infocircus

• The philosophy of liberty is based on the principle of self-ownership.
  • You own your life.
  • To deny this is to imply that someone else has a higher claim on your life than you do.
  • No other person, or group of persons, owns your life.
  • Nor do you own the lives of others.
• You exist in time: future, present and past.
  • This is manifest in [respectively]: your life, your liberty and the product of your life and liberty.
  • To lose your life is to lose your future.
  • To lose your liberty is to lose your present.
  • And to lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose the portion of your past that produced it.
• A product of your life and your liberty is your property.
  • Property is the fruit of your labour: the product of your time, energy and talents.
  • Property is that part of nature that you turn to valuable use.
  • Property is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent.
  • Two people who exchange property voluntarily are both better off, or they wouldn’t do it.
  • Only they may rightfully make that decision for themselves.
• At times, some people make use of force or fraud to take from others without voluntary consent.
  • The initiation of force or fraud to take life is murder.
  • The initiation of force or fraud to take liberty is slavery.
  • The initiation of force or fraud to take property is theft.
  • It is the same whether these things are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against the few, or even by officials in fine hats.
• You have the right to protect your life, liberty and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others; and you may ask others to help defend you.
  • But you do not have the right to initiate force against the life, liberty and property of others.
  • Thus you have no right to designate some other person to initiate force against others on your behalf.
• You have the right to seek leaders for yourself, but you have no right to impose rulers onto others.
  • No matter how officials are selected, they are only human beings and they have no rights or claims that are higher than other human beings.
  • Regardless of the imaginative labels for their behaviour, or the number of people encouraging them, officials have no right to murder, to enslave or to steal.
  • You cannot give them any rights that you do not have yourself.
• Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life.
  • You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience.
  • Nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice.
  • You choose your own goals based on your own values.
  • Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and grow.
• Your action on behalf of others, or their action on behalf of you, is virtuous only when it is derived from voluntary mutual consent.
  • For virtue can only exist where there is free choice.
  • This is the basis of a truly free society.
  • It is not only the most practical and humanitarian foundation for human action, it is the most ethical.
• Problems in the world that arise from the initiation of force by government have a solution.
  • The solution is for the people of the earth to stop asking government official to initiate force on their behalf.
  • Evil does not arise solely from evil people, but also from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as a means to their own ends.
  • In this manner, good people have empowered evil people throughout history.
• Having confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values, rather than to focus on some imposed vision or goal.
  • Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth, and typically results in unintended, perverse consequences.
• Achieving a free society requires courage—to think, to talk and to act—especially when it is easier to do nothing.

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