A piece of mine featured on Students For Liberty’s website on the importance of libertarians engaging in the political process.

Another piece of mine featured on the Students for Liberty site

I highly recommend this book to people. “Road to Serfdom” by FA Hayek.

Economic freedom is often falsely labeled as greed, while the people demanding other people’s money by force pose as moral crusaders.

Will all libertarians agree on all things?  Of course not.  If they do, they are not truly thinking independently.  Libertarianism is a philosophy; a philosophy with applications in human action, political philosophy, moral conduct and social functions.  It is not a form of governance.  It does not prescribe one set method of achieving libertarian ends nor does it dictate justifications or public policies in regards to actuating libertarian principles.  While some purists would have you believe there is one set of philosophies and policies you must endorse or condemn to  be a true libertarian, the notion is harmful to the advancement of liberty as a whole. 

People are attracted to libertarianism for a number of reasons.  All people think and rationalize differently.  If we are to be a movement of independent thinkers we must concede that sometimes people will have different approaches to realizing our principles.  This is not to say that we should compromise on principle, as supporting wealth redistribution or censorship would be, but that we should realize that people are going to have their own notions on what exactly individual liberty entails and how best to advance those principles.  With this in mind, we must embrace hyphenated libertarians, even if we disagree with them.  Republican-libertarians, feminist-libertarians, civil-libertarians, progressive-libertarians, etc.  I for one, refer to my self as a libertarian-republican.  My philosophy is libertarianism, but my governing philosophy is republicanism, meaning I believe a republican form of government is the form of government best designed to support libertarian ideals.  Many will disagree with me.  It is fine.  That is what we must welcome within our movement.  We cannot rigidly reject all we disagree with as “statists”, we must realize the majority of us who are attracted to libertarianism share a majority of the same principles, even if we differ on how best to promote them.

A piece I wrote for the Students for Liberty blog this past winter during Norway’s butter shortage.  How does a country full of dairy farmers end up with a butter shortage?  Central planning, of course.

Government does not produce anything and anything it has it has taken from someone.  The bigger the government, the more of a drain it becomes on the people.  This is why government cannot never create prosperity through spending.  Government spending is the destruction of capital. 

Many time we are told libertarianism is racist.  This is often based on a misunderstanding of libertarian opposition to State policies.  For example, the Civil Rights Act which many people claim to be an example of great legislation because it sought to end discrimination in the South.  Libertarians take issue with the Act’s trampling of property rights in order to fix a problem created by government in the first place: institutionalized racism. 
Racism is a form of collectivism— viewing all people as a member a specific race and assigning qualities to them based on their membership of that group. It is impossible for libertarians to be racist, as they are individualist and see each person as unique and believe that every individual should have liberty.  Libertarianism is the antithesis to racism and all forms of collectivism. 

Nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction would have never emerged from a free market system. Only governments, with the ability to endlessly fund projects with other people’s money with no regard to value or profit, could create such instruments of death. There is no value to the industrialist or the entrepreneur in such devices, no return or promise of profit, only the promise of destruction.