Kevin Carson: The vast majority of accumulated capital today is the result, not of the capitalist’s past labor and abstention, but of robbery.
Gary Chartier: Being a libertarian means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. That doesn’t mean it should be understood as involving support for capitalism.
Kevin Carson: The healthcare industry is a textbook example of what Ivan Illich (in Tools for Conviviality) called a “radical monopoly.”
Charles Johnson: For most of the 20th century, American libertarians were mostly seen as — and mostly saw themselves as — defenders of capitalism. Was that an accurate view of 20th century libertarians were about?
Charles Johnson: Individualists believe in individualism precisely because we believe that human beings can and should be both social and civilized to each other at the same time.
Libertarian equality involves not merely equality before those who administer the law, but equality with them.
Roderick T. Long: The question is: can economics or praxeology give us anything more than that? Can it give us any implications for positive ethical theorising?
These aren’t merely cases of some people having more stuff than you do.
Stressing the Hayekian strand within Austrian socioeconomic thought at the expense of the Kirznerian strand can lead to excessive passivity in the face of the omniscient, omnipotent forces of history.
Sheldon Richman: Libertarianism is premised on the dignity and self-ownership of the individual, which sexism and racism deny. Thus all forms of collectivist hierarchy undermine the libertarian attitude and hence the prospects for a free society.
Mandatory restitution to the victim is justified on libertarian grounds as an expression of defensive coercion; but punishment, I believe, constitutes not defensive but retaliatory coercion, and so is not permissible.
Intellectual property is not necessary to encourage innovation, this means that its main practical effect is to cause economic inefficiency by levying a monopoly charge on the use of existing technology.
Free Nation that undertook to enforce slavery contracts would not be a Free Nation worth fighting to build or to defend.
A fully freed market means liberating essential command posts in the economy from State control, to be reclaimed for market and social entrepreneurship
I hope that you realize that not everyone who supports universal healthcare supports government healthcare, and not everyone who opposes government healthcare opposes universal healthcare.
The measure of statism inheres in the functioning of the overall system, not in the formal statism of its separate parts.
A genuinely radical project beckons, one that integrates the explanatory power of libertarian social theory and the context-keeping orientation of dialectical method.
It requires that we question the fundamental basis of the current statist system.
If libertarians continue to use the word “capitalism” as some kind of ahistorical ideal, they will forever be dismissed by the Left as rationalist apologists for a state-capitalist reality.
So it seems that any attempt by the anti-corporatist free market movement to engage with the mainstream Left will focus, of necessity, on a few issues.
