Category Archives: Blog

Many self-described libertarians hold the view that “all rights are property rights.” This idea appears to originate with Murry Rothbard. As he puts it,

In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights. The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from the owners, or to own one oneself; the human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy.  There is no extra “right of free speech” or free press beyond the property rights we can enumerate in any given case. And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up. (emphasis in original)[1]

Although he is less than pellucidly clear in this passage, I don’t believe that Rothbard is merely being descriptive. That is, he is saying something more than that the exercise of all rights requires the ownership of some form of property, which would imply nothing about the moral status of such property. Rather, I read him here, in combination with the remainder of the chapter from which this quotation is taken, as claiming that in all cases the wrong-making feature of impermissible acts against persons is the violation of the victim’s property rights. And, in my experience, this is how followers of Rothbard understand him. Continue Reading »

Having done my best to evict Thomas Szasz from the Libertarian pantheon, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to nominate a suitable replacement, and I believe I have found one. I speak of the great poet, playwright, and critic, T. S. Eliot. As far as I can tell, Eliot was not particularly active in or outspoken about his politics, but his most acclaimed play, Murder in the Cathedral, has unmistakable libertarian overtones.   Continue Reading »

Ever since the Enlightenment, philosophers and theologians have argued over a challenge to religious belief known as the “problem of evil.” Very briefly, how can God be both omnipotent and benevolent, yet allow things like the Holocaust or the 1994 genocide in Rwanda? If this apparent inconsistency cannot be resolved, God must either not exist or be radically different than conceived by most believers. As evident from the entry on this subject by Michael Tooley in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is an enormous literature on controversy. I believe it is fair to say that Professor Tooley is convinced that the problem of evil constitutes a decisive reason to deny the existence of a benevolent God. Continue Reading »

In a post last month I discussed the disgraceful failure of our public schools to adequately educate our most gifted children. As if on cue, the Wall Street Journal published last week an important opinion piece on this subject. This essay, “The Bright Students Left Behind,” by Chester Finn, Jr. and Brandon Wright (both affiliated with an Ohio think-tank dedicated to school reform) does a superb job of diagnosing and documenting the disease, but falls far short in its recommended cure. Continue Reading »

In previous posts (here and here) I have discussed Nozick’s somewhat neglected libertarian “framework for utopia,” which he lays out in Part III of ASU. Very briefly, in a perfect world the minimal state would provide the institutional skeleton around which individuals and communities could construct their own preferred modes of living. So long as people join them voluntarily and are free to leave, such communities may be distinctly illiberal. The state would function to ensure that the various sub-units do not aggress against each other, and would safeguard each person’s right of exit.

Nozick is operating here in the realm of ideal theory, and accordingly does not attempt to thoroughly address various practical problems that would arise under his framework. See ASU, 329-31. For one thing, children do not voluntarily elect to live in a particular jurisdiction, but are born, socialized, and educated wherever their parents have decided to reside.  Furthermore, exit from such communities will inevitably involve certain costs.  Such facts might, in the real world, require a more interventionist state than anticipated by Nozick in his idealized setting.  Apart from this, there may be certain group rules and practices that are so abhorrent to other communities, even if adopted on a consensual basis, that the latter may not wish to “share the same roof” with them, even symbolically.

Putting these complexities aside, Nozick’s idea has striking similarities to the federalism that the framers understood to be the essence of our constitution. “Federalism” is defined by my dictionary as “the distribution of power in an organization (as a government) between a central authority and the constituent units.” The founding fathers embraced this idea: all responsibilities not formally delegated to the federal government were to remain with the several states and ultimately repose in the people themselves (see the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution). The remaining substantive guarantees set forth in the Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government. Continue Reading »

The leveling down argument has discredited the claim that equality of condition has any intrinsic value. Nevertheless, a rigid egalitarianism remains an article of faith among many of our politicians and opinion leaders, and thus continues to serve as a handy excuse for the violation of rights; e.g. “capital should be much more aggressively taxed because…equality.”[1]  It also, in the two ways discussed below, rears its ugly head in the sphere of educational policy, and again reveals its intellectual bankruptcy. Continue Reading »

The ongoing negotiations between Greece’s hard-left leaders and its European creditors (together with the IMF) regarding whether the former will agree to the fiscal and tax reforms demanded by the latter are becoming more farcical by the day. The last five months have brought non-stop drama, melodrama, and posturing, but no resolution. Its creditors see Greece as a potential financial black hole into which ever-larger loans enter but are never repaid. For their part, the Greeks are reluctant to face the fact that cannot both have their cake (the Euro) and eat it too (by continuing to pile up external debt). Continue Reading »

We have just marked the eight hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta, forced by the great barons on England’s King John on June 15, 1215. It had its origin primarily in the King’s insatiable appetite for new taxes, which he sought to impose in violation of prevailing feudal law and custom. This agreement was an important victory for property rights and not coincidentally the first step in the establishment of the rule of law (however imperfect) in Britain, and by extension, the English-speaking world.

In honor of the occasion, I offer an excerpt from my Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World: The Politics of Natural Rights (pp. 34-6), where I summarize and defend the libertarian case for stringent property rights. Continue Reading »

As most everyone knows by now, Pamela Geller, the head of an organization called American Freedom Defense Initiative, isn’t fond of traditional Islam. In fact, she regards those who promote sharia, or Islamic law, as a mortal threat to America and to liberal values generally. Many Muslims do in fact interpret sharia as justifying the use of deadly force against those who dare to depict the Prophet. In response, she recently sponsored a “draw Muhammad contest” in Garland, Texas, which resulted in the timely death of two terrorists who attempted a Charlie Hebdo style massacre (welcome to Texas).

As a result on staging this event, Geller has been accused of a wide variety of things: hate speech, bigotry, provocation, incitement, the “abuse” of free speech, and so forth. The nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker’s comments are representative. In an opinion piece titled “Pamela Geller’s Abuse of Free Speech,” she describes the contest as “provocative” and “incendiary,” and then writes:

And Geller’s contribution to these [First Amendment] protections and our unwavering dedication to its preservation is, exactly, what? A taunt. Shouldn’t one at least aspire to some originality? It’s been done. And each time, the result is the same. You haul out a picture of Muhammad; “they” haul out a fatwa. Cat puts out cheese; mouse gets eaten. What does one expect?

As argued below, whatever one thinks of Geller’s underlying thesis, not only was she completely within her rights to stage her “contest,” but her tactics are unobjectionable, if not laudable. Continue Reading »

Guest post by Danny Frederick

The traditional problem of free will arose out of theology. God was supposed to know everything, in which case He would have perfect foreknowledge. But if God knows beforehand what we are going to do, how can we be free either to do it or not?

In the Enlightenment, the problem arose out of science, specifically, the success of Newton’s theory. For here was a clear and (relatively) simple theory of the world, expressed in precise mathematical formulae, which made predictions about the motions of every kind of matter, whether large or small, whether on earth or in the heavens, whether solid or fluid; and the predictions were borne out by experimental testing. Furthermore some of the predictions were very surprising and counterintuitive, so people expected them to fail; yet they also survived testing. The theory was even used to predict the existence, size and orbit of a planet in the solar system which no one had previously known about; and when telescopes were pointed in the relevant portion of the night sky, there it was! Neptune was discovered. People could not believe that this theory could be false. It was generally accepted as firmly established truth. The success of Newton’s theory marked the transition from the open-minded and critical Renaissance to the dogmatic Enlightenment. Continue Reading »