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Robert Lefevre Lefevre’s Journal Summer 1977

Robert Lefevre Lefevre’s Journal Winter 1977

Robert Lefevre Lefevre’s Journal Spring 1978

Robert Lefevre Lefevre’s Journal Summer 1978

Here is Robert LeFevre’s classic argument (1959) for a purely free society, the essay that made him a leading, if controversial, spokesman for the libertarian position on government and society in the 2nd half of the twentieth century. He argues that government is in its essence a violation of rights, one that makes life brutal, poor, and short.

Five hundred years from now, when historians and philosophers have the opportunity of viewing the 20th century in perspective, they may decide that the outstanding characteristic of our time was a willingness to pass responsibility to others. In a sense, this has become the age of Pass The Buck. In the British Isles, until the 20th century, the

[Chapter 9 of This Bread Is Mine ] We must return to Adam Smith. This great economist and father of the modern theory of free markets propounded an error which has haunted us ever since. Smith’s “labor theory of value” was mistaken. However, David Ricardo accepted it and elaborated it. As elaborated by Ricardo, the labor theory of value was still

[Chapter 14 of This Bread Is Mine (1960)] It is time for the descendants of the early American patriots who fought and died for that poorly defined but magnificent idea, liberty , to let their voices be heard once more. It is time for those newly arrived Americans, fleeing the atrocities and tyrannies of Europe and Asia, to speak up boldly in

[Chapter 4, The Philosophy of Ownership ] If the idea of owning property privately began as I have conjectured, then the self-identification of the individual as a unique center of consciousness not only assisted in orienting him to his surroundings, but awakened in him the recognition that he owned himself. Each person grows to maturity, taking

[Chapter 8, The Philosophy of Ownership ]   Land has been owned both collectively and privately. The evidence reveals that in earliest times, before men learned to establish cities, they laid claim to hunting and foraging territories, establishing a kind of collective control over the area. This is collective ownership, for it excludes the private