The institution of a State is praxeologically incompatible with private property and private property based enterprise. It is the very anti-thesis of private property, and any proponent of private property and private enterprise then must, as a matter of logic, be an anarchist.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind.

Private transactions, because they’re voluntary, presumably benefit both parties or they wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. But since government transactions are financed via coercive transfers of wealth, there’s no way of knowing whether and to what extent people value the goods in question. The money to finance the goods was simply seized from them.

The greatest of all crimes are the wars that are carried on by governments, to plunder, enslave, and destroy mankind.

Anarchism -- a social philosophy which aims at the emancipation (economic, social, political and spiritual) of the human race.

We libertarians defend economic freedom, not big business. We advocate free markets, not the corporate economy. And what would freed markets look like? Nothing like the controlled markets we have today. But how often do we hear mass unemployment, financial crisis, ecological catastrophe, and the economic status quo attributed to the voraciousness of "unfettered free markets"? As if they were all around us!

It is obscene to undermine the glorious operation of the market in producing wealth and abundance by imposing artificial scarcity on human knowledge and learning... Learning, emulation, and information are good. It is good that information can be reproduced, retained, spread, and taught and learned and communicated so easily. Granted, we cannot say that it is bad that the world of physical resources is one of scarcity -- this is the way reality is, after all -- but it is certainly a challenge, and it makes life a struggle. It is suicidal and foolish to try to hamper one of our most important tools -- learning, emulation, knowledge -- by imposing scarcity on it. Intellectual property is theft. Intellectual property is statism. Intellectual property is death. Give us intellectual freedom instead!

Knowing libertarian theory -- the rules of peaceful interactions — is like knowing the rules of logic -- the rules of correct thinking and reasoning. However, just like the knowledge of logic, as indispensable as it is for correct thinking, does not tell us anything about actual human thought, about actual words, concepts, arguments, inferences and conclusions used and made, so the logic of peaceful interaction (libertarianism) does not tell us anything about actual human life and action. Hence: just as every logician who wants to make good use of his knowledge must turn his attention to real thought and reasoning, so a libertarian theorist must turn his attention to the actions of real people. Instead of being a mere theorist, he must also become a sociologist and psychologist and take account of "empirical" social reality, i.e., the world as it really is.

Left-anarchists and anarcho-capitalists both look upon wars as grotesque struggles between ruling elites who treat the lives of "their own" people as expendable and the lives of the "other side's" people as worthless. It is here that anarchism's strong distinction between society and the state becomes clearest: whereas most people see war as a struggle between societies, anarchists think that war is actually a battle between governments which greatly harms even the society whose government is victorious. What is most pernicious about nationalist ideology is that is makes the members of society identify their interests with those of their government, when in fact their interests are not merely different but in conflict.

No attempt to hold the arrogance of government in check will work -- because a majority of the people themselves are too easily seduced into abandoning their own institutional protections against tyranny by the false promises and poisonous dreams of statist propaganda.

Not only does the system of private property respect the rights of individuals to the fruits of their labor and good judgments; not only is this system a very useful device for managing scarce resources in society; but the alternative of public control seems to be inherently irrational.

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime ... and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

Almost anyone, I suppose, can call himself or herself an anarchist, if he or she believed that the society could be managed without the state. And by the state--I don't mean the absence of any institutions, the absence of any form of social organisation--the state really refers to a professional apparatus of people who are set aside to manage society, to preempt the control of society from the people. So that would include the military, judges, politicians, representatives who are paid for the express purpose of legislating, and then an executive body that is also set aside from society. So anarchists generally believe that, whether as groups or individuals, people should directly run society.

Critics of anarcho-capitalism sometimes assume that communal or worker-owned firms would be penalized or prohibited in an anarcho-capitalist society. It would be more accurate to state that while individuals would be free to voluntarily form communitarian organizations, the anarcho-capitalist simply doubts that they would be widespread or prevalent. However, in theory an "anarcho-capitalist" society might be filled with nothing but communes or worker-owned firms, so long as these associations were formed voluntarily (i.e., individuals joined voluntarily and capital was obtained with the consent of the owners) and individuals retained the right to exit and set up corporations or other profit-making, individualistic firms.

The criminal essence of the State is found in the means that it uses, not in the services that it performs. Certain goods and services are essential to life, but it is not imperative that they be provided by the State. People individually or together in associations will provide for their own needs. History amply demonstrates that people provide the goods and services that they need and desire. Keeping time is one of those essential services that, fortunately, was never controlled to any great extent by the State. If it had been, private clocks and wristwatches probably would have never evolved, or if they had, they would have been exorbitantly expensive. Timekeeping, precisely because it was primarily left in private hands, has today evolved to a high art. State intervention would only have impeded its progress. If people had been raised with the idea that the State should be responsible for keeping time, it would be difficult for them to imagine how the free enterprise system would provide people with digital clocks and the many other gadgets people have to assist them in telling time.

The roots of copyright lie in censorship. It was easy for state and church to control thought by controlling the scribes, but then the printing press came along and the authorities worried that they couldn't control official thought as easily. So Queen Mary created the Stationer's Company in 1557, with the exclusive franchise over book publishing, to control the press and what information the people could access. When the charter of the Stationer's Company expired, the publishers lobbied for an extension, but in the Statute of Anne (1710) Parliament gave copyright to authors instead. Authors liked this because it freed their works from state control. Nowadays they use copyright much as the state originally did: to censor and ban books -- or their publishers do, who have gained a quasi-oligopolistic gatekeeper function, courtesy copyright law.

In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. If the road between two villages is impassable, the peasant says: -- "There should be a law about parish roads." If a park-keeper takes advantage of the want of spirit in those who follow him with servile observance and insults one of them, the insulted man says: -- "There should be a law to enjoin more politeness upon park-keepers." If there is stagnation in agriculture or commerce, the husbandman, cattle-breeder, or corn speculator argues, "It is protective legislation that we require." Down to the old clothesman there is not one who does not demand a law to protect his own little trade. If the employer lowers wages or increases the hours of labour, the politician in embryo exclaims, "We must have a law to put all that to rights," instead of telling the workers that there are other, and much more effectual means of settling these things straight ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowardice.

There is a battle shaping up in the world - a battle between the forces of archy - of statism, of political rule and authority - and its only alternative - anarchy, the absence of political rule. This battle is the necessary and logical consequence of the battle between individualism and collectivism, between liberty and the state, between freedom and slavery. As in ethics there are only two sides to any question - the good and the evil - so too are there only two logical sides to the political question of the state: either you are for it, or you are against it. Any attempt at a middle ground is doomed to failure, and the adherents of any middle course are doomed likewise to failure and frustration - or the blackness of psychological destruction, should they blank out and refuse to identify the causes of such failure, or the nature of reality as it is.

The state pretends that all its demands, however arbitrary, are moral obligations, even though those demands rest on force. If it were confined to demanding only what decent people do anyway -- refraining from murder, robbery, et cetera -- it might be bearable. But it never stops with reasonable moral demands; at a minimum, even the most "humane" and "democratic" states use the taxing power to extort staggering amounts of money from their subjects. The predatory tendency of the state is inherent and expansive, and nobody has found a way to control it. No control can long withstand the monopolistic "right" to demand obedience in every area of human activity the state may choose to invade. Systematized force -- which is all the state really is -- follows its own logic. Legal forms, moral rhetoric, and propaganda may disguise force as something it is not. The idea of "democracy" has persuaded countless gullible people that they are somehow "consenting" when they are being coerced.

Although I sincerely believe that a stateless world would be better than the present world in countless ways, such as better health, greater wealth, and enhanced material well-being, I am not a libertarian anarchist primarily on consequentialist grounds, but instead primarily because I believe it is wrong for anyone–including those designated the rulers and their functionaries–to engage in fraud, extortion, robbery, torture, and murder. I do not believe that I have a defensible right to engage in such acts; nor do I believe that I, or anyone else, may delegate to government officials a just right to do what it is wrong for me–or you or anyone–to do as a private person.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Liberty, not the daughter of order, but the mother of order.

Anarchy is precisely the reverse of chaos. Libertarian anarchists contend that the free market is the best way to produce a peaceful and prosperous social order.

Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

The State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending.

From its origins, the state has been the instrument by which priest-kings, latifundia owners and slave masters, feudal landlords, and capitalists have lived off the labor of the producing classes. In the nineteenth century, with the birth of a large-scale consciousness of this history of class exploitations, the first deliberate movements arose to seize the state and govern in the name of the exploited. But when these workers’ parties came to hold state power, they immediately became a new ruling class. Because that’s all state power is good for: Robbery and exploitation.

"The best offense is a good defense" may be effective strategy in war and various competitive sports to decide winners and losers. But this offense-defense terminology is misleading with reference to free market competition. Voluntary exchange is neither a game nor a war; it is a form of cooperation between buyer and seller to their mutual advantage -- as each one determines advantage. So, the rule of the market would run more like this: "He gains most who serves best." A businessman's profits are a measure of his efficiency in the use of scarce and valuable resources to satisfy the most urgent wants of consumers. Having competed successfully in the market, a property owner seeks to preserve his gains. But the market continues to insist: "He gains most who serves best." In other words, the way to preserve your gains is to keep on serving consumers efficiently; that's the only protection of property the market can offer.

When it is remarked, that the prosperity of every nation is in an inverse proportion to the power and to the interference of its government, we may be almost tempted to believe the common opinion, that governments are necessary and beneficial, is one of those general prejudices which men have inherited from an ignorant and a barbarous age, and which more extensive knowledge and greater civilization will show to be an error full of evil.

To a very significant degree, the economic system we have now is one from which peaceful, voluntary exchange is absent. An interlocking web of legal and regulatory privileges benefit the wealthy and well connected at the expense of everyone else (think patents and copyrights, tariffs, restrictions on banking, occupational licensing rules, land-use restrictions, etc.). The military-industrial complex funnels unbelievable amounts of money--at gunpoint--from ordinary people's pockets and into the bank accounts of government contractors and their cronies. Subsidies of all kinds feed a network of privileged businesses and non-profits. And the state protects titles to land taken at gunpoint or engrossed by arbitrary fiat before distribution to favored individuals and groups. No, the economies of the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, at least, aren’t centrally planned. The state doesn’t assert formal ownership of (most of) the means of production. But the state's involvement at multiple levels in guaranteeing and bolstering economic privilege makes it hard to describe the economic system we have now as free.

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.

The theoretical connections between individualist anarchism and liberalism seem obvious. While liberalism called for individual liberty and a limited state, individualist anarchism called for individual sovereignty and no state. In economics as well as in politics, individualist anarchism seemed to be the logical extreme of liberalism. George Bernard Shaw put this succinctly: “laissez-faire, in spite of all the stumblings it has brought upon itself by persistently holding the candle to the devil instead of to its own footsteps, is the torchbearer of Anarchism.” However, this picture is too simplistic for several reasons. First of all, socialism was at least as influential as liberalism on the character of individualist anarchism, particularly in terms of economics.

Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part.

Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy.

Every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist -- even if you don’t realize it.

By definition an anarchist is he who does not wish to be oppressed nor wishes to be himself an oppressor; who wants the greatest well-being, freedom and development for all human beings. His ideas, his wishes have their origin in a feeling of sympathy, love and respect for humanity: a feeling which must be sufficiently strong to induce him to want the well-being of others as much as his own, and to renounce those personal advantages, the achievement of which, would involve the sacrifice of others. If it were not so, why would he be the enemy of oppression and not seek to become himself an oppressor?

Philosophers have spent at least 2,500 years trying to produce a good theory of government authority--that is, of the duty to obey the law. But basically all their attempts to justify government authority stink, and stink badly. Every major theory of authority has big gaping holes and is subject to devastating objections. If, after 2,500 years, super-smart people can't produce a decent justification of authority, perhaps government authority is a myth. Perhaps there's no duty to obey the law after all.

Defending the continued existence of the state, despite having absolute certainty of a corresponding continuation of its intrinsic engagement in robbery, destruction, murder, and countless other crimes, requires that one imagine nonstate chaos, disorder, and death on a scale that nonstate actors seem incapable of causing. Nor, to my knowledge, does any historical example attest to such large-scale nonstate mayhem. With regard to large-scale death and destruction, no person, group, or private organization can even begin to compare to the state, which is easily the greatest instrument of destruction known to man.

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

Despots reward compliance with more oppression.

The essence of government is force, and most often that force is used to accomplish evil ends.

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.

The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital and human ingenuity - in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.

Anarchy is defined, not as the absence of all physical compulsion, but absence of physical compulsion of the non-aggressive. Individuals would not be left to do as they choose. They would be left to do as they choose only within certain limits,--those of equal freedom. Criminals or invaders would be restrained or punished by voluntary organizations for defence, and only non-aggressive persons would be exempt from interference.

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Libertarians have often dreamed of escaping the tyranny of the State; some have sought to do so by seeking refuge in distant and uninhabited lands where they could live in solitary hermitage or in small communities held together by the principle of voluntary association and mutual aid. But historians know that such experiments seldom survive in peace for long; sooner or later the State finds and confronts them with its instinctive will to violence, its mania for coercion rather than persuasion, for compulsion rather than voluntarism. Such has been the fate of the Mormons and Mennonites, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Amish people, among others.

If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.

Freedom is threatened from two ends, the right and left. The idea of liberty really does represent a third way, a path lit by the hope in the kind of civilization that can be built not from the top down but from the bottom up, not through the force of power but by voluntary associations of regular people who aspire to live better lives.

The individualistic or philosophical anarchists favor the abolition of 'the State' and government of man, by man. They seek to bring about a state of perfect freedom of anarchy.

Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood, thou art the grisly terror of our age. “Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude, “Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.” O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven the truth that lies behind a word to find, to them the word’s right meaning was not given. They shall continue blind among the blind. But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure, thou sayest all which I for goal have taken. I give thee to the future! Thine secure when each at least unto himself shall waken. Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill? I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see! I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another ... We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.

Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? ... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

What, then, is legislation? It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they can subject to their power. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be. It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place. All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as human legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed.

The average man, on being told that the anarchist would abolish all governmental restraints, not unnaturally concludes that the proposition involves the removal of the restrictions upon criminal conduct, the relinquishment of organized defence of life, liberty and property... But such interpretations are without any foundation. The anarchists emphatically favor resistance to and organized protection against crime and aggression of every kind; it is not greater freedom for the criminal, but greater freedom for the noncriminal, that they aim to secure; and by the abolition of government they mean the removal of restrictions upon conduct intrinsically ethical and legitimate, but which ignorant legislation has interdicted as criminal.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy - which is their own population.

When men set up an imaginary Authority armed with force, they destroy all opportunity to exercise their natural freedom.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Among the political ideologies generally considered to be of continuing significance, anarchism alone has never been implemented. Perhaps its rigors are too strong and its advocates are too weak. That it is still considered worth studying is testimony to its intellectual credibility, particularly its single-minded emphasis on individual liberty.

Slaves and master do not make a society; "free and equal" beings do.

Is a little wet, still wet? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. But, for many, the correct answer—for which they argue vociferously—is that "a little wet is not wet." I am, of course, talking about minarchism and statism. Both are positions with designs for how society must be organized, guaranteed by the monopolization of the use of force and violence. Wherein they differ is "how wet" they are. Yet they want us to believe that there is much more than a difference in their respective degree of wetness. They claim it is a matter of principle, not of magnitude. From my anarchist perspective, this is at the same time funny and sad. A state is a state regardless of how big it is. It has a nature that comes from simply being a state. And this nature applies regardless of how you choose to measure its size or impact. This is important to remember, and it needs to be core to libertarian philosophy.

The study of complexity, or chaos, informs us of patterns of regularity that lie hidden in our world, but which spontaneously manifest themselves to generate the order that we like to pretend authorities have created for us. There is much to discover about the interplay of unseen forces that work, without conscious direction, to make our lives more productive and peaceful than even the best-intended autocrat can accomplish. As the disruptive histories of state planning and regulation reveal, efforts to impose order by fiat often produce disorder, a phenomenon whose explanation is to be found in the dynamical nature of complexity.

Unlike all authoritarian movements for social betterment, Mutualism requires no compulsory measures for its introduction or maintenance.  It is eminently practical, and can be adopted at once in ever-widening circles of social and economic life with great advantage to those who practice it; and it is based on a logical extension of the past history of mankind: the gradual evolution of free society.

There is no power that is not the enemy of the people, because, no matter what the attendant conditions, no matter who the man invested with it, no matter how it may be described, power is always power, that is to say, the irrefutable badge of abdication of the people’s sovereignty and consecration of supreme overlordship.

All the world's governments and central banks share a common philosophy, which drives these policies. They believe that you create economic activity by stimulating demand, and you stimulate demand by printing money. And, of course, it's true, in a way. Roughly the same way a counterfeiter can stimulate a local economy. Unfortunately, they ignore that, and completely ignore that the way a person or a society becomes wealthy is by producing more than they consume and saving the difference. That difference, savings, is how you create capital. Without capital you're reduced to subsistence, scratching at the earth with a stick. These people think that by inflating—which is to say destroying—the currency, they can create prosperity. But what they're really doing, is destroying capital: When you destroy the value of the currency, that discourages people from saving it. And when people don't save, they can't build capital, and the vicious cycle goes on. This is destructive for civilization itself, in both the long term and the short term. The more paper money, the more credit, they create, the more society focuses on finance, as opposed to production. It's why there are many times more people studying finance than science. The focus is increasingly on speculation, not production. Financial engineering, not mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering. And lots of laws and regulations to keep the unstable structure from collapsing.

Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.

Voluntaryism figures prominently in the libertarian tradition in three distinct ways. First, voluntaryism represents the final goal of all libertarians. After all, libertarianism is the doctrine that all the affairs of people, both public and private, should be carried out by individuals or their voluntary associations. Secondly, voluntaryism is a realization about the nature of political society. The voluntaryist approach rests on the crucial, theoretical insight that all tyranny and government are grounded on general popular acceptance. The primary responsibility for the existence and continuation of any political system rests on the majority of the population, who willingly acquiesce in their own subjection. Thirdly, voluntaryism represents a way of achieving significant social change without resort to politics or violent revolution. Since voluntaryists realize that government rests on popular consent, they conclude that the only way to abolish government power is simply for the people at large to withdraw that consent. As a means, voluntaryism calls for peaceful persuasion, education, civil disobedience, and non-violent resistance to the State. To libertarians, voluntaryism thus represents a means, an end, and an insight. Only voluntary means can be used to attain the truly voluntary society, based on the insight that existing tyrannies depend on the voluntary submission of the governed.

The love of liberty and the sense of human dignity are the basic elements of the anarchist creed.

To want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work.

If there were no scarcity in the world, human conflicts would be impossible. Interpersonal conflicts are always and everywhere conflicts concerning scarce things. I want to do X with a given thing and you want to do Y with the same thing. Because of such conflicts -- and because we are able to communicate and argue with each other -- we seek out norms of behavior with the purpose of avoiding these conflicts. The purpose of norms is conflict-avoidance. If we did not want to avoid conflicts, the search for norms of conduct would be senseless. We would simply fight and struggle. Absent a perfect harmony of all interests, conflicts regarding scarce resources can only be avoided if all scarce resources are assigned as private, exclusive property to some specified individual. Only then can I act independently, with my own things, from you, with your own things, without you and me coming into conflict.

Even if we stipulate starting from basic assumptions like the broadest understanding of self-ownership and the nonaggression principle (not that even a majority of the anarchist movement actually comes from the philosophical tradition which regards these as words to conjure with), that means very little in terms of the practical rules that can be deduced from them. There is simply no way, starting from basic axioms like self-ownership and nonaggression, to deduce any particular rules that are both obvious and necessary on issues like (for example) whether I have the right to intervene to stop an animal being tortured by its “owner,” or what the specific rules should be for squatters’ rights and constructive abandonment of a property long left idle. Even the definition of physical aggression against an individual is, to a large extent, culturally defined. The surrounding environment impinges on the physical body in a million different ways, and the boundary between those that are considered aggressive and those not (like photons or sound waves that physically affect the sensory organs and subsequently the nervous system and internal mental state) is somewhat arbitrary. The same is true for varying cultural definitions of the boundary between person and environment, and how much of the surrounding physical environment not actually part of the human body can be regarded as an extension of the self or an envelope of “personal space.” Bear in mind that common law definitions of assault assume such a spatial envelope, and include actions short of physically touching another person’s body with one’s own.

I believe that the complete triumph of anarchy will come by evolution, gradually, rather than by violent revolution ... In any case, if we take into account our sparse numbers and the prevalent attitude among most people, and if we do not wish to confuse our wishes with reality, we must expect that the next revolution will not be anarchist one, and therefore what is more pressing, is to think of what we can and must do in a revolution in which we will be a relatively small and badly armed minority. But we must beware of ourselves becoming less anarchist merely because the people are not ready for anarchy. If they want a government, it is unlikely that we will be able to prevent a new government being formed, but this is no reason for our not trying to persuade the people that government is useless and harmful or of preventing the government from also imposing on us and others like us who don’t want it.

A careful examination of the facts will decide the problem of government more and more in favor of liberty, just as it does all other economic problems. We are convinced, so far as we are concerned, that one day societies will be established to agitate for the freedom of government, as they have already been established on behalf of the freedom of commerce. And we do not hesitate to add that after this reform has been achieved, and all artificial obstacles to the free action of the natural laws that govern the economic world have disappeared, the situation of the various members of society will become the best possible.

The market anarchist objection to government is simply a logical extension of the standard libertarian objection to coercive monopolies in general. First, from a moral point of view, among people regarded as equals it cannot be legitimate for some to claim a certain line of work as their own privileged preserve from which others are to be forcibly excluded; we no longer believe in the divine right of kings, and on no other basis could such inequality of rights be justified. Second, from an economic point of view, because monopolies are insulated from market competition and hold their customers by force, they lack both the information and the incentive to provide consumers with fair, efficient, and inexpensive service. The anarchist accepts these arguments, and merely asks why they should apply with any less force to the provision of legal services.

What are presented as the strongest critiques of anarchism are invariably descriptions of the status quo.

A genuine free enterprise system, without state-enforced artificial scarcities, artificial property rights or subsidies, would be like dynamite at the foundations of corporate power.

The shape of a free society is formed not only by anonymous economic tendencies and "market forces," but also by conscious social activism and community organizing.

We Voluntaryists believe that no true progress can be made until we frankly recognise the great truth that every individual, who lives within the sphere of his own rights, as a self-owner, and has not first aggressed upon others by force or fraud, and thus deprived himself of his own rights of self-ownership by aggressing upon these same rights of all others, is the one and the only one true owner of his own faculties, and his own property. We claim that the individual is not only the one true owner of his faculties, but also of his property, because property is directly or indirectly the product of faculties, is inseparable from faculties, and therefore must rest on the same moral basis, and fall under the same moral law, as faculties. Personal ownership of our own selves, of our own faculties, necessarily includes personal ownership of property. It would be idle, it would be a mere illusion, to speak of an individual, as owner of his own faculties, and at same time to withhold from him fullest and most perfect right over his property, if such property has been rightfully acquired through faculties (by rightfully we mean acquired without force or fraud), or inherited from those who have rightfully acquired it.

Most libertarian writers hold that man is a mixture of good and evil and therefore that it is important for social institutions to encourage the good and discourage the bad. The state is the only social institution which is able to extract its income and wealth by coercion; all others must obtain revenue either by selling a product or service to customers or by receiving voluntary gifts. And the state is the only institution which can use the revenue from this organized theft to presume to control and regulate people's lives and property. Hence, the institution of the state establishes a socially legitimatized and sanctified channel for bad people to do bad things, to commit regularized theft and to wield dictatorial power... A free society, by not establishing such a legitimated channel for theft and tyranny, discourages the criminal tendencies of human nature and encourages the peaceful and the voluntary. Liberty and the free market discourage aggression and compulsion, and encourage the harmony and mutual benefit of voluntary interpersonal exchanges, economic, social, and cultural.

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.

Men cannot be forced to be free, nor can they even be forced to be virtuous. To a certain extent, it is true, they can be forced to act as though they were virtuous. But virtue is the fruit of well-used freedom. And no act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue--or of vice.

Nine hundred and ninety nine men out of a thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning the tax that is laid on it.

All government is founded in opinion. Men at present live under any particular form because they conceive it their interest to do so. One part indeed of a community or empire may be held in subjection by force; but this cannot be the personal force of their despot; it must be the force of another part of the community, who are of opinion that it is their interest to support his authority. Destroy this opinion, and the fabric which is built upon it falls to the ground.

As a libertarian anarchist, I am pressed from time to time to defend anarchy against those who dispute its desirability or its feasibility. But, really, why should I be the one who must defend this condition (that is, the absence of rulers)? I live in a world in which gangs of total strangers -- people I do not know, people who do not know me, people I want nothing to do with -- presume to order me about in countless ways and to strip me of my wealth at their pleasure, putting the plunder to uses that in many cases I consider utterly abhorrent and achieving this domination over me only by making credible threats to bring violence to bear against me should I resist their impositions. THAT outrageous complex of actions, not my embrace of anarchy, is the condition that requires a defense. Strange to say, although the prevailing rulers' insolence and moral arrogance rise to horrifying heights, many of their victims take completely for granted the legitimacy of the degrading and exploitative setup under which they live -- Stockholm syndrome writ large.

From my point of view the killing of another, except in defense of human life, is Archistic, authoritarian, and, therefore, no Anarchist can do so. It is the very opposite of what Anarchism stands for.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. The primitive exercise of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest, confiscation, expropriation, and the introduction of a slave economy. The conqueror parcelled out the conquered territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their needs and desires by exploiting the labour of the enslaved  inhabitants. The feudal State, and the merchant-State, wherever  found, merely took over and developed successively the heritage of character, intention and apparatus of exploitation which the primitive State transmitted to them; they are in essence merely higher integrations of the primitive State. The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or, merchant, is the organization of the political means. Now since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can- exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means. He will, at the present time, that is, have recourse to the State's modern apparatus of exploitation; the apparatus of tariffs, concessions, rent-monopoly, and the like. It is a matter of the commonest observation that this is his first instinct. So long, therefore, as the organization of the political means is available - so long as the highly-centralized bureaucratic State stands as primarily a distributor of economic advantage, an arbiter of exploitation, so long will that instinct effectively declare itself.

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.

The market, absent of force and fraud, is a shorthand term for a group of individuals cooperating in the pursuit of various goals. Striving after different values, working to realize divergent plans, possessed of diverse stores of knowledge, these individuals go their chosen ways, trading only when it is to mutual advantage. Without intending it, such actions by individuals—their acceptance and non-acceptance of goods and services at market prices—generate a complex system in which all the diverse knowledge of the separate individuals is put into a form that is usable by all the market’s participants. It is a system in which all people are left free to pursue their plans without constraint; where the wealth of information contained in market prices offers all the opportunity to rationally adjust those plans when appropriate. In short, the system that spins out of the actions of free human beings offers them the only peaceful, efficient way to deal with an uncertain future.

The more enlightened man will become, the less he will employ compulsion and coercion. The really civilized man will divest himself of all fear and authority. He will rise from the dust and stand erect: he will bow to no tsar either in heaven or on earth. He will become fully human when he will scorn to rule and refuse to be ruled. He will be truly free only when there shall be no more masters. Anarchism is the ideal of such a condition; of a society without force and compulsion, where all men shall be equals, and live in freedom, peace, and harmony. The word Anarchy comes from the Greek, meaning without force, without violence or government, because government is the very fountainhead of violence, constraint, and coercion. Anarchy therefore does not mean disorder and chaos, as you thought before. On the contrary, it is the very reverse of it; it means no government, which is freedom and liberty. Disorder is the child of authority and compulsion. Liberty is the mother of order.

The primary concern of every government is to ensure its continuance in power, irrespective of the men who form it. If they are bad, they want to remain in power in order to enrich themselves and to satisfy their lust for authority; and if they are honest and sincere they believe it is their duty to remain in power for the people.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.