(...) in order to have a thought you must have property rights over your body. That doesn't imply that you own your thoughts. The thoughts can be used by anybody who is capable of understanding them.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

If you look at the way the term natural is used in our culture, it's really wierd. Because it's not like there's some reason why natural is good and almost everybody assumes that natural is good (...) And, you know, man in the state of nature lived a pretty grim life. (...) I think you can plausibly argue that what's going on with environmentalism really is a religion and that's what it's driving force is, but doesn't get recognized as such.

David Friedman "Global Warming, Population, and the Problem with Externality Arguments"

One of the things that's sort of striking about the whole global warming discussion, is how conservative people are. That is taken for granted and almost without speaking that change is bad.

David Friedman "Global Warming, Population, and the Problem with Externality Arguments"

Rights cannot plausibly be conceived of and held irrespective of the practical consequences of applying them. It’s absurd to suppose that there could be a genuine right or duty that had disastrous consequences for human beings. Rights and duties tend to evolve just because of their apparent usefulness to humans. Similarly, it’s absurd to suppose a valid form of consequentialism that in practice flouts rights and duties. In fact, libertarianism can be interpreted as a form of rule consequentialism: it provides the rule (respect liberty) that promotes the best consequences. Far from being incompatible, deontologism and consequentialism are more like two sides of the same coin.

J. C. Lester "The Three Great Errors of Most Libertarians: A Concise Philosophical Analysis"

Go look at the Lincoln Memorial. Abraham Lincoln, who was a massive fascist, he has his two hands on the Lincoln Memorial on fascis, which is actually where the meaning of the word fascism came from. It's a bundle of sticks that have a rope tied around them. It means they're strong and they're going to use force to keep everything together.

Jeff Berwick

[In Mexico] it's very cheap to have your own personal bodyguard. It costs about 15 dollars a day. So I have my own private police always with me.

Jeff Berwick

I just came down from Chile. (...) Most of things out there are privatized.  (...) I was driving on beautiful highways, all of them privatized. So there's your answer to - who will build the roads or - who will let the roads deteriorate, which is the real question. The fire fighters in Chile are volunteers for the most part. Taxi drivers are usually volunteer fire fighters.

Jeff Berwick "Advice for the American Public - Get Out!"

[There's this thing called fat cut], which basically makes that no American can open a bank account, or an offshore company, or a brokerage. (...) This all goes into effect on July 2014. So rather than saying - you can't take your money outside of U.S., the U.S. government has gone to every country on earth and said - you accept an american client and we'll Syria you. (...) And they're serious. (...) Dominikan Republic - I'll give you an example. These have a passport  citizenship program. It will take three years to get a passport. (...) They've changed it to four years, then they've changed it to seven years. All within a couple of years. Now I think it's eight years. And I was talking to them. I said - what's going on? And they said - U.S. government is telling us - if we make it easy for people to get foreign citizenship, they're going to... do whatever they do, whether it's sanctions or attacks, or whatever. So they're actually doing all this stuff. That wall on the mexican border isn't to keep Mexicans out. It's not. There's actually more Mexicans leaving the U.S. than going to the U.S. right now. That should be a hint.

Jeff Berwick "How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Agorist Enterprise"

Here in the US to be a money transmitter you need a 25 million dollar insurance bond just to get into the business.

Jeff Berwick "How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Agorist Enterprise"

The existence of societies without state law enforcement that work badly (...) is no more evidence against anarchy than the existence of societies with state law enforcement that work badly is against the alternative to anarchy. To make your case, you have to show that societies without state law enforcement have consistently worked worse than otherwise similar societies with it.

David Friedman "A Belated Reply to Brad DeLong"

There's sort of inherent logic to the system, such that pays politicians to make laws that transfer wealth from disperced interest groups to concentrated interest groups.

David Friedman "Law Without the State"

Hobbes says that man in his natural state everybody is everybody else's enemy, sneak up and kill people and so forth. Why isn't that the world we know? It doesn't do any good to say - there are policemen enforcing the law. Why are they enforcing the law? Why aren't they sneaking up killing people? There are judges - yeah, but putting a wig on somebody doesn't make him behave any differently, or putting a fancy suite on him, or calling him "your honor". Why people behave in such a pattern that is organized in a generally peaceful way? And I think the good deal of the answer is a complicated network of commitment strategies, in which fighting might be physical, might be a willing to sue people (you can imagine all the different ways you can fight), but commitment strategies such that they are mutually recognized, such that I know, that there are certain things if I try to do to you, you will impose large costs on me, as best as you can.

David Friedman "Law Without the State"

Suppose you're Apple and you're thinking about suing Samsung on the claim they violate your patents. And suppose you think you're probably gonna loose, suppose your case isn't very strong. It looks as though it still pays to sue them. Because to begin with even if you're in the wrong you might win - there are mistakes in the court system, it's not a perfect system. And even if you loose, well - the case is going on, the people will be less willing to buy Samsung phones, because they are afraid that if you win, they'll have to withdraw some of their phones. That means you can sell more iPhones. So there's an incentive to attack people through the legal system, whether or not they're guilty.

David Friedman "Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own"

It is really unclear, what the government can possibly do such that they would have failed in their obligation. Such that they would admit that they had failed and you will be able to collect money. (...) There's a case with a child who was beaten and suffered brain damage by his father and then the mother sued the Department of Social Services because they knew about the abuse before it got worse and they didn't do anything about it. She lost also. (...) The only time the government has an obligation to protect you as an individual is if you are in their custody. So ironically the women in that case didn't have any right to government protection but after the criminals were arrested, they had a right to government protection.

Michael Huemer "Defending Libertarianism: The Common Sense Approach"

Different approach to defending libertarianism - not the economic argument and not the argument from rights or the non-aggression axiom. Just make this observation - the government does a whole bunch of things that, if anyone else were to do them, would be uncontroversially wrong.

Michael Huemer "Defending Libertarianism: The Common Sense Approach"

I do not want to rely on changes in human morality to make a system work. It's seems to me that what I want to do is to assume human beings are going to be about the way they are and to see if I can figure out institutions that will produce about the results I want. I think that one of the approaches some of the libertarians have used is that we convert everybody to be a libertarian and then the problem disappears. The experiment's been done... A couple of hundreds years ago... Didn't work very well, right? I mean - the constitution was pretty good constitution as such things go but didn't enforce itself. (...) This has partly to do with my disagreement with both Rothbard and Rand, because both of them imagined that the solution is to get the philosophy right and then everybody will agree. And what I want to do is to say - let's actually have a competing market to generate your law rather than having libertarian legal philosophers persuade everybody else what the right law is.

David Friedman "A Consequentialist Theory of Anarcho-Capitalism"

It is unlikely to be the case, that I will be willing to pay more for the ability to violate your rights, than you will be willing to pay to be protected from this ability. It's not impossible, but it's an unlikely situation. But you can imagine counterexamples. (...) Suppose we're in a society, where almost everybody regard heroin addiction is a really horrible thing and therefore would much rather patronise an agency which goes to courts which holds that you can be locked up for using heroin than one that doesn't. Under those circumstances you would get an unlibertarian law coming out from my market for law - you would get a law against the use of heroin. On the other hand, under those circumstances you would get that law coming out of the government produced legal system as well, as we observe that we in fact do get. So the claim I would make is that it's at least unlikely that you would not get a substantially more libertarian outcome from what I just described, than you would get from the political alternative which is what minarchist position ultimately end up with - namely some political mechanism generating legal rules.

David Friedman "A Consequentialist Theory of Anarcho-Capitalism"

My favorite example of the evidence that democracy does not do a good job of producing laws is the example of tarifs - taxes on imports. It was a well accepted XVIIIth century doctrine that the way a country got rich was to export more than imported. This was one central argument of what was called "mercantilism". This position was persuasively attacked by Adam Smith in 1776 and utterly demolished by David Ricardo about forty years later. When Ricardo worked out, what is still regarded as a correct economic analysis of foreign trade - something called a principle of comparative adage (...). So it has been about two hundred years since there was a defensible economic argument to show that a country is better off with tarifs. And during that period of time off-hand I can only think of two places (one of them not a country) that actually had a free trade - England in the XIXth century and Hong Kong in the XXth century. They were both spectacularly successful economies. Hong Kong went from being dirt, poor and ten times as density populated as the most density populated country in the world, to being richer than England. And they did it in about thirty years. Nonetheless you observe that the US still has tarifs. That essentially all countries have tarifs. This suggests that whatever has generated the laws it is not a mechanism for getting the right laws, the laws that make the population as well off as possible.

David Friedman "A Consequentialist Theory of Anarcho-Capitalism"

Why is it [government] ineffiicient? It's inefficient, because it can't go bankrupt.

Walter Block "When Should Government Intervene in the Financial Markets?"

Slavery is a pretty good idea. You can pick cotton, you can sing songs. It's just that when you wanna to quit they wouldn't let you. If you can't quit, you're a slave. We're all slaves to the government.

Walter Block "When Should Government Intervene in the Financial Markets?"

Even if it's the case that rich people individually have more dollar votes, their votes are really not able outweight the votes of the masses.

David Gordon "Everyday Logic of Economics"

Why do we have to work? The answer is - we have scarcity. Our desires are greater than what we have. Therefore I don't think you can have "more workers than work". If you had more workers than work you wouldn't be having a scarcity. Work is limited by scarcity and scarcity is, I wouldn't say infinite, but indefinitely large. (...) As long as we want more than we have there's plenty of work, so there can't be more workers than work.

Walter Block "Labor Unions and the Minimum Wage"

What I say is that the relationship between parents and children is that - you can't own them, but you can hold the rights to homestead them or to bring them up to be their guardians. How do you get the rights to be their guardians? First of all by giving breath to them. And second of all by caring for them.

Walter Block "The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Discussion"

I am sure there are traffic safety engineers in engineering schools right now. (...) I'm sure there are experts at this. But the point is that there are expert chefs. There are expert people in making pens. There are experts all over the place. But what is lacking is an automatic ridding out system for ineffective experts.

Walter Block "The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Discussion"

The maket (...) is an instrument that enables us to utilize knowledge which is distributed among hundred thousands of people. It's an adaptation to thousands of circumstances which nobody ever can know as a whole. (...) Prices tell the individual what to do and what not to do in the social interest. (...) Because we are utilizing more information, more effects than anybody know, the outcome for particular individual is necessarly unpredictable. Now an outcome which is unpredictable and undesigned by anybody, cannot be just. Just as little as an outcome of a game of chance can be a just game. (...) And there are people who imagine - oh, it could be possible to design all this, to arrange this (...) in the manner that the distribution is just. That is little imposible, because it would require, that all this widely dispersed information about particular facts and particular circumstances, and particular gifts can be used and controlled by a central authority.

Friedrich Hayek

- Reasonable people debate how to best regulate or how government can most effectively do its work, not whether to regulate at all or whether the government should even exist.

- So reasonable people debate... Hmm... Reasonable people debate... So what does the government law do? Does the government law send someone over to your house to debate with you about the best way to deal with the complexities of poverty? (...) I really don't understand how the government (...) can possibly be put into the category of debating with you. The government says jump and they say how high and you either jump that high or go to jail.

Stefan Molyneux "Libertarians Are the New Communists - Rebutted!"

You say - things that are collective and unowned are big problems, so let's have a government, which is collective and unowned to solve that problem. All you do is you create a greater problem of the commons by creating a government to solve a problem of the commons.

Stefan Molyneux "Libertarians Are the New Communists - Rebutted!"

Anarchism is not no rules. Anarchism is no rulers. Because anarchism is the understanding that when you have rulers, there are no rules.

Stefan Molyneux "Libertarians Are the New Communists - Rebutted!"

Celine Dion doesn't show up, people want their money back. Some third bassoonist doesn't show up, they don't even notice probably. (...) So hierarchies are perfectly valid, perfectly fine. In fact if you're not in a hierarchy, it means you're not doing any division of labour, you're not having any pyramids of efficiency, you're not having any specialisation and you're in the stone age.

Stefan Molyneux "Tarot Cards, Astrology and Hierarchy"

[Keynes] just took it for granted that Marshall's textbooks contained everything one need to know about the subject. There was a certain arrogance of Cambridge economics. They thought they are the center of the world and if you've learned Cambridge economics, there's nothing else worth learning.

Friedrich Hayek

Due to Ayn Rand who, I think, steered libertarianism in the wrong direction, because even some libertarians who should know better come out against collectivism. We're not against collectivism. (...) You wanna join the chess club or the tennis club, you have a collective where you agree on certain things - that's fine. As long as one is not drafted or forced into - you must play chess or we will kill you.

Walter Block "Differing Worldviews on Social Justice"

If animals had rights then when a lion kills a zebra we should put the lion in jail.

Walter Block "Differing Worldviews on Social Justice"

Libertarianism is the view that the only way we should interact with each other is a voluntary way. That's the only civilised way of interacting with each other. Any other way is barbaric. For example, I just really like this young man's brown jacket. (...) There are only two ways I can get it. One - I come up to him with a gun and I say - give me that brown jacket or I'll shoot you. Or I can be a demagog and convince everyone in the community that I should have that jacket and we all vote for it and - yes, Block should have Thomas's jacket and we all grab it from him and give it to me. These are barbaric, uncivilized ways of me getting the jacket. What are the civilised ways or way? Voluntary. I say - I'll give you ten bucks for it. He says - no. I say - I'll give you five hundred bucks for it, which is way more than I presume he bought it for but his grandmother gave it, it's got a personal attachments. And so he says no again. I say - I'll be your best friend forever if you gave me this jacket. He says no, amazingly. Well, then I just don't get the jacket. It's his jacket. That's libertarianism.

Walter Block "Walter Block Debate with John Clark"

I always like to think - compared to what? Compared to what? Libertarianism does not have a perfect solution for children's rights. I have not resolved children's rights for myself. But compared to what? Does socialism do any better? Does fascism do any better? What system answers this questions better? If in fact you look at libertarianism and say - ah, it really doesn't give me the answer I'm satisfied with. Does it give the best answer of all the answers out there? And I almost always come back and say - yes, it does.

Wendy McElroy

The abolitionists who were in favor of immidiate end of slavery by which they meant as fast as humanly possible they argued that there should be no other considerations which override the slave's right to his own life and freedom. There was another group which became known as gradualists who agreed with the abolitionists, they said it's true the slavery is wrong, it's evil, it should be gotten rid of, but they added on "eventually". What they argued was that should slavery seize immediately it would wreak economic havok on the south in particular but also on the northern industrial states which relied very heavilly on the southern agroculture. (...) It's important to know how the abolitionists responded to it. They did not necessarily try to argue that the immediate abolition of slavery would not have this terrible economic consequences. What they argued was - this economic sort of argument was irrelevant, because what had to take precedence was the right of the slave to his own liberty.

George H. Smith "Ethics vs. Economics"

I think it's fortunate that are economic position is so strong, because unfortunately our philosophic position is very weak. Much weaker that we wish it were. (...) We like to say that you cannot trespass a person's land without his permission however small the trespass is. That should be up to him to decide whether you're injuring him, not up to you. Every time I light a match fotons from that match are trespassing on property four hundred miles around. Every time I light a match a little bits of sulfur are trespassing on land twenty miles around. And therefore if we really took seriously sort of a lot of a simple aprioristic arguments we sometimes like to make in order to proof things we do believe to be true. If we took those things seriously, we would conclude that you couldn't light a match without permission from every land owner within site.

David Friedman "Ethics vs. Economics"

The Marxist's argument goes as follows:

All things are produced by the workers, either directly by the workers working or indirectly by the workers building machines called capital, which then help produce goods. The capitalist consumes some of it, therefore the capitalist exploits the workers.

Now if you think of it, you will notice that there is a hidden libertarian premiss in there somewhere. Namely that things belong to the people who make them. If the socialist really believe that the right premiss was - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, it would follow that the worker is good in working and the capitalists need Rolls Royces, and that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with a capitalist receiving profits.

David Friedman "Ethics vs. Economics"

(...) we libertarians IMO ought to define ourselves as simply opposing the initiation of violent force against innocent people--aggression. We should *not* run around saying "liberty is our highest value" b/c that just gives an opening to conservatards to say "oh, we also believe in liberty, but it's just one of 'many values' for us. we are not so simplistic." It lets them avoid saying "we believe in aggression in some cases--you have to break some eggs to make an omelet".

Stephan Kinsella (Facebook post)

This is what we're doing with our drones. Double tap is when we hit a single target and then when first responders come in, rescuers come in to help the people who have been hurt or killed... we hit them again. (...) Yes, the CIA not only do it earlier between 2009 and 2011, when it was widely acknowledged, but they revived the program in 2012, which was not widely acknowledged.

Cenk Uygur "'Double Tap' Drone Strikes On First Responders Still In Use Overseas"

Why has information in the modern age become so valuable? I'll play a show in front of, let's say, five thousand people, while if all five thousand people decide to rush the stage, there's no security, that's gonna stop them. And that's the same thing with governments. They want the populous to be neutered in their thinking because they don't all want them rush in over the gates.

Billy Corgan "Total Paradigm Shift"

We live in - what's called - mixed economy in United States. And the mixture is that government is involved in almost everything. (...) Probably the least regulated industry in U.S. is technology, which is doing very well (...) The most regulated industry in the world is financial services. It's not surprising that the most regulated industry, the least free industry, is the one where we have the biggest problems.

John Allison "The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure - A Conversation with John A. Allison"

Human are amazingly social animals. That doesn't justify a political philosophy that has "social" in the name.

lengthyounarther "Against the NAP"

(Austrians) spend so much time thinking about knowledge and they spend so much time thinking about incentives in ways that mainstreamers and neoclassical economists don't.

Daniel D'Amico "The Imprisoner's Dilemma"

You hear a lot about how capitalism promotes consumerist-based culture but when you really think about it - government in the moment, politicians in the moment profit the most from consumerism and they work to promote consumerism in the here and now.

Stefan Molyneux "Environmentalism and The Sin of Breathing"

[Ted Turner - the founder of CNN] is one of the single largest private land owner in the United States at this time. (...) He's taken his wealth and he's purchasing land, he owns it privately, and he says - "I'm gonna restock buffalos on this land".

Redmond Weissenberger "Environmentalism and The Sin of Breathing"

Whenever you have a big human edifice that falls away, the first thing you need to look at is something new that's going to arise in its place, that's gonna serve the same psychological need. There's great profit in telling people they are sinful for being alive and if they give you money, you will remove this sinfulness or you will forgive them for their sin of breathing.

Stefan Molyneux "Environmentalism and The Sin of Breathing"

City is a beaver dam with neon lights. It's all it is. Beavers alter their environment to make their own homes comfortable and the same thing is what human beings do.

Stefan Molyneux "Environmentalism and The Sin of Breathing"

In the history of our species it was very common for some of people to have a lot of power over others. If you're in that situation and you're the powerless person your survival and certainly your well-being may depend upon pleasing the powerful person. (...) The hypothesis is that we might have an evolutionary adaptation to please people who are in power.

Michael Huemer "The Psychology of Authority"

[Legal language] has certain functions. One is that it's a little bit confusing to the person who's listening and because you're confused it's a little bit harder for you to dispute what's being said. You think that the person who's talking must be really smart and sophisticated (...). It also drains the emotional force out of what's being said. (...) One function is to make it so that the people who read the laws don't feel emotional about them, so that they don't get upset about the fact that they're being coerced. The other function is so that the people who are writing the laws and the people who are enforcing the laws also don't have strong emotional reactions to it. Because normally when you're responsible for making coercive threats against other people and forcing them to obey your will, and especially if you're ordering people to be punished severly for not obeying, that would be an emotional experience.

Michael Huemer "The Psychology of Authority"

There is a psychology experiment on the effect of a uniform on obedience. What it was is that psychologists put up made up uniform on someone, a uniform that doesn't correspond to any actual office or government, or anything. The person in the uniform goes out on the street and then somebody's passing by and the person in the uniform says:
- Look, this person is overparked on this parking meter. Give him a nickel.
(...)
And then you put somebody who doesn't have a uniform, who does the same script. The result is that people are more likely to obey the person with a uniform.

Michael Huemer "The Psychology of Authority"

You tend to judge the things the other people are doing to be permissible.

Michael Huemer "The Psychology of Authority"

The existence of culture is an illustration of social proof phenomenon.

Michael Huemer "The Psychology of Authority"

When we look at the UK historically, at some place that has strict gun control, the murder rate actually hasn't decreased. It's actually increased.

AmidsTheNoise "Fireside Stats Chat"

When you're wondering about what's possible, it is often very helpful to take a look on what exists.

Bryan Caplan "Rethinking the Watchman State"

Every political perspective eventually has to say "Tough luck" when confronted with well-crafted what-ifs. There's nothing uniquely hard-hearted or cruel about libertarianism.

Bryan Caplan "Tough Luck"

Many of the common lines of criticism against anarchist theories succeed only by holding anarchy and anarchists to higher standards than the State or statists are held to.

Rad Geek "Ask an Anarchist! — How would anarchists prevent the rise of tyrants?"

Sadly, as a fellow American, as an adult, who doesn’t need to turn to government, doesn’t need an authority, who is capable of being an author of my own life, I’m sucked in to your bullshit. I am a victim of your emotional immaturity.

Adam Kokesh

If you're getting raped in the ass, are you really going to try to determine and spend all of your time thinking - "geez, is he using lub or not? I can't really tell, it's kind of uncomfortable. Maybe he's using lub, maybe he's using a cheap lub, maybe he's using a really good lub." I don't know. I'm just going to get the dick out of my ass as soon as I can. That's just me.

Adam Kokesh

For far too long we've tended to see capitalism as a synonymous for a certain, particular kind of buisness structure. Not true. It should be seen as a synonymous of a certain kind of process, voluntary interaction. If, more or less, we see some rather than others, it may be because people were not inventive enough or some are more efficient or people like them for a variety of reasons.

Roy A. Childs

That an anarchocapitalism is libertarian is a prediction not a definition.

David Friedman

If they cared about keeping you safe, when you're vulnerable and in large groups like on an airplain, they wouldn't have you waiting in long lines, when you're totally disarmed and unsecured.

Adam Kokesh

You can become the most greediest person in the world and it will not raise your income by one dime. (...) The question is not why they accept these money but why other people are offering it to them.

Thomas Sowell

If labor and labor alone determines the value of an item, what of the fact that a cherry pie and a mud pie contain the same number of labor hours, and yet the former is far more valuable than the latter? The response of the unsophisticated Marxist is that what he has in mind is not labor per se, but rather “socially necessary labor,” or some such. (...) But to define “socially necessary labor” as that which is correlated with value (the cherry pie has more of it than the mud pie, which, it turns out, has none), is to leave unexplained its genesis.

Walter Block "Kevin Carson as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

The state is here to protect me, against my will if necessary, because the state knows better than a poor, incompetent woman like me, what I want sexually.

Wendy McElroy

All choices, all range of choices benefit me as an individual, because it expands the range of what's out there for me.

Wendy McElroy