This article presents an application of Rothbardian environmental policy. It argues that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and net zero by 2050 legislation have created a tort and that tort litigation should therefore be brought against them. Climate change is an interpersonal conflict to be resolved, where necessary, through tort litigation. Rothbardian climate change policy can be seen as a contribution to the research programs of robust decision-making (RDM) and robust political economy (RPE). RDM aims to identify robust strategies that generate beneficial results even under the least favorable conditions, and RPE does the same for institutions. The common strength shared by RPE, RDM, and Rothbardian climate policy is resilience in the face of uncertainty. Recent developments in climate science have vindicated Rothbardian climate policy by revealing the uncertainty surrounding the predictions of the climate models used by the IPCC. The climate is changing, but the IPCC overlooks two facts: Historical climate change has occurred on a scale that exceeds what is happening now, and nonanthropogenic forces, notably changes in solar irradiance, exert significant influence. The IPCC’s monopoly on the supply of climate science to national governments should be challenged by tort litigation on the grounds that the IPCC is in breach of its duty to supply reliable climate science to policymakers when it produces a biased selection of climate research. A class action bringing a tort against the IPCC on these grounds would allow dissident climate scientists to be called as expert witnesses, thereby extending the scope of substantive freedom of expression. Unlike mitigation under net zero by 2050, which is inappropriate except in the single case of imminent climate catastrophe, Rothbardian climate policy, RDM, and RPE advocate adaptation to the constantly changing climate.
This article investigates the evolution, function, and eventual decline of friendly societies in nineteenth-century Britain. Initially autonomous mutual aid organizations rooted in working-class self-help and communal identity, friendly societies provided economic security and social cohesion through insurance, savings, and ritualized affiliation. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, increasing regulation transformed these organizations into extensions of the British state. This study argues that the regulation of friendly societies—ostensibly a negotiated process aimed at improving security and efficiency—ultimately led to their displacement by the welfare state. Drawing on historical legislation and contemporary accounts, this article shows how both the state and societies perceived regulation as mutually beneficial yet underestimated its long-term consequences. The gradual erosion of autonomy and identity among societies facilitated their integration into a state-led welfare system, dissolving their role as civic institutions and contributing to the reorientation of working-class identity toward trade unions and class-based politics. The case highlights how incremental policy change and negotiated co-option can obscure high systemic costs and unintended transformations.
Despite the ideological impartiality claimed by Thomas Sowell and many of his followers, he is frequently boxed into the category of conservatism. This article challenges this assumption by advancing a reading of the conceptual foundations of Sowell’s thought as fundamentally Hayekian. While Hayek’s influence on Sowell is well documented—he was Sowell’s professor at the University of Chicago, and Hayek regarded Sowell’s work on knowledge and decisions as a creative continuation of his own—the significance of this influence is often overlooked in favor of other figures in Sowell’s career, such as Milton Friedman. Although this article does not deny the influence of other thinkers on Sowell’s work, it proposes an alternative interpretation that reveals parallels to Hayek’s ideas and advances a reading of Sowell as a Hayekian liberal by focusing on three key concepts across his work: freedom, justice, and order. Each of these concepts heavily relies on a shared lineage between Hayek’s British evolutionary tradition and Sowell’s constrained vision. I argue that the conceptual foundation of Sowell’s thought is Hayekian, regardless of clear methodological differences.
Perhaps the most fundamental question in political philosophy is whether any state is justified. The most impressive modern attempt to justify the state is in part 1 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia . Nozick argues that a minimal state, and only a minimal state, is compatible with our having natural rights. Here, I clarify the logic of Nozick’s strategy and show that his attempt to justify the state fails at every step. A central issue is that Nozick implicitly adopts a restricted, rather than absolute or even bounded absolute, conception of natural rights. I argue that the nature of Nozick’s failure should make natural rights theorists doubt that any state is justified. My discussion also clarifies the historical background to Nozick’s work and explains his later (apparent?) turn away from libertarianism.
This article explores the intersections between privacy, property rights, ideas, and information. The multiple-homesteading theory (MHT) posits that property rights have universal applicability, encompassing the physical, digital, and mental domains. Property in ideas and information (PII) exists only as long as privacy is fully maintained. Once shared, ideas and information trigger automatic homesteading processes in any individual who comes into contact with them; these individuals then form new and original ideas, which remain their exclusive property as long as privacy is preserved. Any libertarian addressing PII must investigate the ontological nature of ideas and information, which cannot be defined in purely physicalistic terms. This article carries out this preparatory work through examinations of heterogeneous philosophical and scientific theories, literature, and classical music. In addition, a meme theory of ideas is outlined. Ultimately, recognizing the existence of PII does not legitimize positivistic intellectual property (IP) legislation, which is incompatible with libertarian principles. Instead, the MHT demonstrates that privacy bridges coherent libertarian theory and effective libertarian action, especially in a world dominated by the pervasive intersection of the physical and digital domains.
Every generation of intellectual, cultural, and political elites, from antiquity to the present, has characterized its society as being suboptimal in some respect, or heading down the wrong track, or spiraling into decay and toward oblivion, or else becoming incomprehensibly and disconcertingly complex due to social and political evolution, technological developments, population growth, demographic shifts, and so on. A key to analyzing these characterizations lies in understanding the ways in which a society vacillates between being “open”—that is, to the extent that its political and administrative structures accommodate change without bloodshed—and, conversely, becoming “closed” to the possibility of peaceful change. Open societies, desirable as they are, nevertheless contain seeds of their own destruction due to conflicting political ideologies and social visions, to competing private interests that are contrary to open societies’ overarching purposes, and to natural social, economic, and political cycles. Defensive bulwarks against these intrinsic “enemies” are essential for sustaining an open society. This article visualizes and evaluates the open society’s nature, and advances two constitutionally feasible defenses against its enemies.
The contemporary discourse surrounding misinformation has generated unprecedented calls for government intervention in information markets and content regulation. While acknowledging legitimate concerns about false information’s potential harms, this article argues that top-down regulatory approaches fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of democratic discourse and the most effective means of promoting information quality. Drawing on classical liberal principles and empirical evidence, I demonstrate that decentralized information governance systems, market competition, and robust protection of free expression provide superior frameworks for addressing misinformation challenges while preserving the foundational elements of freedom within a democratic society. My research examines historical patterns of novel moral paradigms surrounding new communication technologies, and in doing so it evaluates evidence regarding the effects of misinformation and presents the case for distributed, bottom-up approaches to information quality that strengthen rather than constrain democratic discourse and the ideals of liberty.
In the present article, we criticize a skeptical solution to the “paradox of blackmail” offered by libertarianism. For such libertarians as Rothbard and Block, there is no real paradox of blackmail, because blackmail is legitimate, or should be legal, and so it is not the case that two legal whites make a legal black. We contend that the libertarian theory of coercion which supports this libertarian skepticism of the paradox of blackmail is problematic and that it unduly monopolizes the discussion of blackmail. As we argue in Dominiak (2024), there is an alternative approach to the question of blackmail according to which blackmail, or at least some instances thereof, can be viewed as fraud rather than coercion. Accordingly, we submit, against libertarian skepticism, that the paradox of blackmail is a real libertarian paradox which, instead of a skeptical dissolution, merits a straight solution. Such a solution, however, should not be looked for in the libertarian theory of coercion but should be based on the libertarian theory of deception and fraud.
Despite starting from different intellectual traditions, Friedrich Hayek and Robert Nozick reach the same verdict that unequal distributions of wealth or income are not ipso facto unjust. Hayek starts from the Scottish Enlightenment theory of spontaneous order, while Nozick works within a Lockean natural-rights framework. This article argues that the convergence of their thought rests on a shared nonjustificationist epistemology. Hayek treats knowledge as subjective and dynamic, generated outside the self and therefore externalist. Nozick defines knowledge as beliefs that reliably track truth, independent of internal justification. The combined Hayek-Nozick theory of knowledge has implications for distributive egalitarianism: because the information that creates any distribution emerges only ex post, no planner can certify a preferred pattern ex ante without disabling the very discovery mechanism that enables societal learning. The result is a presumption in favor of institutions that leave truth tracking and discovery intact.
This article examines four competing philosophical theories of the parental role within a libertarian framework: parental ownership, parenting as charity, parenting as voluntary social contract, and causal parental responsibility. It critically analyzes each theory, evaluating its logical implications—particularly concerning the legitimacy of enforceable parental obligations—and its compatibility with libertarian principles. The article argues that the first three theories are unsound and incompatible with libertarianism. In contrast, it defends the theory of causal parental responsibility as the only sound framework consistent with libertarian philosophy, grounding enforceable parental obligations in the creation of peril. This analysis seeks to resolve long-standing debates and establish a coherent libertarian theory of parental obligation.
Friedrich Hayek developed a novel evolutionary theory of institutions and society in his last decades of life that was at odds with the prevailing theories in the twentieth century but that—in the light of new empirical evidence and theoretical models from evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology—can be considered now almost prophetic. In this article, I first briefly outline Hayek’s main ideas to confront them with recent evidence, distinguishing between three different but related branches: new evidence from happiness studies on positional externalities and Robert Frank’s criticism in The Darwin Economy; behavioral economics findings on human altruism and the possibility of crowding-out effects of economic incentives for intrinsic (prosocial) motivation reviewed by Samuel Bowles in The Moral Economy; and the development of a new cultural group selection theory, with David Sloan Wilson in books like This View of Life as its most fervent proponent. After confirming the adequacy of Hayek’s ideas to the emergent new science of social behavior, I warn about the need to address some science-based ethical consequences and policy implications that are being proposed and partially contradict Hayek’s own libertarian ideas.
Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer pertaining to the Randians details Rothbard’s rollercoaster of responses toward the Collective. The letters on Rand begin shortly before the release of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957 and end after the publication of an unsigned 1961 Newsweek article belittling the novelist. The newly discovered correspondence undermines the persistent claim that Rothbard fabricated unflattering descriptions of the Objectivists in response to their accusing him of plagiarism. The letters, sent long before Nathaniel Branden leveled those charges, reflect the general description of the group in Rothbard’s “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” issued in 1972. The article further details the influence of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists on Rothbard in his structuring of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.”
This article explores the growing trend of state regulation targeting social media addiction among young people, offering a libertarian assessment of its legitimacy, consequences, and alternatives. The article introduces the concept of state primary socialization indoctrination, a novel contribution to Austro-libertarian literature, to describe how the state conditions citizens in the earlier part of their lives (from day care to university)—through education, media, and crisis management—to accept interventionist authority as natural. Drawing from Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Friedrich Hayek, the article critiques international regulatory responses—specifically those of China, the US, Spain, Australia, and South Korea—highlighting their impact on individual autonomy, parental authority, and economic efficiency. It argues that overregulation fosters dependence, erodes family responsibility, and imposes significant social and financial costs. In place of coercive mandates, the article advocates for voluntary solutions rooted in parental guidance, market innovation, and decentralized education. By grounding the debate in libertarian ethics and praxeology, it offers an alternative framework for addressing digital addiction while preserving freedom and personal responsibility.
The status of so-called public property remains a particularly contentious issue within libertarian literature. While some theorists contend that such property is unowned, others argue that it constitutes privately owned property under state control. This debate has direct and significant implications for the issue of open versus controlled borders. This article argues that, given the existence of the state, a consistent application of libertarian property theory renders the open-borders position untenable. It further contends that certain immigration restrictions represent a “second-best” solution to the problem of managing public property. Ultimately, the article defends the view that treating public property as privately owned by the taxpayers is the only coherent and justifiable libertarian position.
Unified libertarian theory (ULT) contends that libertarianism and realism are expressions of a single ethic shaped by context. At its core, ULT affirms the nonaggression principle (NAP) as the foundational moral commitment of libertarian thought. However, it recognizes that international relations lack the legal infrastructure and mutual norms that make this principle operational at home. While a domestic environment allows for law and norms-based restraint, foreign affairs operate in an anarchic environment where deterrence, not morality, secures order. ULT asserts that liberty is preserved through two means: institutions where possible, strategy where necessary. Realism becomes not a rival to libertarianism but its external application in a world without courts, contracts, or reciprocity. Power must still be bound, but by prudence and self-interest rather than statute. The state’s function remains constant: to preserve liberty, not project virtue. Internally, this is achieved through decentralized law and voluntary interaction; externally, through strategic discipline and calibrated force. ULT acknowledges that a state may be forced to act to preserve the liberty of those it serves. Action must be guided by interest, necessity, and proportionality. Coercion is justified only insofar as it defends liberty without becoming its own threat. ULT therefore rejects both the moral imperialism of idealist interventionism and the paralyzed absolutism of doctrinaire pacifism. ULT offers a doctrine for a world where good intentions are not enough. It affirms that liberty is sustained by structure—legal where it can be, strategic where it must.
The question of which social setting best minimizes coercion has long divided the libertarian community. Minarchists advocate for a minimal state confined to police, defense, and justice, while anarcho-capitalists call for the complete abolition of the state in favor of market-based alternatives. This enduring debate is not merely ideological but logical. This work, inspired by radical constructivism, employs a method derived from constructivist psychology, and rooted in formal logic, as a conceptual tool to analyze and deconstruct the logical underpinnings of each position. By revealing a paradox at the core of minarchism, the analysis reframes the debate and offers new perspectives on the search for a stable, liberty-maximizing social order.
In the present article we argue that Walter E. Block’s (2025) recent rejoinder to our critique (DW 2023a) of evictionism—Block’s well-known libertarian solution to the abortion dilemma—does not succeed. However, instead of limiting ourselves merely to addressing Block’s latest objections, we seek to identify possible common ground between evictionism and our charge that it entails an untenable position according to which the fetus is a duty-bearer. We do so by pinpointing the theses that a friend of evictionism would have to modify in order to defend this doctrine against our criticism and by trying to gauge the cost of doing so. The argument we put forth suggests that possible common ground could be found in relaxing the evictionist thesis that the unwanted fetus forfeits its rights and instead accepting the view that the woman’s right to her body vests her with a particularly strong prerogative to defend it against the unwanted fetus—a prerogative that justifies infringing upon the fetus’s unforfeited rights.
Most literature on cryptocurrency splits focuses on technical causes, while this article examines the philosophical and ideological conflicts behind them. Competing interpretations of freedom drive major network divisions. Bitcoin (BTC) emphasizes decentralization to resist control, bitcoin cash (BCH) champions free-market flexibility, ethereum (ETH) protects universal property rights, ethereum classic (ETC) upholds immutability, and bitcoin SV (BSV) prioritizes governance transparency. The major forks (ETC, BCH, and BSV) highlight tensions between decentralization and flexibility, immutability and intervention, and privacy and transparency. These disputes reveal how blockchain networks function as laboratories for broader societal debates on governance, control, and financial freedom. Instead of converging on a single vision, the ecosystem sustains diverse and evolving approaches to freedom.
