Abstract: Joseph Newhard (2017) argues that a libertarian anarchist society would be at a serious military disadvantage if it extended the nonaggression principle to include potential foreign invaders. He goes so far as to recommend cultivating the ability to launch a nuclear attack on foreign cities. In contrast, I argue that the free society would derive its strength from a total commitment to property rights and the protection of innocent life. Both theory and history suggest that a free society would be capable of defending itself, and indeed that it would probably use other means to avoid military conflict altogether.

Keywords: private defense, national defense, nonaggression principle, minimum deterrence, nonviolence

JEL Codes: H41, H56, K40

Download PDF: “Libertarian Law and Military Defense”

Abstract: It is a commonplace of the current learned diagnoses that modern technology has all but abolished the resistances of nature to the physical production and transportation of goods. Distribution is regarded as less well developed—as the open or broken link between our needs and their ful­fillment, between desire and gratification. To concede this should suggest not that the current processes of distribution should be attacked or abolished but rather that they should be examined and understood, for it should be remem­bered that distribution, for all its difficulties, does at least measurably take place and, like any other phenomena, it can be understood only in terms of its functioning and carrying on and never in terms of its non-functioning or failure to do so.

Keywords: Distribution, market process, ownership, land, productivity

Download PDF: “What is Distribution in the Market Process?”

Abstract: Unlike economists, it is unusual for political scientists to discuss first principles of our discipline. My purpose in this article is to make a small contribution toward remedying this situation by calling to mind a few fundamentals about government that all students of politics should know. Drawing on the work of classical, modern and contemporary scholarship, and my own empirical analysis of 700 elections in 50 democracies, of more than a dozen dictatorships of various ideological cast, and of the history of two cases with which I am most familiar—the United States and Cuba—I identify five elements of politics, two basic compounds or regime types, and six scientific “laws” that govern their operations.

Keywords: Political science, laws of politics, democracy, dictatorship, United States, Cuba

Download PDF: “Some Principles of Politics”

Abstract: In a new book-length treatment, Tara Smith, who has written extensively on the intersections of Objectivist philosophy and law, explains how judicial review, a feature of non-Objectivist jurisprudence, should function in a truly Objectivist legal system. Divided into two halves, Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System first sets forth what Objectivism is and how Objectivists understand law. Of particular importance in this regard, Smith stresses, is the written constitution, which Smith, following the logical premises of Objectivism, calls “bedrock legal authority.” In the second half of the book, Smith moves to narrower considerations of judicial review proper. Smith’s first task in those sections is to critique the “failures” of “the reigning accounts” to understand judicial review. After dispensing with the various mistaken versions of judicial review as she sees them, Smith defines Objectivist judicial review before providing a handful of examples of how such a process might work in “contemporary conditions.”

Keywords: Objectivism, judicial review, common law, natural law, rule of law

Download PDF: “Book Review: Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System“

Abstract: Jan Narveson criticizes the view expressed in my Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World that there is no orthodox libertarian position on the ethics of abortion. He asserts that fetuses lack the defining characteristics of personhood, and thus are ineligible for what he terms “intrinsic” rights under his, and presumably any other, plausible libertarian theory. My counterargument is threefold: (i) Narveson’s contractarianism can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the pro-life perspective; (ii) because his theory permits no principled distinction between the moral status of third trimester fetuses and newborns, the contrary reading of his social contract produces a result that is implausible and even repellent; and (iii) even if his version of contractarianism does imply a unique, aggressively pro-choice stance on abortion, there are competing libertarian theories that are receptive to pro-life views.

Keywords: Abortion, natural rights, newborn rights, child rights, parenting

Download PDF: “Libertarianism and Abortion: A Reply to Professor Narveson”

Abstract: This paper defends the Blockian Proviso against its critics, Kinsella in particular, and interprets it as a law of non-contradiction in the theory of just property rights. I demonstrate that one may not lawfully appropriate in such a way as to forestall others from appropriating an unowned land because such appropriation would result in conflict-generating norms, and conflict-generating norms are not rationally justifiable and just norms. The Blockian Proviso, which precludes forestalling, operates therefore at the level of original appropriation and determines, according to the homestead principle of justice in first acquisition, what may and what may not be lawfully appropriated. Hence, the Blockian Proviso is not an add-on to the homestead principle but part and parcel thereof.

Keywords: Blockian Proviso, forestalling, homestead principle, property rights, conflict avoidance, law of non-contradiction, compossibility of property rights

Download PDF: “The Blockian Proviso and the Rationality of Property Rights”

Abstract: Ayn Rand and Friedrich A. Hayek were two of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century in the effort to turn the current of opinion away from collectivism and toward what could be called classical liberalism or libertarianism. The purpose of this pedagogical article is to explain, describe, and compare the essential ideas of these great advocates of liberty in language that permits generally educated readers to understand, recognize, and appreciate their significance. It that sense, it hopes to make the the ideas of Rand and Hayek accessible to a wide range of readers through the use of clear explanations. To aid in this endeavor, the article concludes with the presentation and discussion of a table that summarizes and compares their ideas on a variety of problems in and dimensions of philosophy and social science. The target audience of this essay includes educated laypeople and college students, many of whom may decide to read and study the original works of these prominent theorists of a free society after being exposed to their essential ideas.

Keywords: Ayn Rand, Friedrich A. Hayek, Objectivism, Austrian Economics, libertarianism

Download PDF: “Ayn Rand and Friedrich A. Hayek: A Comparison”

Abstract: The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented productivity in the world, occasioned by the widespread development and practice of contract and voluntary exchange. For the first time in history, man began to cease, like other animals, to be essentially predatory on his environment, despoiling and exhausting it, and began instead to make it progressively more productive and more able to support his own kind. Thomas Robert Malthus lived well into this productive century, but his thinking remained in the past, as did that of his contemporary, David Ricardo, and his successors, the Classical Economists, including even J.S. Mill. In this essay Spencer Heath carefully refutes Ricardo’s argument in support of Malthus and stresses the importance of understanding man not in terms of his animal nature, but in terms of his uniquely human potential; that is, his evolving, creative nature.

Keywords: Thomas Malthus, Ricardo’s law of rent, the golden rule, property in land, social evolution, organic society

Download PDF: “Malthus’s Doctrine in Historical Perspective”

Abstract: Minimum deterrence, though consistent with the nonaggression principle, is inadequate to deter states from invading anarchist territory and provides inadequate means of territorial defense when deterrence fails. In order to be effective, and thus attract clients, private defense agencies may want to adopt a military posture that incorporates first-strike counterforce and second-strike countervalue capabilities. To this end, they must acquire weapons of mass destruction—including tactical and strategic nuclear weapons—and long-range delivery vehicles capable of penetrating deep into enemy territory. They must also decline to extend the nonaggression principle to states and individuals outside the voluntary defense network. Paradoxically, advertising such a posture while possessing a nuclear arsenal will save lives on both sides by minimizing the probability that anarchists must ever wage a defensive war at all.

Keywords: private defense, national defense, nonagression principle, minimum deterrence, nuclear weapons

Download PDF: “Minimum Deterrence as a Vulnerability in the Market Provision of National Defense”

Abstract: Lysander Spooner has become one of the most influential anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century, but the details of his transition toward anarchism are unclear. This paper explores this question. I argue that although Spooner was a natural-rights Jeffersonian prior to the Civil War, it is clear he was not yet an anarchist. His writings on the constitutionality of slavery demonstrate the seeds of anarchism, but also show his willingness to effect change through the legislative process. After the Dred Scott ruling, he became markedly more radical, but the American Civil War was the catalyst for his embrace of the anarchism for which he is known today. More specifically, I contend that Spooner’s 1864 letter to Charles Sumner is the first written expression of his anarchism, a position that was retroactively explained through his No Treason pamphlets.

Keywords: Lysander Spooner, anarchism, abolitionism, natural rights, American Civil War, No Treason, Dred Scott

Download PDF: “From Abolitionist to Anarchist: Lysander Spooner’s Radical Transition through the Civil War”

Abstract: It is widely believed that John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) to protest the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War.  The central thesis of this paper is that Britain’s war debt problem, not German reparations, led Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace.  His main goal at the Paris Peace Conference was to restore Britain’s economic hegemony by solving the war debt problem he helped to create.  We show that Keynes was responsible for many of the most notorious aspects of the reparations section of the Treaty, and he crafted his proposals in light of mercantilist theories designed to keep Germany relatively poor after the war.  His desperate desire to solve Britain’s war debt problem, mixed with his mercantilist ideas, inspired him to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Keywords: John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, First World War, Treaty of Versailles, reparations

JEL Codes: B17, E12, N14

Download PDF: “Keynes and the First World War”

Abstract: Thomas C. Leonard presents an intellectual history of the Progressive Era from the perspective of economists. It is hard to understate the influence this group had in developing Progressive ideas. Leonard brilliantly details how Progressive economists wielded enormous influence not only in spreading ideas about traditional economic concepts, but also ideas and theories that influenced political and civil liberties. For example, the Progressives gave us the social science professor, the scholar-activist, social worker, muckraking journalist, and expert government advisor. All of these reform-vocations, according to Leonard, sought to replace the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of the administrative state. In short, Leonard’s book is a must-read for everyone remotely interested in political economy.

Keywords: progressivism, race, eugenics, American economics, political economy

Download Paper: “Book Review: Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era“

Abstract: Libertarian Quandaries is a slim volume of tight reasoning that makes a resolute case for libertarianism. Libertarianism is “the social philosophy that identifies individual liberty as the most fundamental social value, and by extension treats moral cooperation as the only morally permissible form of social interaction.” More specifically, the book is a compendium of concise rebuttals to commonplace counterarguments advanced against libertarianism. It attempts to show that libertarianism withstands wide-ranging criticisms in principle, but also that it can be implemented in practice. It does an admirable job in this regard. The book is not, however, aimed at lightweight lovers of liberty. The content—conveyed in carefully crafted phrases—makes non-trivial intellectual demands on the reader.

Keywords: Aggression, lifeboat situations, moral tragedy, social safety net, market anarchy

Download Paper: “Book Review: Libertarian Quandaries“

Abstract: This note evaluates the claim of Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the advent of strong states led to a decline in violence. I test this claim in the modern context, measuring the effect of the strength of government in lower-income countries on reductions in homicide rates. The strength of government is measured using Polity IV, Worldwide Governance Indicators, and government consumption as a percentage of GDP. The data do not support Pinker’s hypothesis.

Keywords: homicide, political institutions, Steven Pinker

JEL Codes: D74, H11

Download Paper: “Are Strong States Key to Reducing Violence? A Test of Pinker”

Abstract: Arguments for handgun ownership typically appeal to handguns’ value as an effective means of self-protection. Against this, critics argue that private ownership of handguns leads to more social harm than it prevents. Both sides make powerful arguments, and in the absence of a reasonable consensus regarding the merits of gun ownership, David DeGrazia proposes two gun control policies that ‘reasonable disputants on both sides of the issue have principled reasons to accept.’ These policies hinge on his claim that ‘an even-handed examination of the available evidence casts considerable doubt on the thesis that handgun ownership enables more adequate self-defense and physical security in the home.’ We challenge DeGrazia’s ‘moderate gun control’ policies on both philosophical and empirical grounds. Philosophically, we show that the arguments he gives in support of his proposed gun-control measures are too narrow and incomplete to warrant his conclusions about what kind of gun control there ought to be, even if he is right about the empirical evidence. Empirically, we argue that a truly even-handed examination of the evidence makes DeGrazia’s claim that gun ownership is on average self-defeating much less plausible than he supposes. Our conclusion is that DeGrazia has failed to establish his claim that gun ownership is self-defeating and therefore has no case for the gun-control policies he suggests.

Keywords: gun control, handguns, self-defense, concealed carry, homicide, suicide

Download Paper: “Against Moderate Gun Control”

Abstract: How accurate is Kevin Carson’s characterization of “freed” markets? Carson, a left-libertarian “free market anti-capitalist,” portrays free markets as so radically different from actually-existing markets that they are almost unrecognizable. In The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto, he provides an alternative history of industrialization that argues that large-scale industrial organization and production are largely creatures of state intervention and that truly free markets would be characterized mainly by small-scale production for local markets. This paper evaluates Carson’s narrative in order to determine whether his vision of the freed market is credible. I find that Carson fails to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that, but for government intervention, national markets would only exist for a few goods. Furthermore, many of the features he believes freed markets would possess are based on fallacious views of competition, knowledge, capital, and entrepreneurship.

Keywords: Left-libertarianism, freed market, anti-capitalist, mutualism

JEL Codes: L1, L11, P1, P12, B5

Download Paper: “Kevin Carson and the Freed Market: Is His Left-Libertarian Vision Plausible?”

Abstract: I take issue with the view that libertarian theory does not imply any particular stand on abortion. Liberty is the absence of interference with people’s wills—interests, wishes, and desires. Only entities that have such are eligible for the direct rights of libertarian theory. Foetuses do not; and if aborted, there is then no future person whose rights are violated. Hence the “liberal” view of abortion: women (especially) may decide whether to bear the children they have conceived. Birth is a good dividing line between the freedom to abort and the point at which society is permitted to take an interest. Once born, children detach from their mothers; no invasion of their bodies is necessary to separate them. Yet some ways of bringing them up can have a negative impact on society. There is a thus legitimate interest in protecting ourselves from the results of truly bad parenting.

Keywords: Abortion, natural rights, newborn rights, child rights, parenting

Download Paper: “Resolving the Debate on Libertarianism and Abortion”

Abstract: This study steps beyond the traditional arguments of feminism and examines homebirth from a libertarian perspective. It addresses the debate over homebirth and midwifery, which includes the use of direct-entry midwives as well as the philosophical implications of individual autonomy expressed through consumer choice. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that the medical establishment gains economic and political control primarily through medical licensing, and uses the state to undermine personal freedom as it advances a government-enforced monopoly on birth. At the same time, empirical studies have established a substantial record of high safety and low medical complication rates for homebirth as compared to hospital births. Ultimately, the state’s restriction on medical choices is incompatible with the nonaggression principle and voluntarism, and therefore, with libertarianism.

Keywords: homebirth, libertarianism, medical licensing, midwifery, voluntarism

Download Paper: “Homebirth, Midwives, and the State: A Libertarian Look”

Abstract: Matt Zwolinski argues that libertarians “should see the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)—a guarantee that all members will receive income regardless of why they need it—as an essential part of an ideally just libertarian system.” He regards the satisfaction of a Lockean proviso—a stipulation that individuals may not be rendered relevantly worse off by the uses and appropriations of private property—as a necessary condition for a private property system’s being just. BIG is to be justified precisely because it prevents proviso violations. We deem Zwolinski’s argument a “Direct Proviso-Based Argument” for BIG. We argue that because this sort of argument for the BIG is in tension with other principles libertarians within the Lockean tradition hold dear, specifically prohibitions on seizing legitimately held property and forcing individuals to labor, the Direct Proviso-Based Argument fails.

Keywords: Basic Income Guarantee, Lockean proviso, Robert Nozick, income distribution, welfare

Download Paper: “The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income Guarantee: an Assessment of the Direct Proviso-Based Route”

Abstract: This essay offers a standard by which to assess the feasibility of market anarchism. In anarchist thought, the concept of feasibility concerns both the ability and the willingness of private defense agencies to liberate their clients from state oppression. I argue that the emergence of a single stateless pocket of effective, privately-provided defense for a “reasonable” length of time is sufficient to affirm feasibility. I then consider the failure of private defense agencies to achieve even this standard. Furthermore, I identify five possible explanations for the conspicuous absence of private defense agencies. These explanations are entrepreneurial, technological, or economic in nature, or result from a lack of consumer demand or a lack of incentive for violence specialists to refrain from aggression. Of these, only an economic deficiency renders anarchism intrinsically unworkable.

Keywords: market anarchism, private defense agencies, private production of law, inevitability of government

Download Paper: “On the Conspicuous Absence of Private Defense”

Abstract: Society, based on contract and voluntary exchange, is evolving, but remains only partly developed. Goods and services that meet the needs of individuals, such as food, clothing, and shelter, are amply produced and distributed through the market process. However, those that meet common or community needs, while distributed through the market, are produced politically through taxation and violence. These goods attach not to individuals but to a place; to enjoy them, individuals must go to the place where they are. Land owners, all unknowingly, distribute such services contractually as they rent or sell sites. Rent or price is the market value of such services, net after disservices, as they affect each site. By distributing occupancies to those who can pay the highest price, land owners’ interests align with those of society. Without this, tenure would be precarious—by force or favor of politicians. The 18th-century separation of land from state, so little studied by historians, permitted the development of modern property in land. This change is perhaps “the greatest single step in the evolution of Society the world has ever seen.” When land owners realize that they market community services, they will organize to produce and administer them as well, and society will be made whole.

Keywords: Spencer Heath, Georgism, land ownership, public goods, market process, social progress

Download Paper: “Society, Its Process and Prospect”

Abstract: Latin American religious political thought includes colonial Spanish and Portuguese ideologies that preceded independence but have survived into the post-independence era, authoritarian ideologies supportive of military governments in the twentieth century, and progressive liberation theologies. In this article, I present a distinct tradition: a version of classical liberal thought. This tradition is skeptical of big government, opposed to caste systems, supportive of a high degree of federalism, uneasy with militarism, and supportive of democratic institutions while affirming religious social norms. This ideology was developed in northeastern Brazil in the early nineteenth century by a Carmelite activist named Frei Caneca (Brother Mug), who published a newspaper titled the Typhis Pernambucano (Tiphys of the State of Pernambuco).

Keywords: Classical liberalism, Brazil, Rio, Frei Caneca, Brother Mug, Confederation of the Equator, political philosophy, federalism, regional autonomy

Download Paper: “Freedom from the State in Rio: The Classical Liberal Ideals of Frei Caneca, Leader of the 1824 Confederation of the Equator Movement in Northeastern Brazil”

Abstract: This book is a collection and reworking of research done by Pascal Salin since around 1990. Salin is an economist in the tradition of the Austrian school of economics. He emphasizes the centrality of individual choice in an uncertain world in which individual actions interact to produce spontaneous orders. But he is no mere conduit of established ideas. He also offers his own highly original insights honed after a lifetime as an economist, one who has earned the respect in which he is now held by his peers worldwide. The book makes delightful reading. Salin covers a lot of ground in this book, mostly within the topics indicated by the title, though in the final two chapters he goes beyond these and into the foundations of economic science. The book is divided into five parts: (1) firms, markets and competition, (2) globalization and international economic problems, (3) monetary integration, (4) money, finance and economic policies, and (5) foundations of economic theory.

Keywords: Pascal Salin, Frédéric Bastiat, Austrian economics, classical liberalism, the theory of the firm, monopoly, economic integration, European Union

Download Paper: “Book Review: Competition, Coordination and Diversity: From the Firm to Economic Integration“

Abstract: Stephen Cox writes of the complexities that guided this well-known columnist, literary critic, best-selling novelist, avid reader, and intellectual, Mary Isabel Bowler Patterson, better known as Isabel Paterson or “I.M.P.” This edited collection includes a well-chosen selection of her essays, reviews, and letters. Combining both formal and colloquial prose, Paterson’s writings incorporated quips about such people as Sinclair Lewis and Henry David Thoreau, as well as candid discussions of William F. Buckley, Jr., Buffalo Bill, and Cecil Rhodes. The more than one hundred names mentioned in the collection included such diverse figures as Virginia Woolf, John Pierpont Morgan, H.G. Wells, Henry Hazlitt, and Jasper Elliot Crane.

Keywords: Isabel Paterson, Stephen Cox, Amercian literature, individualism, The God of the Machine

Download Paper: “Book Review: Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson“

Abstract: A critical but underdeveloped part of the libertarian debate about immigration is the question of who, if anyone, owns public property, and the consequences of the answer to this question. Libertarians who favor restrictive immigration policies, such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe,  argue that taxpayers own public property, and that the state, while it is in control of such property, should manage it on behalf of taxpayers in the same way private owners would manage their own property. In other words, it should be quite selective about who may enter. Walter Block, who takes an “open borders” position, does not appear to dispute the claim that taxpayers own public property, but nevertheless argues that immigrants are entitled to ignore the state’s control of, and thus may freely enter, such property. In this article I explore the question of public property ownership using Rothbardian property rights principles. I conclude that, at least with respect to a particular type of public property, neither Hoppe’s nor Block’s reasoning is consistent with these principles. I also consider the idea that the state ought to have a role in managing public property in light of some libertarian anarchist ideas about the state. I conclude that supporting a legitimate role for the state as an immigration gatekeeper is inconsistent with Rothbardian and Hoppean libertarian anarchism, as well as with the associated strategy of advocating always and in every instance reductions in the state’s role in society.

Keywords: Immigration, public property, private property, state-claimed land, immigration controls, open borders

Download Paper: “Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate”