Nikos Déjà Vu: Nikos Deja Vu - The philosophy of Liberty

The philosophy of Liberty

The philosophy of Liberty is simple... It's Self Ownership... Which means you own you... Nobody else owns you. Which means you are completely responsible for your own actions.
The philosophy of liberty is based on the principle of self-ownership.
You own your life.
To deny this is to imply that someone else has a higher claim on your life than you do.
No other person, or group of persons, owns your life.
Nor do you own the lives of others.
You exist in time: future, present and past.
This is manifest in [respectively]: your life, your liberty and the product of your life and liberty.
To lose your life is to lose your future.
To lose your liberty is to lose your present.
And to lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose the portion of your past that produced it.
A product of your life and your liberty is your property.
Property is the fruit of your labour: the product of your time, energy and talents.
Property is that part of nature that you turn to valuable use.
Property is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent.
Two people who exchange property voluntarily are both better off, or they wouldn't do it.
Only they may rightfully make that decision for themselves.
At times, some people make use of force or fraud to take from others without voluntary consent.
The initiation of force or fraud to take life is murder.
The initiation of force or fraud to take liberty is slavery.
The initiation of force or fraud to take property is theft.
It is the same whether these things are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against the few, or even by officials in fine hats.
You have the right to protect your life, liberty and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others; and you may ask others to help defend you.
But you do not have the right to initiate force against the life, liberty and property of others.
Thus you have no right to designate some other person to initiate force against others on your behalf.
You have the right to seek leaders for yourself, but you have no right to impose rulers onto others.
No matter how officials are selected, they are only human beings and they have no rights or claims that are higher than other human beings.
Regardless of the imaginative labels for their behaviour, or the number of people encouraging them, officials have no right to murder, to enslave or to steal.
You cannot give them any rights that you do not have yourself.
Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life.
You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience.
Nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice.
You choose your own goals based on your own values.
Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and grow.
Your action on behalf of others, or their action on behalf of you, is virtuous only when it is derived from voluntary mutual consent.
For virtue can only exist where there is free choice.
This is the basis of a truly free society.
It is not only the most practical and humanitarian foundation for human action, it is the most ethical.
Problems in the world that arise from the initiation of force by government have a solution.
The solution is for the people of the earth to stop asking government official to initiate force on their behalf.
Evil does not arise solely from evil people, but also from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as a means to their own ends.
In this manner, good people have empowered evil people throughout history.
Having confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values, rather than to focus on some imposed vision or goal.
Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth, and typically results in unintended, perverse consequences.
Achieving a free society requires courage—to think, to talk and to act—especially when it is easier to do nothing.