Equal Freedom: The Principle of Equal Freedom and Noncoercive Government

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It would be pointed out to objectors that the implementors are willing to have a State over them, and so, fully within the terms of the Golden Rule, they can impose a State upon all others — since they are willing to have a State imposed upon themselves, they are logically allowed to impose a State upon others. This is the fatal flaw of the rule with respect to a free society — the rule does not assure freedom. Only the Principle of Equal Freedom as stated herein, or some logically equivalent construct, can assure freedom when the principle is followed. It is only this principle that implies that wherever it is the foundation for a society, that society will be a free society and will have no State.

The Golden Rule does not exclude the tax collector who believes in what he is doing, therefore it does not imply or require the existence of freedom. The Golden Rule allows one who believes in the application of taxes to strive to implement taxes upon others — by taking away property, he also takes away freedom. The Principle of Equal Freedom disallows this. Logically, one has to conclude there can be no stable freedom found in following the Golden Rule alone.

Reciprocity is a natural part of civilized life, and should be widespread within a free society, but it is not adequate by itself.

Law of equal liberty

The Golden Rule is different from the principle. It can — and generally should — be interpreted as a social rule to look after each other. Thus it is social in nature, while the principle is more societal. Which is why the rule is not adequate for determining societal form and function. The Golden Rule has a long history within religious teachings, and so has acquired many people who espouse the rule, however poorly they might actually live by it or understand it.

The more complete Principle of Equal Freedom has not been included in religious teachings, at least not in any substantial manner few indeed are the religious leaders who believe in real freedom , and it therefore has a much smaller following. Condensing the principle does not result in anything like: Do toward others as you would have them do toward you. If it must the condensed for assimilation, it would be much better done as: Live and let live.

It should be recognized that the let live part is a crucial part to be taken quite seriously. Coercion and fraud are actions that limit or destroy freedom. The State, Church, various organizations, groups, and individuals are sources of these acts. The acts can limit or remove the individual's choices, control, and properties — the individual loses control of his own life under these acts. The ultimate coercion is loss of life for the victim. Coercion and fraud exist everywhere on Earth, in every society, as the dominant factors shaping contemporary social life.

The Basics of Properties A person's properties, in their broadest definition, include life, liberty, health, intangible properties, tangible properties, and estate. Life includes biological existence, body, name, social identity, and reputation. Estate includes monies and equivalents, creations, land, land use, land improvements, and contractual entitlements. Life and liberty are typically considered separate from other properties because of their innate, generally nontransferable nature.

Coercion and fraud are the means by which property is improperly taken from a person, or by which he is restrained from taking a moral action or forced to take an action against his wishes. John Locke maintained that a person's life is his own property. He wrote, "Every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself.

Tangible properties, including land holdings, have been recognized as a person's own, at least until his death, by custom and common law. States, warlords, religious leaders, thieves, and many others have transgressed these property rights for many millennia. Herbert Spencer stated that a person's intellectual property is his own, to do with as he wishes, not to be compromised by the States' patent laws. The States' patent laws enforce coercive monopolies and deny independent inventors the right to use their own inventions. Lysander Spooner held that a person's ownership and interest in his intellectual properties continues without end, beyond his own life.

The creator bears responsibility for the use of his intellectual properties. The totality of properties is life and the tangible and intangible things that properly belong to a person. Locke summarized them as life, liberty, and estate. Ownership of non-life properties means holding proper, moral title to properties, whether or not in immediate possession of the properties, and whether or not title is formally recorded.

An estate is the entirety of a person's possessions and entitlements, tangible and intangible, exclusive of his life and liberty. It is what a person accumulates during his life. The estate continues on beyond the life of the person unless that person declares his estate dissolved, with the properties then fully disposed of. An estate could be established as an incorporated entity by the person prior to his death or interment into some form of suspended animation, including cryopreservation.

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An incorporated estate could be established after a person's death as a vehicle for royalty payments or other property transfers, provided the person has not specifically forbidden the establishment of such an estate. What holds for a person with respect to properties also generally holds for an incorporated entity, as with a company or corporation. If artificial intelligence develops sufficiently, then someday sapient, self-responsible machines should also have the same rights to properties as a human person, including the ownership of their own lives.

The same is true for biological beings with artificially enhanced intelligence who become sapient and self-responsible. Liberty is having the ability to act according to one's own wishes. This implies not having to act against one's wishes. In a free society, each independent person can act, or not act, according to his wishes. He also enjoys or suffers the consequences of his actions. If his actions are beneficial, he does not have to distribute those benefits to others, except by any existing contracts that require it.

If the consequences are harmful or undesirable, he may not impose those consequences on others, except where an existing contract might allow it. In abiding by the principle, liberties are constrained to moral actions. Moral actions include defense, but not harmful, unjustified offense. In a free society, a person's liberty cannot morally be constrained or abridged while his actions, which may be considered in total, are moral actions.

Thus a person who aggresses one day can have his liberty curtailed on another even though he is acting morally on that day. A person's liberty cannot morally interfere with the liberty or properties of another. If a person does not have permission to use another's property, that first person can be restrained from using the property. He can also be restrained from interference with another's liberty. He can be constrained to prevent harm to people or their properties. Freedom is having liberty and being in full ownership and control of the entirety of one's own properties.

If a person is constrained in acting outside of contract , his liberty is lost, as is his freedom. If his property is taken or controlled by others outside of contract , his freedom is lost. Under the principle, it is only for the owner of properties, not others, to determine the usage of those properties, except that moral uses be made. There is at this time no theory of freedom that meets conventional standards of scientific theory.

A valid scientific theory must meet certain standards of form and rigor. It must be falsifiable, that is, it must be capable of being disproved if such evidence turns up. It must be supported by a substantial body of evidence, otherwise a construct is hypothesis or speculation.

However, a body of theoretical, or logical, constructs can be derived from principle. In this manner, this work advances libertarian theory. If one accepts the principle, then by logical process one must accept validly-derived corollaries and other ancillary deductions. Without principle for guidance in society, one can only have a body of laws, rules, and conventions, each of which is arrived at as a matter of preference or consensus, and which are likely to conflict with one another.

The Principle of Equal Freedom is the strongest statement of freedom and property rights that has yet been uttered within human civilization. It can be used as the foundation for societies that enjoy freedom. The explicit principle seems to have fallen into disuse with some friends of freedom, yet their statements on the proper functioning of society typically are the logical equivalents of the principle, but without its clarity and definitiveness.

Corollaries can be derived from the principle that clarify the meaning and implications of the principle. These corollaries are, sadly, the point where many people, who like the sound of the principle, will decide that they prefer to abandon the principle as a foundation for society. They are unwilling to give up control of their neighbors through use of the State, and are fearful of living without its coercive authority. The Principle of Equal Freedom is the most complete principle for assuring freedom that I have encountered in current or historical literature, and I doubt that a fundamentally better formulation could be found.

It obviously applies to liberty by its statement of legitimate action being unconstrained except for equality. As the next chapter shows, liberty allows a person to acquire, create, and hold properties in addition to those properties innate to his existence. Thus it is a fully-encompassing principle of freedom because it applies to all of the properties of a person: Those people able to live without States and Churches, and by this principle alone, will be truly free people.

Freedom is not obtained from mythical rights, and certainly not from constitutions, which are the very antithesis of freedom because they imply a State with power over people. Freedom is obtained by decision and declaration by people who choose to be free, and who are willing to defend their freedom. Without a willingness to repulse thugs of all types and to reject the myriad forms of fraud, their declaration will sooner or later be seen as a hollow gesture, and ultimately a failure.

Freedom is simple, but not easy. If one can do as he wishes and has control of his properties, he is free — simple. But since the beginning of civilization there has been a continuous presence of people who would take away freedom through coercion, fraud, or both. Defending against them is not easy, but it is necessary. Equality in a free society arises from principle and from respect, in its several forms, between people. The Principle of Equal Freedom applies equally to all, without abridgement. There can be no interference with the life, liberty, and estate properties of any morally-acting adult, nor any interference with his moral protection of those things.

Honest, ethical behavior is the necessary norm for the continuance of equality. The coercers and the fraudsters, by their very acts, destroy equality as they seek to acquire something that is not theirs or to control the actions of others. A free society remains such, withstanding events of coercion or fraud through corrective mechanisms, provided such events are aberrations, and not the norm. The Possibility of Freedom Freedom is about liberty and property, but, moreover, it is the elimination of coercion and fraud as social institutions.

Over three hundred years ago, John Locke wrote on equal freedom, property, and upholding natural law: In , he presented as the First Principle: Definitions of Terms The following are the meanings of some of the key words as used in this book: Moral action as used here is secular, without religious connotations. Background Societies are essential for the individual, and necessary for civilization. Molinari wrote in On the Production of Security: Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. August Learn how and when to remove this template message. Age of Enlightenment Aristotelianism Classical liberalism. Agorism Anarchism Anarcho-capitalism Autarchism Christian libertarianism Collectivist anarchism Consequentialist libertarianism Free-market anarchism Fusionism Geolibertarianism Georgism Green anarchism Green libertarianism Individualist anarchism Insurrectionary anarchism Left-libertarianism Left-wing market anarchism Libertarian communism Libertarian Marxism Libertarian socialism Libertarian transhumanism Minarchism Mutualism Natural-rights libertarianism Paleolibertarianism Panarchism Right-libertarianism Social anarchism Voluntaryism.

Austrian School of economics Civil libertarianism Constitutionalism Economic liberalism Libertarian conservatism Libertarian Democrat Libertarian hip hop Libertarian Republican Libertarian science fiction Libertarian transhumanism Libertarianism in the United States Objectivism Public choice theory Small government Technolibertarianism. The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. Columbia University Press, , pp. Anarcho-capitalism Autarchism Christian libertarianism Conservative libertarianism Consequentialist libertarianism Fusionism Libertarian transhumanism Minarchism Natural-rights libertarianism Paleolibertarianism Voluntaryism.

Age of Enlightenment Aristotelianism Classical liberalism. Agorism Anarchism Anarcho-capitalism Autarchism Christian libertarianism Collectivist anarchism Consequentialist libertarianism Free-market anarchism Fusionism Geolibertarianism Georgism Green anarchism Green libertarianism Individualist anarchism Insurrectionary anarchism Left-libertarianism Left-wing market anarchism Libertarian communism Libertarian Marxism Libertarian socialism Libertarian transhumanism Minarchism Mutualism Natural-rights libertarianism Paleolibertarianism Panarchism Right-libertarianism Social anarchism Voluntaryism.

Austrian School of economics Civil libertarianism Constitutionalism Economic liberalism Libertarian conservatism Libertarian Democrat Libertarian hip hop Libertarian Republican Libertarian science fiction Libertarian transhumanism Libertarianism in the United States Objectivism Public choice theory Small government Technolibertarianism. Age of Enlightenment , History of liberalism , and French Revolution. Anarchism Libertarianism Left-libertarianism Marxism Socialism.

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A History of Anarchism. Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'. It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition".

There is a complex debate within this tradition between those like Robert Nozick, who advocate a 'minimal state', and those like Rothbard who want to do away with the state altogether and allow all transactions to be governed by the market alone. From an anarchist perspective, however, both positions—the minimal state minarchist and the no-state 'anarchist' positions—neglect the problem of economic domination; in other words, they neglect the hierarchies, oppressions, and forms of exploitation that would inevitably arise in a laissez-faire 'free' market.

The individual freedom invoked by right-wing libertarians is only a narrow economic freedom within the constraints of a capitalist market, which, as anarchists show, is no freedom at all". Retrieved February 21, Retrieved 25 January Institute for Humane Studies. Retrieved 16 February I mean all three of these very different movements.

It might be protested that LibCap ["libertarian capitalism"], LibSoc [" libertarian socialism "] and LibPop [" libertarian populism ] are too different from one another to be treated as aspects of a single point of view. But they do share a common—or at least an overlapping—intellectual ancestry. In Miller, Wilburn R. A Collection of Revolutionary Writings. It attacks not only capital, but also the main sources of the power of capitalism: In Carlos Peregrin Otero.

Noam Chomsky book author 3rd ed. Carlos Peregrin Otero, ed. Radical priorities 3rd ed.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Spring ed. Retrieved 5 March Libertarianism is committed to full self-ownership. Facts on File Inc.

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In the modern world, political ideologies are largely defined by their attitude towards capitalism. Marxists want to overthrow it, liberals to curtail it extensively, conservatives to curtail it moderately. Those who maintain that capitalism is a excellent economic system, unfairly maligned, with little or no need for corrective government policy, are generally known as libertarians. The Betrayal of the American Right. Ludwig von Mises Institute. One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy The History of a Movement.

Life and Times of Stein: Or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age. The term originally denoted a person who upheld the doctrine of the freedom of the will; in this sense, Godwin was not a 'libertarian', but a 'necessitarian'. It came however to be applied to anyone who approved of liberty in general. At the end of the last century, the anarchist Sebastien Faure took up the word, to stress the difference between anarchists and authoritarian socialists.

A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. From Anarchy to Anarchism CE— A Short History of Anarchism. A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press , p. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers Retrieved 21 November The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world.

Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. According to them, these parties are united by their 'critique of the statist and bureaucratic tendencies of modern welfare states The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Rothbard and Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'.

It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition. Depending on the context, libertarianism can be seen as either the contemporary name for classical liberalism, adopted to avoid confusion in those countries where liberalism is widely understood to denote advocacy of expansive government powers, or as a more radical version of classical liberalism.

Essentially, we believe all Americans should be free to live their lives and pursue their interests as they see fit as long as they do no harm to another. The Politics of Postanarchism. Anarcho-capitalists, even if they do reject the State, might therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than anarchists.

Little Prayers and Finite Experience. The Future of Freedom Foundation. Retrieved 27 January Archived from the original on 31 December Retrieved 20 September Retrieved 11 October Making Speech Free, — Archived from the original on 18 December Retrieved 6 June Retrieved 12 July History of Education Quarterly. History of Education Society. Archived from the original on 7 August Danto writes that Reich offered a mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives," and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left.

The clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help. Danto, Elizabeth Ann Retrieved 29 January Unnecessary but Inevitable" PDF. Archived from the original PDF on 5 July The Market for Liberty , p. Namely, these resources must be treated as collective property that is made available on an egalitarian basis.

Left libertarians embrace the view that all natural resources, land, oil, gold, trees, and so on should be held collectively. To the extent that individuals make use of these commonly owned goods, they must do so only with the permission of society, a permission granted only under the provision that a certain payment for their use be made to society at large.

In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 26 December Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School. The term is not without its critics, as Roediger b , p. Their challenge was mercilessly concrete. Douglass, who tried out speeches in work places before giving them in halls, was far from unable to speak to or hear white workers, but he and William Wells Brown did challenge metaphors regarding white slavery sharply.

They noted, for example, that their escapes from slavery had left job openings and wondered if any white workers wanted to take the jobs. This Marxist objection is what motivated Nelson's essay, which argues that labur is not, in fact, a commodity. Emphasis in the original. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production. In Gaus, Gerald F.

Libertarianism

The Murray Bookchin Reader. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. It combines the libertarian assumption that each person possesses a natural right of self-ownership over his person with the egalitarian premise that natural resources should be shared equally. Right-wing libertarians argue that the right of self-ownership entails the right to appropriate unequal parts of the external world, such as unequal amounts of land.

However, according to left-libertarians the world's natural resources were initially unowned, or belonged equally to all, and it is illegitimate for anyone to claim exclusive private ownership of these resources to the detriment of others. Such private appropriation is legitimate only if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if those who appropriate more are taxed to compensate those who are thereby excluded from what was once common property.

In Miller, Wilbur R. The social history of crime and punishment in America. Namely, these resources must be treated as collective property that is made available on an egalitarian basis". Left libertarians regard each of us as full self-owners. However, they differ from what we generally understand by the term libertarian in denying the right to private property. We own ourselves, but we do not own nature, at least not as individuals.

To the extent that individuals make use of these commonly owned goods, they must do so only with the permission of society, a permission granted only under the proviso that a certain payment for their use be made to society at large. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy: Retrieved 13 June Left-libertarians, by contrast, hold that natural resources e. Reprinted at Cato Institute. Archived 16 July at the Wayback Machine. Religion, Virtue, Liberty , ProQuest, , p.

17 February, 2007

Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America. That is why they did not want to see the state become a terrestrial Providence which in its infallibility would make on its own every decision, thereby not only blocking the road to higher forms of social development, but also crippling the natural sense of responsibility of the people which is the essential condition for every prosperous society.

They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that that which governs least is no government at all. Two Cheers for Anarchism: At the other end of this continuum lies, perhaps, some ideal version of Jeffersonian democracy composed of independent, self-reliant, self-respecting, landowning farmers, managers of their own small enterprises, answerable to themselves, free of debt, and more generally with no institutional reason for servility or deference.

Such free-standing farmers, Jefferson thought, were the basis of a vigorous and independent public sphere where citizens could speak their mind without fear or favor. Somewhere in between these two poles lies the contemporary situation of most citizens of Western democracies: Social Philosophy and Policy. The Libertarian Manifesto , ; published at LewRockwell. University of California Press. Hoffman, "Paine and Prejudice: Making the Declaration of Independence New York: Knopf, , pp. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Thomas Paine's Theory of Property Rights".

The Public School Monopoly: Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Manchester University Press, Retrieved 11 August I mean by individualism the moral doctrine which, relying on no dogma, no tradition, no external determination, appeals only to the individual conscience. To say that the sovereignty of the individual is conditioned by Liberty is simply another way of saying that it is conditioned by itself. Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow. Liverpool University Press, , p.

A Library of Universal Knowledge. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought. Archived from the original PDF on 7 December Retrieved 1 September Karl Marx and the Anarchists. Archived from the original on 15 February Retrieved 4 December What do anarchists want from us? Archived from the original PDF on 4 February Retrieved 17 June Individualist Anarchism and Reaction". Archived 23 July at the Wayback Machine. Su portavoz es L'Internazionale con sede en Ancona. Archived 8 September at the Wayback Machine..

Doug Imrie published by Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. Theory and Practice — The Anarchist Library". In Drachkovitch, Milorad M. The Revolutionary Internationals, Retrieved 24 October The Italian factory occupations — Biennio Rosso" on Libcom. A History of Anarchism , , p.

Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism, and the State: Later, they spread throughout the whole of Spain until they came to represent the third branch of the great libertarian family The FIJL had agreed upon the following statement of principles: The Spanish Civil War: A Modern Tragedy , Routledge, Felix Morga, Alcalde de Najera Retrieved 19 January W L Morison memorial site. Retrieved 13 May Anarchosyndicalist Ideas and Discussion. Libertarian Labor Review, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly.

The First American Anarchist". The COST consists of the amount of labor bestowed on the mineral or natural wealth, in converting it into metals Bogus Anarchy — The Anarchist Library". Journal of the History of Ideas. Muchos han visto en Thoreau a uno de los precursores del ecologismo y del anarquismo primitivista representado en la actualidad por Jonh Zerzan. Readings And Reflections" — via Amazon. The Puritan Influence in America Literature. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. Taxes upon the Rent of Houses".

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