Laissez-faire capitalism, or anarchocapitalism, is simply the economic form of the libertarian ethic. Laissez-faire capitalism encompasses the notion that men should exchange goods and services, without regulation, solely on the basis of value for value. It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash and credit. Economically, this system is anarchy, and proudly so.
Source: The Death of Politics (1969)
[link] #6Libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but... in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which is now called private. Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.
Source: Where Are the Specifics? (1969)
[link] #10We do not want to lead or be led. We want to be free.
Liberty is not a box into which people are forced. Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can.
Source: Anarchy without Hyphens (1980)
[link] #101Anarchism is not an ideological movement. It is an ideological statement. It says that all people have the capacity for liberty. It says that all anarchists want liberty. And then it is silent. After the pause of that silence, anarchists then mount the stages of their own communities and history and proclaim their, not anarchism’s ideologies - they say how they, how they as anarchists, will make arrangements, describe events, celebrate life and work.
Anarchism is the hammer-idea, smashing the chains. Liberty is what results and, in liberty, everything else is up to the people and their ideologies.
Source: Anarchy without Hyphens (1980)
[link] #124In a laissez-faire society, there could exist no public institution with the power to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people (criminals), yes. From one's own self, no.
Source: The Death of Politics (1969)
[link] #217Libertarianism is the view that each man is the absolute owner of his life, to use and dispose of as he sees fit: that all man's social actions should be voluntary: and that respect for every other man's similar and equal ownership of life and, by extension, the property and fruits of that life is the ethical basis of a humane and open society.
Source: The Death of Politics (1969)
[link] #240The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone. The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.
Source: Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970) #445
An anarchist is a voluntarist. Now, beyond that, anarchists also are people and, as such, contain the billion-faceted varieties of human reference... They spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that it’s all choice and chance. Anarchism, liberty, does not tell you a thing about how free people will behave or what arrangements they will make. It simply says that people have the capacity to make arrangements.
Source: Anarchy without Hyphens (1980)
[link] #449Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. That is the property most brutally and constantly abused by state systems whether they are of the right or left. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and as importantly secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one's own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion. Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliché.
Source: Where Are the Specifics? (1969)
[link] #476Libertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.
Source: Where Are the Specifics? (1969)
[link] #484All who love Liberty are enemies of the state.
In an anarchist world, of course, there would be thousands of different communities, enough variety to accommodate everyone except someone who wanted power over others.
Source: From Far Right to Far Left -- and Farther (1970)
[link] #547Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.
Source: Quoted in Why Americans Hate Politics, by E.J. Dionne, Jr., Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 267.
[link] #591About Karl Hess
Karl Hess (born Carl Hess III; May 25, 1923 — April 22, 1994) was an American speechwriter and author. He was also a political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, and libertarian activist. His career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left before embracing anarcho-capitalism. Later in life, he summed up his role in the economy by remarking "I am by occupation a free marketer (crafts and ideas, woodworking, welding, and writing)."
Hess began reading American anarchists largely because of the recommendations of his friend Murray Rothbard. Hess said that upon reading the works of Emma Goldman he discovered that anarchists believed everything he had hoped the Republican Party would represent, and that Goldman was the source for the best and most essential theories of Ayn Rand without any of the "crazy solipsism that Rand was so fond of."
From 1969 to 1971, Hess edited The Libertarian Forum with Rothbard.
Hess had come to put his focus on the small scale, on community. He said, "Society is: people together making culture." He deemed two of his cardinal social principles to be "opposition to central political authority" and "concern for people as individuals." His rejection of standard American party politics was reflected in a lecture he gave during which he said, "The Democrats or liberals think that everybody is stupid and therefore they need somebody... to tell them how to behave themselves. The Republicans think everybody is lazy..."
In the 1980s, Hess joined the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971 and served as editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990.
Additional Resources
Karl Hess: Toward Liberty | YoutubeKarl Hess and the Death of Politics | Libertarianism.org
