The State Is a Predator. It Can’t Be Used to Achieve Libertarian Ends
In portraying the state as an integral part of economy and society, advocates of "state capacity libertarianism" ignore the state's unique political, i.e., predatory, nature.
In portraying the state as an integral part of economy and society, advocates of "state capacity libertarianism" ignore the state's unique political, i.e., predatory, nature.
In terms of economics, what currently is should be of very little importance: what matters, and that we should seek to understand, is the process that brought it about and that will create what will be in its place.
Liberalism conceives of freedom as the absence of constraint, but Hegel's definition is more expansive. And, of course, the state is a necessary condition for it.
Some argue that someone’s superior talent or success is itself the result of mere luck. That claim, and its relevance as a justification for redistribution, has generated much controversy.
It's a paradox: never before has a government in human history assumed unto itself the power to regulate the minutiae of daily life as much as this one. At the same time the United States is overall the wealthiest society in the history of the world.
Why should we think that government officials are better at acting “rationally” than those they regulate? Even if we were to concede that smoking deserves to be restricted, why should we think the government can do it in a reasonable way?
The Murray Rothbard Memorial Lecture, delivered at the 2019 Austrian Economics Research Conference, discusses anarchistic arguments against the classical liberal and social democratic conceptions of the state.
Untangling the libertarian concepts of interpersonal liberty, this article proposes a new paradigm of libertarianism to solve the old one's problems.