In this article, Daniel J. D’Amico reviews Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime which was edited by Alexander Tabarrok.

Volume 21, Number 2 (2007)

In this article, Nortbert Lennartz reviews Michael van Notten’s The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa.

Volume 21, Number 2 (2007)

An introduction by Roderick T. Long to the 21st volume of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. As mentioned above, this issue focuses on the anarchy/minarchy debate.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

In this paper, I argue that Nozick fails to adequately defend the claim that a just state would arise from a Lockean state of nature by a process which need not violate libertarian rights. In particular, I argue that the state-creating processes cited by Nozick are antithetical to the enforcement rights (those rights such as self-defense and the exacting of just restitution) of persons.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

In response to my article, “Government: Unnecessary but Inevitable” (2004), Walter Block (2005) offers a detailed refutation of my argument on the inevitability of government. I want to respond to some of what Block said because I think that in his zest to show where he thinks I have erred, he has overlooked the larger issue of how one might determine whether government really is inevitable.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

Holcombe (2004) argued that government was inevitable. In Block (2005) I maintained that this institution was not unavoidable. Holcombe (2007) takes issue with that response of mine to his earlier paper, and the present essay is, in turn, a response to his latest missive in this conversation.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

Walter Block has penned a response to my paper in which I argue that there isn’t much more than a verbal difference between limited government (minarchist) and defense-insurance agency (anarchist) libertarians.

Block disputes my thesis for one reason: He defines government as necessarily coercive.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

Mixing economics and government is a dangerous idea, nearly as dangerous as mixing church and government. With the latter, you get a theocracy, and with the former, the unwieldy behemoth of the American political-economic system—both very undesirable. After the trauma of the Great Depression and the wide-scale introduction of paternalistic government by Franklin Roosevelt, Americans have acquired an unhealthy mistrust of capitalism.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

Jordan Schneider’s article is directed in part against a talk I gave in 2004 titled “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections,” in which I defended the moral and practical superiority of stateless over state-based legal systems. Schneider is unconvinced, maintaining that market anarchism will be unworkable because of the absence of legal objectivity. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear to me what Schneider takes a legal system’s objectivity to consist in, or why this feature is supposed to be available to states but not to anarchies.

Volume 21, Number 1 (2007)

2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a novel that has had an enormous impact on the libertarian movement. Atlas Shrugged offered a powerful and inspiring case, both intellectual and emotional, for libertarian ideas at a time when such resources were thin on the ground.