The following lecture was presented by Roderick T. Long during the Philosophy of Liberty Conference at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, Saturday, September 29, 2001. 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,

The following article was written by Roderick T. Long and published on Austro-Athenian Empire, May 15th, 2010. “I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein “Over and over, you’re falling, and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.” — Laurie

The following article was written by Charles Johnson and published on his Rad Geek People’s Daily, May 1st, 2004. Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: an international day for celebrating the achievements of workers and the struggle for organized labor. You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not

Carson: Capitalism may have many varieties, types or flavors, but they all have one thing in common – they have nothing to do with a free market.

Knapp: There’s some ideological overlap, but it’s fuzzy. There are some people with one foot in each of the two camps (I used to be one of them; now I’m not), which can be confusing.

Carson: Had the industrial revolution taken place in a genuine free market, our economy today would probably be far closer to the vision of Lewis Mumford than that of Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Chandler.

Gary Chartier: Consider the characteristic Hobbesian argument for the state…

Roderick T. Long: Even in what might seem his least Humean moment – his anarchism – Godwin draws more decisively on Hume than on Rousseau.

Kevin Carson: The large firm and the factory system did not become the dominant economic institutions because of some objective technological imperative, or their superior efficiency in a free market. They became the dominant economic institutions because of their superior effectiveness at controlling labor; and then the state intervened in the market to make them efficient enough to survive.

Gary Chartier: The question whether people in a stateless society could respond satisfactorily to a disaster like the BP oil spill is really just a special case of the general question whether people without the state can do the things people attempt to do through the state. It seems to me that the answer is “yes.”

It is the responsibility of libertarians to once again pick up the banner of true radicalism, of the anti-draft, anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, and anti-feudal movements.

Consent is always compromised by force; the mere existence of effective force dedicated to some end constitutes coercion toward that end, whatever you may think or want.

Roderick T. Long: The libertarian struggle against statist oppression needs to be integrated (or re-integrated) with traditionally left-wing struggles against various sorts of non-state oppression.

Charles Johnson: If libertarianism needs to slim down, which specific varieties of thickness does it need to avoid—and what’s the health benefit to doing so?

Kevin Carson: Sigh. There you have it. Just about every single cliche from the Art Schlesinger historical mythology, condensed into one short passage for your convenience.

Roderick T. Long: At a time when emotions run high, how should we go about deciding on a morally appropriate response? Should we allow ourselves to be guided by our anger, or should we put our anger aside and make an unemotional decision?

Thomas L. Knapp: Bourgeois libertarianism is a failure not of theory or of ideology, but of imagination.

Benjamin Tucker: The usurer is the Somebody, and the State is his protector. Usury is the serpent gnawing at labor’s vitals, and only liberty can detach and kill it.

Roderick T. Long: We tend to think of the “ruling class” as a Marxist concept, but the notion has a long history before Marx.

Roderick Long: I’m hoping to make you puzzled about a problem that has puzzled me on and off over the years. Misery loves company, I suppose –