[This article is taken from the final chapter of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to this chapter in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book has now been prepared for podcast and download.]

The elaboration of a systematic theory of liberty has been rare enough, but exposition of a theory of strategy for liberty has been virtually nonexistent.

A Shreveport attorney who has challenged the government for years on the legality of filing federal income taxes has been acquitted on charges he failed to file returns.

A federal jury unanimously found Tommy Cryer not guilty this week on two misdemeanor counts of failure to file.

And according to Cryer, the prosecution dismissed two felony charges of tax evasion prior to trial...

[This article is taken from chapter 28 of The Ethics of Liberty.1 Listen to this chapter in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach.

One of the best-known and most influential present-day treatments of liberty is that of Sir Isaiah Berlin. In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin upheld the concept of “negative liberty”—absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action—as against “positive liberty,” which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual’s effective power or mastery over himself or his environment.

It is a commonplace, for libertarians at least, that coercive redistribution cuts into charity by reducing the funds available for charitable giving. But Arthur C. Brooks, in his book Who Really Cares, points to another effect of redistribution on giving... To be precise, an effect of a belief in redistribution. From an interview with Brooks in the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty:

Please note that I do not subscribe to the panicked cries of human-induced, carbon-based global warming. But, just for fun, let’s assume that the cries are indeed true.

Ever since Mises exposed the negative effects of government interventions, politicians, bureaucrats, and most economists have attempted to refute those truths. A leading fallacy still driving debates and discussions is the one which implies that government can borrow goods from the future in order to satisfy its current demand. That simply cannot happen.

A. Introduction: Utilitarian Social Philosophy

Economics emerged as a distinct, self-conscious science or discipline in the nineteenth century, and hence this development unfortunately coincided with the dominance of utilitarianism in philosophy. The social philosophy of economists, therefore, whether the laissez-faire creed of the nineteenth century or the statism of the twentieth, has almost invariably been grounded in utilitarian social philosophy.

In case you haven’t already read it, see my analysis of the American health care system which exposes some of the lies of Michael Moore by pointing out that it is far better compared to other countries’ health care systems than he would have you believe and that it’s real shortcomings is due to government intervention.