The Humble Libertarian original

Elizabeth Anderson recently coined the term “ contract feudalism” to describe the increasing power of employers over employees’ lives outside the workplace. According to Anderson, one of the benefits that the worker traditionally received in return for his submission to the bosses’ authority on the job was sovereignty over the rest of his life in the “real world” outside of work. Under the terms of this Taylorist bargain, the worker surrendered his sense of craftsmanship and control over his own work in return for the right to express his “real” personality through consumption in the part of his life that still belonged to him. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Libertarian Alliance . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of past state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the structural foundations of the present system. The extent to which present-day concentrations of wealth and corporate power are the legacy of past injustice, I call the subsidy of history. The first and probably the most important subsidy of history is land theft, by which peasant majorities were deprived of their just property rights and turned into tenants forced to pay rent based on the artificial “property” titles of state-privileged elites. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Freeman Online . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Pag...

There are lots of good folks out there working hard to advance the ideas and practice of liberty. They deserve our support. Here are a few of those causes. Please send a few bucks in their direction as a quick and easy way to live your principles and advance a more just world for all of us. The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) is a libertarian media project. C4SS employs some of the smartest folks in libertarian circles to produce libertarian media, mostly in a written format suitable for op-eds. Read the rest of George Donnelly's article at Arm your Mind for Liberty . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

A free nation is not necessarily a Capitalist nation. As we seek to describe the institutions of a free nation we must consider all the alternatives. In the United States, libertarians tend to associate the idea of an economy based on voluntary relations with cash-based, for-profit enterprises. Other voluntary economic relations are possible. In addition to enterprises based on private monetary profit, there are at least two others which do not use this approach. one is the system based on charitable donations, usually of cash. The other is the system based on the charitable donation of labor. It is often assumed by libertarians in America that, were it not for violent intervention by government or by criminals, most economic activity would be handled through profit-making business relations. This seems more a reflection of the history of the American economy than of economic analysis. It is far from true that philosophical libertarianism requires any inherent bias towards profit-orien...

Anarchists want to abolish the state, with all functions now performed by the state being performed by voluntary associations. So naturally, we object to “public employment” — the funding of services through compulsory taxation — in principle. The question is, how do we get there from here? Some things currently done by tax-funded government employees are legitimate functions that would still exist in some form in a stateless society. Mail delivery is one example. Education would no doubt be different in many ways in a free society — no compulsory attendance laws, and no processing of human resources for the corporate state. But teaching children is an important function in any society, and much that public school teachers do now would probably carry over without much change. Even some of what police do, like stopping violent crime and apprehending aggressors, would still be necessary — but without laws against victimless crimes, or any of the thuggish behavior regularly chronicled ...

“Government shutdown.” For sheer beauty, I can’t think of another two-word phrase in the English language that even comes close. And, as American media breathlessly relate, that’s what we’re going to get come March 4th unless Congress and the Obama administration manage a meeting of the minds on spending. Well, no, not really. But kind of. Sort of. In a way. Read the rest of Thomas L. Knapp's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America. It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense. Because so many of its people, however, have come from the right there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private. Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery Read the rest of Karl Hess' article at The Ludwig von Mises Institute . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

In a Feb. 15 op-ed for the New York Times, three representatives of the Authors Guild — Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro — raise the question “Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?” In my opinion they have it just about backward. They’d have been better off asking whether the Bard would have survived copyright. In the course of this piece, the authors manage to recycle just about every pro-copyright cliche and strawman known to humankind. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Karl Hess's brilliant and challenging article in this issue raises a problem of specifics that ranges further than the libertarian movement. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of "professional" anti-Communists in this country. Yet not one of these gentry, in the course of their fulminations, has come up with a specific plan for de-Communization. Suppose, for example, that Messers. Brezhnev and Co. become converted to the principles of a free society; they than [sic] ask our anti-Communists, all right, how do we go about de-socializing? What could our anti-Communists offer them? The homesteading principle means that the way that unowned property gets into private ownership is by the principle that this property justly belongs to the person who finds, occupies, and transforms it by his labor. This is clear in the case of the pioneer and virgin land. But what of the case of stolen property? Read the rest of Murray Rothbard's article at The Ludwig von Mis...

Tonight I want to talk about an essay that Rothbard wrote just over forty years ago, an essay that had an enormous impact on my own intellectual development. In 1965 Rothbard published "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," the keynote editorial in the first issue of a magazine he'd just founded, also called Left & Right — the forerunner of his later Libertarian Forum.[1] (By the way, the complete runs of both Left & Right and Libertarian Forum are available in all their fascinating glory on Mises.org.)[2] Written during the early years of the Vietnam War, as the New Left was emerging and the old coalition between libertarians and conservatives was beginning to fray, Rothbard's article placed the libertarian movement in a historical context, tracing its past and possible future, and called on libertarians to gain a better self-understanding, and consequently to rethink their political affiliations and alliances. Read the rest of Roderick T. Long's ...

There’s a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time (for this is how stories of this kind should begin), back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez-faire. But then there arose a movement to subject business to regulatory restraint in the interests of workers and consumers, a movement that culminated in the presidencies of Wilson and the two Roosevelts. This story comes in both left-wing and right-wing versions, depending on whether the government is seen as heroically rescuing the poor and weak from the rapacious clutches of unrestrained corporate power, or as unfairly imposing burdensome socialistic fetters on peaceful and productive enterprise. But both versions agree on the central narrative: a century of laissez-faire, followed by a flurry of anti-business legislation. Every part of this story is false. Read the rest of Roderick T. Long's article at Praxeology (dot) net . James Tuttle , Regular Columni...

At first glance, the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) might strike you as an odd subject for a consideration by libertarians. Most self-described free market libertarians and market anarchists are more likely to condemn unions than to praise them. But in a stateless society, or at least in a society where labor relations are unregulated by the state, the Wobblies’ model of labor struggle is likely to be the most viable alternative to the kinds of state-certified and state-regulated unions we’re familiar with. And for those of us in the libertarian movement who don’t think “God” is spelled B-O-S-S, or instinctively identify with employers and gripe about how hard it is to get good help these days, the question of how labor might negotiate for better terms is probably of direct personal interest. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at On ALLiance at Rational Review . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

All men are created equal. When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, set out to enunciate the philosophical principles underlying the American Revolution—the principles of '76, as later generations would call them—that's the one he put down first, as the foundation and justification of all the rest. Equality—not, as one might expect, liberty. Read the rest of Roderick T. Long's article at The Ludwig von Mises Institute . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

One question that’s frequently raised about market anarchism: How would you prevent the economy from being taken over by monopolies, if we didn’t have anti-trust regulations and other restrictions on corporate abuses of power? Without anti-trust laws, the firms in an oligopoly or cartel could simply lower prices when a competitor tried to enter the market, and then raise them again when the competitor went out of business. Oligopoly firms could also, it’s argued, use their market power to restrict competition in other ways, like making exclusivity contracts to prevent a would-be entrant to the same industry from obtaining the suppliers and outlets it needed to function. The problem with this argument is that it assumes a great deal of what it needs to prove. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore Time itself, is against him, and hence the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and Communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative's rather bizarre short-run optimism; for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with Communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the Practical Man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day. Pessimism, however, both short-run ...

The general lines of Ludwig von Mises’s rational-calculation argument are well known. A market in factors of production is necessary for pricing production inputs so that a planner may allocate them rationally. The problem has nothing to do either with the volume of data or with agency problems. The question, rather, as Peter Klein put it, is “[h]ow does the principal know what to tell the agent to do?” This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation under interventionism, or state capitalism. Read the rest of Kevin carson's article at The Freeman Online . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Uprisings against notably authoritarian regimes, and resistance to attacks on labor power in Wisconsin show that the general public has power when they choose to use it. How powerful they can become and how beneficial their power will be rests on how much they continue to believe in authority. A conscious populace can discard a system that does not work for them. The current political system solidly maintains the power of politicians and their supporters over the general populace. Office-holders and their corporate partners make deals with each other to keep their faction in charge – and the maintenance of a stable power structure is essential to enabling them to rule. Fortunately the system is composed of people, and those people are bound by the political necessities of good appearances, by rivalries among rulers, and by the consciences of the enforcers. All the weapons money can buy are only as effective as the individuals operating them. Read the rest of Darian Worden's article...

Libertarianism needs a theory of class. This claim may meet with resistance among some libertarians. A few will say: "The analysis of society in terms of classes and class struggles is a specifically Marxist approach, resting on assumptions that libertarians reject. Why should we care about class?" A greater number will say: "We recognize that class theory is important, but libertarianism doesn't need such a theory, because it already has a perfectly good one." The first objection is simply mistaken. While the prominence of the Marxist theory of classes may have left rival approaches obscured in its shadow, class analysis is thousands of years older than Marx; and in Marx's own day the Marxist version of class analysis was only one of a number of competing and very different theories, including several far more congenial to libertarianism. The problem of class is one that faces any serious political theory, Marxist or otherwise. Read the rest of Roderick T. ...

Doug French, in an article for the Mises.org website — a site, named for the conservative Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose politics tend to fall on what’s conventionally regarded as the Right — makes some points about the current trend toward mergers and acquisitions that sound an awful lot like what the Marxists at Monthly Review have been saying for a long time. But they’re both right. In “Merger Monday and the Destruction of Wealth” (Feb. 15), French argues that the uptick in mergers and acquisitions is occurring because corporations are loaded down with cash burning a hole in their balance sheets, with no productive outlet to invest it in. That’s pretty much what the Monthly Review folks have been saying since the 1970s. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

In his short review of The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Timothy Virkkala (May 1999) praises Tim S. Gray's discussion of the great classical liberal's methodology as a synthesis of 'individualist' and 'holist' approaches to social theory. But Virkkala remarks "This method--I'm tempted to call it 'dialectical,' but Spencer's prose and position seem so far from Hegel's that the term is almost indecent--confuses many readers. But it is surely his strength. Gray is one of the few Spencer scholars to see this method as fundamental, and to present sophisticated analyses of Spencer's syntheses." It is unfortunate that Virkkala refuses to give into his temptation, because crucially significant aspects of Herbert Spencer's work are, indeed, dialectical. Read the rest of Chris Matthew Sciabarra's article at New York University (dot) edu . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website