Note the following arguments in their succinctness: From John Stuart Mill (5.6): Liberty is necessary for development of the individual. IF one wants development, THEN one wants liberty. Of course the one who promotes coercive control by non-owners (government/thief) can simply reject the IF. He rarely does. He asserts that he can force development. He …
Author Archives: Purilib
5.8, Isabel Paterson, Human Nature and Liberty
Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine is is one of those rich and mysterious works. It is at once singularly focused in subject-matter and expansive in historical breadth. In addition, there is an engineering metaphor running through the text that I have at best tapped but not entirely grasped. It is Paterson who highlighted, …
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5.7, Spencer, Human Nature and Liberty
Murray Rothbard, the libertarian economist and revisionist historian, called Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics the greatest work of libertarian political philosophy ever written. It was for that reason that I read it. Such praise is worth investigation. What I found was the recesses of a spacious and patient thought on the nature of man and the …
5.6, Mill, Liberty and Development
What I want from John Stuart Mill is his insight about the relationship between freedom and development. The puritanical libertarian thinks that anyone who wants development (deep better-making) must presuppose freedom (contractual activity). But all around him there rages what he takes to be the contradiction between means and ends found in coercion and development. …
5.5, Behemoth, Leviathan, Life Under Coercive Control
As the territorial dominance of coercive (non-contractual) control grows, there are glimmers of relative hope. Some of the coercive controllers have noticed that reducing coercion to the defensive protection of private-property rights has the surprising effect of most effectively producing prosperity. The flourishing of choice and contract always takes place in such places. The analysis …
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5.4, Lineage and History, From Phoenicia to Hansa
We move, in thought and imagination, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic sea. Interesting that the great flourishing of the contracting and trading spirit, the “yes” and “no” of promise, the voluntary mutually beneficial meeting, has taken place in the development of instruments that carried the embodied spirit away from the gaze and control of …
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5.3, Heritage and Identity
The Puritanical Libertarian is a human animal. For this reason he relies on body and image through which to extract knowledge and ultimately wisdom (if he so climbs). Being a human animal, in addition, means he has strong desire for identity in group, to be a part of the club, membership. The history that he …
5.2, Analogy and Coercion
The thesis for the “5” series of posts is to meditate on coercion, its prevalence, its unjustifiability, the costs (which may be split between the coercer and the coerced), the value of liberty, the foundation of liberty in property rights, and the reasonability of the anarcho-capitalist framework. We will inch our way into this. But …
5.1, A New Series: Property Rights, Liberty, Oppression
Living, as we do, under regimes of internal coercion and aggression much of which we have grown up with and adapted to, it can be difficult to first, shake off the fetters theoretically and conceptually. Second, to imagine community in its fullness. Third, to pursue non-aggression and voluntary association in a state of aggression and …
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4.20, From Moral Investment to Moral Prosperity
All good things (down here on this ole’ clod) must come to an end. Speculations on what goes on after or above I leave to the theologians. They claim expertise there. The Puritanical Libertarian desires to use speech for what speech can handle: limit, shape, particularity, individuality. Listen to Pascal (who the Puritanical Libertarian trusts): …
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