Rothbard A to Z
LAISSEZ-FAIRE
LAISSEZ-FAIRE
… laissez-faire will lead to harmony, prosperity, and abundance, while government intervention leads to conflict and impoverishment …
Economic Controversies, p. 97
Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns and economic crises.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 47
… the laissez-faire forces were known as “liberals” and “radicals” …
For a New Liberty, p. 11
Those economists and others who espouse the philosophy of laissez-faire believe that the freedom of the market should be upheld and that property rights must not be invaded.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1048
… libertarianism, laissez-faire, is more practical in the short as well as in the long run.
Strictly Confidential, p. 276
LABOR
… all labor, not just labor embodied in material objects, is “productive.”
Classical Economics, p. 20
… in a free-market society, every individual will enter those fields and areas of work which he or she finds most attractive.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 163
… labor always involves the forgoing of leisure, a desirable good.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 43
The more a man labors, the less leisure he can enjoy. Increased labor therefore reduces the available supply of leisure and the utility that it affords.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 44
… a man will expend his labor as long as the marginal utility of the return exceeds the marginal disutility of the labor effort. A man will stop work when the marginal disutility of labor is greater than the marginal utility of the increased goods provided by the effort.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 46
… labor will tend to be supplied until the point at which the marginal utility reaped from labor no longer outweighs the marginal utility of leisure on the individual’s value scale. In the money economy, labor will cease when the marginal utility of the additional money income per unit of time no longer exceeds the marginal utility of the leisure forgone by working for the additional time.
Thus, man allocates his time between leisure and productive labor, between labor for money and labor on unexchangeable items, etc., in accordance with the principle of maximizing his psychic income. In deciding between labor and leisure, he weighs the marginal advantages of work with the marginal advantages of leisure.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 218–19
Laborers are all those who expend their labor in the productive process.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 222
… the owner of every labor factor has some minimum selling price, a price below which he will not work.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 364
… on this earth, labor has been a far scarcer factor than land.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 366
Higher prices for labor services will induce more units of labor to enter the market, while lower prices will increase the relative advantages of leisure.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 406
… labor is almost always a nonspecific factor …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 442
Labor, on the other hand, is almost always nonspecific; very rare indeed is the person who could conceivably perform only one type of task.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 523
… labor factors have always been relatively scarcer than land factors.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 559
The marginal value product of a factor decreases as its total supply increases, and increases as the supply declines. The three major categories of factors in the economy are land, labor, and capital goods.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 560
… “labor” is a category that includes a myriad variety of services. Generally, labor is the expenditure of pure human energy on a production process. Catallactically, labor is hired by entrepreneur-capitalists. It is grossly unscientific to separate laborers into arbitrary categories and to refer to one group as “labor” and “workers,” while the other group receives various other names. …
… there is no difference in kind between “workers” and “management.”
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 564–65
… labor cannot be capitalized.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 567
… labor is preeminently the nonspecific factor, which is applicable to all processes of production, whereas land tends to be far more specific.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 567
Laborers are also entrepreneurs in the sense of predicting demand in the markets for labor and choosing to enter certain markets accordingly.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 604
The intersecting points on the DMVP schedules will yield the prices of the factors, also known as “rents” and “wage rates” (in the case of labor factors).
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 625
… labor energies work on natural and produced factors to arrive at the most urgently demanded consumers’ goods.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 642
It is the unique characteristic of labor in a free society, however, that it cannot be monopolized. Each individual is a self-owner and cannot be owned by another individual or group. Therefore, in the labor field, no one man or group can own the total supply and withhold part of it from the market. Each man owns himself.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 705
What is the only alternative to free labor? It is unfree labor, i.e., serfdom. The man who is not allowed to be a free laborer is a serf.
Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 136
… only a free market is compatible with the free choice by every man of his own occupation. A governmentally-run economy must entail government planning of labor as well as of other resources—which means, ultimately, that people must be told what jobs (and where) they can work and at what they cannot.
Science, Technology, and Government, p. 18
… there can be no lasting shortage of any occupation on the free market, for if there is a shortage, it will be quickly revealed in higher salaries, and these salaries will do all that is humanly possible to alleviate the shortage rapidly by attracting new people into the field …
Science, Technology, and Government, p. 28
LAND
… even the poorest land in cultivation never earns a zero rent, just as the least productive piece of machinery or worker never earns a zero price or wage.… even the marginal land will always earn some positive rent, however small.
Classical Economics, p. 84
… landlords do perform a vital economic function: they allocate land to its best and most productive use. Land does not allocate itself; it must be allocated, and only those who earn a return from such service have the incentive, or the ability, to allocate various parcels of land to their most profitable, and hence most productive and economic uses.
Classical Economics, p. 91
Landowners generally benefit from inflation. Land prices usually rise more rapidly than most other prices, and lowered interest rates have a particularly strong impact in raising the values of an extremely durable good such as land. Since landlords, especially speculative landlords, are often debtors as well, they have a multiple incentive for favoring inflation.
Conceived in Liberty v. 2, p. 126; p. 624
… if an individual cannot own original ground land, neither can he in the full sense own any of the fruits of his labor.
Economic Controversies, p. 358
… the inevitable result of a single tax would be nothing less than locational chaos. And since location—land—must enter into the production of every good, chaos would be injected into every aspect of economic calculation. Waste in location leads to waste and misallocation of all productive resources.
Economic Controversies, p. 580
… landowning is a business like any other, the return from which is regulated and minimized, in the long run, by competition. If land temporarily offers a higher rate of return, more people invest in it, thereby driving up its market price, or capital value, until the annual rate of return falls to the level of all other lines of business.
… the only landowners who reap special gains from progress are the ones more farsighted than their fellows—the ones who earn more than the usual rate of return by accurately predicting future developments.
Economic Controversies, p. 583
… man cannot produce anything without the cooperation of original land, if only as standing room. A man cannot produce anything by his labor alone. He must mix his labor with original land, as standing room and as raw materials to be transformed into more valuable products. …
… if an individual cannot own original land, neither can he in the same sense own the fruits of his labor.
Economic Controversies, p. 584
… the moral course is to grant ownership of land to the person who had the enterprise to bring it into use, the one who made the land productive.
Economic Controversies, p. 585
… a piece of land sells now at the discounted sum of its future rents.
Economic Controversies, p. 593
… the landlord performs the vital function of allocating the land to its most productive use.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 456
… the justification for the ownership of ground land is the same for that of any other property. For no man actually ever “creates” matter: what he does is to take nature-given matter and transform it by means of his ideas and labor energy. But this is precisely what the pioneer—the homesteader—does when he clears and uses previously unused virgin land and brings it into his private ownership. The homesteader—just as the sculptor, or miner—has transformed the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as much a “producer” as the others, and therefore just as legitimately the owner of his property.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 49
… if any land has never been transformed, no one can legitimately claim its ownership.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 63
… in order for property in land to be valid, it must be continually in use. The only requirement is that the land be once put into use, and thus become the property of the one who has mixed his labor with, who imprinted the stamp of his personal energy upon, the land. After that use, there is no more reason to disallow the land’s remaining idle than there is to disown someone for storing his watch in a desk drawer.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 64
… a truly free market, a truly libertarian society devoted to justice and property rights, can only be established there by ending unjust feudal claims to property.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 70
… the natural-rights justification for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership of all other property.
For a New Liberty, p. 41
There is no existing entity called “society”; there are only interacting individuals. To say that “society” should own land or any other property in common, then, must mean that a group of oligarchs—in practice, government bureaucrats—should own the property …
For a New Liberty, p. 41
… if an individual cannot own original land, neither can he in the full sense own any of the fruits of his labor.
For a New Liberty, p. 42
If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his “human right”—or his property rights in his own person—he must also have the property right in the material world, in the objects which he produces.
For a New Liberty, p. 52
What we favor, here as always, is justice and property rights, and we favor the return of stolen property to its rightful owners. In many areas of the world, arable land was stolen by conquest and government expropriation from the peasants and handed to a favored group of “feudal” landlords, and we consider it not only just but essential to restore this property to the rightful peasant owners.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 730
… land that has been cleared, tilled, plowed, etc., by human labor has become a capital good. This land is a produced good, and not an originally given good. Decisions concerning whether and how much to improve the soil, or whether to maintain it or extract the maximum present consumers’ goods at the expense of future losses (“erosion”), are on exactly the same footing as all capital formation decisions. They depend on a comparison of the expected utility of future production as against the utility of present consumers’ goods forgone.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 68
… a large part of the value of what is generally considered “land”—i.e., that part that has to be maintained with the use of labor—is really a capital good.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 486
… the capital value of land is equal to the sum of its discounted future rents.… if we have a constant rent expected to be earned in perpetuity, the capital value of the asset will equal the annual rent divided by the rate of interest.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 493
A major characteristic of land as compared to capital goods is that its series of future rents is generally infinite, since, whether as basic soil or site, it is physically indestructible.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 493
… a key distinction between land and capital goods is that the owners of the former sell future goods for present money, whereas the owners of the latter advance present money, buy future goods, and later sell their product when it is less distantly future.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 494
… natural resource comes as a special division under the “land” category.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 496
… a progressing economy will lead to an increase in the real rents of ground land.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 528
… land can be capitalized in its price as a “whole factor” and therefore earns simply interest and entrepreneurial changes in asset value …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 566–67
The fact that labor is scarcer and nonspecific means that there will always be unused land. Only the best and most productive land will be used, i.e., the land with the highest DMVPs.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 567
The prices of land factors will be determined by the general schedule of the factors’ DMVPs and will be set according to the point of intersection of the total quantity, or stock, of the factor available, with its discounted marginal value productivity schedule. The DMVP, in turn, is, as we have seen at length, determined by the extent to which this factor serves the consumers. The MVP is determined directly by the degree that a factor unit serves the consumers, and the discount is determined by the extent that consumers choose saving-investment as against present consumption.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 569
The existence of idle land may always be due to the fact of the relative scarcity of labor as compared with available land.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 692
The landlord, a tax being imposed on his rents, will have less of a spur to allocate land sites efficiently.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 915
The owner of ground land performs a very important productive service. He finds, brings into use, and then allocates, land sites to the most value-productive bidders.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 935
As the economy progresses, real land rents will rise with real wage rates, and the result will be increases in the real capital values of land.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 1037–38
… land speculation performs a useful social function. It puts land into the hands of the most knowledgeable.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1202
LANGE, OSKAR
… socialists and other economists erroneously assumed that Oskar Lange and others had satisfactorily solved this calculation problem in their writings of the 1930s. Actually, Mises had anticipated the Lange “solutions” and had refuted them in his original article.
Economic Controversies, p. 238
All the textbooks say that Mises was quickly refuted by Oskar Lange and others, but he really wasn’t refuted.
Economic Controversies, p. 678
… Oskar Lange devoted a great deal of time to the painful acknowledgement that economics must encompass praxeology as well as Marxism.
Economic Controversies, p. 802
… Lange agrees with Mises that the economic principle is itself embedded in the wider praxeological principles of general human action. …
Lange, however, now found himself at the brink of a precarious position: the Mises thesis that praxeology had so far been elaborated only in economic theory, and that therefore economics and praxeology, while conceivably of different scope in the future, are now virtually identical. To take such a position would mean, for Lange, being close to becoming a Misesian and an Austrian School economist.
Economic Controversies, p. 804
… Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction. While Lange attempts to qualify this agreement by stating that empirical testing is needed to see whether various economic actions are “rational” or “customary-traditional,” his basic alignment with Misesian methodology still remains.
Economic Controversies, p. 805
Economists were convinced of the Lange solution because they had already come under the sway of the Walrasian general equilibrium model …
Economic Controversies, p. 832
Another grievous flaw in the Lange model is thinking that general equilibrium, a world of certainty where there is no room for the driving force of entrepreneurship, can somehow be used to depict the real world.… No economic theory worth its salt can be worthwhile if it omits the role of the entrepreneur in an uncertain world.
Economic Controversies, p. 833
… Lange, in postwar Poland, argued strongly for the historical necessity of the persistence of the Stalinist model as opposed to his own market socialism.
Economic Controversies, p. 851
Shortly before his death in 1965, however, Oskar Lange, in his neglected last word on the socialist calculation debate, implicitly revealed that his socialist-market “solution” had been little more than a hoax …
Economic Controversies, p. 852
… Socialists and other economists erroneously assumed that Oskar Lange and others had satisfactorily solved this calculation problem in their writings of the 1930s. Actually, Mises had anticipated the Lange “solutions” and had refuted them in his original article.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 236
While the official textbook line by the 1940s—when socialism had triumphed among intellectuals—decreed that Lange and Lerner had solved the crucial question posed by Mises, Mises and the free market have had the last laugh. It is now generally acknowledged, especially in Communist countries, that Mises and Hayek were right, and that the enormous defects of socialist planning in practice have conformed their views.
Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, p. 28
LANGUAGE
… language contains an important ideological, and hence conscious, component.
Economic Controversies, p. 203
Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom.
Ethics of Liberty, pp. 32–33
… it is common human experience that individual desires are not absolute and unchanging. They are not hermetically sealed off from persuasion, rational or otherwise; experience and other individuals can and do persuade and convince people to change their values. But how could that be so if all individual desires and values are pure givens and therefore not subject to alteration by the intersubjective persuasion of others? But if these desires are not givens, and they are changeable by the persuasion of moral argument, it would then appear that inter-subjective moral principles do exist that can be argued and can have an impact on others.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 202
… men can become more moral only through rational persuasion, not through violence, which will, in fact, have the opposite effect.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1319
… force and persuasion are antitheses …
Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 64
LAW
… the law is trying to discover who, if anyone, in a given situation has aggressed against the person or property of another—in short, who has been a tortfeasor against the property of another and is therefore liable for penalty.
Economic Controversies, p. 259
Law is a set of commands; the principles of tort or criminal law … are negative commands or prohibitions, on the order of “thou shalt not” do actions, X, Y, or Z. In short, certain actions are considered wrong to such a degree that it is considered appropriate to use the sanctions of violence (since law is the social embodiment of violence) to combat, defend against, and punish the transgressors.
Economic Controversies, p. 367
… law is a subset of ethics identifying certain actions as appropriate for using violence against them. The law says that action X should be illegal, and therefore should be combatted by the violence of the law. The law is a set of “ought” or normative propositions.
Economic Controversies, p. 368
… law is a set of prohibitions against the invasion of, or aggression against, private property rights; that is, spheres of freedom of action by each individual. But if that is the case, then the implication of the command, “Thou shall not interfere with A’s property right,” is that A’s property right is just and therefore should not be invaded. Legal prohibitions, therefore, far from being in some sense value-free, actually imply a set of theories about justice, in particular the just allocation of property rights and property titles. “Justice” is nothing if not a normative concept.
Economic Controversies, p. 369
The law is a set of normative principles …
Economic Controversies, p. 373
There is no way for the law to reduce risk overall …
Economic Controversies, p. 382
… proper procedure calls for rational proof about the guilt or innocence of persons charged with tort or crime. Evidence must be probative in demonstrating a strict causal chain of acts of invasion of person or property. …
But what about situations where it is unclear whether or not a person is committing aggression? In those cases, the only procedure consonant with libertarian principles is to do nothing; to lean over backward to ensure that the judicial agency is not coercing an innocent man. If we are unsure, it is far better to let an aggressive act slip through than to impose coercion and therefore to commit aggression ourselves. A fundamental tenet of the Hippocratic oath, “at least, do not harm,” should apply to legal or judicial agencies as well.
The presumption of every case, then, must be that every defendant is innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof must be squarely upon the plaintiff.
If we must always insist on laissez-faire, then it follows that such a weak standard of proof as “preponderance of evidence” must not be allowed to serve as a demonstration of guilt.
Economic Controversies, pp. 384–85
… the best standard for any proof of guilt is the one commonly used in criminal cases: Proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Obviously, some doubt will almost always persist in gauging people’s actions, so that such a standard as “beyond a scintilla of doubt” would be hopelessly unrealistic. But the doubt must remain small enough that any “reasonable man” will be convinced of the fact of the defendant’s guilt. Conviction of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” appears to be the standard most consonant with libertarian principle.
Economic Controversies, p. 386
What the plaintiff must prove, then, beyond a reasonable doubt is a strict causal connection between the defendant and his aggression against the plaintiff. He must prove, in short, that A actually “caused” an invasion of the person or property of B.
Economic Controversies, p. 387
To establish guilt and liability, strict causality of aggression leading to harm must meet the rigid test of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Hunch, conjecture, plausibility, even mere probability are not enough.
Economic Controversies, p. 388
… a strict causal connection must exist between an aggressor and a victim, and this connection must be provable beyond a reasonable doubt. It must be causality in the commonsense concept of strict proof of the “A hit B” variety, not mere probability or statistical correlation.
Economic Controversies, p. 389
… in a strict causal liability theory, vicarious liability would be tossed out with little ceremony.
Economic Controversies, p. 391
… the ad coelum rule never made any sense, and is therefore overdue in the dustbin of legal history.
Economic Controversies, p. 402
… there is no vicarious liability, but only liability for those who actually commit the deed.
… proof of causality is a basic principle of civilized law …
Economic Controversies, p. 405
… only the victim (or his heirs and assigns) can legitimately press suit against alleged transgressors against his person or property. District attorneys or other government officials should not be allowed to press charges against the wishes of the victim, in the name of “crimes” against such dubious or non-existent entities as “society” or the “state.” If, for example, the victim of an assault or theft is a pacifist and refuses to press charges against the criminal, no one else should have the right to do so against his wishes. For just as a creditor has the right to “forgive” an unpaid debt voluntarily, so a victim, whether on pacifist grounds or because the criminal has bought his way out of a suit or any other reason, has the right to “forgive” the crime so that the crime is thereby annulled.
Economic Controversies, p. 407
… the entire structure of criminal law must be dispensed with, [so] that we are left with tort law, where the victim indeed presses charges against the aggressor.
Economic Controversies, p. 409
… class action suits binding on anyone except voluntary plaintiffs are impermissible.
Economic Controversies, p. 414
… class action suits should not be allowed except where every plaintiff actively and voluntarily joins and where common interests predominate over separate and individual ones.
Economic Controversies, p. 416
… any prosecution on behalf of “society” or the “state” is impermissible …
Economic Controversies, p. 417
The aggressor and only the aggressor should be liable, and not the employer of an aggressor …
Economic Controversies, p. 417
For the libertarian, the law can only be negative, can only prohibit aggressive and criminal acts by one person upon another. It cannot compel positive acts, regardless of how praiseworthy or even necessary such actions may be.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 152–53
… law is a valuable good that is no more necessarily produced by the State than is postal or defense service; the State can be separated from lawmaking just as it can be separated from the religious or the economic spheres of life.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 208
… the legal principles of any society can be established in three alternate ways: (a) by following the traditional custom of the tribe or community; (b) by obeying the arbitrary, ad hoc will of those who rule the State apparatus; or (c) by the use of man’s reason in discovering the natural law—in short, by slavish conformity to custom, by arbitrary whim, or by use of man’s reason. These are essentially the only possible ways for establishing positive law. Here we may simply affirm that the latter method is at once the most appropriate for man at his most nobly and fully human, and the most potentially “revolutionary” vis-à-vis any given status quo.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 17
… any set of objective moral principles rooted in the nature of man must inevitably come into conflict with custom and with positive law.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 18
… the State by its very nature cannot obey its own legal rules. But if the State cannot obey its own legal rules, then it is necessarily deficient and self-contradictory as a maker of law.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 179
It is only the business of legal violence to defend people against the use of violence, to defend them from violent invasions of their person or property.
For a New Liberty, p. 127
… the justly celebrated common law, was developed over the centuries by competing judges applying time-honored principles rather than the shifting decrees of the State. These principles were not decided upon arbitrarily by any king or legislature; they grew up over centuries by applying rational—and very often libertarian—principles to the cases before them.
For a New Liberty, p. 283
… in the future libertarian society, the basic legal code would not rely on blind custom, much of which could well be antilibertarian. The code would have to be established on the basis of acknowledged libertarian principle, of non-aggression against the person or property of others; in short, on the basis of reason rather than on mere tradition …
For a New Liberty, p. 286
… unjust laws deserve to be broken.
Left and Right, p. 130
… liberty requires not that despotic laws be passed and then only moderately enforced, but that the law not be passed at all.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 4
Libertarian law must be a law shorn of all elements of tyranny and aggression against those not yet proven to be criminal invaders of the person and just property of another man.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 73
One of the glories of the Anglo-Saxon legal structure is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty after the best possible case has been put up in his defense; if we are going to scrap this elementary legal safeguard, then this country is really lost, and none of us are safe.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 93
… the great bulk of our laws is despotic, exploitative, immoral and unjust.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 125
Objective law existed long before government (e.g., in the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law) and was worked out by privately competitive judges long before the State imposed its monopoly. Since law is objective, it is discoverable by reason and doesn’t need government to formulate it—on the contrary, government, subject as it is to the caprice and whims of legislators, is most unlikely to respect objective law, as history has amply demonstrated. The objective Law Code would be the libertarian law of outlawing aggression against person and property, defining what that property is, setting up rules for trials to determine who the criminals are (e.g., permitting cross-examination of witnesses, etc.), and, in the libertarian society that I envision, all the privately competing courts and defense agencies would be pledged to abide by this objective Code. Any court which flouted this libertarian Code and imposed its own rules would be deemed to be itself guilty of aggression …
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 268
Libertarian legal theory suffices to lay down a general law code—enshrining and developing the implications of the libertarian principle of non-aggression against person and property—which, in my own view of anarcho-capitalism, all the courts would be pledged to follow. Reason, not the State, is the proper agency for laying down this Law Code, and this can be seen in the ways in which judges worked out the principles of the best parts of our legal system: the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 320
The State is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the State, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed upon principles derived either from custom or reason. The idea that the State is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the State is needed to supply postal or police service.
… an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 539
When in doubt about whether some activity is aggressive, the answer is laissez-faire. Let the person alone! Or, to apply venerable Anglo-Saxon law, nothing should be considered aggressive or criminal or tortious unless proven so beyond a reasonable doubt. Every person must be assumed innocent until proven guilty.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, pp. 953–54
The common law has often been a good guide to the law consonant with the free market.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 749
The law merchant, admiralty law, and much of the common law began to be developed by privately competitive judges, who were sought out by litigants for their expertise in understanding the legal areas involved.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1051
The Law Code of the purely free society would simply enshrine the libertarian axiom: prohibition of any violence against the person or property of another (except in defense of someone’s person or property), property to be defined as self-ownership plus the ownership of resources that one has found, transformed, or bought or received after such transformation. The task of the Code would be to spell out the implications of this axiom (e.g., the libertarian sections of the law merchant or common law would be co-opted, while the statist accretions would be discarded). The Code would then be applied to specific cases by the free-market judges, who would all pledge themselves to follow it.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1053n4
LAW OF THE JUNGLE
The free market, in fact, is precisely the diametric opposite of the “jungle” society. The jungle is characterized by the war of all against all. One man gains only at the expense of another, by seizure of the latter’s property. With all on a subsistence level, there is a true struggle for survival, with the stronger force crushing the weaker. In the free market, on the other hand, one man gains only through serving another … The “fit” in the jungle are those most adept at the exercise of brute force. The “fit” on the market are those most adept in the service of society. The jungle is a brutish place where some seize from others and all live at the starvation level; the market is a peaceful and productive place where all serve themselves and others at the same time and live at infinitely higher levels of consumption.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1325
In the jungle, some gain only at the expense of others. On the market, everyone gains. It is the market—the contractual society—that wrests order out of chaos, that subdues nature and eradicates the jungle, that permits the “weak” to live productively, or out of gifts from production, in a regal style compared to the life of the “strong” in the jungle.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 1325–26
It is precisely statism that is bringing back the rule of the jungle—bringing back conflict, disharmony, caste struggle, conquest and the war of all against all, and general poverty. In place of the peaceful “struggle” of competition in mutual service, statism substitutes calculational chaos and the death-struggle of Social Darwinist competition for political privilege and for limited subsistence.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1326
Any society of force—whether ruled by criminal bands or by an organized State—fundamentally means the rule of the jungle, or economic chaos. Furthermore, it would be a jungle, a struggle in the sense of the Social Darwinists, in which the survivors would not really be the “fittest,” for the “fitness” of the victors would consist solely in their ability to prey on producers. They would not be the ones best fitted for advancing the human species: these are the producers, the conquerors of nature.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1331
LEISURE
Leisure, like any other good, is subject to the law of marginal utility. The first unit of leisure satisfies a most urgently felt desire; the next unit serves a less highly valued end; the third unit a still less highly valued end, etc. The marginal utility of leisure decreases as the supply increases, and this utility is equal to the value of the end that would have to be forgone with the loss of the unit of leisure.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 45
Leisure is the amount of time not spent in labor …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 46n30
… as his consumption of leisure increases, the marginal utility of leisure will decline, while the marginal utility of the goods forgone increases, until finally the utility of the marginal products forgone becomes greater than the marginal utility of leisure, and the actor will resume labor again.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 47
Leisure is the one good that is produced almost instantaneously …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 47
… man laboring bears the cost of leisure forgone.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 342
… leisure is always a consumers’ good. As a result, there will be reserve prices for labor against leisure …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 567
… leisure is forgone in the process of expending labor.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 574
… leisure is a definite alternative to work.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 606
The individual who withholds his own labor may be doing so in order to obtain leisure …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 633
Idle labor resources will always mean increased leisure …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 692
… as civilization expands the supply of goods, the marginal utility of goods declines and the marginal utility of leisure forgone (the opportunity cost of labor) increases, so that more and more real income will be “taken” in the form of leisure.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 976
… the market, by raising living standards, permits man the leisure to cultivate the very qualities of civilization that distinguish him from the brutes.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1326
LIBERTARIANISM
… my basic motivation for being a libertarian had never been economic but moral.… While I was convinced that the free market was more efficient and would bring about a far more prosperous world than statism, my major concern was moral: the insight that coercion and aggression of one man over another was criminal and iniquitous, and must be combatted and abolished.
Betrayal of the American Right, pp. 73–74
… while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 22
It is no wonder that the contemporary Libertarian, seeing the world going socialistic and communistic, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization—the overthrow of the Old Order—was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 46
Only libertarianism is truly radical. Only we can complete the unfinished revolution of our great forebears, the bringing of the world from the realm of despotism into the realm of freedom.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 193
… if we could push the button for instantaneous abolition of unjust invasions of liberty, would we do it? If we would not do it, we could scarcely call ourselves Libertarians. …
The genuine Libertarian, then, is, in all senses of the word, an “abolitionist”; he would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions of liberty, whether it be, in the original coining of the term, slavery, or whether it be the manifold other instances of State oppression.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 242–43
The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that each person must be a self-owner, and that no one has the right to interfere with such self-ownership.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 60
Any action would be legal in the libertarian society, provided that it does not invade property rights …
Ethics of Liberty, p. 131
… liberty is the highest the “highest political end,” the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 258
… the libertarian must be an “abolitionist,” i.e., he must wish to achieve the goal of liberty as rapidly as possible.… The libertarian, then, should be an abolitionist who would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions of liberty.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 259
… the libertarian must call for immediate abolition of the State as an organized engine of aggression …
Ethics of Liberty, p. 261
… the libertarian triumph must eventually occur.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 269
… the libertarian stands foursquare for what are generally known as “civil liberties”: the freedom to speak, publish, assemble, and to engage in such “victimless crimes” as pornography, sexual deviation, and prostitution (which the libertarian does not regard as “crimes” at all, since he defines a “crime” as violent invasion of someone else’s person or property). Furthermore, he regards conscription as slavery on a massive scale. And since war, especially modern war, entails the mass slaughter of civilians, the libertarian regards such conflicts as mass murder and therefore totally illegitimate.
For a New Liberty, p. 27
The libertarian favors the right to unrestricted private property and free exchange; hence, a system of “laissez-faire capitalism.”
For a New Liberty, p. 28
The central core of the libertarian creed, then, is to establish the absolute right to private property of every man: first, in his own body, and second, in the previously unused natural resources which he first transforms by his labor. These two axioms, the right of self-ownership and the right to “homestead,” establish the complete set of principles of the libertarian system. The entire libertarian doctrine then becomes the spinning out and the application of all the implications of this central doctrine.
For a New Liberty, pp. 47–48
The central thrust of libertarian thought, then, is to oppose any and all aggression against the property rights of individuals in their own persons and in the material objects they have voluntarily acquired.
For a New Liberty, p. 55
Libertarians regard the State as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. …
… The distinctive feature of libertarians is that they coolly and uncompromisingly apply the general moral law to people acting in their roles as members of the State apparatus. Libertarians make no exceptions. For centuries, the State (or more strictly, individuals acting in their roles as “members of the government”) has cloaked its criminal activity in high-sounding rhetoric. For centuries the State has committed mass murder and called it “war”; then ennobled the mass slaughter that “war” involves. For centuries the State has enslaved people into its armed battalions and called it “conscription” in the “national service.” For centuries the State has robbed people at bayonet point and called it “taxation.” In fact, if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.
For a New Liberty, pp. 56–57
… the central thrust of the libertarian is to oppose all aggression against the rights of person and property …
For a New Liberty, pp. 57–58
The libertarian creed can now be summed up as (1) the absolute right of every man to the ownership of his own body; (2) the equally absolute right to own and therefore to control the material resources he has found and transformed; and (3) therefore, the absolute right to exchange or give away the ownership to such titles to whoever is willing to exchange or receive them.… each of these steps involves property rights …
For a New Liberty, p. 85
… libertarians do not assume that the ushering in of the purely free society of their dreams will also bring with it a new, magically transformed Libertarian Man. We do not assume that the lion will lie down with the lamb, or that no one will have criminal or fraudulent designs upon his neighbor. The “better” that people will be, of course, the better any social system will work, in particular the less work any police or courts will have to do. But no such assumption is made by libertarians. What we assert is that, given any particular degree of “goodness” or “badness” among men, the purely libertarian society will be at once the most moral and the most efficient, the least criminal and the most secure of person or property.
For a New Liberty, p. 291
… the libertarian creed is still that of a relatively small minority, and furthermore, it proposes radical changes in the status quo. Hence, it is bound to be a lonely creed …
For a New Liberty, p. 375
… the potential appeal of libertarianism is a multiclass appeal; it is an appeal that cuts across race, occupation, economic class, and the generations … Every person or group that values its liberty or prosperity is a potential adherent to the libertarian creed.
Liberty, then, has the potential for appealing to all groups across the public spectrum.
For a New Liberty, pp. 391–92
… libertarianism will win eventually because it and only it is compatible with the nature of man and of the world. Only liberty can achieve man’s prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness. In short, libertarianism will win because it is true, because it is the correct policy for mankind, and truth will eventually win out.
For a New Liberty, p. 394
… libertarians should consider themselves people of the right.
Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 32
Libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture, society, religion, or moral principle.
Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 101
Only libertarianism is truly radical. Only we can complete the unfinished revolution of our great forebears, the bringing of the world from the realm of despotism into the realm of freedom. Only we can replace the governance of men by the administration of things.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 29
… libertarian philosophy [rests] on two basic axioms: the absolute right of every individual to “self-ownership,” to the ownership of his own body; and the right to own all virgin resources that the individual finds and transforms by his personal energy. From these two axioms can be derived the entire system of property rights, freedom of contract and bequest, and free-market economy.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 189
… libertarians [are] all people who have arrived at the axiom of non-aggression …
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 384
Libertarianism, the free society, is compatible with any psyche that holds firmly to the rights of person and property, whether for humanistic, traditionalist, or totally non-psychological reasons.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 424
… libertarian ideology is a highly “radical” one—far outside the present political matrix. There are, of course, elements of libertarianism which will appeal to all parts of the ideological and occupational spectrum.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 597
The heart and soul of libertarianism is its ideas, and the success of liberty will be still-born if that body of ideas is not discussed, advanced, and disseminated to scholars and interested students of liberty.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 640
… those of us who are “fanatical” libertarians, engaged in a lifelong battle on behalf of individual liberty, joyously earn a psychic profit in the course of the struggle. Why? Because our value-scales are such that we consider it of enormous psychic profit to us to participate in the battle for liberty, to fight for the most noble and glorious cause of all. We don’t consider that we are “sacrificing” either ourselves or our descendants. We consider that a commitment to participate as much as possible in the struggle for liberty gives joy and enrichment to our lives. If we feel that we are succeeding in bringing the glorious future day of total liberty closer by our efforts, then of course so much the better; but if our best efforts do not eventually succeed (which I do not believe), we in no sense will consider our efforts wasted—for we will consider ourselves happy and privileged to have fought for the glorious cause of individual liberty. That continuing and lasting psychic profit cannot be taken away from us.
… the libertarian fights for the liberty of all men because he believes that justice requires such a world; since he holds the liberty of all very high on his value-scale, such liberty is to his own “psychic interest” as well as to the psychic interest of everyone. The libertarian fights for a world in which he would very much like to live, a world of justice where everyone’s rights (including of course his own) are upheld. He wants to exploit no one and no one to exploit him.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 703
… the truly complete libertarian, the “born again” libertarian, if you will, is not content with recognizing the truth of liberty as the best social system; he cannot and will not rest content until that system, that set of principles, has triumphed in the world of reality. Reason and will are thus fused in a mighty and unflinching determination to carry on the struggle until the victory of liberty over statism has been achieved.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 785
Our goal is nothing less than the victory of liberty over the Leviathan State …
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 788
… [libertarians] are not on the left-right political spectrum.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 834
What are libertarians? Some of us are free-market anarchists, others are minimal statists. But we all believe that government must not stray beyond the strict confines of the defense of each individual’s rights to liberty and property. We favor personal and economic liberty. And we believe in minimal government at home and abroad; we oppose government intervention in the domestic economy or in the affairs of other nations. We are not pacifists; we want to confine the U.S. government to protecting its own citizens while aggressing against no one else.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 886
… the attack that statists and non-libertarians have always leveled against libertarians [is:] Why are you so “negative”? Why are you always so opposed to the government? Can’t you ever offer positive measures? The answer to this bit of hokum is precisely the same now as it was before: We are strongly opposed to the State to the extent that we love liberty. We positively favor liberty and libertarianism, and it is precisely for that reason that we are so negatively opposed to those who would trample upon liberty or on the principles of libertarianism. Indeed, how could we love liberty strongly and passionately if we did not oppose its enemies with equal fervor?
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 971
… libertarianism decrees that every person should have the right to do whatever he wants with his own property.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1123
I like to think of the libertarian political philosopher as a kind of spiritual Lone Ranger, dedicated to defending rights and justice and to combating crime against such rights wherever he finds it. Examining all the possible hypotheticals, the Lone Ranger descends from the sky with his six-shooters ablaze, interested in one and only one concern: defense of the victim’s rights against aggression. He cares not for excuses, alibis, starvation, or emergency situations; he cares only for defense of rights.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1180
… no anarchist has ever deliberately willed chaos or world destruction. Indeed, anarchists have always believed that the establishment of their system would eliminate the chaotic elements now troubling the world.
Strictly Confidential, p. 27
LIBERTY
The interest of the people coincides with universal interest and with laissez-faire and liberty for all.
Classical Economics, p. 78
I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life.
Conceived in Liberty v. 1, pp. 9–10; p. xvi
From liberty all other blessings flow.
Conceived in Liberty v. 2, p. 193; p. 691
Liberty implies property rights and free trade; it does not contradict them.
Conceived in Liberty v. 3, p. 263; p. 1027
… man’s equality lies in his equal right to liberty.
Conceived in Liberty v. 4, p. 179; p. 1293
… liberty causes innovations and fuels the spirit of enterprise …
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 262
… only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy. Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops …
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 47
The key to the theory of liberty is the establishment of the rights of private property, for each individual’s justified sphere of free action can only be set forth if his rights of property are analyzed and established.
Ethics of Liberty, p. xlviii
… in a libertarian world, every man has equal liberty, equal rights under the libertarian law. There can be no special immunities, special licenses to commit crime.
Ethics of Liberty, pp. 82–83
Rights to one’s liberty and property must be universal.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 122
… liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion of an individual’s person and property.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 215
… liberty requires the elimination of aggressive violence in society …
Ethics of Liberty, p. 226
… liberty should be the highest political end … liberty is a moral principle, grounded in the nature of man. In particular, it is a principle of justice, of the abolition of aggressive violence in the affairs of men.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 258
… the victory of total liberty is the highest political end …
Ethics of Liberty, p. 264
… the current prospects for liberty, even in the short-run, are highly encouraging.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 273
… the rights of personal liberty and “freedom of enterprise” almost invariably intertwine and cannot really be separated.
For a New Liberty, p. 85
… only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system …
Left and Right, p. 22
It is liberty that is the idea most threatening to the state. And all men who hold it as an ideal are enemies of the state.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 39
The eventual victory of liberty is inevitable, because only liberty is functional for modern man.… liberty one day shall triumph.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 175
… the fundamental definition of liberty is “negative”: it consists in the absence of molestation, the absence of invasion of anyone’s property rights in his person or material goods by other people. And the first philosophical error of every statist or socialist, left or right, is always to denounce the “superficiality” of “negative” freedom, and to set forth their views of “positive” freedom, which can include a grab-bag of goodies from full employment and three-square-meals a day to the present fad for “personal liberation.”
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 184
… liberty is, to be sure, not the be-all and end-all of anyone’s personal philosophy. The libertarian does not believe that liberty per se provides the magic panacea for all ills or the magic guide for all actions; he simply advocates the liberty for every man to work out his own goals and his own personal philosophy. Once liberty is achieved, there can be all sorts of moral philosophies which different libertarians can pursue; the rationalist libertarians, for example, among whom I include myself, would hope that the free man would use his liberty in accordance with a rational ethic, an ethic derived from a rational study of the objective nature of man. But this plea for rationalism is on a different plane than the wider plea for liberty.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 184
Liberty is profoundly American …
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 214
Liberty—the problem of the proper scope of violence …
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 384
… we cannot have liberty unless we have life …
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 703
Liberty is not always a rose garden—especially for the existing ruling class and those living off the State.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 944
The advent of liberty will immeasurably benefit most Americans. But some will lose—those who have been exploiting us and feeding at the public trough. And these special interests and ruling elites will not surrender their ill-gotten gains so readily. They will fight like hell to keep it. Libertarianism is not a message of treacle and Camelot; it is a message of struggle.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 949
… the whole point of achieving liberty: to give individual persons the chance to develop their own lives in freedom.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1135
… liberty is a lifetime commitment, and not a quick ticket to fortune and glory.
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1191
… a condition of absence of coercion over person and property for every man …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1311
… liberty is defined as freedom to control what one owns without molestation by others …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1342
… the government should not infringe on liberty and property …
Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 69
… liberty is necessary to a viable social order.
Strictly Confidential, p. 47
LIMITED GOVERNMENT
… through the centuries men have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees and actions.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 70
… the State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 79
The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 88
If, in fact, we cast a cold and logical eye on the theory of “limited government,” we can see it for the chimera that it really is, for the unrealistic and inconsistent “Utopia” that it holds forth.… In the first place, there is no reason to assume that a compulsory monopoly of violence, once acquired by the “Jones family” or by any State rulers, will remain “limited” to protection of person and property. Certainly, historically, no government has long remained “limited” in this way. And there are excellent reasons to suppose that it never will. First, once the cancerous principle of coercion—of coerced revenue and compulsory monopoly of violence—is established and legitimated at the very heart of society, there is every reason to suppose that this precedent will be expanded and embellished. In particular, it is in the economic interest of the State rulers to work actively for such expansion. The more the coercive powers of the State are expanded beyond the cherished limits of the laissez-faire theorists, the greater the power and pelf accruing to the ruling caste operating the State apparatus. Hence, the ruling caste, eager to maximize its power and wealth, will stretch State power …
… the State and its rulers will act to maximize their power and wealth, and hence inexorably expand beyond the supposed “limits.” The crucial point is that in the Utopia of limited government and laissez-faire, there are no institutional mechanisms to keep the State limited. Surely the bloody record of States throughout history should have demonstrated that any power, once granted or acquired, will be used and therefore abused.
Ethics of Liberty, pp. 175–76
The idea of a strictly limited government has proved to be utopian …
For a New Liberty, p. 84
The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble experiment that failed …
For a New Liberty, p. 381
The idea of a strictly limited, laissez-faire government turns out to be a Utopian, unrealistic one. It can never work, which is one of the main reasons why anarchists see the necessity for eliminating the State altogether, rather than try to limit and confine it once it is there.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 119
… once grant to one agency the power to enforce a compulsory monopoly of ultimate defense in a given territorial area, once grant it the right to outlaw competing police and judicial agencies, and its coercive power is already so great that its enforcement of compulsory taxation is a brief further step in its grab for power. This is in theory; in practice, of course, there was never this separation to begin with; the bandit gang that achieved the power to call itself the “State” never had any compunction about exercising as much coercion and extracting as much plunder as it could get away with.
Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 320
… it is the essence of Power, of government, to expand beyond its laissez-faire limits … it is the task of the people to guard eternally against this process.… they must always regard their government with hostility and deep suspicion …
Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 786
… in the history of political thought, time after time a concept originally designed to limit and check the State was turned by the State into an instrument to give it legitimacy and moral approval in the eyes of the masses.
Strictly Confidential, p. 53
LOCKE, JOHN
… a great liberal philosopher …
Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 466; p. 456
… contrary to some historians, Locke’s “labor theory of property” has no relation to the “labor theory of value” of Karl Marx and other socialist authors.
Conceived in Liberty v. 2, p. 190n3; p. 688n3
The moral justification for government, to Locke, was to defend these rights of property. Should government fail to serve this function, and itself become destructive of property rights, the people then have the right to revolt against such government and to replace it with one that will defend their rights. Thus, Locke, by the use of reason in investigating the laws of man’s nature, adumbrated the doctrine of the natural rights of the individual to person and property, rights that are anterior to government and that government is duty-bound to defend, on pain of a justified overthrow.
Conceived in Liberty v. 2, p. 191; p. 689
John Locke continued to be the major fountainhead of libertarian theory in America …
Conceived in Liberty v. 3, p. 335
Here was the quintessence of John Locke and of the eighteenth century libertarian creed: it is axiomatic that all men are endowed by nature with inalienable rights; the proper aim of government, as derived from the consent of the governed, is to secure those rights. Nothing other than this function justifies government’s existence; hence the right of the people to revolt against any government destructive of those aims.
Conceived in Liberty v. 4, p. 178; p. 1292
… the great libertarian political theorist …
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 313
Locke may have been and indeed was an ardent Protestant, but he was also a Protestant scholastic, heavily influenced by the founder of Protestant scholasticism, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, who in turn was heavily influenced by the late Spanish Catholic scholastics.… While Locke developed libertarian natural rights thought more fully than his predecessors, it was still squarely embedded in the scholastic natural law tradition.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 314
Locke grounded his theory of natural property rights in each individual’s right of self-ownership, of a “propriety” in his own person. …
… Locke’s is a labor theory of property, that is, how material property justly comes into ownership by means of labor exertion or “mixing.” This theory has absolutely nothing to do with what determines the value or price of goods or services on the market, and therefore has nothing to do with the later “labor theory of value.”
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 316–17
Locke had denounced debasement as deceitful and illusionist: what determined the real value of a coin, he declared, was the amount of silver in the coin, and not the name granted to it by the authorities. Debasement, Locke warned in his magnificently hard-money discussion, is illusory and inflationist …
… Locke superbly put his finger on the supposed function of the Mint: to maintain the currency as purely a definition, or standard of weight of silver; any debasement, any change of standards, would be as arbitrary, fraudulent, and unjust as the government’s changing the definition of a foot or a yard.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 321–22
… Locke the natural rights-er developed the scholastic natural law tradition, and was the opposite of Hobbes’s right-wing Grotian apologia for state absolutism.… Locke was not a Hobbesian but in the natural law tradition …
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 339n8
John Locke (1632–1704), the great late seventeenth century English libertarian political theorist, is often erroneously held to have originated the labor theory of value. Actually, Locke was discussing a far different problem from the determination of price. In the first place, he championed the idea of private property in land to the original homesteaders, who took unused land out of the common by “mixing their labor” with the soil. This is a labor theory of the proper origin of private property rather than a labor theory of value. Second, Locke is trying to demonstrate the unimportance of land—supposedly originally communal—as compared to the importance of human energy and production in determining the value of products or resources. Locke asks us to compare an unused piece of communal land with the difference made by labor in tilling the soil and transforming it into consumer goods. Here Locke is certainly correct in highly valuing the input of human energy, which here includes the creation and the collaboration of capital goods as well as the narrow modern meaning of “labor.” Human energy, or “labor” in the broadest sense, has certainly made the crucial difference in the march upwards from penury and barbarism to modern civilization. But this is no “labor theory of value” in the sense of determining price.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 472n17
… the proper theory of justice in landed property can be found in John Locke: that it first become private property by the use criterion.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 210
It was … John Locke in seventeenth-century England who transformed classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism. From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts, stemmed his conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of each individual. It was the Lockean individualist tradition that profoundly influenced the later American revolutionaries and the dominant tradition of libertarian political thought in the revolutionary new nation. …
Locke’s celebrated Second Treatise on Government was certainly one of the first systematic elaborations of libertarian, individualistic, natural-rights theory.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 21
It should not be surprising that Locke’s natural-rights theory, as historians of political thought have shown, was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. After all, the pioneers of any discipline, any science, are bound to suffer from inconsistencies and lacunae that will be corrected by those that come after them.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 22
… the American Revolution … was grounded in a radically revolutionary development of Lockean theory during the eighteenth century.
Ethics of Liberty, p. 23
The earliest theoreticians of libertarian classical liberalism were the Levellers during the English Revolution and the philosopher John Locke in the late seventeenth century … John Locke set forth the natural rights of each individual to his person and property; the purpose of government was strictly limited to defending such rights.
For a New Liberty, p. 4
While Locke was a brilliant property theorist, we are not claiming that he developed and applied his theory with anything like complete consistency.
For a New Liberty, p. 40n3
I am in the “radical Lockean” tradition of the founders of the American Republic, of the Commonwealthmen, of the American Revolutionaries, of the Anti-Federalists, the Jeffersonians, etc.
Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 291
Jefferson, Paine, et al. were taking their doctrines squarely from Locke.
Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 64
… Locke justified rebelling against the government when the latter violated the natural rights of individuals …
Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 88n33
LOGIC
… if a man cannot affirm a proposition without employing its negation, he is not only caught in an inextricable self-contradiction; he is conceding to the negation the status of an axiom.
Economic Controversies, p. 6
A self-evident axiom … will be a proposition which cannot be contradicted without employing the axiom itself in the attempt.
Economic Controversies, p. 10
… economics, in contrast to physics, can derive absolutely valid substantive truths about the real world by deductive logic.
Economic Controversies, p. 292
For the Aristotelian philosophers, logic was not a separate and isolated discipline, but an integral part of the natural law. Thus, the basic process of identifying entities led, in “classical” or Aristotelian logic, to the Law of Identity: a thing is, and cannot be anything other than, what it is: a is a.
It follows, then, that an entity cannot be the negation of itself. Or, put another way, we have the Law of Non-Contradiction: a thing cannot be both a and non-a. a is not and cannot be non-a.
Finally, in our world of numerous kinds of entities, anything must be either a or it won’t be; in short, it will either be a or non-a. Nothing can be both. This gives us the third well-known law of classical logic: the Law of the Excluded Middle: everything in the universe is either a or non-a.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 4
… the use of verbal logic is not inferior to logistics. On the contrary, the latter is merely an auxiliary device based on the former. For formal logic deals with the necessary and fundamental laws of thought, which must be verbally expressed, and logistics is only a symbolic system that uses this formal verbal logic as its foundation. Therefore, praxeology and economics need not be apologetic in the slightest for the use of verbal logic …
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 76
The economist does not “assume”; he knows. He concludes on the basis of logical deduction from self-evident axioms, i.e., axioms that are either logically or empirically incontrovertible.
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 582
LOOPHOLE
… is it really a “subsidy” to be allowed to keep more of your own money? Only if we agree with the curious implicit assumption of the flat-taxers that the government, not us, really owns our earnings and our property …
Economic Controversies, p. 536
Neither can one call accelerated depreciation a subsidy. There is no reason why a business should not be able to depreciate its capital at any pace it wants.… Accelerated depreciation simply allows firms to arrange the time-schedule of their payments in the most convenient and efficient ways.
Economic Controversies, pp. 539–40
A deduction or exemption is only a “loophole” if you assume that the government owns 100 percent of everyone’s income and that allowing some of that income to remain untaxed constitutes an irritating “loophole.” Allowing someone to keep some of his own income is neither a loophole nor a subsidy.
Making Economic Sense, p. 16
… the very concept of “loopholes” implies that the government rightly owns all of the money you earn …
Making Economic Sense, p. 24
Let us hope that the tax credit will return in full force. And then we can revive the lost tactic, not of “closing the loopholes,” but of ever-widening them, opening them so widely for all indeed, that everyone will be able to drive a Mack truck through them, until that wondrous day when the entire federal revenue system will be one gigantic loophole.
Making Economic Sense, p. 215
… the hidden assumption of those who want to eliminate deductibility (not only of state and local taxes but of many other expenditures and “loopholes”), is that the government is really the just owner of all of our income and property, and that allowing us to keep any of it, or any more of it than before, constitutes an illegitimate “subsidy.”
Making Economic Sense, p. 216
