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...

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...

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 ...