Fabio Massimo Nicosia, Libertarian Equality, Contradiction, Reconciliation, Maximization. (Amazon.com, 2020) Libertarian Equality, by Italian author Fabio Massimo Nicosia, is a surprising book on left-libertarian political philosophy. It’s not often that left-libertarian thought pops up in Italy, so a brand new book on the topic is a refreshing novelty. In Italy – and probably elsewhere too…

The Organic Emergence of Property from Reputation Property as a Useful and Necessary Toil, Not a God For centuries radicals have debated alternative property systems, and I’m glad we’re having these conversations. But what has been consistently disappointing about them is how little they generally seek to explore the underlying roots of “property” itself. To be sure, all…

Occupancy-and-Use Reflects Moral Imperatives …Implied by Land’s Unique Scarcity, Kevin Carson responds to Jason Byas Jason starts out by accepting my blurred lines between Lockeanism and occupancy-and-use, and agreeing that the difference between them is largely a matter of degree: Non-Proviso Lockeanism is just occupancy-and-use with a higher threshold for constructive abandonment. And the proper…

How Rothbardians Occupy Part of the Occupancy-and-Use Spectrum Jason Byas’s Response to Kevin Carson Are We All Mutualists Now? Maybe: Lockeanism as Occupancy & Use The first thing to say in response to Kevin Carson’s opening essay is that he’s largely right. As this exchange’s representative Rothbardian, I agree with his suggestion that the differences…

First, I [1] must begin by affirming my conviction that Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker were unsurpassed as political philosophers and that nothing is more needed today than a revival and development of the largely forgotten legacy that they left to political philosophy. By the mid-nineteenth century, the libertarian individualist doctrine had reached the point…

Murray Rothbard once opined that there were only two “just wars” in all of American history. The wars in question were the American Revolutionary War and the secessionist war of the Confederate States during the American Civil War. Murray’s reasoning for including, at least, the war of the Confederacy is dubious. To quote his take…

In 1973, nine years before he published his magnum opus in political philosophy, The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard issued a comprehensive popular presentation of the libertarian philosophy in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, first published by the mainstream publisher Macmillan. The book is an excellent discussion of libertarian principles and applications, and it is…

In 1982 Murray Rothbard published his magnum opus in political philosophy, The Ethics of Liberty. It is a tour de force, a remarkable presentation of the moral case for political freedom. What a complement to Man, Economy, and State and Power and Market, Rothbard’s towering contributions to our understanding of free markets! The first striking feature of Ethics is that the…

C4SS Media presents Natasha Petrova‘s “Hayek vs Rothbard On Coercion,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “An expansive definition of coercion allows libertarians to achieve a greater depth of understanding about the various ways in which people can be coerced. If we wish to comprehensively eradicate initiatory coercion; we will have to understand the…

James Tuttle alerted me to an appendix discussing Hayek’s conception of coercion in Murray Rothbard’s, The Ethics of Liberty. It serves as the jumping off point for a broader discussion of what constitutes coercion. Let us begin by contrasting the definitions of coercion employed by Hayek and Rothbard. Rothbard defines coercion thus: the invasive use…

I declare myself to be a capitalist and anti-capitalist, a socialist and anti-socialist, all at once. No, this is not my resignation of all use of politically descriptive terminology, and I am not declaring myself a moderate between two polar opposite camps. So how may I hold to each of these positions simultaneously? It is…

Esta postagem se inicia onde a primeira metade parou: com a desilusão (e o abandono) da New Left por parte de Rothbard. Agora eu quero olhar para algumas das pessoas que continuaram a tradição rothbardiana de esquerda. Karl Hess estava entrando de cabeça na esquerda quando Rothbard deu a New Left como uma causa perdida. Mesmo durante…

Em “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right”, eu mencionei o Rothbardianismo de Esquerda como uma base possível para buscar áreas de concordância entre libertários de mercado e a esquerda. Eu gostaria de entrar já nessa questão com mais profundidade. Em 2004, eu estava extremamente animado sobre a “Era of Good Feelings” entre os políticos Michael Badnarik do…

Kevin Carson: with Rothbard’s disillusion with (and abandonment of) his New Left alliance. Now I want to look at some of the people who continued the left-Rothbardian tradition.

Rothbard didn’t exactly fit the “pot-smoking Republican” stereotype.