In this article, medieval thinkers will be explored and how they dealt with these ideas, and developed them into the concept that “political legitimacy is grounded in the free consent of the governed”.
The defense of government schooling, like government itself, is based on fallacies. In this article, I directly refute many of the main arguments for government schooling. Using argumentation ethics, all conceivable arguments are refuted, thereby eliminating any valid reason for its continuance.
n this article, J.H. Huebert reviews Randy E. Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty.
The inability of modern philosophers to furnish any kind of argument for the maintenance of a government is a notorious weakness. In Lysander Spooner’s writings, it becomes an odd strength. Throughout such writings as No Treason, A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, and “Natural Law,” Spooner asks why taxation and participation in the workings of the state should be compulsory. He concludes that there is no legitimate reason, and that government is the instrument of robbery, slavery, and murder.
The business cycle refers to fairly broad changes in economic activity according to a well-identified sequence, which includes a boom, a crisis, a period of stagnation, and then a new expansion.1 This sequence tends to repeat itself; but neither the length of the cycle, nor the intervals between cycles necessarily follows a regular time pattern. There is substantial agreement both about this definition and about the temporal irregularities.
On college campuses across the country, there has been an escalating uproar concerning labor conditions in less economically developed regions of the world.
In an article published in this journal, Walter Block (2002, pp. 3–36) is rather scathing about Henry Simons’s credentials as a champion of free enterprise. But it seems possible to be considerably more generous to Simons than Block is, and to regard him as significantly less unlibertarian than Block does, which is not to deny that many of Simons’s policy proposals cannot be squared with classical liberal or libertarian principles, or that much of Block’s critique is justified.
Randy Holcombe’s “Government: unnecessary but Inevitable” (2004) is an interesting and challenging, but ultimately fallacious, essay on government. In his view, this institution is “unnecessary, but inevitable.”
Colin Williams, “Contra Spooner,” argues that Lysander Spooner is wrong about the state’s being the “instrument of robbery, slavery, and murder.” He begins by observing, accurately enough, that Spooner’s arguments are constructed of “pure philosophy” and thus require a reply in kind. It is puzzling, then, that Williams thinks to show Spooner wrong by a “survey of the culture of the ancient Mediterranean.” This survey produces the result that the ancient Greeks thought nothing of plunder and murdering people as long as they were in some other city.
In this article, Robert Bass reviews Wendy McElroy’s The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881–1908.
