Hi all. I'm 35 and had an accident when I was 29 and had to have brain surgery. It affected me like a stroke on my right side minus the face and I was immediately told to file for long term disability which I got easily. Basically, when this happened, I was not libertarian. I was nothing, but I knew in my heart not to become reliant on the government. I didn't trust them and knew the money could be taken away at any time because it's the government.

I learned how to walk again and talk again by pushing myself. I did not just wanna sit on disability the rest of my life. I'm not lazy. I don't look at it like here you go now you never have to work. 1159 a month doesn't even cover rent. So long story short, even though I'm still disabled, I drive again, have my own place, and work 22 hours a week at a job and make 2700 a month. The people on disability who don't do this are either accepting the money and not trying because of whatever living situation lets them do that, or are legit too disabled to work.

I said all that so you understand my mindset as an individual. The fact is, is if wasn't disabled I would work 40+ hours a week. However, I physically can't now. I push myself beyond what my body can do and end up in the hospital needing injections in my leg from just not wanting to work anymore after pushing it too much. So I can't live a life by myself without collecting disability. Which I'm pretty sure goes against the mindset of libertarians. I just think people should be allowed to freely do what is common sense to everyone here. The government lies and is corrupt. Like my thought about disability while even being on it is that they do this basically to justify taxes more and look good to the public. They are ALWAYS trying to take it away. They have a thing called the ticket to work program, which txts you and says it wants to empower you while you try working again. If you go on it, after 9 months they take away your disability check. And say you chose to do this. Its disguised as helping you work while on disability. They take advantage of people like me who have brain damage and its pathetic.

Sorry that was all long af. I don't see charities and communities pulling together to give everyone 1200 a month who can't work. Like realistically. How do you guys feel about disability? I've never talked to libertarian's this is my first attempt lol. I just wrote down my views last week, looked it up, and holy shit. Checked every box. Thank you and I'm sorry, I do have a brain injury if that was long and stupid lol

Can anyone explain to me the line of reasoning between objective praxeology and the need to use that itself as a political/ethical preference? As far as I can tell this link from praxeology to ideology is entirely subjective.

I was debating with an Objectivist earlier, I asked if they would take resources from one person in order to save dying people in need and they said "I will not commit contradictory action". They have made it clear that their core ethical principle is to not commit contradictory action, above all else.

But I explained to them that there is no law of logic i know of that causes this particular principle to be used in ethics. Contradictory actions like theft are taken all of the time in the world, this shows that it is possible for people to choose other systems of ethics. This means that ethical principles are a choice, and so by definition they are a subjective decision of what one should value. It seems that any claim otherwise would involve creating ideological constructs in ways that redefine ethics to "only what i agree with/only what praxeology states can be in the category of ethics" in which case i would need to make a new word defined by the category: "Systems by which subjective beings can determine what they ought do." and we could then move on with the actual debate.

Therefore this whole approach would need a stronger justification for it's superiority as an ethical principle than just "it is an objective concept" because the *choice* to insert the objective concept of "non-contradictory action" into their ideology as their own preferred ethical principle is a subjective choice.

And so it seems that any further reasoning requires the use of subjective appeal to convince one why using Objectivism as an ethical framework is better than other approaches, which would perhaps defeat the purpose of naming it something like 'objectivism'.

And the person I was debating did not have a coherent answer to my point, they just said "logic cannot be disproven" which is correct but entirely besides the point, as the point of my question was asking which law of logic necessitates one ethical framework over another, so i am very curious now. Does anyone have any ideas about this?

I’m a libertarian, but not an anarcho-capitalist. I find the concept of a stateless society difficult to reconcile with the incentives surrounding organized force.

As I understand it, anarcho-capitalism depends on a sufficiently strong cultural commitment to property rights, voluntary exchange, and the non-aggression principle. That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone reads Rothbard, but presumably enough people (especially those in powerful institutions) must broadly accept libertarian definitions of property and aggression.

What happens when those initial cultural conditions begin to change? If private defence agencies and polycentric courts compete in a free market, why should we expect them to equilibrate toward voluntary cooperation and peaceful dispute resolution over time? Sure, a libertarian revolution may succeed for two or three generations, but what about the long term? What prevents a successful defence agency from buying its competitors, forming a cartel, selectively enforcing contracts while neglecting others, or using force when aggression becomes more profitable than defence? What if that’s what the majority customers truly want? What does anarcho-capitalism protect against? What protections exist for people who lack wealth, influence, organizational backing, or contractual relationships with powerful defence providers?

Saying that such agencies behaving contrary to the NAP doesn’t resolve my question. I’m asking whether the institutional incentives of the system might undermine the ethical conditions needed to sustain it.

There is also the problem of defining aggression. Libertarians often speak as though courts apply objective principles. But ask any lawyer or judge worth their salt, and they’ll tell you legal interpretations are rarely normatively neutral. That’s not a feature unique to statism. So suppose in an ancap society, one community gradually adopts an expansive interpretation of threats to their property. Its members might argue that a neighboring communist community creates a material threat to their property and contracts. Conversely, the communist community could develop its own incompatible understanding of ownership and coercion. Without a final authority, what prevents competing courts and defence agencies from redefining “aggression” in ways that serve their clients and expand their own power? What stops them now? Well, what causes war or prevents the “anarchy” among and within nations? The issue seems more complicated and rooted in human nature than simply swapping “public” for “private.”

To be clear, I’m not asking why aggression is ethically wrong. I’m asking what concrete incentive structure makes aggressors, cartels, and would-be states unlikely to succeed.

Anticipating natural law comments: it’s not whether a coercive monopoly is morally or ethically legitimate. It’s: does ancap provide an incentive mechanism that prevents institutions from becoming too powerful? If your answer is "the NAP," that doesn’t address my point. The NAP tells us what is legitimate or illegitimate. I'm asking what incentive structure prevents illegitimate institutions from becoming powerful in the first place. I’m asking: Does anarcho-capitalism ultimately depend on a culture committed to natural rights? So that people will refuse to pay for, work for, or obey a coercive power? If so, doesn’t the system’s stability still depend on maintaining that culture? Why bother with anarcho-capitalism then? Why not have a constitutional limited government?

What mechanism makes the emergence of a state less likely in anarcho-capitalism than in a libertarian minarchy?

Many (though not all) libertarians respond to the challenge posed by enclosure—a property claim that surrounds another—with some variation on an easement.

These arguments vary in their from. Some of the responses I’ve seen seem to assign positive rights of access and transit to property owners, while others—like the Blockian Proviso—simply deny the legitimacy of property claims that could produce enclosure.

But all of these seem to violate principles of self-ownership and the NAP. Whether we assign property rights via first use, labor-mixing, incorporation into ongoing projects, or whatever libertarian standard you’d prefer, easements seem to deny rights to own what would otherwise be legitimately appropriated matter.

Can anyone explain to me how easements do not violate the NAP and self-ownership?

Previously, companies had an incentive to raise wages for workers because it provides better outcomes, as time progressed the incentive for cheap labor has increased

My question is, if a company can automate its business, doesn't the endgame of capitalism indeed lead to massive unemployment? Why would I as a company owner hire people when I can automate the whole process for much cheaper? And how would that benefit the mass population?

I guess to summarize, in the automated age, what would create jobs, and how would someone from any background be able to rise to the top when everything would require tons of materials a normal person would never have? From a libertarian sense if the market stop prioritizing people, is it still beneficial even if the prices of everything go down?

In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick proposes a though experiment that brings into question the nature of property acquisition from the unowned commons:

> “Why does mixing one's labor with something make one the owner of it? Perhaps because one owns one's labor, and so one comes to own a previously unowned thing that becomes permeated with what one owns. Ownership seeps over into the rest. But why isn't mixing what I own with what I don't own a way of losing what I own what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don't? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?”

Nozick explicitly frames this as an exploration of labor theories of property, but it applies equally well to any natural law or NAP-based approach to subtracting unowned matter from the commons and transforming it into private property.

What is the minimum quantum of effort required to transform unowned matter into property? Nozick proposes pouring juice, but what if he instead left a can of juice to rust until the juice spilled out under the force of gravity? Can we objectively define a minimum quantum of activity to warrant a property claim and, if not, in what sense can property serve as an objective remedy to conflict over the use of scarce resource?

Similarly, what is the boundary on matter transformed into property? If Nozick spills juice into the ocean or plants a seed, how many molecules of water or soil are transformed into his property, and according to what objective standard? If we can’t objectively define a quantum of property transformed through a quantum of effort, in what sense can property serve as an objective remedy to conflict over the use of scarce resources?

I've been arguing online with Marxists who claim profit is theft and I typically make the following points:

1) Employment is consensual

2) For ever transaction in manufacturing, both sides exchange what they think is more valuable for what they think is less valuable, i.e. raw materials for money, labor for money, finished product for money.

3) Marxists claim workers deserve the profit difference because they made it happen, but don't want workers to lose money when the company suffers a loss. Steady wages isolates workers from risk.

The marxists typically counterargue:

1) Workers have an unequal bargaining position (i.e. they need a job. The job does not need them. "The rich have already bought all the land, so you can't live of the land, you have bargain with them").

2) Capital is dead labor and again workers have an unequal bargaining position

3) The typical worker does not have control how the company is run, so that why the can't be responsible for the losses. Workers should all have a say in the how the company is run. Private ownership of the means of production is immoral.

What are the best counterarguments for these points?

Food abundance and longer lives are nice, but tons of perfectly good food gets thrown out every year, and aging populations hemorrage young people trying to get by. I play video games and wouldn't be able to without capitalism, but at the end of each day, I feel like the time I spent playing video games was wasted. As for dating and the general social capability of people, it's never been this bad, and tech companies are to blame.

My point is, libertarianism is technically correct, but is it actually good? I don't know for sure, but I assume that concerns like these are why libertarianism is so niche.

EDIT: Thank you all for your feedback. You've made good points, and I suppose the answer is simply to form tight-knit communities while the market runs in the background.

I’ve been developing a monetary architecture called the Citizens Standard and I’m genuinely interested in libertarian critique. The framework has features that align with libertarian principles but also features that won’t — I want to understand where the real tensions are.

What it does that libertarians might like:

• Removes the Federal Reserve as a discretionary institution entirely
• Replaces it with a constitutional formula — issuance tied to population growth and real productivity
• Ends fractional reserve banking — banks can only lend what they’ve actually taken in as term deposits
• Every citizen holds individually owned equity accounts (locked until 65), not government‑pooled funds
• Includes a constitutional Market Exit — citizens can convert their stake to gold, foreign currency, or decentralized assets if the system is ever compromised
• No taxation required to fund it — issuance is the mechanism

What libertarians might push back on:

• It still requires a constitutional monetary authority — not a pure free‑market solution
• Constitutional amendment is required for ratification
• Mandatory universal enrollment (I know this is a major philosophical objection)

I’m not here to convince anyone — I want the strongest critiques the framework hasn’t fully addressed. Where do you see the biggest issues?

Architecture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6702518
Empirical (1960–2025): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6735078
Transition (pending SSRN approval): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6810741
Replication code: https://github.com/Neo-Solon/Citizens-Standard
Further discussion: r/CitizenStandard
Discord: https://discord.gg/hFyzcXV54

“Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets?”

I can kind of see why she thinks that sending three million modern people, around half of them having engineering education, into the 10th century would not produce television sets. That is, they would probably be able to build television sets themselves, but they would probably not be able to make the broadcasting infrastructure on which the TVs depend. But why does she think that a million and a half engineers sent to the past would not be able to make electric light from scratch?

i’m at work and haven’t had a chance to read thru all of it. can’t tell if i’m disgusted or genuinely impressed at Block’s ability to stretch the NAP to whatever he pleases

https://www.independent.org/wp-content/uploads/tir/2025/08/tir_30_2_10_block.pdf

This has always confused me. My understanding is that under libertarian (not anarcho capitalist) ideology, the state does the bare minimum, where it acts as a justice system to enforce property and natural rights and doesn’t do much else. I have also seen a pretty overwhelming stance that taxation is theft and/or slavery and morally wrong. So now what I don’t get is how does the state, no matter how barebones, raise funds? Courthouses, judges, voting systems, police, and even the means for a state to enforce its sovereignty/existence requires some amount of money to be created or hired (if these are handled by the private sector and contracted). Does the state rely on charity alone? Does the state resemble more of a private company in which the citizens are stakeholders in which it then seeks profit on the free market somehow? Thanks in advance

I was thinking about this today about things like the overall decline of marriages and the rising numbers of single men and women. Since the pandemic it's been very difficult because young adults have a lot less money and there aren't a lot of third spaces anymore where people meet and greet and become friends.

At least in my town I know that nobody wants to build a third party space that young people will have fun hanging out at because they can make more money with a luxury bar that has oldies covers that appeal to old money folk and baby boomers.

Then there's the issue of online dating apps which are private Enterprises that use a predatory algorithm to get people hooked on being a customer of the app and never finding a match, and then in addition to paywalling the ability to communicate with people like send messages.

Overall some of the factors affecting dating and relationships and also marriage is one the cost of living of everything and to everybody's addiction to the internet and social media.

Then there's also things like White Collar jobs in corporate environments making people work so much and even requiring people to work over weekends and during after hours limiting time that they can spend with families or their significant others. I feel like a 4-day work week might help remedy this, but I don't know.

So I recently purchased the complete collection of Andrew Galambos’s Sic Itur Ad Astra. If you’re not familiar with this author or work, here’s a summary. Andrew J. Galambos was an astrophysicist who worked for the government until he had an attack of conscience about contributing to the development of weapons. He resigned his position and started formulating his own theories about things which were apparently of a libertarian nature. He eventually founded a small college called The Free Enterprise Institute where he gave lectures on his theories. These lectures have now been transcribed into a series of books called Sic Itur Ad Astra. It’s a sprawling work which covers an immense variety of subjects, from science to economics to politics to philosophy to history, etc. In total, counting the indexes and concordexes, it’s over 7,000 pages in length. I just received it in the mail the other day, so I haven’t read it yet, but I thought I’d make a post about to maybe see if anyone out there has read it, and also maybe to bring it to greater notice. It’s available in paperback on Amazon for around $500, so if you’ve got that much to spare and you’re interested in libertarian theory, you might give a thought to picking it up. To the stars! 🚀 ✨

in the first post, he seems okay with "law enforcement" touching people who are not local to his locality

in the second post, he seems not okay with "law enforcement" touching him while he's trying to visit another locality

serious question. i'm genuinely not trolling. i want to understand libertarianism.

both posts in one page (imgur)

The typical responses I've seen to concerns about unregulated economies being potentially harmful to individuals, populations, or the environment is to say that certain things would constitute violations of the NAP and other things would be ruled out by way of people simply not purchasing from businesses that engage in harmful practices.

My concern goes a level deeper than that. What's to stop businesses from engaging in misinformation campaigns to convince people that what they're doing is good or that they're not doing what's claimed of them?

Wouldn't the market incentives (both directly on the businesses and the hypothetical free market courts judging on the basis of the NAP) be heavily skewed by a misinformed or uninformed populace? Wouldn't widespread consumer practices require the public in general to be mostly very well informed on all potentially harmful business practices at all times?

Not only that, but wouldn't responsible consumer practices require individuals to be more informed than can be reasonably expected of one person? I'm all for people being educated, but having sufficient expertise in environmental pollutants, climate science, diseases and viruses, food safety, digital privacy, medicine, health, etc. to make informed decisions in a modern economy seems like a huge burden to put on any individual much less every individual.

Sure, you could have businesses that do quality checks and do this thinking for people, but that just makes it the responsibility of individuals to figure out which of those businesses does that well, for what industries, how honest they are being, how honest companies claiming to be supported by them are being, etc. All of that, arguably, just requires the same sorts of expertise to figure out. It only moves the goals rather than solves the problem.

I'd love to know what I'm missing or getting wrong about this stuff. Thank you!

Do we argue whether iPhone is better than Android?

We do. But ultimately, we just shop around.

iPhone and Android factories are privately owned by corporations that is run for profit. We don't need to argue whether bigger screen is better than bigger battery or cheaper price. We shopped around.

Does this eliminate all aggressions? No. iPhone can produce garbage and sell through scam. But other mechanism is in the way. Like reputational brand, etc.

Some would say government punish fraudster but that's hardly an issue. If we buy phone we mainly get good ones because the middle men between us and the sellers are also privatized.

Government job is very little.

Like say I have a dispute with a seller at eBay and I don't get good solution with eBay then I sue eBay itself in Government court. Like how often that happened?

Very rarely.

Silkroad run fine without government court adjudicating things.

I can understand that corporations have limitation. Government can be very abusive. A king can, For example, promise low tax, and then raise tax abruptly once you settle.

In fact, I would say democracy may have been an improvement over say, feudalism.

But some variance of feudalism, like neo feudalism may work. That's not fundamental ideological "problems". That's just technicality.

We can even combine territorial ownership with democracy. Say the state is owned by a corporation whose 80% of the share are always owned by actual people living there or have historic "ties" to the land.

So democracy with tradeable citizenship, for example, will combine firms maximizing profit, customers shopping around like what we have in normal capitalism.

So basically because government can do really horrible things like executing people, then we may need more "safeguards". But that's just technicality and not fundamental ideological problems.

Some libertarians complain that you can't own territories. If you own territories and rule the territories then you are government and government is bad.

You can own land. Territories are just large amount of land.

Why can you own land but not territories?

In fact, contemporary democracy is like squatters' right. If a state or city lower tax and govern well, immigrants just come to the territories and now can vote communism. Hard to get working libertarians if commies can keep coming voting socialism. And they always do because their states will be sucks.

For example, many Californian in US move to Texas and vote communism in Texas. Well, everyone will be commies then.

But if a bunch of libertarians own large amount of territories, you can arrange that people coming must buy a share first before they can live. Now only those sharing our value will think it's worth paying.

Another issue is initial "owners" of territories. But just like land, it's an issue that will go away eventually. Technically if you go far enough, all land is "stolen". But "stolen" land has low market value and the real value is in building communities and infrastructure on it. Also once land is bought and sold several time everything is pretty legitimate anyway.

If you buy a land from government we don't dispute that you own the land and can "rule" the land as you please. You can build house and charge rent from tenants there.

The same way if a democratic city or state says, okay, we turn our voters into shareholders and our state/city is now a corporation, I don't see that's more disputable from libertarian points of view.

In general, I like the idea of shopping around.

We may disagree whether drug, transactional sex, transactional reproduction, transactional organs, should be legal or illegal.

But that's just like we disagree if bigger screen is better than bigger batteries in phones.

Let the market decide.

Which kind of phones people choose to manufacture will be similar to whichever societies people choose to create.

I also think this will SOLVE most libertarians problem. Tax too high? Shop around for low tax low welfare states.

There are practical reasons why we can't have that. But as usual, I see that as practical and business problems, not ideological problems under libertarianism.

What do you think?

I’ve been doing some reading on the philosophy of liberty and free expression and there is one question I have become increasingly interested in: Why are libertarian concerns regarding free speech almost exclusively focused on the external restriction of expression and almost never on the proactive improvement of the internal ability to excercise this freedom?

This is not a matter of someone deciding what is good and bad expression, but just an observation that a society of legally free but mentally degraded people is not a very free society in any meaningful sense. I get that it might simply be out of scope for some kinds of libertarianism, but a political philosophy is informed by what a person thinks matters. Why is this question on the effective exercise of liberty almost entirely ignored?

JS Mill talks about the development of individuality, human capability and how society is made richer by the diverse experiments of life. But that this can only be done well when the mental faculties and core human abilities are well developed. This is why he believed a strong education was essential in a healthy liberal society.

Further, I believe today, there are a certain set of issues brought on by new technology that makes threats to the internal ability to exercise freedom of expression more pressing. Just to note a few:

• News and social media driving a habituation of emotional reactivity over thoughtful discussion and evaluation of issues.
• The increasingly concerning trend of people outsourcing critical thinking and the ability to articulate thoughts to LLMs.
• The damage to attention span and ability to concentrate as a result of extended consumption of short form content.

I see these as threats to human creativity, critical thinking and originality - the core ability to effectively exercise free action both at a personal and societal level. Perhaps I’m imagining these issues to be more significant than they are, but issues like them related to poor education, growing mental health issues, the weakening or corrupting of human faculties through unhealthy habits - why are these not at least equally as offensive to a libertarian as outside restriction?

What is the libertarian solution here?

Of course, the act itself doesn't harm you directly, but I thought libertarians might think it's still unethical because successful formation of such unions will destroy liberty down the road.

Is your opinion different between alienated incompetents (e.g. disabled) and "lazy" incompetents?

Chief Justice John Roberts said that Marshall has had more influence on the current US than most presidents. Indeed, Marshall, more than anybody, is to credit for US not developing as a loose union of powerful states but as a country with very powerful federal government. He established judicial review.   Marshall settled meaning of "necessary and proper clause" as very broad, reading "necessary" as" convinenet" to uphold the power of Congress to create national bank . Which some libertarians do not like. Here is Madison reacting to McCulloch:

" In the great system of political economy, having for its general object, the national welfare, every thing is related immediately or remotely to every other thing; and consequently, a power over any one thing, if not limited by some obvious & precise affinity, may amount to a power over every other. Is there a Legislative power, in fact, not expressly prohibited by the Constitution, which might not, according to the doctrine of the Court, be exercised as a means of carrying into effect some specified power?”

In Gibbons he established that commerce clause is broad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbons_v._Ogden

Yet without Marshall, the US would not look like it does today or be superpower, what do you think?

So, apparently using of commodity money rather than fiat currency decreases the ability to spy on people by both government and big businesses. What other advantages are there?