To Liberty Web Alliance what we believe is very simple and can be boiled down to a few key concepts from which a coherent, practical, and moral worldview emerges.
The following ideas do not necessarily reflect the views
of our member organizations or team members.
Private Property
You own your person and the fruits of your person. This self-ownership has many ramifications for how we interact. What someone chooses to do with their property is not something that one can forcibly violate. The Non-Aggression Axiom respects this right of a sovereign individual and says that using initiated aggression against a person is a violation of their right to their person. (Expanded Analysis)
Natural Law
There are laws that are common to all men across all cultures, ages, and geographies. These are things that humanity knows are wrong intuitively. Things like: murder, theft, fraud. Whether these come from DNA, conditioned cultural norms, intellectual reason, a deity, and so forth is not the point. Humans know these and they are essential to a just society.
These two principle justly understood have broad and important impact on how we live and interact with other individuals.
War, taxes, voting, laws, etc. all are put into a new light when these two elemental principles of humanity are put into the light of truth.
Principles Applied
Private Property (Expanded)
Avoids conflict over scarce resources
- Human bodies are scarce
- Natural resources are scarce
Is the only internally consistent and viable property ethic
- One demonstrates the validity of private property whenever he uses his body purposefully. He demonstrates that he is its owner. Furthermore, if he did not have a right to appropriate scarce resources, he would very quickly perish. Thus, private property is the only ethic that does not contradict itself in practice AND allows its proponents to live.
Is universally applied
- There are no exceptions to private property rights. A conflict-avoiding ethic would fail if it did not apply to everyone at all places and times since there would be conflict over who has the right to decide on the exceptions.
Promotes value creating activity
- Private property allows people to retain the fruits of their labor. Thus, all people must engage in the process of production and trade, for these are the only ways to obtain valuable goods. Property-violating ethics have the reverse affect; they provide an alternate way to obtain valuable goods. Such ways are necessarily value-destroying. Therefore, private property leads to wealth because it promotes value-creating activity and punishes value-destroying activity.
Government / Democracy
Taxes
It is indisputably true that each individual has a right to his own person – his life. And so it must also hold true that the individual has a right to the extension of his person – his property or the fruits of his labor. We’ve already established this as “property rights.” Taxation is a compulsory financial charge on the accumulated wealth or property of the individual.
In ordinary circumstances a forced expropriation by an individual on another is known as theft. The extension of of this circumstance – from an individual to “society” at large – hence, should be known as the same.
Our position is taxes imposed on anything – land, income, gifts, transfers and inheritances, and for whatever reason, social betterment, welfare, religious initiatives, military and defense, are an ethical violation of our persons.
From an economics standpoint, taxes counter wealth creation and diminish prosperity. Taxes discourage capital accumulation and as a result stunt production.
Drugs / Vices
First and foremost, to make absolutely clear, we neither encourage nor promote in any way the use of illicit substances. We will quote Walter Williams, professor of Economics at George Mason University to make very clear our stance:
When what are seen as vices are legally prohibited, supply responses change people’s behavior. Imagine there’s a supplier of illegal marijuana. Government steps up its efforts to stop its supply by increasing interdiction efforts, along with stiffer fines and prison sentences. Which is easier to conceal and transport—a million dollars’ worth of marijuana or a million dollars’ worth of cocaine? Obviously, it’s cocaine because there is far less bulk per dollar of value. Thus one effect of prohibition is the tendency toward increased sales and use of more-concentrated forms of drugs that can include products such as crack cocaine, ice, and meth.
Guns / Self Defense
War
Police
Voluntary Association
Intellectual Property
Freedom of Speech / Religion
Freedom of Speech and Religion is essential to the preservation of liberty and individual freedom. The goodness or worth of ideas can only be realized when they are discussed, written, spoken, including any other form of articulation. More importantly, the prevention of certain kind(s) of speech, or practice of faith, only lends to the destruction of the individual.
Immigration / Borders
To quote economist Tom Woods:
According to the “non-aggression axiom,” it is wrong to aggress against the person or property of anyone who has not himself committed such aggression. To restrict the free movement of peoples across borders is thus to engage in unjustified aggression, and is therefore anathema.