[From my Webnote series]
Related:
- On Property Rights in Superabundant Bananas and Property Rights as Normative Support for Possession;
- Post-scarcity, Superabundance, Money, and Star Trek Space Cadets;
- Nobody Owns Bitcoin
- The Problem with “Coercion”
- The State is not the government; we don’t own property; scarcity doesn’t mean rare; coercion is not aggression
- The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”
[Note: this topic is also discussed in “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, forthcoming 2023), Part III; also in “What Libertarianism Is,” in LFFS, p. 33.
See also “Goods, Scarce and Nonscarce,” in LFFS:
“Instead, the term scarcity here refers to the possible existence of conflict over the possession of a finite thing. It means that a condition of contestable control exists for anything that cannot be simultaneously owned: my ownership and control excludes your control.”
See also “Good Ideas is Pretty Scarce”
Update: Penner on Intellectual Property, Monopolies, and Property, p.69: “So long as we conceive of a right to use in a social situation, in the real world, that is, the implications of that kind of right will raise issues about the rightfulness of excluding others, because the vast majority of the uses that a person will make of a thing are impossible if everyone tries to use the thing at the same time. Because we live in a world of scarcity there is an insufficient quantity of perfect substitutes for everything that people wish to use, and this cannot but give rise to conflict. Now, of course, some things are not scarce, and in some situations commons work (although in the case of commons, too, a large set of people is usually excluded), but this does not detract from the general point. The obvious solution is to link rights of use with rights of exclusion, and so we must look at the different exclusionary rights to which rights of use may be linked.”]
It’s been my impression that usually, when some author coins a bunch of new terms, or over-uses older, arcane terms, it’s a sign he’s a crank. 1 Usually it’s some amateur wannabe “intellectual,” or a quasi-mystic, who borders on incoherent. I figure you only get to coin a new term if you are some serious scholar and real genius pioneering new ground; and if you coin more than one, then the bar is even higher. For example Mises coined praxeology, catallactics and thymology, I believe. That’s at least 3. But hey, he is entitled; they all make sense, and he is one of the greatest geniuses and original thinkers of the 20th century.
Another neologism I like is “cooperatism,” coined by Hazlitt to describe what we call libertarianism. 2 Libertarianism has been somewhat coopted by minarchists and doesn’t really get at the essence of our property rights allocation rules, which are not directly about “liberty” or “freedom,” but about rules that permit conflict-free use of scarce (rivalrous) resources, and thus enable cooperation between human actors in a division and specialization of labor society or community. Anarchy is too broad since it covers non-libertarian anarchists, and anarcho-capitalist is too narrow. I tend to prefer libertarianism or anarcho-libertarianism, or if we want to get real specific, Austro-anarcho-libertarianism. In any case, “libertarianism” is preferable to “voluntaryism” (apparently also sometimes called “voluntarism“) since coerced action is “voluntary” but can still be unjust and aggression. 3 If you hand over your wallet to an armed robber, your action is voluntary, but you didn’t meaningfully consent to it. So the crucial criterion is whether a given action is consensual, not whether it’s “voluntary.” As Sheldon Richman observes,
A person can never transfer control of his will. It is inseparable. Nor can anyone directly control the will of another. A will can only control itself and no other. If Jones commands Smith to perform an action, the action will be performed only if Smith wills it. Threats of force notwithstanding, Smith has to exercise his will to perform the action. Jones cannot exercise it for him. “[Nlo man can delegate, or impart, his own judgment or conscience to another ).” 4 In the strictest sense all actions are voluntary.” 5
So “consensualist” could be another good term for the freedom philosophy, but cooperatism is good too and libertarianism is fine for now. I’m too stubborn to give it up. Some annoying libertarian anarchists say things like “Oh, I’m not a libertarian—I’m an anarchist.” This is dishonest. Others who are obviously libertarians but shun the word for various reasons, such as “I prefer the term ‘liberal.'” Annoying. Just because you don’t “like” a word doesn’t mean you can unilaterally change its definition. As I often point out, all consistent libertarians are anarchist, 6 and all true anarchists are libertarian.
But we have to be careful with neologisms. Writers often abuse the privilege, like Hayek with nomos, thesis, taxis, cosmos—concepts and terms almost no one really remembers or finds useful. I’ve come across others over the years but can’t recall the specifies… Voegelin with his “gnosticism,” others with “immanentizing the eschaton,” Galambos with his “primordial property,” blah blah blah.
Update:
Every time someone tries to rename libertarianism or introduce another framing or vocabulary, it’s like they think it’s all just a matter of branding or persuasion, that you can trick people into thinking or saying they are really libertarian–e.g. voluntyarism,…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) January 8, 2026
Every time someone tries to rename libertarianism or introduce another framing or vocabulary, it’s like they think it’s all just a matter of branding or persuasion, that you can trick people into thinking or saying they are really libertarian–e.g. voluntyarism, live-and-let-live-ism, nations of sanity-ism, panarchy, private law society, cooperatism, consensualism, agorism, autarky, polycentrism, market-liberalism, and now aparactonomy … it ain’t gonna work. People may be confused and inconsistent and quasi-statist but they are not stupid.
See also:
- The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”;
- Should Libertarians Oppose “Capitalism”?
- The Origin of “Libertarianism”
- Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism”
- Amusingly, in a recent book, the author coins bizarre terms like “architectonics” and “kleristocracy,” and uses other terms like “sortition” or “a dominium in sortitio” in odd ways, and then notes
We resist any usage of “communitarianism” for the project of this book. Despite its suggestive usefulness, it is freighted with associations to socialism and to the communitarianism of Amitai Etzioni—positions alien to architectonics. We are forced to the terms “architectonics” and “kleristocracy” not out of vanity for novelty or neologism, but in the confidence, as C.S. Peirce once suggested, that they would be “safe from kidnappers.”
T.L. Hulsey, The Constitution of Non-State Government: Field Guide to Texas Secession (2022) (self-published, of course), n.11; and not online, of course; and under copyright, of course; and no citation to the Peirce quote, or to the Etzioni reference, of course. [↩]
- See my post The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”. [↩]
- See also The Problem with “Coercion”. [↩]
- Quoting Lysander Spooner, “Letter to Thomas F. Bayard,” 1882. [↩]
- Sheldon Richman, “The Absurdity of Alienable Rights” (January, 1989), p. 50, italics added; Richman on Inalienable Rights. [↩]
- See What Libertarianism Is. [↩]
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