Digital Proofer A Spontaneous Order: A Spontaneous Order Authored by Christopher Chase ... 6.0" x 9.0" (15.24 x 22.86 cm) The Capitalist Case Black & White on White paper 292 pages For A Stateless Society ISBN-13: 9781512117271 ISBN-10: 1512117277 Please carefully review your Digital Proof download for formatting, grammar, and design issues that may need to be corrected. We recommend that you review your book three times, with each time focusing on a different aspect. Check the format, including headers, footers, page 1 numbers, spacing, table of contents, and index. 2 Review any images or graphics and captions if applicable. 3 Read the book for grammatical errors and typos. Once you are satisfied with your review, you can approve your proof and move forward to the next step in the publishing process. To print this proof we recommend that you scale the PDF to fit the size of your printer paper. CHASE RACHELS DEDICATION Copyright © 2015 Christopher Chase Rachels All rights reserved. ISBN-13: 978-1512117271 ISBN-10: 1512117277 This work is dedicated to my son, Micha Rachels. May he grow up with a Cover Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 free spirit, critical mind, and warm heart. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CONTENTS I would like to first and foremost thank my wife, Michelle Ferris, Foreword … 6 for standing by my side as an active participant in the fight against tyranny. Her loving encouragement and support enabled me to see this project to its Introduction … 11 end. Stephan Kinsella’s mentorship was likewise invaluable in its relation to the precision and rigor of this book. My editor, Mattheus von Guttenberg, 0. Epistemology and Praxeology … 19 also deserves recognition for his professional assistance in editing this work and verifying the accuracy of its content. I would like to express my 1. Libertarianism … 45 gratitude for Will Porter, who was gracious enough to contribute one of his brilliant essays (Chapter 0: Epistemology and Praxeology). I would also like 2. Property … 66 to give thanks to the following people who provided their support in a variety of ways, though bear in mind this list is by no means exhaustive or 3. Contract … 78 in any particular order: Luis F. Duran-Aparicio, Blake Williams, Jason Bassler, Justin Stout, Chris Calton, Gary Simon, Mike Martelli, Joel 4. Money and Banking … 90 Richardson, Walter Block, Jeff Berwick, and many more! 5. Monopolies and Cartels … 122 6. Insurance … 131 7. Health Care … 139 8. Law and Order … 147 9. Defense and Security … 172 10. Transportation Networks … 185 11. Education … 195 12. Poverty … 211 13. Environmentalism … 234 14. The Corporation … 259 15. Getting There … 278 Resources … 286 FOREWORD grew the main sort of libertarianism of the last fifty years. It was based on a principle articulated by Murray Rothbard in the 1970s this way: No one may initiate the use or threat of physical violence against the Foreword person or property of anyone else. The idea had roots in John Locke, America’s founders, and more immediately Ayn MODERN LIBERTARIAN THEORY is only about five decades old. Rand, but it was Rothbard’s formulation The ideas that have influenced our greatest thinkers can be traced back 1 that became standard. It became known as centuries, of course, to luminaries such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, the non-aggression principle or—since Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and to Rothbard took it as the starting point of more recent and largely even more radical thinkers such as Gustave de political theory and not the conclusion of Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Franz 2 philosophical justification—the non- Oppenheimer, and Albert Jay Nock. aggression axiom. In the late twentieth The beginnings of the modern movement can be detected in the century, anyone who accepted this works of the “three furies of libertarianism,” as Brian Doherty calls them: principle could call himself, or could find Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, whose respective books himself called, a libertarian, even if he The Discovery of Freedom, The Fountainhead, and The God of the Machine were all 3 disagreed with Rothbard’s own insistence published, rather remarkably, in the same year: 1943. But in its more that rights are best protected when there is modern form, libertarianism originated in the 1960s and 1970s from no government at all.4 thinkers based primarily in the United States, notably Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. Other significant influences on the nascent libertarian movement We can date the dawn of today’s libertarianism to the works of include Ludwig von Mises, author of Liberalism (1927) and Human Action Rand and Rothbard: to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957); and, especially, to (1949, with a predecessor version published in German in 1940); Nobel Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (1962), Power and Market (1970), and For laureate F.A. von Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom (1944); Leonard A New Liberty (1973), plus his journal The Libertarian Forum (1969–1984). For Read, head of the Foundation for Economic Education (founded 1946); A New Liberty stands today as a brilliant, and early, bold statement of the and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, author of the influential Capitalism and radical libertarian vision. By the mid-60s, the modern libertarian movement Freedom (1962). was coalescing, primarily behind the non-initiation of force principle and The most prominent and influential of modern libertarian figures, the “radical capitalism” of Ayn Rand, and Rothbard’s systematic libertarian however, were the aforementioned novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, the corpus based upon the non-aggression principle or axiom. It is no surprise founder of “Objectivism” and a “radical for capitalism,” and Murray that the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971, as these ideas, and the Rothbard, the Mises-influenced libertarian anarcho-capitalist economist and liberty movement, were gaining steam. political theorist. Rothbard’s seminal role is widely recognized, even by In the ensuing decades many other influential works appeared non-Rothbardians. Objectivist John McCaskey, for example, has observed, expounding on the libertarian idea, such as Linda and Morris Tannehill, The that out of the debates in the mid-1900s about what rights citizens ought to Market for Liberty (1970), John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy have, for Tomorrow (1971), David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (1973), Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Henri Lepage, Tomorrow, Capitalism (1978), Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), Jan 1 For more on this, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 4 John P. McCaskey, “New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State” 2007) and David Boaz, The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary (published as a blog post on johnmccaskey.com, April 14, 2014). Readings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (New York: Free Press, 1997). http://www.johnmccaskey.com/joomla/index.php/blog/71-new-libertarians. See 2 See Boaz, The Libertarian Reader. also, Wendy McElroy, “Murray N. Rothbard: Mr. Libertarian,” (published on 3 See Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism. LewRockwell.com, July 6, 2000). 6 7 A SPONTANEOUS ORDER FOREWORD Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (1988), Anthony de Jasay, Choice, Contract, action. Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (1991), Richard Epstein, Simple Rules for a Thus, Rothbard, influenced by and building on the insights of Complex World (1995), Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A earlier and contemporary thinkers, such such as Mises and Rand, first Personal Interpretation (1996), David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (1998), presented a systematic vision of modern, radical libertarianism: anti-state, Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty (1998), and, more recently, Jeffrey pro-market, Austrian. This enabled Rothbard to adumbrate a broad A. Miron’s Libertarianism, From A to Z (2010), Jacob Huebert’s Libertarianism framework for liberty, from property to contract to punishment theory. Today (2010), Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist (2011), and Rothbard’s analysis extends also to, or draws on, other disciplines as Gerard Casey’s Libertarian Anarchism (2012). necessary, such as epistemology, history, the nature of the sciences, and the These and other works expounding on the ideas of liberty have like.7 their own strengths and merits, and many of them have their own Additional advances to the essentially Rothbardian perspective on deficiencies and idiosyncrasies as well. Some, for example, are statements social theory have been made over the years. Hoppe, for example, a diligent only of the author’s personal vision and do not purport to describe student of both Mises and Rothbard, has emphasized the essential role of libertarian thought in general; some are minarchist, at best, and do not even scarcity in the need for interpersonal property norms, leading to a more recognize anarcho-libertarianism as a type of libertarianism (Miron, for rigorous and streamlined restatement of the basic Lockean approach which example, says “libertarianism accepts a role for government in a few, limited underlies Rothbard’s own radical libertarian system. Hoppe has also areas: small government, not anarchy”);5 and some do not sufficiently extended Rothbardian analysis in the realm of political ethics with his appreciate Austrian economics and