The case of Terri Schiavo is almost as controversial as it is tragic. In 1990 Mrs. Schiavo, who reached her 40th year in 2005, fell victim to brain damage. She has been in a vegetative state ever since, kept alive not under her own power, but aided by a welter of feeding tubes and other paraphernalia of modern medicine.
The controversy? Her husband Michael is adamant that the doctors pull the plug on Terri, and her parents are just as determined to keep her alive.
Did you ever hear the phrase, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” This aphorism applies to several “defenses” of the free enterprise system we could all richly do without. In section one we consider an invalid argument for legalizing addictive drugs. Section two is given over to an analysis of foreign aid, from this perspective. The purpose of section three is to critically examine an argument in favor of the voluntary military. We conclude in section four.
Libertarianism has been widely misunderstood, and the present essay under review is no exception. Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a philosophy of life. It essentially asks but one single solitary question, and gives one single, solitary answer. The question: under what conditions is the use of force or violence legally justified? And the answer: only in response (defense against, retaliation against, punishment of) to the prior use of force or violence against a person or his legitimately owned property.
At one time, the libertarian perspective on immigration could be summed up by the following mantra: “There shall be no interference with the free movement of goods, capital and people.”
A grabs B to use as a shield; A forces B to stand in front of him, and compels him to walk wherever A wishes. A then hunts C in order to murder the latter by shooting him. C also has a gun. Is it legally permissible for C to shoot at A in self defense under libertarian law? Were C to do so he would have to kill B, the innocent shield, in order to defend himself against the perpetrator, A. Assume that this tableau takes place on unowned property, so that the issue of the owner’s rules does not come into play.
In this paper, Walter Block considers several of the criticisms leveled at Hoppe (1988, 1989) by Murphy and Callahan (2006).
Kinsella and Tinsley (2004) is beautifully written, infused with keen insights, in some ways solidly predicated upon libertarianism and praxeology, and yet, and yet, much as I enthusiastically agree with goodly portions of it and am even inspired by them, I cannot see my way clear to accepting all of their insights.
The present paper is devoted to a critique of those parts of the paper with which I cannot agree.
This paper is an attempt to combine the insights of Van Creveld (1999) concerning statism with libertarian theory in order to forge a theory of justified punishment for the crime of engaging in statist, governmental or other gangster activity.
In this article, Walter Block reviews Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
Muetze Hellmer is a former student of mine at Loyola University New Orleans. The first draft of Hellmer (2005) started out as a term paper for a course she took with me. I am very proud of her for having an article she wrote while a mere undergraduate published in a prestigious scholarly journal such as The Journal of Libertarian Studies.
