If every man has the absolute right to his justly-held property it then follows that he has the right to keep that property—to defend it by violence against violent invasion. Absolute pacifists who also assert their belief in property rights—such as Mr. Robert LeFevre—are caught in an inescapable inner contradiction: for if a man owns property and
[This article is excerpted from chapter 14 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] We have now established each man’s property right in his own person and in the virgin land that he finds and transforms by his labor, and we have shown that
[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 .] Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of “rights” for such “human” rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property. And yet, on the contrary the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For
[This article is excerpted from chapter 16 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] Our theory of property rights can be used to unravel a tangled skein of complex problems revolving around questions of knowledge, true and false, and the
As in the case of blackmail , bribery has received a uniformly bad press, and it is generally assumed that bribery should be outlawed. But is this necessarily true? Let us examine a typical bribe contract. Suppose that Black wants to sell materials to the XYZ Company. In order to gain the sale, he pays a bribe to Green, the purchasing agent of the
[This article is taken from chapter 18 of The Ethics of Liberty .] A boycott is an attempt to persuade other people to have nothing to do with some particular person or firm — either socially or in agreeing not to purchase the firm’s product. Morally a boycott may be used for absurd, reprehensible, laudatory, or neutral goals. It may be used, for
[This article is taken from chapter 19 of The Ethics of Liberty . The full audiobook is available for download .] The right of property implies the right to make contracts about that property: to give it away or to exchange titles of ownership for the property of another person. Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make
[First published in the Libertarian Forum , August 15, 1969.] Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), late 1960s This open letter is addressed to the libertarians attending the YAF national convention in St. Louis this Labor Day weekend. Notice I said the libertarians in YAF; I have nothing to say to the so-called “traditionalists” (a misnomer, by
Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital. The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the
Liberals will generally concede the right of every individual to his “personal liberty,” to his freedom to think, speak, write, and engage in such personal “exchanges” as sexual activity between “consenting adults.” In short, the liberal attempts to uphold the individual’s right to the ownership of his own body, but then denies his right to
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.