The Humble Libertarian original

“We Are the Future Rally” at the Sun Dome at the University of South Florida. ( Andrew Harnik/The Washington Time s By: Eric Sharp   The Sunday before the 2012 RNC, a unique political event took place. "We Are The Future Rally" with Ron Paul drew an overflow crowd of more than 10,000 young people. While the GOP Establishment was busy pushing Ron Paul's delegates to the margins with rule changes , the R3VOLUTION was making other plans. "We Are The Future" isn't just a name, it is a declaration. What we are looking at is a "libertarian long-march ", to borrow a Marxist term (it's pay back for stealing the word liberal). What this means is that the Ron Paul Revolutionaries are not going to quietly assimilate into the machine and become good cogs that do what they are told. They will " throw their bodies upon the gears ". They will keep pushing every way they can until a free society is achieved.  The method of each activist is ...

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 ...