Every libertarian would refuse to steal a ladder to save their mom from a burning building, and refuse to steal a penny to stop aliens from destroying the world, because every libertarian is a libertarian.
The moment this statement appeared on my X feed, I wasn’t so much at a loss for words as I was struck by a familiar, wearying conclusion: this person believes libertarianism to be a death cult. And sadly, they are not alone. It would seem that for a growing number of people, libertarian ethics have been flattened into a binary matter, where a strict, Spartan adherence is demanded of a “true” libertarian, even if the price is one’s own life. [continue reading…]
Overview and Summary of the Book and Its Arguments
Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957) is a seminal exploration of how medieval political thought conceptualized the ruler as possessing dual natures: a “body natural” that is mortal, fallible, and subject to human frailties, and a “body politic” that is immortal, infallible, and eternal, ensuring the continuity of sovereignty beyond the individual’s lifespan. Drawing from legal, theological, and philosophical sources, Kantorowicz argues that this “mystic fiction” emerged as a mechanism to sustain political order in pre-modern societies lacking strong bureaucratic institutions. The book traces the idea’s genealogy from Tudor England backward to late antiquity, emphasizing its roots in Christian theology—particularly the dual nature of Christ (human and divine)—and its adaptation through Roman and canon law, where concepts like the eternal dignity of office (dignitas) and the mystical body of the Church (corpus mysticum) were secularized to apply to kingship and the state. This duality, Kantorowicz posits, resolved practical issues like succession, inalienability of crown lands, and the perpetuity of royal authority, while reflecting broader tensions between sacral and rational governance. [continue reading…]
To solve a problem, one must recognize the true cause of it. The true cause of social and political problems is that the conflict resolver must not be part of the conflict. This cannot work because the state is the ultimate judge in all conflicts, including those that it is involved in.This book’s thesis, which is new in libertarian theory, is that property rights and the realization of the non-aggression principle are merely the consequence of respecting the principle of the neutral judge. After describing this logically, the author presents a natural legal system that functions without a state. The consequence: wars are a thing of the past, the power of influential groups, both clandestine and publicly known, is reduced to zero, the mafia and the deep state cease to exist. Crime rates fall dramatically, prosperity increases and social safeguards improve significantly.Oliver Janich’s best-selling books have been praised by leading scholars like Hans-Herman Hoppe, Thorsten Polleit, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and celebrities like the singer Xavier Naidoo, Golden Globe winner Christine Kaufmann and political comedian and actress Lisa Fitz. Janich is one of the leading journalists in social media with videos that have been viewed over 40 million times. As an individual, he has the largest following on Telegram worldwide.
I originally intended to pose this question during one of your livestreams with a donation, but I noticed that you unfortunately do not take questions in that format.
Sorry to bother you again; I know you are busy with the upcoming PFS event and likely have no time to be answering questions all the time, so feel free to backlog this for a later date or just refer me to any previously-written sources if you deem it necessary. [continue reading…]
My name is [], I’m [] years old and live in Türkiye. I’m reading libertarian philosophy and Austrian economics, and I also came across your writings on argumentation ethics; I found them very informative. [continue reading…]
I just finished having a debate with someone over the idea that receiving State welfare is aggression. I defended the stance that it is not inherently aggression (for the aggression is committed by the State when it taxes people, not by the welfare recipient), while he defended the idea that it is aggression. His argument was that when one receives money from the State, that money has a legitimate owner, and that at the very least one cannot receive more from the State than one has paid to it. [continue reading…]
Maksima is an inspiration community that is building a political, ideological and spiritual movement based on The Maksima Declaration.
Maksima will eventually launch a main project, in addition to four sub-projects. The name of the main project is The Progenitor Temple. The four sub-projects are The Real Jesus, War on Dullards, Free Brothels, and War on Levelers. Each project serves a specific purpose.
Walter Block, “Does Trespassing Require Human Action? Rejoinder to Kinsella and Armoutidis an Evictionism,” MEST Journal (forthcoming 2025): Abstract: “Libertarian scholars Kinsella and Armoutidis criticize the libertarian theory of evictionism. This is a principled compromise between the pro-life and the pro-choice positions. Its conclusion overlaps with the former in the last trimester of pregnancy and with the latter in the first two trimesters. That is, the pregnant mother may expel the fetus from her body whenever she wishes but may not ever kill this preborn baby. This theory is predicated upon the notion that the unwanted fetus is a trespasser; an innocent one, to be sure. Thus, he may be expelled from her body, her private property, but not treated as a criminal, since he is innocent of any crime. Evictionism stands or falls on this one claim. If the fetus is not a trespasser, this solution to the abortion controversy is a failure. Kinsella (2023) and Armoutidis (2024) maintain, to the contrary, that trespassing is a human action, and that the fertilized egg, the beginning of human life, is capable of nothing such thing. This essay aims to refute their position.”
Rothbard, Editor response to James Sadowsky, S.J., “Abortion and Rights of the Child,” Libertarian Forum, XI, no. 4 (July-Aug. 1978). Rothbard writes: “to correct a misunderstanding, while Walter Block and I agree on many things, we are not a monolith. In contrast to Walter, who agrees that the foetus is human, I simply made the assumption for the sake of argument, in order to grant the anti-abortionists their best case. In fact, if I had to “vote” on the issue, I would probably say that the foetus only acquires the status of human upon the act of birth. If so, then of course the foetus has no rights, and the thorny abortion question would be eliminated forever. It seems to me that the problem with the Block-Sadowsky thesis of asserting the foetus to be human is that that act of birth, which I had always naively assumed to be an event of considerable importance in everyone’s life, now takes on hardly more stature than the onset of adolescence or of one’s “mid-life crisis.” Does birth really confer no rights?”
Zark, “At Ease with Easements: A Libertarian Case for Easements: Resolving Landlocked Libertarian Property Conflicts,” Planet Zark (Jan 11, 2026): Grok: “The Substack post “At Ease with Easements” defends forced easements (rights to cross private property against the owner’s will) as theoretically necessary in libertarian property theory to avoid contradictions, impossible duties, forestalling, and effective enslavement, using three cases: a “donut” of homesteaded land enclosing unowned interior that others cannot access, accidental confinement (e.g., wind blowing someone onto land with no permitted exit), and restricted invitation that traps a person. This stance aligns more with Walter Block’s anti-forestalling “Blockean proviso” than with Kinsella or Hoppe: Kinsella rejects such forced easements, treating property rights as purely exclusionary (with easements arising only via voluntary title transfer/contract) and denying any special status or access claim for unowned land simply because it is enclosed; Hoppe similarly grounds exclusive title in original appropriation without provisos that burden first appropriators, while allowing only the preservation of pre-existing rights-of-way when privatizing former common or public resources (not new claims across pure private land).”
My comment: “‘it becomes harder to see how B-Y are not committing aggression by refusing to allow passage to resources they have a duty to not prevent people from accessing.”I don’t see why you have a duty to “not prevent” people from accessing unowned land that your land blocks access to. In general obligations or duties are those that correspond to negative rights only. There are not positive obligations. You can’t make something look like a negative obligation by clever wording– by saying “a duty to not prevent people from accessing” instead of “a duty to [let people use your property to access]” But then this way of wording it would show that it’s just an assertion and question-begging. There is no “contradiction’ entailed by not letting someone use your property to access remote unowned property. Even if there is, “contradicting” is not an act of aggression. In any case, you can’t just say that because an unowned tract is unowned, “homesteading it is permissible,” and thererefore, there ‘is a duty” not to prevent it. Saying it’s permissible only means that (a) the property has no owner, and that (b) IF someone is able to reach and possess and control and emborder it, then they would have established a link to it and become its owner.
So I think the error may your sneaking in the loaded term “permissible” e.g. “If no one has a duty to not homestead the interior, then it is permissible to homestead the interior.” You are reading ‘is permissible” to imply that there is a duty not to allow it to happen. Look you can say it’s permissible for people to “eat food” or to “have food” and then you could say positive welfare rights are justified because otherwise you are “allowing them to starve” or “preventing them from having that which it is permissible them to have.” But saying it is permisisble for someone to have food only means that “having food” is not per se a rights violation–that if you are able to get food without violating rights, you have the right to do it. It doesn’t mean anymore than that.
Same with saying it’s permissible to homestead unowned land in the middle of the donut. Saying it’s permissible only means that if you can do it, it would be legitimate. It’s like saying it’s permissible for you to travel to Alpha Centauri and homestead an unowned tract of land on a planet there. SAying it’s permissible is just a way of saying “if you do X, then it doesn’t necessarily violate others’ rights” or “if you are able to possess X, then you own it”. So if you are clear about what it means to say “it’s permissible to hometead X” then it does not not imply a duty on the part of a third party “not to prevent it from happening by failing to provide the means to make it possible.” Because this is simply just a restatement of Block’s ridiculous position that “libertarianism abhors unowned property,” whatever this weird metaphorical statement is even supposed to mean.”
Walter Block sent me a draft article “Does Trespassing Require Human Action? Rejoinder to Kinsella and Armoutidis an Evictionism,” MEST Journal (forthcoming 2025) and “invited” me to respond, whatever that means (I guess it means: “please change your priorities to suit my goals and spend your time writing this the article I want you to write instead of whatever article you were planning on writing”), presumably in aid of his stated goal of publishing 1000 peer reviewed or law review articles. 1 I assume he counts “MEST Journal,” whatever that is, as peer reviewed even though it seems unlikely it is actually refereed (he has four articles in 2025 alone in that journal). 2 I know from personal experience editing Libertarian Papers for ten years and from other publishing and peer reviewing experience how difficult and time-consuming it is. There is no way MEST Journal publishes this many papers and actually has them peer reviewed. But no matter. [continue reading…]
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