Someone asked me if I wanted to see an essay to provide feedback on it, based on a 4-page excerpt (below). My reply below, along with a Summary of his excerpt and the excerpt.
Kinsella:
No time. Re the excerpt I saw, a few quick thoughts:
It seems like you have lots of disjointed and scattered observation and things that are just assertions, un-unnuanced, no proof, no argument, no citations or references e.g. “Negligence is a subcategory of aggression.”
Re infinite importance and needs overriding etc. — see re absolute rights and nozick on rights as “side constraints”: Dominiak & Wysocki, “Libertarianism, Defense of Property, and Absolute Rights” and The “Liberty Is Your Only Value” Canard.
“Libertarianism is based on others not violating your liberty and you not violating theirs.”
More precisely it’s not about liberty it’s about invading the borders’ of others owned resources. trespass. invasion. This is all over my book Legal Foundations of a Free Society. And see The Universal Principles of Liberty and Property Rights as Limits on Actions, Individuals are Responsible for Actions, not “for Their Property”; Property rights are not obligations or responsibilities.
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Grok summary of paper based on the excerpt:
This four-page excerpt defends core libertarian principles: individual self-ownership and property rights take absolute priority over others’ needs, and aggression (including state coercion) is impermissible even when it might produce better aggregate outcomes.
It opens with the kidney example: a dialysis patient’s greater need does not create a right to seize someone else’s kidney. Consent is required for any use of another person’s body or property. Under libertarianism the individual is treated as having infinite moral weight, so one cannot legitimately sacrifice one person to benefit others. The author contrasts this with consequentialist or utilitarian approaches and notes that voluntary risk-taking (driving, sports) shows people do not infinitely value their own lives, yet the key distinction is that such risks are chosen rather than imposed.
The discussion then turns to risk, consent, and negligence in everyday activity, using driving as the main illustration. Awareness that driving is dangerous does not equal consent to being injured by another’s negligence. Negligence is treated as a form of aggression. State licensing regimes can suspend a driver’s license for medical conditions (e.g., seizures). A pure libertarian legal order would have no state-issued licenses, but private or court-ordered suspension of the right to drive would still be available if someone posed a clear danger to others. The difference is important: a license is a permission that can be withheld or conditioned; a right is not.
The same logic is applied to other regulated activities. Parenting requires no prior permission or credential, yet becoming a paid childcare provider often does. The libertarian default is liberty: people may drive, parent, cut hair, etc., without first obtaining state approval. Safety and competence concerns can still be addressed after the fact through courts or private arrangements, but the starting presumption is freedom.
The excerpt closes by rejecting eugenics and state control of reproduction. Even if the goal (a “better” population or greater national prosperity) is desirable, the means—coercive fertility laws administered by state-certified experts—are not. Both ends and means must be consistent with individual rights.
Throughout, the author prioritizes liberty as the supreme value over pure safety or utilitarian calculations, while still allowing legal remedies for actual aggression or clear threats to others.
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EXCERPT OF ESSAY
“Just because a patient on dialysis needs one of my kidneys more than I do (assuming I have two healthy ones) doesn’t mean he has a right to it … Why not? Because it’s mine. Needs don’t trump my [right] to do what I want with the things I own.”1 My consent determines whether others may use my property.
This kidney example illustrates a key quality about libertarianism: you may not commit aggression (say seizing my kidney) to help someone. Under libertarianism, the individual is of infinite importance, so comparing one individual life to five others is comparing infinity to infinity, which prevents aggressing (say be seizing a kidney) to help another. Alternatively stated, the needs of others never override the rights of an individual. “Evil is evil . . . Lesser, greater, middling … if I have to … choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose[.]”2 Here is an alternative comedic view: “Between two evils[,] I always pick the one I never tried before.”3
A kidney donor noted “the chances of dying as a result of donating a kidney are about 1 in 4,000. For him this implies that to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio [he] considers ‘obscene.’”4 This reminds me of an anonymous quote: “A moralist believes that virtue is its own reward, and that people should be good for nothing.”
Likely no one infinitely values their life. Any activity that risks life like driving a car (risking a car crash) or playing a sport (risking an injury) shows someone values the activity despite some risk to life. But that someone chooses the risk. The risk is not forced.
Awareness of risk differs from consenting to risk. While each motorist “is aware that driving is a potentially hazardous activity and that inherent in the act of driving is the risk that he or she will be injured by the negligent driving of another, a person who voluntarily chooses to drive does not thereby ‘impliedly consent’ to being injured by the negligence of another, nor has such a person ‘impliedly excused’ others from performing their duty to use due care for the driver’s safety. Instead, the driver reasonably expects that if . . . injured by another’s negligence, i.e., by the breach of the other person’s duty to use due care, the driver will be entitled to compensation[.]”5 By contrast, drivers consent to collision in a demolition derby: “A contest in which drivers crash old cars into each other until only one is left running.”6
Negligence is a subcategory of aggression. Unlike someone who intentionally runs you over with a car (attempted homicide), someone carelessly hitting you with a car is negligent. Whether struck intentionally or carelessly, the strike remains impermissible aggression.
Under a state-run legal system, dangerous driving can result in a suspended driver’s license. Under libertarian law, state-issued licensure is absent. For comparison, under Florida law, a doctor’s claim that a “driver’s ability to operate a motor vehicle safely is questionable”7 can lead to a suspension of the license due to a medical disability. In one case, a woman was told “she was medically not qualified to drive because she suffers from seizures.”8
Libertarianism is based on others not violating your liberty and you not violating theirs. A driver with seizures can easily violate the liberty of others by crashing into them because the driver has lost bodily control.
A function of a driving license (safety) could still be enforced in a libertarian court. Under libertarian law, rather than suspending a driving license, a court could suspend the right to drive. Libertarian law has no state-issued licenses to drive a car, boat, or plane. If you have a vehicle, you may drive it provided you don’t trespass on the property of others. Yet if any driver lacked the ability to drive it safely, anyone could ask a libertarian court to suspend the right to drive.
Is there a difference between suspending a license versus suspending a right? Yes. Acquiring a license can require time, money, passing a written test, and so forth.
You can be eligible for a license, not entitled to it. By contrast, a right has no screening process associated with a license.
Someone with little ideological interest could say, “Compare a state-run legal system with driver licenses to a libertarian legal system without them. If, after say 2 years, one system has more car crashes than another, then one system has been shown to be safer than another.” If my supreme value was safety, I could support this comparison. But my supreme value is liberty, so the results of this comparison would not change my supreme value.
Consider a different role: parenting. In the United States, people may become parents without permission. No questions asked, no forms to complete. Yet if a person wants to become, say a childcare provider, that person could be required to “have a degree in Early Childhood Education. That can take two years and cost $22,000.”9
A libertarian can wonder why parents should be entrusted to have children with no approval yet a stranger must get a degree to become a daycare provider. If parents are presumed fit for parenthood, why are not other adults presumed fit for being babysitters, barbers, or other jobs? Under libertarian law, the default is liberty, so people may take on roles like vehicle driver, parent, or barber without permission.
Some governments have regulated reproduction with eugenics, which is about “encouraging the reproduction of people considered to have desirable traits and discouraging or preventing the reproduction of people considered to have undesirable traits.”10 Consider the argument of eugenicists: “Nothing is more vital to the future prosperity of the nation than the quality of its population, the argument went; and surely nothing is more foolish than to leave the decisions that determine that quality to short-sighted individuals rather than to state-certified experts.”11
Set aside whether eugenics works, say creating humans of a minimum height. Instead, examine the morality. To a libertarian, the how and the goal must each be permissible. Being happy is a permissible goal, but not if the how is by kidnapping a grandmother to throw her in a shark tank. Likewise, prosperity is a permissible goal, but not if the how is state-certified fertility laws.
Notes
1 Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, Michael J. Sandel, page 67 (2009)
2 Quote by Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher, Season 1, Episode 1, The End’s Beginning
3 Mae West, Stage and Movie Star Who Burlesqued Sex, Dies at 87, The New York Times (November 23, 1980)
4 What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, Peter Singer, The New York Times (December 17, 2006)
5 Knight v. Jewett, 3 Cal. 4th 296, 311–12 (California Supreme Court 1992)
6 Demolition derby, American Heritage Dictionary
7 Florida Statute Section 322.221(2)(b) (2022)
8 Johnson v. State, 709 So. 2d 623, 623 (Florida 4th District Court of Appeals 1998)
9 Little Kids, Big Government, John Stossel (April 15, 2026)
10 Eugenics, American Heritage Dictionary
11 Eugenics: The Secret Lurking in Many Nations’ Past, Adrian Wooldridge, The Los Angeles Times (September 7, 1997)
