertarians? 🙂

Minarchist libertarians are less radical, observe that U.S. territory could certainly be protected effectively with a military costing less than half of the bloated U.S. military budget.

Voluntary cooperation is a wonderful thing, and we encourage it whenever we can. Despite the tired old tag line about "dog-eat-dog competition" and the presence of government intervention, the relatively free market of today's capitalism is the most spectacular argument for voluntary cooperation in history; millions, even billions of people coordinating with each other every day to satisfy each others' needs and create untold wealth.

What we oppose is the mockeries politicians and other criminals call cooperation but impose by force; there is no "cooperation" in taxation or the draft or censorship any more than you and I are "cooperating" when I put a gun to your head and steal your wallet.

Think about freedom, and act on your thoughts. Spend your dollars wisely. Oppose the expansion of state power. Promote "bottom-up" solutions to public problems, solutions that empower individuals rather than demanding intervention by force of government. Give to private charity. Join a libertarian organization; the Libertarian Party, or the Advocates for Self-Government, or the Reason Foundation. Start your own business; create wealth and celebrate others who create wealth. Support voluntary cooperation.

No one knows. Your author thinks libertarianism is about where constitutional republicanism was in 1750 -- a solution waiting for its moment, a toy of political theorists and a few visionaries waiting for the people and leaders who can actualize it. The collapse of Communism and the triumph of capitalist economics will certainly help, by throwing central planning and the "nanny state" into a disrepute that may be permanent. Some libertarians believe we are headed for technological and economic changes so shattering that no statist ideology can possibly survive them (in particular, most of the nanotechnology "underground" is hard-core libertarian). Only time will tell.

There's an excellent FAQ on anarchist theory and history at http://www.princeton.edu/~bdcaplan/anarfaq.htm with links to many other Web documents.

Peter McWilliams's wise and funny book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do is worth a read.

Friedman, Milton and Friedman, Rose, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Constitution of Liberty (Henry Regnery Company, 1960).

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944).

Lomasky, Loren, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford University Press, 1987).

Machan, Tibor, Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989).

Murray, Charles A. In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (Simon and Schuster, 1988).

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J., Liberty and Nature (Open Court, 1991).

Rothbard, Murray N. For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 2nd ed (Macmillan, 1978).

Reason. Editorial contact: 3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90034. Subscriptions: PO Box 526, Mt. Morris, IL 61054

Liberty. PO Box 1167, Port Townsend, WA 98368.

1202 N. Tenn. St., Suite 202 Cartersville, GA 30120

3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90034

1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20001-5403

938 Howard St. San Francisco, Suite 202, CA 94103

818 S. Grand Ave., Suite 202, Los Angeles, CA 90017

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The Libertarianism FAQ - catb.org

In this article I'm going to consider Universal Basic Income (UBI) from a libertarian perspective, focusing mainly on analysis of the labour market, rather than the much more common libertarian "small state" argument in favour of UBI.

The crux of the article

The current labour market is terribly unfree as it is because it relies on coercion, workfare, sanctions, draconian anti-labour legislation etc.

The introduction of Universal Basic Income would would create a much freer labour market (no more threat of destitution, sanctions or forced labour schemes, and much freer labour contracts between employers and employees), but this increased freedom for the majority would come at the expense of necessary measures in order to control inflation (which would rapidly destroy the project if left unchecked).

The reduction in aggression against the majority of workers would outweigh the infringements on the current rights that rentiers have to exploit access to basic commodities in order to extract profit for themselves (which it can be argued is another form of aggression against the majority anyway).

What is libertarianism?

The origins of libertarianism can be traced to the 18th and 19th Century anarchist and and socialist movements in Europe, however it was quickly embraced and integrated into

One of the most famous left-libertarians was the American Henry George (1839-1897), who opposed rentierism, and argued in favour of Land Value Tax. Many Georgists have argued that the proceeds from Land Value Tax should be used to fund a citizens income, or Universal Basic Income.

Left-Libertarianism is not as famous as its rabid Ayn Rand inspired American cousin, but it is an increasingly popular political stance, and one which I personally embrace.

What is Universal Basic Income [Main article]

If you're not fully versed on what Universal Basic Income (UBI) is, I suggest that you read my introductory article before coming back to finish this one. If you haven't got time for that, or you are reasonably clued up about what UBI is, I'll just provide a short summary.

UBI is an unconditional payment that is made to every qualifying individual within an economy. There is no means testing at all, other than determination that the individual is eligible (a citizen in the economy for example). Ideally the UBI is set at a rate which is sufficient to ensure that all recipients have access to basic human necessities (a home, sufficient food and water, basic energy needs ...).

This concept is generally appealing to libertarians on a basic level because it dispenses with almost all forms of state means testing, meaning a smaller, and less obtrusive state. In this article I'm not going to focus on this compelling "smaller state" argument for UBI, in favour of considering the libertarian case for UBI from a labour market perspective.

What makes the current labour market so unfree?

Labour is a fundamentally important factor in any economy. Orthodox economic theories tends to treat labour as if it is just some other kind of basic commodity, however, if it is to be referred to as a commodity at all, it must be recognised as a very special and distinct form of commodity, one that can be created at will, and which takes myriad potential forms.

The neoclassical orthodoxy fails to treat the labour market as utterly different to other commodities markets and it also fails to recognise the unequal nature of the market in labour, where the employer at a huge advantage over the employee. There are innumerable factors that put the buyer at an advantage of the seller in the labour market, but perhaps the most significant is the creation of false abundance via political policies aimed at retaining a constant pool of unemployment, the "reserve army of unemployment" as Marx defined it in the 19th century, or the "price worth paying" as it was described by former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1991.

In 1918 Bertrand Russell argued against this inequality in the labour market, proposing a kind of basic income so "the dread of unemployment and loss of livelihood will no longer haunt men like a nightmare".

The constant threat of destitution is a powerful means by which employers can drive down wages and working conditions, putting them at an unfair price advantage over the worker. If the scale of unemployment has been brought about via deliberate economic policies based on the equilibrium rate of unemployment, this is a clear case of the state trampling all over the libertarian non-aggression principle. If government policies result in your labour being coerced from you at a lower rate than you would be willing to sell it, solely because you fear destitution if you don't work for low wages, you're suffering aggression at the hands of the state. The spectre of unemployment and impoverishment created by economic policies aimed at maintaining "extra capacity" in the labour market is not the only current example of aggressive coercion in the labour market.

Workfare blatantly violates the libertarian non-aggression principle [Main article]

One of the starkest examples of a labour policy which violate the libertarian non-aggression principle is the kind of mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed collectively termed "Workfare".

These schemes coerce the unemployed, under threat of absolute destitution, into giving up their labour for free, often to highly profitable corporations.

It's bad enough that the state uses the threat of destitution (via welfare sanctions) to undermine the aggregate value of labour, but that ministers of the government openly declare that they believe that the state has "a right" to extract the labour of the individual for no wage at all, demonstrates an extremely illiberal attitude towards the labour rights of the individual.

These mandatory unpaid "Workfare" labour schemes demonstrate beyond doubt that the ministers involved in administering these schemes believe that the labour of the individual actually belongs to the state. If your government acts as if it believes that your labour is a commodity which belongs to the state, and which can be extracted and distributed for free to favoured corporations, the labour market isn't just unfree, it is grotesquely authoritarian. How would UBI make the labour market freer?

If every individual received an unconditional basic income sufficient to meet their fundamental human needs (housing, food and water, energy, health care ...) the threat of destitution would cease to necessitate people into accepting wages and working conditions they deem unfair.

An unconditional basic income would also render totally unworkable the draconian regime of "Workfare" labour extraction schemes enforced via draconian welfare sanctions regimes. If the individual has a right to an unconditional subsistence income, the state loses the power to coerce and intimidate the individual into giving up their labour for free with threats of destitution, starvation and homelessness.

Even if we accept the wrong-headed idea that labour is a basic commodity with a defined value (the national minimum wage for example), we have to accept that coerced unpaid labour represents theft, and a clear violation of the libertarian non-aggression principle. Universal Basic Income would render this form of theft by the state totally unworkable, because the state would have no right to revoke the unconditional incomes of those that won't comply with their unpaid labour extraction schemes.

How a freer labour market could benefit society and the economy

I've explained a how UBI could benefit society and the economy in the primer article on the subject, so I'll try to be concise here.

The free labour market that UBI would create if administered correctly, would benefit society by alleviating extreme poverty, which would lead to a fall in poverty related social problems such as crime and poverty related ill-health.

Another benefit to society would be that the existence of UBI would push up the cost of employing people to do undesirable jobs (disgusting, dangerous or debilitating work), meaning that in turn there would be much greater financial incentives for companies to invest in technology to automate such work. The development of technology to eliminate undesirable jobs would benefit society and the economy (fewer people working in undesirable jobs, greater demand for high-tech solutions).

UBI trials have shown that people generally don't stop working and laze about once their basic necessities are provided, in fact UBI works as an economic stimulus, because people have more time to invest in starting their own businesses, and the public has more money to spend on consumption. The only demographics to substantially reduce the hours they work are mothers with young children and young people in education, it is arguable that these reductions are actually beneficial in socio-economic terms.

Why is controlling inflation so important?

Controlling price inflation would be absolutely crucial to the success of any Universal Basic Income project because without measures to stop the inflation of basic necessities (rent, utilities, food ...) the gains that UBI would provide would soon be eroded away as price rises diminish the value of the basic income payment so that it is no longer sufficient to cover the basic costs of subsistence.

If inflation is allowed to run rampant, the benefits of Universal Basic Income would soon be transferred from the ordinary citizen that receives it, to the rentiers that take advantage by hiking the prices they charge for the provision of basic commodities and services.

Controlling Rentierism

If the rentiers are allowed free rein to profiteer from basic income provision, they will simply inflate their prices in order to soak up the entire value of basic income to cover the cost of some necessity of life (rent, transport, childcare, energy consumption). If the parasitic behaviour of rentiers is not controlled, all of the socio-economic benefits would soon be siphoned off as into the bank accounts of the most ruthlessly self-interested rent seekers. Essentially Universal Basic Income would turn into a government subsidisation scheme for the most ruthlessly self-interested, which is precisely the kind of system we have now, which is one of the main reasons people have been proposing the introduction of UBI in the first place.

The only practical way to stop this kind of rent seeking behaviour from destroying UBI would be to introduce some form of market regulation to prevent landlords, utilities companies, childcare providers and the like from massively inflating their prices in order to soak up the economic benefit of UBI for themselves.

There's no such thing as a perfectly free-market economy

Anyone that believes that there is such a thing as a perfectly free market is living in the same cloud-cuckoo land as those that believe a totally state controlled economy is a possibility.

What is up for debate is how more market freedom can be created. The orthodox neoliberal would argue that greater market freedom is produced through deregulation, but the huge growth in inequality, the ever increasing size of economic crises and the rise of vast "too big to fail" oligopolies since the neoliberal craze of privatisation and deregulation became the economic orthodoxy in 1980s, suggests that they are wrong. Deregulation and privatisation have increased the freedoms of corporations and the super-rich at the expense of the majority, who have seen their share of national incomes eroded away dramatically since the late 1970s despite rising productivity.

Others might argue that the best way to stimulate market freedom is through the creation of a "fair market", through carefully planned market regulation. Rules to prevent (and properly punish) anti-competitive practices such as price rigging, formation of oligopolies, monopolies and cartels, financial doping, insider trading, political patronage, front running, information asymmetry, dividing territories, corruption and outright fraud, would create a freer and safer market for individuals and small businesses, which would increase competition and efficiency, but at the cost of the freedoms of those that currently profit from the use of anti-competitive practices.

The same kind of debate can be had over the introduction of rules (rent caps, inflation controls on basic commodities and services ... ) to prevent the rentier class form extracting the benefit of Universal Basic Income for themselves. The infringement of their "right" to gouge as much profit as possible out of basic commodities and services, would have to be weighed against the greater economic freedoms afforded to the majority.

Essentially it boils down to the question of which is the most important; freeing up the currently unfree labour market or the continuation of free market in the provision of fundamental commodities and services?

Providing more freedom in which of these markets would create the biggest increase in aggregate freedom, and which would be most compliant with the libertarian non-aggression principle? In my view the answer is obvious. The freedom of the majority outweighs the freedom of the minority.

Other libertarian arguments for UBI aside from the labour market analysis

Before I conclude I'd like to state that this labour market analysis is far from the only libertarian argument for the introduction of Universal Basic Income.

Other arguments include the most common "small state" argument because universal welfare would reduce the size of the state by reducing the number of functions of the state. Another argument can be made that since there would be no means testing, UBI would provide greater freedom from intrusion by the state into the private lives of the individual.

Perhaps the most compelling libertarian argument in favour of Universal Basic Income is that perhaps freedom from destitution in itself is the most important liberty, because without freedom from destitution the individual is often left facing either the suffering of destitution, or the suffering of wage slavery.

Conclusion

Labour is a fundamental element of any economy (be it capitalist, state socialist or anywhere in between). and an unfree market in labour is fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism.

If the deliberate economic policies of the political establishment in your country mean that your labour can be coerced from you at a lower rate than you would be willing to sell, simply because of the threat of absolute destitution, this is clearly an act of aggression on the part of the establishment.

If your government acts as if it believes that your labour is a commodity which actually belongs to the state, and can be extracted from you for no recompense at all, this is an even more vile example of state aggression.

The introduction of Universal Basic Income would put an end to both of these forms of labour market aggression, but in order for it to work measures to prevent rentiers from profiteering by inflating the prices they charge for basic human necessities would need to be introduced. Thus the debate is not over whether UBI is compatible with libertarianism (it clearly is) but whether the benefits from the greater freedoms in the labour market would outweigh the necessary losses in freedom of rentiers to profiteer from the provision of basic human needs, which would be necessary in order to prevent the whole project collapsing into inflationary chaos.

In my view the freedoms of the majority should outweigh the freedoms of the minority, and in any case, the current freedom to profiteer from the provision of basic human necessities that the rentier class enjoy can actually be viewed as a form of aggression in its own right. Why should the profits of the minority take precedence over the basic human needs of the majority?

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Universal Basic Income from a libertarian perspective - A ...

May 12, 2015 columns

Libertarians should oppose the states victimization of transgender people and help build a society safe for a diverse range of gender identities, argues Novak.

On all reasonable accounts, libertarianism should greatly appeal to transgender women.

Most fundamentally, libertarianism represents a set of philosophical dispositions firmly grounded in affirming the primacy of individual liberties. In his recent book, The Libertarian Mind, David Boaz powerfully describes the broad parameters of libertarian adherence to the freedom of the individual human being in the following way:

the basic unit of social analysis is the individual. Its hard to imagine how it could be anything else. Individuals are, in all cases, the source and foundation of creativity, activity, and society. Only individuals can think, love, pursue projects, act. Groups dont have plans or intentions. Only individuals are capable of choice, in the sense of anticipating the outcomes of alternative courses of action and weighing the consequences. Individuals, of course, often create and deliberate in groups, but it is the individual mind that ultimately makes choices. Most important, only individuals can take responsibility for their actions.

Irrespective of whether the key argumentative basis for individualism stresses selfownership of body, mind, and soul (Locke), or the virtues of diversity and flourishing associated with the development of the person (von Humboldt and Mill), libertarian philosophy should easily accommodate the aspirations and prerogatives of transgender women, and all other people subscribing to diverse gender identities, in seeking to live their lives as they see fit.

Further, libertarian acceptance for transwomen, transmen, and genderqueer people and, indeed, cisgender people (readers unfamiliar with the meaning of these, and similar, terms depicting gender diversities may wish to read this glossary) is not contingent upon whether there are biological or nonbiological bases of gender identity.

Respect for transwomen, and for others who wish to self identify and express diverse gender identities in numerous ways, should also not be contingent upon the numerical strength of varied groupings within society. Given the stigma attached to gender diversity, there remain limitations in our understandings of the exact numbers of transgender people; however, some surveys suggest that less than one per cent of the American adult population identify as transgender.

To put it simply, each and every individual should be free to choose, to act, and to be, regardless of reason or of numbers, for as long as the equal freedom of others to do the same is respected.

Aside from celebrating individual liberties, libertarianism ought to be more appealing to transwomen, and everyone for that matter, because of its principled antipathy, both in historical and contemporary terms, toward the exhaustion of individual freedoms by the state. Indeed, for a very long time, and certainly to this day, governments have demonstrated overt hostility towards transgender people, seeking to undermine their interests in pursuing their own lives in a dignified manner.

Attention has been increasingly drawn to the often highly detrimental effects of the policeprison industrial complex upon minority groupings, including transgender and other gender diverse people. In a recent contribution, Nathan Goodman noted the elevated levels of violence against incarcerated transgender people, particularly transwomen, arising from prison policies that house transwomen with cisgender men, a harmful practice compounded by instances of sexual abuse and physical violence perpetrated against inmates by corrections staff.

The treatment of transwoman Chelsea Manning, sentenced to be held captive by the state for 35 years on account of whistleblowing about US war crimes, is a case in point. Although her statecaptors recently afforded Manning hormonal treatment, they had denied her the appropriate medications for years in an obvious act of psychological torment. Chelsea Manning still remains incarcerated, in the presence of male prisoners, in spite of her selfidentification as a woman.

A disproportionate lack of access to formal labour markets, often as a result of discriminatory treatment by employers, can often lead transgender people into the forced situation (rather than heroic, antistatist choice lauded by some libertarians) of attaining incomes through the shadow economy. Ongoing state detection of activities, such as the provision of prostitution services and the sale of illicit drugs, where these are not legalised, can fairly readily bring forth instances in which transwomen come into contact with police and other lawenforcement agents, with the harassment, intimidation, and violence this all too often entails.

Transwomen have even been victimised by police profiling, as was the case for sex worker advocate Monica Jones, who was charged and found guilty of manifesting prostitution, or as it has infamously become known walking while trans, during an antiprostitution sting in Phoenix, Arizona. Incidentally, Ms Jones was deported from Australia, and subjected to sensationalist media coverage, on account of her Phoenix conviction which was later overturned on appeal.

In many countries around the world, including the United States, political institutions continue to suppress diverse gender identities by refusing to enable individuals to easily alter gender markers on identity documents. Altering gender markers (that is, conventionally, male or female) on official documentation is, for the largest part, entirely conditional on people having undertaken invasive, typically irreversible and almost always expensive gender affirmation surgical processes, or at least hormone therapies with equally significant physiological implications.

The reality is that for many transwomen, at least at a given point in their lifetimes, gender markers on government identification documents are inconsistent with the lived gender under which they undertake their daily routines and responsibilities, and this can give rise to unwarranted economic and social discrimination and exclusion. For example, employers usually require job applicants to furnish governmentprovided documents as proof of identity, and there is much anecdotal evidence suggesting they are likely to turn away prospective transgender employees when identity documents display gender markers appear not to accord with the everyday lived experiences (including presentation) of the applicant. As discussed by Dean Spade, the refusal of governments to enable individuals to easily alter gender markers on identity documents rests on the myth that transgender people do not exist. When ID issuing agencies refuse to change the gender marker on an ID, they are operating on the idea that birth-assigned gender should be permanent and no accommodation is necessary for those for whom such an assignment does not match their lived experience of gender.

These and other policies enacted, and enforced, by governments malevolently fit together to violate the liberties and rights of transwomen and other genderdiverse individuals, just like many other regulatory, and fiscal, policies are prone to do. And it is naive to conceive that certain legislative edicts purportedly designed to defend the interests of transgender people, and gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or intersex people, for that matter, such as antidiscriminationor hate crime laws, do much to greatly foster greater acceptance, respect, and tolerance for minorities.

Statist prejudice against transwomen in particular reinforces, and is reinforced by, complex and widespread forms of nonstate discrimination, harassment, and violence. Decentralised efforts to maintain gender conformism, perpetrated by vigilante acts by individuals or groups, underlined by derogatory stereotypes of gender variance in popular film, literature, and music, induce among transwomen and genderdiverse people limitations of movement, social isolation, the delaying or deterrence of gender selfexpression, and, at its worst, can lead to vulnerable, often young, people ending their own lives.

From a philosophical standpoint which behoves interactions among individuals imbibing the spirit of anything thats peaceful, libertarians can, and indeed ought to, play a very important role in rebuking the misguided and highly damaging acts by cisgender supremacists attempting to prevent individuals identifying and expressing their diverse gender identities. Redressing nonstate sources of transphobia through instances of bottomup social activism, including appealing to the common humanity that transwomen share with other people, would represent a befitting way to respond to the Leelah Alcorns plea in her suicide note to fix society.

Indeed, we should fervently celebrate the emergent social order which arises when transwomen, transmen, genderqueer, and other genderdiverse people free themselves from conventions and norms most amenable to cisgender existences, as Nick Cowen explained:

Polycentric orders offer choice: whether identifying as straight, gay, male, female or anything else. In this context, queer individuals take the role of social entrepreneurs, combining ways of living in new ways. The more successful or aesthetically-engaging lifestyles are further developed by others. Popular identities remain common but are not enforced through violence or legislation. Alternatives to existing sexualities are allowed to flourish. People are not bound by one abstract order, statutorily enforced, but are allowed to develop new orders that use and display our personalities in different ways.

As amply illustrated through its long and distinguished history, the philosophy of libertarianism represents a broader cast of mind seeking to enhance the life of each individual person, and to extend to them maximum respect for their dignity, freedom, and individuality. Clearly, this must incorporate the dignity, freedom, and individuality inherent in the ways in which people identity with, and express, their gender identity, if libertarianism is to maintain relevance and meaning to the lives of each and every human being.

Mikayla Novak contributes to a group column on libertarian feminism along with Sharon Presley, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and Helen Dale.

Novak is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian freemarket think tank, and has a PhD in economics. She is interested in how libertarian feminism concerns relate to how market processes and civil societal actions satisfactorily accommodate individual womens preferences, in a variety of ways.

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The Condition of Transgender Women ... - Libertarianism.org

Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism has been and continues to be a major influence on the libertarian movement, particularly in the United States. Many libertarians justify their political views using aspects of Objectivism.[1] However, the views of Rand and her philosophy among prominent libertarians are mixed and many Objectivists are hostile to non-Objectivist libertarians in general.[2]

Some libertarians, including Murray Rothbard and Walter Block, hold the view that the non-aggression principle is an irreducible concept: it is not the logical result of any given ethical philosophy but, rather, is self-evident as any other axiom is. Rand, too, argued that liberty was a precondition of virtuous conduct,[3] but argued that her non-aggression principle itself derived from a complex set of previous knowledge and values. For this reason, Objectivists refer to the non-aggression principle as such, while libertarians who agree with Rothbard's argument call it "the non-aggression axiom." Rothbard and other anarcho-capitalists hold that government requires non-voluntary taxation to function and that in all known historical cases, the state was established by force rather than social contract.[4] They thus consider the establishment and maintenance of the night-watchman state supported by Objectivists to be in violation of the non-aggression principle. On the other hand, Rand believes that government can in principle be funded through voluntary means.[5]

Jennifer Burns in her biography Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, notes how Rand's position that "Native Americans were savages", and that as a result "European colonists had a right to seize their land because native tribes did not recognize individual rights", was one of the views that "particularly outraged libertarians."[6] Burns also notes how Rand's position that "Palestinians had no rights and that it was moral to support Israel, the sole outpost of civilization in a region ruled by barbarism", was also a controversial position amongst libertarians, who at the time were a large portion of Rand's fan base.[6]

Libertarians and Objectivists often disagree about matters of foreign policy. Rand's rejection of what she deemed to be "primitivism" extended to the Middle East peace process in the 1970s.[6][7] Following the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Rand denounced Arabs as "primitive" and "one of the least developed cultures" who "are typically nomads."[7] Consequently, Rand contended Arab resentment for Israel was a result of the Jewish state being "the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their (Arabs) continent", while decreeing that "when you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are."[7] Many libertarians were highly critical of Israeli government at the time.[citation needed]

Most scholars of the libertarian Cato Institute have opposed military intervention against Iran,[8] while the Objectivist Ayn Rand Institute has supported forceful intervention in Iran.[9][10]

The United States Libertarian Party's first candidate for president of the United States, John Hospers, credited Rand as a major force in shaping his own political beliefs.[11]David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank, described Rand's work as "squarely within the libertarian tradition" and that some libertarians are put off by "the starkness of her presentation and by her cult following."[12]Milton Friedman described Rand as "an utterly intolerant and dogmatic person who did a great deal of good."[13] One Rand biographer quoted Murray Rothbard as saying that he was "in agreement basically with all [Rand's] philosophy," and saying that it was Rand who had "convinced him of the theory of natural rights..."[14] Rothbard would later become a particularly harsh critic of Rand, writing in The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult that:

The major lesson of the history of the [objectivist] movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.[15]

Some Objectivists have argued that Objectivism is not limited to Rand's own positions on philosophical issues and are willing to work with and identify with the libertarian movement. This stance is most clearly identified with David Kelley (who separated from the Ayn Rand Institute because of disagreements over the relationship between Objectivists and libertarians), Chris Sciabarra, Barbara Branden (Nathaniel Branden's former wife), and others. Kelley's Atlas Society has focused on building a closer relationship between "open Objectivists" and the libertarian movement.[citation needed]

Rand condemned libertarianism as being a greater threat to freedom and capitalism than both modern liberalism and conservatism.[16] Rand regarded Objectivism as an integrated philosophical system. Libertarianism, in contrast, is a political philosophy which confines its attention to matters of public policy. For example, Objectivism argues positions in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, whereas libertarianism does not address such questions. Rand believed that political advocacy could not succeed without addressing what she saw as its methodological prerequisites. Rand rejected any affiliation with the libertarian movement and many other Objectivists have done so as well.[17]

Rand said of libertarians that:

They're not defenders of capitalism. They're a group of publicity seekers.... Most of them are my enemies... I've read nothing by Libertarians (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn't my ideas badly mishandledi.e., the teeth pulled out of themwith no credit given."[16]

In a 1981 interview, Rand described libertarians as "a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people" who "plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose."[16]

Responding to a question about the Libertarian Party in 1976, Rand said:

The trouble with the world today is philosophical: only the right philosophy can save us. But this party plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes them with the exact oppositewith religionists, anarchists and every intellectual misfit and scum they can findand call themselves libertarians and run for office."[18]

In 2011, Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, spoke at the Foundation for Economic Education.[19] He was a keynote speaker at FreedomFest 2012.[20] He appeared on ReasonTV on July 26, 2012.[21]

Ayn Rand Institute board member John Allison spoke at the Cato Club 200 Retreat in September 2012,[22] contributed "The Real Causes of the Financial Crisis" to Cato's Letter,[23] and spoke at Cato's Monetary Conference in November, 2011.[24]

On June 25, 2012, the Cato Institute announced that John Allison would become its next president.[25] In Cato's public announcement, Allison was described as a "revered libertarian." In communication to Cato employees, he wrote, "I believe almost all the name calling between libertarians and objectivists is irrational. I have come to appreciate that all objectivists are libertarians, but not all libertarians are objectivists."[26]

On October 15, 2012, Brook explained the changes to The American Conservative:

I dont think theres been a significant change in terms of our attitude towards libertarians. Two things have happened. Weve grown, and weve gotten to a size where we dont just do educational programs, we do a lot more outreach and a lot more policy and working with other organizations. I also believe the libertarian movement has changed. Its become less influenced by Rothbard, less influenced by the anarchist, crazy for lack of a better word, wing of libertarianism. As a consequence, because were bigger and doing more things and because libertarianism has become more reasonable, we are doing more work with them than we have in the past. But I dont think ideologically anything of substance has changed at the Institute.[27]

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Libertarianism and Objectivism - Wikipedia, the free ...

Historically, Americans have seen libertarians as far outside the mainstream, but with the rise of the Tea Party movement, libertarian principles have risen to the forefront of Republican politics. But libertarianism is more than the philosophy of individual freedom and unfettered markets that Republicans have embraced. Indeed, as Jason Brennan points out, libertarianism is a quite different--and far richer--system of thought than most of us suspect.

In this timely new entry in Oxford's acclaimed series What Everyone Needs to Know, Brennan offers a nuanced portrait of libertarianism, proceeding through a series of questions to illuminate the essential elements of libertarianism and the problems the philosophy addresses, including such topics as the Value of Liberty, Human Nature and Ethics, Economic Liberty, Civil Rights, Social Justice and the Poor, Government and Democracy, and Contemporary Politics. Brennan asks the most fundamental and challenging questions: What do Libertarians think liberty is? Do libertarians think everyone should be selfish? Are libertarians just out to protect the interests of big business? What do libertarians think we should do about racial injustice? What would libertarians do about pollution? Are Tea Party activists true libertarians? As he sheds light on libertarian beliefs, Brennan overturns numerous misconceptions. Libertarianism is not about simple-minded paranoia about government, he writes. Rather, it celebrates the ideal of peaceful cooperation among free and equal people. Libertarians believe that the rich always capture political power; they want to minimize the power available to them in order to protect the weak. Brennan argues that libertarians are, in fact, animated by benevolence and a deep concern for the poor.

Clear, concise, and incisively written, this volume explains a vitally important philosophy in American history--and a potent force in contemporary politics.

What Everyone Needs to Know is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

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Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know

This essay first appeared in the International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, edited by Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovski (London and New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 403-407). It was posted as a Notablog entry on 5 January 2006. Comments welcome (post here).

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"LIBERTARIANISM"

By Chris Matthew Sciabarra

Libertarianism is the political ideology ofvoluntarism, a commitment to voluntary action in a social context, where no individual or group of individuals can initiate the use of force against others. It is not a monolithic ideological paradigm; rather, it signifies a variety of approaches that celebrate therule of law and the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas a laissez-faire attitude towards what philosopher Robert Nozick (1974) once called capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Modern libertarians draw inspiration from writings attributed to the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, as well as the works of Aristotle, among the ancients; [seventeenth-,] eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classicalliberalism (e.g. John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, the American founders, Carl Menger, andHerbert Spencer); individualist anarchism (e.g. Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner); Old Right opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal (e.g. Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Isabel Paterson andH. L. Mencken); modern Austrian economics (e.g. Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard), as well as the economics of the Chicago school(Milton Friedman) and Virginia school (James Buchanan); and the Objectivist philosopherAyn Rand.

Classical liberalism is the most immediatepredecessor of contemporary libertarianism. Locke and the American founders had an impact on those libertarians, such as Rothbard and Rand, who stress individual rights, while the Scottish Enlightenment and Spencer had a major impact on thinkerssuch as Hayek, who stress the evolutionary wisdom of customs and traditions in contradistinctionto the constructivist rationalism of state planners.

Among evolutionists, Spencer in particularmade important contributions to what would become known as general systems theory; some consider him to be the founder of modern sociology. Indeed, he authored Principles of Sociology and TheStudy of Sociology, which was the textbook used for the first sociology course offered in the United States, at Yale University. A contemporary of Charles Darwin, he focused on social evolution the development of societies and organizational structuresfrom simple to compound forms. In such works as The Man Versus the State, he presented a conception of society as a spontaneous, integrated growth and not amanufacture, an organically evolving context for the development of heterogeneity and differentiation among the individuals who compose it. Just as Spencer emphasized organic social evolution, so too did he focus on the organic evolution of the state with its mutually reinforcing reliance onbureaucracy and militarism, and how it might be overcome.

The Austrian-born Carl Menger, a founder along with W. S. Jevons and Lon Walras of the marginalist revolution in economics, held a similar view of social life as a dynamic, spontaneous, evolving process. Influenced by Aristotle in his methodological individualism, Menger wasfervently opposed to the historical relativism of the German historicists of the Methodenstreit. Menger focused on the purposeful actions of individuals in generating unintended sociologicalconsequences a host of institutions, such as language, religion, law, the state, markets, competition and money.

In the twentieth century, the Nobel laureate Austrian economist F. A. Hayek carried on Mengers evolutionist discussion and praised it for providing outstanding guidelines for general sociology. For Hayek (1991), Menger was among the Darwinians before Darwin those evolutionists,such as the conservative Edmund Burke and the liberals of the Scottish Enlightenment, who stressed the evolution of institutions as the product of unintended consequences, rather than deliberate design. Hayek drew a direct parallel between hisown concept of spontaneous order and Adam Smiths notion of the invisible hand. Hayek argued that, over time, there is a competition among various emergent traditions, each of which embodies rivalrules of action and perception. Through a process of natural selection, those rules and institutions that are more durable than others will tend to flourish, resulting in a relative increase in population and wealth. Though he didnt argue for a theory of inevitable progress, as Spencer had, heclearly assumed that liberalism was the social system most conducive to such flourishing.

Like Karl Marx, Hayek criticized utopiansfor their desire to construct social institutions as if from an Archimedean standpoint, external to history and culture. But Hayek turned this analysis on Marx; he developed a full-fledged critique of socialism and central planning as utopian requiring an unattainable synoptic knowledge of all the articulated and tacit dimensions of social life. Hayek argued that market prices were indispensable to rational entrepreneurial calculation. He also focused on the sociological and psychological ramifications of the movement away from markets. He maintains in The Road to Serfdom (1944), for example, that there is a structural connection between social psychology and politics: to the extent that the stateimposes collectivist arrangements on individuals, it is destructive of individualchoice, morals and responsibility, and this destruction of individualism reinforces the spread of statism. And the more the state comes to dominate social life, says Hayek, the more state power will be the only power worth having which is why theworst get on top.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was similarly opposed to statism and collectivism, and presented, in [1922], an influential book entitled Socialism, which was an economic and sociological analysis of all forms of state intervention from fascism to communism. Mises used the tools of praxeology, the science of humanaction, to demonstrate the calculational problems that all non-market systems face, due to their elimination of private property, entrepreneurialism and the price system. More important, perhaps, is Misess development of a non-Marxist, libertarian theoryof class. Like Charles Dunoyer, Charles Comte, James Mill and other classical liberals, Mises argued that traders on the market share a mutuality of benefit that is destroyed by political intervention. For Mises, the long-term interests of marketparticipants are not in fundamental conflict. It is only with government action that such conflict becomes possible, Mises claims,because it is only government that can create a caste system based on the bestowal of special privileges.

Mises located the central caste conflictin the financial sector of the economy. In such books as The Theory of Money and Credit, he contends that government control over money and banking led to the cycle of boom and bust. A systematicincrease in the money supply creates differentialeffects over time, redistributing wealth to those social groups, especially banks and debtor industries, which are the first beneficiaries of the inflation.

Mises student, Murray Rothbard, developed this theory of caste conflict into a full-fledged libertarian class analysis. Rothbard views central banking as a cartelizing device that has created a powerful structure of class privilege in modern political economy. These privileges growexponentially as government restricts market competition and free entry, thereby creating monopoly through various coercive means (e.g. compulsory cartelization, price controls, output quotas, licensing, tariffs, immigration restrictions, labourlaws, conscription, patents, franchises, etc.).

Rothbards view of the relationship between big business and government in the rise of American statism draws additionally from the work of New Left historical revisionists, such as Gabriel Kolko andJames Weinstein. These historians held that big business was at the forefront of the movement towards government regulation of the market. That movement, according to Rothbard, had both a domestic and foreigncomponent, since it often entailed both domestic regulation and foreign imperialism to secure global markets. The creation of a welfare-warfare state leads necessarily to economic inefficiencies and deep distortions in the structure of production. Like Marx, Rothbard views these internal contradictions as potentially fatal to the economic system; unlike Marx, Rothbard blames these contradictions not on the free market, but on the growth of statism.

Drawing inspiration from Franz Oppenheimers and Albert Jay Nocks distinction between state power and social power, or state and market, and from John C. Calhouns class theory, as presented in Disquisition on Government, Rothbard sawsociety fragmenting, ultimately, into two opposing classes: taxpayers and tax-consumers. In his book Power and Market, Rothbard identifies bureaucrats, politicians and the net beneficiaries of government privilege as among the tax-consumers. Unlike his Austrian predecessors Hayek andMises, however, Rothbard argues that it is only with the elimination of the state that a fully just and productive society can emerge. His anarcho-capitalist ideal society would end the states monopoly on the coercive use of force, as well as taxation and conscription, and allow for the emergence of contractual agencies for the protectionof fully delineated private property rights (thereby resolving the problems of externalities and public goods) and the adjudication of disputes. His scenario had a major impact on Nozick, whose Anarchy,State, and Utopia was written in response to the Rothbardian anarchist challenge.

Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist and philosopher, author of best-selling novels TheFountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was one of those who eschewed the libertarian label, partially because of its association with anarchism. An epistemological realist, ethical egoist and advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, Rand maintained that libertarians had focused too much attention on politics to the exclusion of the philosophical and cultural factors upon which it depended. But even though she saw politics as hierarchically dependent on these factors, she often stressed the reciprocal relationships among disparate elements, from politicsand pedagogy to sex, economics and psychology. She sought to transcend the dualities of mind and body, reason and emotion, theory and practice, fact and value, morality and prudence, and theconventional philosophic dichotomies of materialism and idealism, rationalism and empiricism, subjectivism and classical objectivism (which she called intrinsicism). Yet, despite her protestations, Rand can be placed in the libertarian tradition, given her adherence to its voluntarist political credo.

From the perspective of social theory, Rand proposed a multi-level sociological analysis of human relations under statism. Echoing the Austrian critique of state intervention in her analysis of politics and economics, Rand extended her critique toencompass epistemology, psychology, ethics and culture. She argued that statism both nourished and depended upon an irrational altruist and collectivist ethos that demanded the sacrifice of the individual to the group. It required and perpetuated a psychology of dependence and a groupmentality that was destructive of individual authenticity, integrity, honesty and responsibility. Rand also focused on the cultural preconditions and effects of statism since coercive social relations required fundamental alterations in the nature of language, education, pedagogy, aesthetics and ideology. Just as relations of power operatethrough ethical, psychological, cultural, political and economic dimensions, so too, for Rand, the struggle for freedom and individualism depends upon a certain constellation of moral, psychological, cultural and structural factors that support it. Randadvocated capitalism, the unknown ideal, as the only system capable of generating just social conditions, conducive to the individuals survival and flourishing.

See also: inflation; laissez faire; monopolyand oligopoly.

References and further reading

Calhoun, John C. ([1853]1953) A Disquisition onGovernment and Selections from the Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

Hayek, F. A. (1944) The Road to Serfdom, Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

(1991) The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek,Volume 3: The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mises, Ludwig von ([1912]1981) The Theory ofMoney and Credit, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics.

(1936) Socialism: An Economic and SociologicalAnalysis, London: Jonathan Cape.

Nozick, Robert (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia,New York: Basic Books.

Rand, Ayn (1967) Capitalism: The UnknownIdeal, New York: New American Library.

Rothbard, Murray ([1970]1977) Power and Market:Government and the Economy, Kansas City, MO: Sheed Andrews and McMeel.

(1978) For a New Liberty: The LibertarianManifesto, revised edition, New York: Collier Books.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew (1995) Ayn Rand: TheRussian Radical, University Park, PA: PennsylvaniaState University Press.

(1995) Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, Albany,NY: State University of New York Press.

(2000) Total Freedom: Toward a DialecticalLibertarianism, University Park, PA: PennsylvaniaState University Press.

Spencer, Herbert (1873) The Study of Sociology,New York: D. Appleton.

(188298) The Principles of Sociology, threevolumes, London: Williams and Norgate.

([1940]1981) The Man Versus the State, withSix Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics.

CHRIS MATTHEW SCIABARRA

______ Note: [bracketed words] above are corrections to online version

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Original post:

International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology: Libertarianism

Calling yourself a libertarian today is a lot like wearing a mullet back in the nineteen eighties. It sends a clear signal: business up front, party in the back.

You know, those guys who call themselves socially liberal but fiscally conservative? Yeah. Its for them.

Today, the ruling class knows that theyve lost the culture wars. And unlike with our parents, they cant count on weeping eagles and the stars n bars to get us to fall in line. So libertarianism is their last ditch effort to ensure a succession to the throne.

Republicans freak you out but think the Democrats are wimps? You must be a libertarian! Want to sound smart and thoughtful in front of your boss without alienating your socially liberal buds? Just say the L-word, pass the coke and everyones happy!

Just look at how they play it up as the cool alternative to traditional conservatism. Its pathetic. George Will wore the bowtie. But Reason magazines Nick Gillespie wears an ironic D.A.R.E. t-shirt. And dont forget the rest of his all-black wardrobe, complete with leather jacket. What a totally with-it badass.

***

With such a bleak economic forecast for the Millennials, it shouldnt surprise anyone that our elites want to make libertarianism shorthand for political disaffection. Now theres a demographic with some growth potential. And its inspired a lot of poorly-sourced, speculative babble about how the kids have all gone Galt, almost always through the personal anecdotes of young white men.

A couple of months ago, after Harvard released a poll on the political views of Millennials, libertarians took to the internet to tell the world how the youth of America was little more than a giant anarcho-capitalist sleeper cellready to overthrow the state and privatize the air supply at a moments notice. So I took a look at the poll numbers. And you know what? Its utter horseshit.

Right off the bat, were told that 79% of Millennials dont consider themselves politically-engaged at all so, uh, keep that in mind.

Much is made of the fact that less than half of the survey respondents thought the government should provide free health care to those who cant afford it. What they dont mention is that that number (44 percent) is twice the percentage who say they stand against (22 percent) such hand outs. Nearly a third didnt think one way or the other.

Then we hear that the poll proves kids dont care about climate change. But they dont mention that slightly more Millennials wanted the government to do more on that front than theyre doing noweven if it hurt economic growth. Nearly half, you guessed it, neither agree nor disagree. (Come on kids, Rock the Vote!)

More Millennials identify as liberals than conservatives. Hardly any of them (10 percent) support the libertarian-embraced Tea Party. About three-quarters say they despise congressional Republicans.

Nearly two-thirds voted for Obama in 2008. Slightly over half approve of him now. Nearly three-quarters of Millennials hate congressional Republicans. 55% trust in the U.S. military, one of the largest state-socialist programs in the entire world, also responsible for, you know, those wars that libertarians supposedly hate.

Over a quarter put their faith in the federal government all or most of the time, and 55% some of the time. Only 17% answered never. And despite all their supposed Ron Paul love, they trust the globalist United Nations even more than they do the feds.

A little nibble here with only 36% approving of Obamas handling of the budget deficit, but then again, thats actually better than his rating on the deficit with Americans of all ages. Plus, worrying about the budget deficit is how dumb people have tried to sound smart since the days of FDR. And most people are dumb.

And when we finally get down to a hypothetical libertarian match-up between Obama and Ron Paul41 percent pick Obama and only 27 percent pick Paul.

Oh, but the kiddies are cool with gay marriage and tired of bombing brown people overseas? No shit. That just makes them normal people living in the 21st century. Im for single-payer health care and cant stand Barney Frank. Does that mean I sip the Kool-Aid at the Lyndon LaRouche compound?

None of this should be too surprising. For almost two decades, roughly two-thirds of the American public have supported what wed call a moderate European welfare stateputting the average U.S. citizen significantly to the left of the Democratic party, a center/center-right organization saddled, much to their dismay, with a perpetually-disappointed center-left constituency.

But hey, our ruling class would shit a brick if any of that wealth redistribution stuff happened over here. Which is why this is a center-right nation has been a favorite Fox News talking point for over ten years. Its only nowafter Occupy Wall Street forced their handthat the media is finally willing to admit that it might be bullshit.

But libertarianism? Our ruling class is totally fine with that. Smoke your reefer and sodomize whomever you please, just keep your mouth shut and hand over your Social Security account.

***

Never trust a hippietarian

I get the appeal. The states been sticking it to working folks for decades. It seems almost unimaginable that Big Government could ever be run by us and not the One Percent.

But child labor laws, the Civil Rights act, federal income tax, minimum wage laws, Social Security, Medicare, food safetylibertarians have accused all of them as infringements upon the free market that would lead to economic ruin. And over and over again, theyve been proven wrong. Life goes ona little less gruesomelyand society prospers.

There is no such thing as a free-market, economist Ha-Joon Chang has said repeatedly. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.

In other words, markets are social institutions, just as much under the thumb of politics and government as everything else. Which means theyre subject to democratic pressures, as they should be.

And what you earn from said markets? Chang: All our wages are, at root, politically determined. Despite what Ron Pauls trolls might have you believe, gold Krugerrands dont spray out your asshole every time you type up a spreadsheet or pour a Grande mochachino for your next customer.

Capitalism has always been a product of Big Government. Ever since the railroads of the nineteenth century, to Silicon Valley, Big Pharma and the banks, the Nanny State has been there all along, passing subsidies and tax breaks, and eating the costs the private sector doesnt want.

So whenever a libertarian says that capitalism is at odds with the state, laugh at him. Its like saying that the NFL is at war with football fields. To be a libertarian is to say that God or the universe marked up that field, squirted out the pigskins from the bowels of the earth and handed down the playbooks from Mt. Sinai.

***

When a Red like me wants to argue for something like universal health care or free college tuition, we can point to dozens of wealthy democratic societies doing just that. The Stalinist left is nothing more than a faint memory. But where are the libertarian Utopias?

General Pinochets Chile was a longtime favorite. But seeing as how it relied on a fascist coupwith a big assist from Nixon and KissingerChiles lost a bit of that Cold War luster. So these days, for the slightly more with-it libertarian, we get Singapore as the model of choice.

Hey, isnt that where the Facebook guy lives these days? Thats pretty hip!

Ah, Singapore: a city-state near the very top in the world when it comes to number of police and execution rate per capita. Its a charming little one-party state where soft-core pornography is outlawed, labor rights are almost nonexistent and gay sex is banned. Expect a caning if you break a window. And death for a baggie of cocaine.

But hey: no capital gains tax! (Freedom!)

Singapore: Libertarian Paradise

Its not like any of this will make it through the glassy eyes of the true-believers. Ludwig von Mises, another libertarian pin-up boy, wrote in 1927 that, Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization.

Lately, Ron Pauls economic advisor has been claiming that Communist Party-ruled China has a freer market than the U.S.s.

***

So lets talk a little about this freedom theyre always going on about. Or, to paraphrase Lenin, the libertarians ultimate nemesis: freedom for who to do what?

Most American adults spend about half their waking hours at a job. And during that time, libertarians do not give a flying fuck about your liberty. Instead, they condone the most brutal of tyrannies all in the name of a private employers freedom.

Racial discrimination, verbal abuse, random drug testing, body-searches, sexual harassment, illegal termination, email monitoring, union busting, even withholding piss-breaksask any libertarian how they feel about workplace unfreedom and theyll tell you: Hey man, if you dont like it, you have the freedom to get another job. If folks are hiring. But with four-and-a-half applicants for every job, theyre probably not.

Heres another thing libertarians always forget to mention: a free-market capitalist society has never and by definition can never lead to full-employment. It has to be made to byyou guessed itthe Nanny State. Free market capitalism actually requires a huge mass of the unemployedits not just a side effect.

And make no mistake: corporate America loves a high unemployment rate.

When most everyone has a job, workers are less likely to take shit. They do nutty things like join unions, demand better wages and refuse to work off-the-clock. They start to stand up to real power: not to the EPA, and not the King of England, but to their bosses.

But with a real unemployment rate close to 20 percent, that aint happening. Well, fuck. Better sign up for that Big Government welfare state theyre always whining about. Hey, dont worry. You could always sell a little crack and turn a few tricks. Libertarians totally support that.

After all, thats your freedom, dude!

***

Libertarianism isnt some cutting-edge political philosophy that somehow transcends the traditional left to right spectrum. Its a radical, hard-right economic doctrine promoted by wealthy people who always end up backing Republican candidates, no matter how often they talk about civil liberties, ending the wars and legalizing pot. Funny how that works.

Its the third way for a society in which turning against capitalism or even taking your foot off the pedal is not an option. Thanks to our shitty constitution and the most violent labor history in the West, we never even got a social-democratic party like the rest of the developed world.

So what do we get? The libertarian line: No, no: the problem isnt that were too capitalist. Its that were not capitalist enough!

Genius.

At a time in which our society has never been more interdependent in every possible way, libertarians think theyre John fucking Wayne looking out over his ranch with an Apache scalp in his belt, or John fucking Galt doingwhatever it is he does. (Collect vintage desk toys from the Sharper Image?)

Their whole ideology is like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. Its all make-believe, except for the chain-mailthey brought that from home. Elves, dwarves and fair maidens for capital. Even with the supposedly good onesanti-war libertarianswere still talking about people who think Medicares going to lead to Stalinism.

So my advice is to call them out.

Ask them what their beef really is with the welfare state. First, theyll talk about the deficit and say we just cant afford entitlement programs. Well, thats obviously a joke, so move on. Then theyll say that it gives the government tyrannical power. Okay. Let me know when the Danes open a Guantnamo Bay in Greenland.

Heres the real reason libertarians hate the idea. The welfare state is a check against servility towards the rich. A strong welfare state would give us the power to say Fuck You to our bossesthis is the power to say Im gonna work odd jobs for twenty hours a week while I work on my driftwood sculptures and play keyboards in my chillwave band. And Ill still be able to go to the doctor and make rent.

Sounds like freedom to me.

Connor Kilpatrick is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine.

Would you like to know more? Read Thirty More Years of Hell and Silent Majority Millennials by Connor Kilpatrick.

Read more: child labor laws, deficit, democratic party, fascism, fdr, george will, ha-joon chang, libertarian, ludwig von mises, lyndon larouche, medicare, millennials, nick gillespie, pinochet, reason, ron paul, Singapore, social security, socialism, Tea Party, Connor Kilpatrick, Class War For Idiots, Libertards

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Its Hip! Its Cool! Its Libertarianism! - By Connor ...

April 8, 2013 columns

Zwolinski argues that some of the results the non-aggression principle logically leads to mean we ought to question its universal application.

Many libertarians believe that the whole of their political philosophy can be summed up in a single, simple principle. This principlethe non-aggression principle or non-aggression axiom (hereafter NAP)holds that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.

From this principle, many libertarians believe, the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic. What is the proper libertarian stance on minimum wage laws? Aggression, and therefore wrong. What about anti-discrimination laws? Aggression, and therefore wrong. Public schools? Same answer. Public roads? Same answer. The libertarian armed with the NAP has little need for the close study of history, sociology, or empirical economics. With a little logic and a lot of faith in this basic axiom of morality, virtually any political problem can be neatly solved from the armchair.

On its face, the NAPs prohibition of aggression falls nicely in line with common sense. After all, who doesnt think its wrong to steal someone elses property, to club some innocent person over the head, or to force others to labor for ones own private benefit? And if its wrong for us to do these things as individuals, why would it be any less wrong for us to do it as a group as a club, a gang, ora state?

But the NAPs plausibility is superficial. It is, of course, common sense to think that aggression is a bad thing. But it is far from common sense to think that its badness is absolute, such that the wrongness of aggression always trumps any other possible consideration of justice or political morality. There is a vast difference between a strong but defeasible presumption against the justice of aggression, and an absolute, universal prohibition. As Bryan Caplan has said, if you cant think of counterexamples to the latter, youre not trying hard enough. But Im here to help.

In the remainder of this essay, I want to present six reasons why libertarians should reject the NAP. None of them are original to me. Each is logically independent of the others. Taken together, I think, they make a fairly overwhelming case.

Theres more to be said about each of these, of course. Libertarians havent written much about the issue of pollution. But they have been aware of the problem about fraud at least since James Child published his justly famous article in Ethics on the subject in 1994, and both Bryan Caplan and Stephan Kinsella have tried (unsatisfactorily, to my mind) to address it. Similarly, Roderick Long has some characteristically thoughtful and intelligent things to say about the issue of children and positive rights.

Libertarians are ingenious folk. And I have no doubt that, given sufficient time, they can think up a host of ways to tweak, tinker, and contextualize the NAP in a way that makes some progress in dealing with the problems I have raised in this essay. But there comes a point where adding another layer of epicycles to ones theory seems no longer to be the best way to proceed. There comes a point where what you need is not another refinement to the definition of aggression but a radical paradigm shift in which we put aside the idea that non-aggression is the sole, immovable center of the moral universe. Libertarianism needs its own Copernican Revolution.

Matt Zwolinski is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, and co-director ofUSDs Institute for Law and Philosophy. He has publishednumerous articles at the intersection of politics, law, economics, with a special focus on issues of exploitation and political libertarianism. He is the editor of Arguing About Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2009), and is currently writing two books: Exploitation, Capitalism, and the State and, with John Tomasi, Libertarianism: A Bleeding Heart History. The latter is under contract with Princeton University Press. Matt Zwolinski is the founder of and a regular contributor to the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

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Non-Aggression - Libertarianism.org

Libertarianism in the United States is a movement promoting individual liberty and minimized government.[1][2] The Libertarian Party, asserts the following to be core beliefs of libertarianism:

Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.[3][4]

Through 20 polls on this topic spanning 13 years, Gallup found that voters who are libertarian on the political spectrum ranged from 17%- 23% of the US electorate.[5] This includes members of the Republican Party (especially Libertarian Republicans), Democratic Party, Libertarian Party, and Independents.

In the 1950s many with classical liberal beliefs in the United States began to describe themselves as "libertarian."[6] Academics as well as proponents of the free market perspectives note that free-market libertarianism has spread beyond the U.S. since the 1970s via think tanks and political parties[7][8] and that libertarianism is increasingly viewed worldwide as a free market position.[9][10] However, libertarian socialist intellectuals Noam Chomsky, Colin Ward, and others argue that the term "libertarianism" is considered a synonym for social anarchism by the international community and that the United States is unique in widely associating it with free market ideology.[11][12][13]

Arizona United States Senator Barry Goldwater's libertarian-oriented challenge to authority had a major impact on the libertarian movement,[14] through his book The Conscience of a Conservative and his run for president in 1964.[15] Goldwater's speech writer, Karl Hess, became a leading libertarian writer and activist.[16]

The Vietnam War split the uneasy alliance between growing numbers of self-identified libertarians, anarchist libertarians, and more traditional conservatives who believed in limiting liberty to uphold moral virtues. Libertarians opposed to the war joined the draft resistance and peace movements and organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society. They began founding their own publications, like Murray Rothbard's The Libertarian Forum[17][18] and organizations like the Radical Libertarian Alliance.[19]

The split was aggravated at the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom convention, when more than 300 libertarians organized to take control of the organization from conservatives. The burning of a draft card in protest to a conservative proposal against draft resistance sparked physical confrontations among convention attendees, a walkout by a large number of libertarians, the creation of libertarian organizations like the Society for Individual Liberty, and efforts to recruit potential libertarians from conservative organizations.[20] The split was finalized in 1971 when conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr., in a 1971 New York Times article, attempted to divorce libertarianism from the freedom movement. He wrote: "The ideological licentiousness that rages through America today makes anarchy attractive to the simple-minded. Even to the ingeniously simple-minded."[21]

In 1971, David Nolan and a few friends formed the Libertarian Party.[22] Attracting former Democrats, Republicans and independents, it has run a presidential candidate every election year since 1972. Over the years, dozens of libertarian political parties have been formed worldwide. Educational organizations like the Center for Libertarian Studies and the Cato Institute were formed in the 1970s, and others have been created since then.[23]

Philosophical libertarianism gained a significant measure of recognition in academia with the publication of Harvard University professor Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. The book won a National Book Award in 1975.[24] According to libertarian essayist Roy Childs, "Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia single-handedly established the legitimacy of libertarianism as a political theory in the world of academia."[25]

Texas congressman Ron Paul's 2008 and 2012 campaigns for the Republican Party presidential nomination were largely libertarian. Paul is affiliated with the libertarian-leaning Republican Liberty Caucus and founded the Campaign for Liberty, a libertarian-leaning membership and lobbying organization.

Excerpt from:

Libertarianism in the United States - Wikipedia, the free ...

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remained president and CEO for 35 years until 2012 when he was replaced by John A. Allison, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the second largest privately held company (after Cargill) by revenue in the United States.

The Institute's stated mission is "to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace" by striving "to achieve greater involvement of the intelligent, lay public in questions of policy and the proper role of government." Cato scholars conduct policy research on a broad range of public policy issues, and produce books, studies, op-eds, and blog posts. They are also frequent guests in the media.

Cato scholars were critical of George W. Bush's Republican administration (20012009) on several issues, including the Iraq War, civil liberties, education, agriculture, energy policy, and excessive government spending. On other issues, most notably health care, Social Security, global warming, tax policy, and immigration, Cato scholars praised Bush administration initiatives. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Cato scholars criticized both major-party candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama.

The Cato Institute was named the fifth-ranked think tank in the world for 2009 in a study of leading think tanks by James G. McGann, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania, based on a criterion of excellence in "producing rigorous and relevant research, publications and programs in one or more substantive areas of research". It has been called "Washingtons premier libertarian think tank."

Ronald Ernest Paul (born August 20, 1935) is a Republican United States Congressman from Lake Jackson, Texas, a physician, a bestselling author, and the fourth-place finisher in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries.

Originally from the Green Tree suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Gettysburg College in 1957, then studied at Duke University School of Medicine; after his 1961 graduation and a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, he became a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, serving outside the Vietnam War zone. He later represented Texas districts in the U.S. House of Representatives (19761977, 19791985, and 1997present). He entered the 1988 presidential election, running as the Libertarian nominee while remaining a registered Republican, and placed a distant third.

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Portal:Libertarianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

October 25, 2013 essays

Sweden often gets held up as an example of how socialism can work better than markets. But, as Norberg shows, Swedens history in fact points to the opposite conclusion.

Once upon a time I got interested in theories of economic development because I had studied a low-income country, poorer than Congo, with life expectancy half as long and infant mortality three times as high as the average developing country.

That country is my own country, Swedenless than 150 years ago.

At that time Sweden was incredibly poorand hungry. When there was a crop failure, my ancestors in northern Sweden, in ngermanland, had to mix bark into the bread because they were short of flour. Life in towns and cities was no easier. Overcrowding and a lack of health services, sanitation, and refuse disposal claimed lives every day. Well into the twentieth century, an ordinary Swedish working-class family with five children might have to live in one room and a kitchen, which doubled as a dining room and bedroom. Many people lodged with other families. Housing statistics from Stockholm show that in 1900, as many as 1,400 people could live in a building consisting of 200 one-room flats. In conditions like these it is little wonder that disease was rife. People had large numbers of children not only for lack of contraception, but also because of the risk that not many would survive for long.

As Vilhelm Moberg, our greatest author, observed when he wrote a history of the Swedish people: Of all the wondrous adventures of the Swedish people, none is more remarkable and wonderful than this: that it survived all of them.

But in one century, everything was changed. Sweden had the fastest economic and social development that its people had ever experienced, and one of the fastest the world had ever seen. Between 1850 and 1950 the average Swedish income multiplied eightfold, while population doubled. Infant mortality fell from 15 to 2 per cent, and average life expectancy rose an incredible 28 years. A poor peasant nation had become one of the worlds richest countries.

Many people abroad think that this was the triumph of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which somehow found the perfect middle way, managing to tax, spend, and regulate Sweden into a more equitable distribution of wealthwithout hurting its productive capacity. And so Swedena small country of nine million inhabitants in the north of Europebecame a source of inspiration for people around the world who believe in government-led development and distribution.

But there is something wrong with this interpretation. In 1950, when Sweden was known worldwide as the great success story, taxes in Sweden were lower and the public sector smaller than in the rest of Europe and the United States. It was not until then that Swedish politicians started levying taxes and disbursing handouts on a large scale, that is, redistributing the wealth that businesses and workers had already created. Swedens biggest social and economic successes took place when Sweden had a laissez-faire economy, and widely distributed wealth preceded the welfare state.

This is the story about how that happened. It is a story that must be learned by countries that want to be where Sweden is today, because if they are to accomplish that feat, they must do what Sweden did back then, not what an already-rich Sweden does now.

Continue reading here:

How Laissez-Faire Made Sweden Rich | Libertarianism.org

In simplest terms the primary difference between libertarianism and other political philosophies involves beliefs about the amount of authority government should have over peoples' personal and business matters.

Liberals want government to focus on doing what is "good," including providing what is often referred to as "social justice." To do that, among other policies, liberals expect government to: a)tax corporations and "wealthy" and "high income" citizens heavily to pay for the social justice programs and b)regulate business and personal behavior to the extent necessary for social justice.

Conservatives want government to control "bad," offensive, and immoral behavior, even if that behavior brings no harm or danger to non-participants. Most often bad is defined based on the prevailing interpretation of Judeo-Christian rules. And, though conservatives tend to express a belief in small government, they usually cannot resist government programs that serve their agenda such as "family values."

Liberals and conservatives both believe that government's mission is some combination of: a)making the world better, b)providing moral leadership, and c)protecting people from themselves. Of course conservatives and liberals tend to disagree about what is good and what is moral. And whether or not you agree with those objectives, you are forced to pay for them with your money and/or your liberty. Ironically you pay for liberal and conservative programs, rules, and regulations -- with your money and your liberty.

Libertarians believe that goodness is voluntary, morality is personal, human nature cannot be legislated away, and only harm to others should be illegal.

And, though libertarians believe in limited government, as described in the U.S. Constitution, they do not want chaos. Libertarians recognize that government has a clear and critical mission: preserving and enhancing liberty. To achieve that goal government must: a)protect citizens from foreign enemies, b)arrest, try, and punish people that harm or endanger others, and c)make some judgment calls when peoples' liberties conflict.

When considering where to locate your politics on the Nolan Chart first ask yourself: "How much should government do to make my preferences mandatory?" Then ask yourself, "How much should government control what I do based on what other people think, believe, or want?"

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Libertarianism versus other Political Perspectives

June 26, 2012 essays

Smith discusses the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and why it so alarmed the defenders of natural rights.

In my last four essays, I discussed the ideas of Thomas Hodgskin. No discussion of Hodgskin would be complete without considering his great classic, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832). But in order to understand and appreciate this book, we need to know something about the doctrine that Hodgskin was criticizing, namely, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). I shall therefore devote this essay to Bentham and then resume my discussion of Hodgskin in the next essay.

Natural-rights theory was the revolutionary doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, being used to justify resistance to unjust laws and revolution against tyrannical governments. This was the main reason why Edmund Burke attacked natural rightsor abstract rights, as he called themso vehemently in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke later condemned the French Constitution of 1791, which exhibited a strong American influence, as a digest of anarchy.

Similarly, Jeremy Bentham, in his criticism of the French Declaration of Rights (1789), called natural rights anarchical fallacies, because (like Burke) he believed that no government can possibly meet the standards demanded by the doctrine of natural rights. Earlier, a liberal critic of the American Revolution, the English clergyman Josiah Tucker, had argued that the Lockean system of natural rights is an universal demolisher of all governments, but not the builder of any.

The fear that defenders of natural rights would foment a revolution in Britain, just as they had in America and France, alarmed British rulers, causing them to institute repressive measures. It is therefore hardly surprising that natural-rights theory went underground, so to speak, during the long war with France. Even after peace returned in 1815 a cloud of suspicion hung over this way of thinking. Natural rights were commonly associated with the French Jacobins Robespierre and others who had instigated the Reign of Terror so a defender of natural rights ran the risk of being condemned as a French sympathizer, a Jacobin, or (worst of all) an anarchist.

Thus did British liberalism don a new face after 1815, as an atmosphere of peace resuscitated the movement for political and economic reforms, and as many middle-class liberals embraced a non-revolutionary foundation for economic and civil liberties. The premier theory in this regard, which would become known as utilitarianism, was developed by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by his Scottish protg James Mill (the father of John Stuart Mill) and by many other disciples.

Bentham did not originate the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number; we find similar expressions in a number of eighteenth-century philosophers, such as Hutcheson, Helvetius and Beccaria. For our purpose, the most significant feature of Benthams utilitarianism was its unequivocal rejection of natural rights.

Natural rights, according to Bentham, are simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts So-called moral and natural rights are mischievous fictions and anarchical fallacies that encourage civil unrest, disobedience and resistance to laws, and revolution against established governments. Only political rights, those positive rights established and enforced by government, have any determinate and intelligible meaning. Rights are the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without lawno rights contrary to the lawno rights anterior to the law.

The significance of Bentham does not lie in his advocacy of social utility, or the general welfare, or the common goodfor this idea, by whatever name it was called, was regarded by many earlier classical liberals as the purpose of legislation, in contradistinction to its standard.

Original post:

Jeremy Benthams Attack on Natural Rights | Libertarianism.org

Anarcho-capitalism (anarcho referring to the lack of coercion and capitalism referring to the liberation of capital, also referred to as free-market anarchism,[2]market anarchism,[3]private-property anarchism,[4]libertarian anarchism,[5] among others (see below) and the short term "ancap") is a political philosophy which advocates the elimination of the state - which distorts market signals, breeds corruption, and institutionalizes monopoly - in favor of individual sovereignty, absence of invasive private property policies and open markets (laissez-faire capitalism). Anarcho-capitalists believe that in the absence of statute (law by decree or legislation), society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market (or what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").[6][7] In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be operated by privately funded competitors rather than centrally through compulsory taxation. Money, along with all other goods and services, would be privately and competitively provided in an open market. Therefore, personal and economic activities under anarcho-capitalism would be regulated by victim-based dispute resolution organizations under tort and contract law, rather than by statute through centrally determined punishment under political monopolies.[8]

Various theorists have espoused legal philosophies similar to anarcho-capitalism. The first person to use the term, however, was Murray Rothbard, who in the mid-20th century synthesized elements from the Austrian School of economics, classical liberalism, and 19th-century American individualist anarchists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker (while rejecting their labor theory of value and the norms they derived from it).[9] A Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted, and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow."[10] This pact would recognize self-ownership and the non-aggression principle (NAP), although methods of enforcement vary.

Anarcho-capitalists are to be distinguished from minarchists, who advocate a small government (often referred to as a 'night-watchman state') limited to the function of individual protection, and from social anarchists who seek to prohibit or regulate the accumulation of property and the flow of capital.

Anarcho-capitalists argue for a society based on the voluntary trade of private property and services (in sum, all relationships not caused by threats or violence, including exchanges of money, consumer goods, land, and capital goods) in order to minimize conflict while maximizing individual liberty and prosperity. However, they also recognize charity and communal arrangements as part of the same voluntary ethic.[11] Though anarcho-capitalists are known for asserting a right to private (individualized or joint non-public) property, some propose that non-state public or community property can also exist in an anarcho-capitalist society.[12] For them, what is important is that it is acquired and transferred without help or hindrance from the compulsory state. Anarcho-capitalist libertarians believe that the only just, and/or most economically beneficial, way to acquire property is through voluntary trade, gift, or labor-based original appropriation, rather than through aggression or fraud.[13]

Anarcho-capitalists see free-market capitalism as the basis for a free and prosperous society. Murray Rothbard said that the difference between free-market capitalism and "state capitalism" is the difference between "peaceful, voluntary exchange" and a collusive partnership between business and government that uses coercion to subvert the free market.[14] (Rothbard is credited with coining the term "Anarcho-capitalism").[15][16] "Capitalism," as anarcho-capitalists employ the term, is not to be confused with state monopoly capitalism, crony capitalism, corporatism, or contemporary mixed economies, wherein market incentives and disincentives may be altered by state action.[17] They therefore reject the state, seeing it as an entity which steals property (through taxation and expropriation), initiates aggression, has a compulsory monopoly on the use of force, uses its coercive powers to benefit some businesses and individuals at the expense of others, creates artificial monopolies, restricts trade, and restricts personal freedoms via drug laws, compulsory education, conscription, laws on food and morality, and the like.

Many anarchists view capitalism as an inherently authoritarian and hierarchical system, and seek the expropriation of private property.[18] There is disagreement between these left anarchists and laissez-faire anarcho-capitalists,[19] as the former generally rejects anarcho-capitalism as a form of anarchism and considers anarcho-capitalism an oxymoron,[20][21][22] while the latter holds that such expropriation is counterproductive to order, and would require a state.[8] On the Nolan chart, anarcho-capitalists are located at the northernmost apex of the libertarian quadrant - since they reject state involvement in both economic and personal affairs.[23]

Laissez-faire anarchists argue that the state is an initiation of force because force can be used against those who have not stolen private property, vandalized private property, assaulted anyone, or committed fraud. Many also argue that subsidized monopolies tend to be corrupt and inefficient. Anarchist theorist Rothbard argued that all government services, including defense, are inefficient because they lack a market-based pricing mechanism regulated by the voluntary decisions of consumers purchasing services that fulfill their highest-priority needs and by investors seeking the most profitable enterprises to invest in.[24] Many anarchists also argue that private defense and court agencies would have to have a good reputation in order to stay in business. Furthermore, Linda and Morris Tannehill argue that no coercive monopoly of force can arise on a truly free market and that a government's citizenry can't desert them in favor of a competent protection and defense agency.[25]

Rothbard bases his philosophy on natural law grounds and also provides economic explanations of why he thinks anarcho-capitalism is preferable on pragmatic grounds as well. David D. Friedman says he is not an absolutist rights theorist but is also "not a utilitarian", however, he does believe that "utilitarian arguments are usually the best way to defend libertarian views".[26]Peter Leeson argues that "the case for anarchy derives its strength from empirical evidence, not theory."[27]Hans-Hermann Hoppe, meanwhile, uses "argumentation ethics" for his foundation of "private property anarchism",[28] which is closer to Rothbard's natural law approach.

I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Rothbard in Society and State

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Anarcho-capitalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I typically describe myself as a libertarian anarchist. People who dont understand what either word means will essentially assume that Im doubly insane. Libertarian is a more friendly word; anarchist is generally perceived to be hostile. Libertarians are usually considered fringe; anarchists are usually considered dangerous. Yet some people, especially people who are libertarian or anarchists, view the words as essentially the same thing. Analytically speaking, it seems there should be a distinction even if the situation likens itself in many cases to a square being a rectangle, but rectangle not necessarily being a square.

Libertarianism is an ethical doctrine. It is concerned with rights. Most commonly this right is referred to as the right to self ownership which includes the right to the product of your labor. For some (probably most) libertarians, this is essentially a faith based, though not necessarily theological, concept. It is taken on faith that men are imbued with this right through nature or that that these rights are implied by the nature of truth, knowledge, existence, reason, etc. What is ironic about this faith based libertarian concept is that it is widely accepted on face value by most participants in modern (classical) liberal societies. It is conservative (not as in American Conservatives, but as in historically organized society) culture that refutes the idea of self ownership by subjecting the behavior of the individual to the enforced law of the moral majority. However, the concept of self ownership is thoroughly ignored by most in society even while they champion it as the bedrock of their modern culture of tolerance. This is because most of society is conservative and Rightist as opposed to liberal and Leftist. This betrayal of self ownership is implied by the aggression of the government that is condoned by the populace. Even commonplace policy positions in support of a state single payer health care system or a central bank or drug prohibition demonstrate the contempt the populace shows to the individual who libertarians argue should hold sole dominion over his own life. The popular opinion demonstrates a fondness for collective ownership of individuals - a collective slavery, if you will - that the scope of control over humanity extends past ones own fingertips to some degree.

The other form of libertarianism holds that libertarianism is a desirable ethical standard because it results in the most beneficial outcomes. Consequentialists do not operate on faithful assumptions about the nature and rights of men. Their considerations are directed towards a scientific standard that observes and deduces that greater degrees of self ownership and liberty result in a flourishing of society in terms of wealth and culture. While not completely comfortable throwing myself into either category (since I do believe in Divinely granted human rights to self ownership), I probably fit best in the consequentialist camp.

The libertarian principle of non-aggression simply is a means of asserting the premise of self ownership. The non-aggression principle states that one may/should not use coercive physical force to violate the self ownership of any other person. The principle clearly understood merely asserts that all actions should be voluntarily untaken. Likewise, toleration is a key characteristic of libertarian ethics. Libertarians are not required to approve of the actions of others, but, so long as those actions are non-coercive, persuasion is the only ethical outlet for change. The use of force is illegitimate for libertarians. Only the initiation of such force justifies the use of force and only as retaliation. What is clear is that libertarians oppose government. Government is any actor, individual, or collective that negates the liberty of self ownership - any entity that claims control over another person or persons. Libertarians generally concede the necessity of institutions that may seek to prevent violations of liberty in advance through the use of defensive tactics. The purest and most cogent form of libertarianism is anarchistic because the existence of a State requires the involuntary submission to pay for the monopoly services of that State, an obvious violation of liberty.

Anarchism has nothing to do with rights or ethics. The concept of philosophical anarchism may, but that is very similar if not the same as libertarianism. Anarchism is a political concept that promotes ideas hostile to the State. The State can essentially be viewed as a self enforcing monopoly with power over a specified although possibly indefinite region. Because governing institutions are most effective at depriving individuals of liberty, they are well equipped to claim dominion over and submission to itself, while aiming to protect itself from competition. The most effective tool at the disposal of a State or a government that wishes to obtain or maintain Statehood is propaganda which to reinforce its Laws through pop justification. Statist institutions maintain their monopoly through force and through the repeated demonization of competing government and defensive services. Usually, States will seek to expand their role from just that of a governing body to one of greater scope ie education, health care, postal services, etc. States are emblematic and self-reinforced by their governing AND governed classes. In monarchy, a single person is put in charge of the lawmaking process. In oligarchy, a few people decide the laws. In aristocracy, the wealthy decide the laws. In a democracy, the law is decided by the majority of people. Anarchism is opposition to all of this. Fundamentally, anarchism is a strain of political anti-authoritarianism that regards the authority of the State governing class as illegitimate. Anarchists seek the abolition of the political State and its resultant law in lieu of a new order of organic law.

The confusion between anarchy and chaos is fair to a degree. With the abolition of the State, the law would be the natural outcome of community, market, and physical dominance. However, this does not distinguish it from the State at all. The society that approves the will of the State determines the legitimate scope of the State. Furthermore, the rule of the State is enforced strictly through physical dominance. In an anarchist society, one could act anti-socially to any degree he pleases and can get away with, but it is unlikely in civil society that he would last very long. The fear that these people would run rampant is unwarranted. The benefits of cooperation discourage anti-social behavior. The cooperative aspects of society have been learned and evolved into to deal with anti-social behavior. So, any man exposing the world to tyranny would not likely have long before voluntary and contractual coalitions of people were to fight back. Even if this were not the case, the pro-State assumption that anti-social, and in this sense I mean both malevolent and incompetent, people will not infiltrate the State apparatus is false. In fact, the opposite is true. The State apparatus, not existing on a competitive level to help ensure quality and customer satisfaction, involves the gradual usurpation of power by the anti-social (of course assuming the originators of the State were not themselves anti-social). The cohesive force in anarchist society is contract and cooperation for mutual benefit. In other words, anarchist society promotes the thriving of the market by leveling the playing field, increasing transparency, and reflecting the demands of society over State.

An interesting way to view the anarchist struggle is to envision a society of political ladders of power. Statist leaders attempt to climb these ladders to gain power and oversight. Anarchists shake the ladders and expose as phony the pretense under which Statists argue they had a right to become lawmakers instead of market participants in the first place. As the evolution of Statism takes hold and the justifications for it become more broad, the privilege of Statism extends to a larger base of people, starting as monarchist and culminating in democratic. Anarchists are there the entire time to shake the ladders and challenge the idea there should be ladders at all.

In summation, libertarians promote voluntary human interactions as morally imperative or advantageous. Anarchists oppose others holding dominion over them. Libertarianism is the liberation of all individuals from the authority of society. Anarchism is the liberation of self from (political) authority. A (pure) libertarian is an anarchist, but an anarchist is not necessarily a libertarian.

Next Up: Why I Am First and Foremost an Anarchist and Less of a Libertarian

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New Kind of Mind: The Difference Between Libertarianism ...

Liberty. Its a simple idea, but its also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. Theyre called libertarians.

If youre new to libertarianism and want to learn more, the items below will give you a good start.

David Boaz

In just 20 minutes, David Boaz introduces libertarianism, explores the ideas behind it, and the policies it leads to. If you want to know what libertarianism is all about, this is the place to start.

November 3, 2011 Essays

Aaron Ross Powell

Libertarianismits theory, its practiceis an awfully big topic. This reading list gives you a place to start. A combination of newcomers and established classics, these books offer accessible introductions to variety of libertarian thought, from philosophy to history to economics.

April 5, 2012 Columns

Aaron Ross Powell

In this essay, Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus explain how big government not only makes us poorer and less free, but also undermines our moral character and turns neighbor against neighbor.

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What is Libertarianism? | A Libertarianism.org Guide

Definitions, Principles and History What is a libertarian? What do libertarians want to do? Where does libertarianism come from? How do libertarians differ from "liberals"? How do libertarians differ from "conservatives"? Do libertarians want to abolish the government? What's the difference between small-l libertarian and big-l Libertarian? How would libertarians fund vital public services? What would a libertarian "government" do and how would it work? Politics and Consequences What is the libertarian position on abortion? What is the libertarian position on minority, gay & women's rights? What is the libertarian position on gun control? What is the libertarian position on art, pornography and censorship? What is the libertarian position on the draft? What is the libertarian position on the "drug war"? What would libertarians do about concentrations of corporate power? Standard Criticisms But what about the environment? Who speaks for the trees? Don't strong property rights just favor the rich? Would libertarians just abandon the poor? What about national defense? Don't you believe in cooperating? Shouldn't people help each other? Prospects How can I get involved? Is libertarianism likely to get a practical test in my lifetime? Resources Online Books Magazines Libertarian political and service organizations

There are a number of standard questions about libertarianism that have been periodically resurfacing in the politics groups for years. This posting attempts to answer some of them. I make no claim that the answers are complete, nor that they reflect a (nonexistent) unanimity among libertarians; the issues touched on here are tremendously complex. This posting will be useful, however, if it successfully conveys the flavor of libertarian thought and gives some indication of what most libertarians believe.

The word means approximately "believer in liberty". Libertarians believe in individual conscience and individual choice, and reject the use of force or fraud to compel others except in response to force or fraud. (This latter is called the "Non-Coercion Principle" and is the one thing all libertarians agree on.)

Help individuals take more control over their own lives. Take the state (and other self-appointed representatives of "society") out of private decisions. Abolish both halves of the welfare/warfare bureaucracy (privatizing real services) and liberate the 7/8ths of our wealth that's now soaked up by the costs of a bloated and ineffective government, to make us all richer and freer. Oppose tyranny everywhere, whether it's the obvious variety driven by greed and power-lust or the subtler, well-intentioned kinds that coerce people "for their own good" but against their wills.

Modern libertarianism has multiple roots. Perhaps the oldest is the minimal-government republicanism of the U.S.'s founding revolutionaries, especially Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the "classical liberals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were another key influence. More recently, Ayn Rand's philosophy of "ethical egoism" and the Austrian School of free-market capitalist economics have both contributed important ideas. Libertarianism is alone among 20th-century secular radicalisms in owing virtually nothing to Marxism.

Once upon a time (in the 1800s), "liberal" and "libertarian" meant the same thing; "liberals" were individualist, distrustful of state power, pro-free- market, and opposed to the entrenched privilege of the feudal and mercantilist system. After 1870, the "liberals" were gradually seduced (primarily by the Fabian socialists) into believing that the state could and should be used to guarantee "social justice". They largely forgot about individual freedom, especially economic freedom, and nowadays spend most of their time justifying higher taxes, bigger government, and more regulation. Libertarians call this socialism without the brand label and want no part of it.

For starters, by not being conservative. Most libertarians have no interest in returning to an idealized past. More generally, libertarians hold no brief for the right wing's rather overt militarist, racist, sexist, and authoritarian tendencies and reject conservative attempts to "legislate morality" with censorship, drug laws, and obnoxious Bible-thumping. Though libertarians believe in free-enterprise capitalism, we also refuse to stooge for the military-industrial complex as conservatives are wont to do.

Libertarians want to abolish as much government as they practically can. About 3/4 are "minarchists" who favor stripping government of most of its accumulated power to meddle, leaving only the police and courts for law enforcement and a sharply reduced military for national defense (nowadays some might also leave special powers for environmental enforcement). The other 1/4 (including the author of this FAQ) are out-and-out anarchists who believe that "limited government" is a delusion and the free market can provide better law, order, and security than any goverment monopoly.

Also, current libertarian political candidates recognize that you can't demolish a government as large as ours overnight, and that great care must be taken in dismantling it carefully. For example, libertarians believe in open borders, but unrestricted immigration now would attract in a huge mass of welfare clients, so most libertarians would start by abolishing welfare programs before opening the borders. Libertarians don't believe in tax-funded education, but most favor the current "parental choice" laws and voucher systems as a step in the right direction.

Progress in freedom and prosperity is made in steps. The Magna Carta, which for the first time put limits on a monarchy, was a great step forward in human rights. The parliamentary system was another great step. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which affirmed that even a democratically-elected government couldn't take away certain inalienable rights of individuals, was probably the single most important advance so far. But the journey isn't over.

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The Libertarianism FAQ - CatB

In a recent post , famed economist Paul Krugman claims that there basically arent any libertarians out there because public opinion breaks down neatly along a liberal-conservative spectrum where almost everyone who favors government intervention in the economy is a social liberal and almost everyone who is skeptical of it is a social conservative. But Krugman cites no data to support his conclusion. And, in fact, extensive survey data contradicts it.

The relevant evidence has been catalogued by David Boaz, polling guru Nate Silver (who is far from being a libertarian himself), and economist Bryan Caplan. Depending on what measures you use, anywhere from about 10% to as many as 44 percent of Americans hold generally libertarian views in the sense that they favor strict limits on government power in both the economic and social spheres. I believe the lower estimates are more credible than the higher ones. But even the former are still a substantial fraction of the population.

Most of these people arent as consistent and thoroughgoing in their views as libertarian intellectuals are. But the same can be said of most conservatives and liberals in the general public relative to intellectual advocates of those viewpoints. At least within the Republican Party (which is a major focus of Krugmans post), the percentage of libertarians is rapidly increasing; younger Republicans are much more libertarian on social issues than their elders, while still being skeptical of government intervention in the economy.

Krugman also claims that almost no one holds views that are the opposite of libertarianism: combining social conservatism with support for extensive government intervention in the economy (he calls such people hardhats, though public opinion researchers more commonly call them populists). This too is clearly false. As Boaz and Caplan note, surveys show a substantial number of people who fall into that category. In recent years, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum both ran campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination on such a platform, and both attracted substantial support. Perhaps even more telling, George W. Bushs policies as president included a combination of social conservatism and the biggest new welfare state program in some forty years, as well as a major expansion of federal government involvement in education. Bush and his advisers clearly believed there were enough hardhats out there to make this program politically viable. In Europe, the combination of social conservatism and economic interventionism is even more common than in the US, as witness the recent resurgence of parties such as Frances National Front, which combine right-wing nationalism with support for a large welfare state. As a libertarian myself, Im no fan of hardhat/populist ideologies. But I cant deny that there are large numbers of people who support them.

Admittedly, Krugmans claim might be right if we interpret his framework literally. He defines libertarians as people who combine social liberalism with the view that there should be no social insurance. As David Boaz notes in his critique, the latter is an extreme definition that would exclude such prominent libertarian thinkers as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek (both of whom were willing to accept a strictly limited welfare state); it would also rule out the vast majority of those people who hold roughly libertarian views in the general population. But if Krugman means that definition literally, it would also prove there are no conservatives either. After all, very few people who consider themselves to be conservatives favor the complete abolition of the welfare state, as opposed to its restriction to levels smaller than that favored by the left. In the 2012 election, the GOP even ran on a platform attacking Obama for supposedly cutting Medicare too much.

Its also possible to try to justify Krugmans claim by arguing that most of those people who hold seemingly libertarian views havent thought carefully about their implications and are not completely consistent in their beliefs. This is likely true. But it is also true of most conservatives and liberals. Political ignorance and irrationality are very common across the political spectrum and only a small minority of voters think carefully about their views and make a systematic attempt at consistency. Libertarian-leaning voters are not an exception to this trend. But it is worth noting that, controlling for other variables, increasing political knowledge tends to make people more libertarian in their views than they would be otherwise.

Finally, Krugman is wrong to suggest that the difference between supporters and opponents of more extensive government intervention in the economy is solely or even primarily about social insurance that breaks down traditional structures of authority. In many places, early expansions of government intervention in the economy were in part intended to reinforce rather than break down traditional structures of authority, which is one reason why it was often pioneered by right-wingers like Otto von Bismarck. More recently, there are have been many forms of government intervention that tend to benefit the relatively affluent and and well-connected interest groups at the expense of the poor. If you dont want to take my word for it, read Krugmans own recent columns on zoning and farm subsidies.

In his critique of Krugmans post, Bryan Caplan suggests that Krugmans neglect of readily available evidence in this case gives us reason to doubt his reliability more generally. I dont go quite that far. As I see it, this is yet another case where a pundit gets into trouble by pontificating on issues outside their expertise.

Even if you are a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist like Krugman, its easy to go wrong in commenting on a subject you may not have much knowledge about. Moreover, in dealing with such issues, we are more likely to act like political fans and default to simplistic frameworks that make it easy to feel good about our own views, while dismissing those of the opposition.

In this case, postulating a simplistic one-dimensional distribution of political opinion enables Krugman to claim that virtually all of the people who oppose his views on government intervention in the economy do not, in reality, love liberty, and also to ignore the fact that many people who endorse a large welfare state also have illiberal social views. These assumptions make it easy to divide the world into good guys who want to break down traditional forms of authority and bad guys who want to maintain them. But, however comforting it might be, this approach fails to capture the true distribution of political opinion.

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Volokh Conspiracy: Paul Krugman claims there basically arent any libertarians

Indiana #39;s "Religious Freedom" Bill: Libertarianism Won Back in 1972
Most moral reforms suggested by the DNC and fiscal reforms proposed by the GOP were suggested in the 70s and 80s by libertarians. People forget that the first openly gay presidential candidate...

By: Styxhexenhammer666

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Indiana's "Religious Freedom" Bill: Libertarianism Won Back in 1972 - Video