Sheldon Richman: Swartz was a passionate champion of technology’s power to liberate and democratize. He vowed to fight anything which threatened that potential. This offended powerful vested interests.
Neil M. Tokar: In other words, voluntary exchange subverts totalitarianism.
Being a good, active listener makes life a lot easier. Your conversations will be more enjoyable and less nuanced.
It might really be anomalous that most people tend immediately to agree that there is no telling what people might do, if they are free. Instead it ought to be obvious that there is no telling what people might do, if people are not free.
Goodman: Because libertarians care deeply about aggression, we should seek a world where aggressors are held accountable and the victims of aggression are not shamed and degraded. Slut shaming stands directly in the way of such a world.
If gender is used to oppress us, then it’s a meaningful concept to understand if we want to understand the idea of “liberty”.
Alan Furth: How to deal with violent action is a fundamental concept for anarchists, both in philosophical and practical terms.
Kevin Carson: As a genuine free market libertarian, I want labor to receive the full value of its product, without paying tribute to big landlords and usurers or the holders of artificial “property” rights like patents, copyrights and licenses.
The pervasiveness of consumerism in modern societies is often blamed on free markets, due to the brainwashing that corporate monsters affect through advertising campaigns.
Alan Furth: The market anarchist is adamant on the impossibility of reforming the state due to its fundamental incentive structure, of which taxes are a crucial element.
Any economics textbook will tell you that monopolies are bad things.
Furth: Initiating a fist fight, robbery, fraud, and wars of conquest are all obvious forms of aggression, and they are obviously different from other forms of undesirable influence on others.
Furth: Anarchism is not what the majority of people think it is.
RTW laws are problematic for multiple reasons. For instance: they interfere with freedom of contract. And they boost state power and help to legitimize and intensify state intervention inthe economy.
Carson: To the lords of artificial scarcity, who derive their income from impeding producers’ ability to produce, natural abundance is a danger.
But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, “Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare!”
Defenders of “right to work,” arguing on [a dialectical] basis, say that such laws, while formal restrictions on freedom of contract, are really restrictions on the exercise of a prior, larger grant of monopoly privileges to unions.
“The labourers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once become thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing could withstand them”
Gary Chartier: Let’s put it another way: They violate freedom of contract.
Coming to terms with the extended order isn’t always pretty.
