Peter Ramsay and Dave Hierlihy March 24 2026 Gospel Meeting

 

Only Iranian surrender will end its nuclear threat - Walter E. Block

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-866460

A libertarian defense of the use of military force against Iran from famed anarcho-capitalist Walter Block. 

Individualism in Rothbard’s Natural Rights Libertarianism

https://mises.org/mises-wire/individualism-rothbards-natural-rights-libertarianism

To many liberals, the notion of individualism stands in opposition to nationalism, and in favor of globalism. As the New York Times expresses it, individualism “promotes a more universalist outlook. In focusing on individual rights and welfare, it reduces the emphasis on groups – and the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that notoriously erode generosity toward those outside one’s own circle.”

According to NYT, individualism in that sense means looking beyond the confines of one’s own group. The argument is that, by prioritizing individual concerns and not the concerns of the community or country, individualism paradoxically encourages a wider appreciation of our common humanity:

Individualism, as defined by behavioral scientists, means valuing autonomy, self-expression and the pursuit of personal goals rather than prioritizing the interests of the group – be it family, community or country.

The point being made by NYT is that individualism often encourages traits that might seem surprising—while many might associate individualism with selfishness, to liberals it is more about altruism and generosity toward others. In that sense liberals use the term “individualism” to advance a view diametrically opposed, for example, to the views promoted by objectivists.

Individualism certainly means different things to different people, a point which Friedrich von Hayek highlighted in distinguishing between true and false individualism. He observed that individualism “has been used to describe several attitudes toward society which have as little in common among themselves as they have with those traditionally regarded as their opposites.”

It is important to bear this in mind when considering whether a political view is compatible with individualism. Much depends on what is meant by individualism in the first place. For example, if one adopts the NYT view of individualism, then a defense of nationalism would seem to be incompatible with individualism.

How does Murray Rothbard conceptualize individualism? Given the views he expressed in “nations by consent,” it is clear that he does not follow the NYT view of individualism.

In The Ethics of Liberty he defended the natural law individualist tradition which is based on self-ownership and property rights. His notion of self-ownership is explicitly aligned with John Locke’s view that “every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.”

Individualism in the natural law tradition builds on the idea that natural rights “stem from the nature of man and of the world around him.” Rothbard explained:

It was, in contrast [to earlier statists], the Levellers and particularly John Locke in seventeenth century England who transformed classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism. From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts, stemmed his conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of each individual. It was the Lockean individualist tradition that profoundly influenced the later American revolutionaries and the dominant tradition of libertarian political thought in the revolutionary new nation. It is this tradition of natural-rights libertarianism upon which the present volume attempts to build.

This moral foundation of natural rights is indispensable to Rothbard’s political and philosophical analysis. He rejects the notion that policy discussions can be “value free,” conducted without any universal moral foundation. Therefore, natural-rights libertarianism is not merely incidental to Rothbard’s political views, nor is it merely an expression of his personal opinions. His political philosophy is explicitly based on a statement of objectively and universally true principles—principles that form the moral foundation of his defense of individual liberty.

That this moral foundation is universal rather than personal is important. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his introduction to the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard’s political philosophy is distinct from matters of personal ethics or personal morality. While personal morality is subjective, libertarianism as a “moral science” is based on universal principles:

Rothbard’s unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common foundation of both economics and political philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction and conceptual integration of modern, marginalist economics and natural-law political philosophy into a unified moral science: libertarianism.

As Hoppe explains, Rothbard’s political philosophy is, like his economic principles, “equally grounded in the acting nature of man” and forms part of a “unified system of rationalist social philosophy.” It forms part of his “system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones.” These principles are not merely a statement of his opinions as to what people should or should not do.

Therefore, to understand the Rothbardian system, a distinction must be drawn between a statement concerning the right to do something—which vests properly in each individual—and “moral or immoral ways of exercising that right,” that is, one’s personal views of whether or how he ought to exercise that right in the specific circumstances. For example, the right to secede is distinct from whether it is prudent to mount an attempt to secede, and a legal or philosophical defense of the right to secede is analytically distinct from a campaign that people in a particular country ought to secede.

Rothbard regards it as axiomatic that human beings have consciousness and free will, in the exercise of which they make choices: “men are free to adopt ideas and to act upon them.” This necessarily means that all human action is individual, as “only an individual can adopt values or make choices; only an individual can act.”

It is, of course, for each man to make his own choices and decide what he ought to do in any situation. Free will means that individuals are not driven into action deterministically, carried along like automatons by social systems, economic structures, or inevitable forces of history. This is why Rothbard rejects scientism—scientism is incompatible with his view of self-ownership and free will. Scientism rejects individualism and sees factors such as the group, or the forces of history, as the determinant of human events:

The key to scientism is its denial of the existence of individual consciousness and will. This takes two main forms: applying mechanical analogies from the physical sciences to individual men, and applying organismic analogies to such fictional collective wholes as “society.” The latter course attributed consciousness and will, not to individuals, but to some collective organic whole of which the individual is merely a determined cell. Both methods are aspects of the rejection of individual consciousness.

Rothbard’s emphasis on voluntary association in social groups should be understood in that light. It is only by defending self-ownership, property rights, free will, and individual choice, that liberty can be advanced. Nations are defensible and just only when they are formed by consent, and it is only individuals who can give that consent. Consent is not just something that is nice to have but is essential to justice. In “The Nationalities Question,” Rothbard explains the importance of voluntary choice in understanding this concept of the nation:

While the State is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the “nation” may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised. It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph Bourne’s analysis of the crucial distinction between “the nation” (the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and “the State” (the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one’s nation or country while—and even for that very reason—opposing the state that rules over it.

The Money Multiplier – Myth or Reality?

https://mises.org/mises-wire/money-multiplier-myth-or-reality

According to much popular economics, the current monetary system amplifies the initial monetary injections of money. Thus, if the central bank injects $1 billion into the economy, and banks hold 10 percent in reserves against deposits, this will allow the first bank to lend 90 percent of the $1 billion. The $900 million, in turn, will end up with the second bank, which will lend 90 percent of the $900 million. The $810 million will end up with a third bank, which, in turn, will lend out 90 percent of $810 million, and so on.

Consequently, the initial injection of $1 billion will become $10 billion (i.e., money supply will expand by a multiple of 10). Note that, in this example, the central bank has actively initiated the monetary pumping of $1 billion, which, in turn, banks have expanded to $10 billion.

Economists from the Post-Keynesian school of economics (PK) have expressed doubt about the validity of the popular framework of the money multiplier. They argue that the key source of money expansion is the demand for loans together with the willingness of banks to lend. Furthermore, for the PK’s, the central banks are not actively engaged in the expansion of money. The role of the central bank in the modern banking system is to perform a balancing act. For instance, if on a particular day the government’s intake of cash exceeds outlays this leads to a deficiency of cash on the day. To prevent a scramble for cash in the money market and a subsequent increase in the overnight interest rate, the central bank must inject an appropriate amount of cash in order to keep the interest rate at the target, or so it is held by the PK’s. In this way of thinking the key source of monetary expansion is commercial banks that—via an increase in lending—set an increase in the money supply.

The supply of loans, according to the PK’s, is never independent of demand—banks supply loans only because someone is willing to borrow the bank’s money by issuing an IOU to a bank. Again, according to this way of thinking, the driving force of bank credit expansion, and thus money supply expansion, is the increase in demand for loans.

According to the PK’s, banks will always be happy to oblige the demand of a good quality borrower. But, if this is so, how is the demand for credit accommodated? What is the source of the supply of credit? It seems that, by the PK’s, the source of the supply is borrowing by banks.

When a bank borrows from another entity all that we will have here is a shift of money from the entity to the bank with no change in the money supply. Also, according to the PK’s, the central bank has nothing to do with the expansion of money supply. So, if neither the central bank nor the borrowings by the banks are causing the money supply expansion, what then causes the increase in the money supply?

Is the Money Multiplier Myth or Reality?

The money multiplier arises because banks are legally permitted to use money, which was placed by individuals in demand deposits. Banks treat this type of money as if it was loaned to them.

If John places $100 in demand deposit at Bank One, he doesn’t relinquish his claim over the deposited $100. He has an unlimited claim against the $100. The demand deposit would not be regarded as different from the money held in the individual’s pocket. (Note that John can exercise his demand for money by either holding money in his pocket, or under the mattress, or in the bank demand deposit). Hence, when the Bank One uses the deposited money as if it were loaned to the bank, it is as if the bank took some of the money from the individual’s possession without the individual’s consent. Once the bank lends some of the deposited money, the bank generates new deposits.

The fact that banks make use of the money placed in the demand deposits, while the holders of these deposits did not relinquish their claims over the deposited money, this sets in motion the money multiplier in the way the popular way of thinking describes. For instance, the Bank One lends $1,000, which was taken from the John’s demand deposit without John’s consent. The $1,000 ends up with Bank Two, which lends, say, 90 percent of the new money. The $900, in turn, ends up with the third bank and so on.

Free Market Minimization

In a free market economy, the likelihood that banks will make use of depositors’ money in their lending activities without the owners’ consent will tend to be very low. For instance, if Bank One makes a loan of $50 to Mike out of the $100 deposited by John, it runs the risk of going bankrupt. Let us say that John buys goods for $100 from Tom, while Mike buys goods for $50 from Jerry. Both John and Mike pay for the goods with checks against their deposits with Bank One.

Now, Tom and Jerry are depositing the received checks from John and Mike with their bank—Bank B—which is a competitor of Bank One. Bank B presents these checks to Bank One and demands cash in return. However, Bank One has only $100 in cash—he is short of $50. Consequently, Bank One runs the risk of being declared bankrupt. The fact that banks must clear checks will be a deterrent against using depositors’ money without the depositors’ consent.

Furthermore, it must be realized that the tendency of being “caught” practicing lending without the depositors’ consent will increase when there are many competitive banks. As the number of banks increases and the number of clients per bank declines, the chances that clients will spend money on goods of individuals that are banking with other banks will increase. This, in turn, is likely to increase the risk of the bank not being able to clear its checks once this bank practices fractional-reserve banking.

Conversely, as the number of competitive banks diminishes, that is, as the number of clients per bank increases, the likelihood of being “caught” practicing lending without depositors’ consent diminishes. In the extreme case, when there is only one bank, it can practice lending without depositors’ consent without any fear of being exposed. Thus, if Tom and Jerry are also the clients of Bank One, then once they deposit their received checks from John and Mike, the ownership of deposits is transferred from John and Mike to Tom and Jerry. This transfer, however, will not produce any disruptive effect on Bank One.

We can thus conclude that, in a free market, if a particular bank tries to expand credit by the use of depositors’ money without their consent, this bank runs the risk of being caught. Hence, in a free-market economy, the threat of bankruptcy is likely to reduce to a minimum the use of deposits in banks’ lending activities without the depositor’s agreement.

While in a free-market economy the use of deposits without the depositors’ consent in banks’ lending would tend to be minimal, this is not so in the framework of the central bank. By means of inflationary monetary injections, the central bank makes sure that the banking system is “liquid enough” so that banks will not bankrupt each other.

Conclusions 

Contrary to Post-Keynesian (PK), the existence of the central bank enables banks to utilize deposits in lending without the depositor’s consent. This sets in motion the money multiplier (i.e., the generation of the money out of “thin air”).

Who Owns the Bus?

https://mises.org/mises-wire/who-owns-bus

In nearly every city, the same bitter argument repeats itself: riders complain about disorder on trains and buses—open drug use, harassment, people sleeping across seats, feces on vehicles—while activists warn that enforcement is “criminalizing poverty” or discriminating against the mentally ill. The debate stalls because it refuses to ask the most basic question any sane society would ask: Whose property is this?

On truly private transit, the answer would be clear. The bus belongs to an owner (or a cooperative, or a firm) with a duty to deliver a safe, reliable service to the satisfaction of paying customers. That owner sets conditions of entry: pay the fare, don’t assault people, don’t smoke fentanyl in the aisle, don’t defecate on the seat. If you violate the rules, you are removed and excluded; not abducted into some sprawling punitive apparatus at taxpayer expense, not processed as a political symbol. In that case, you are simply denied access—because the service is not yours by right, it’s conditional use of someone else’s property.

But when transit is “public,” ownership is dissolved into a fog of politics. “Everyone” owns it, so in practice no one can exercise ordinary property rights—especially the right to exclude. The result is predictable: agencies drift into a role they were never designed for (mobile shelters, rolling psychiatric wards, de facto harm-reduction sites), while riders—disproportionately working people who can’t easily opt out—pay the price in safety, dignity, and time.

That isn’t a mystery. It’s the tragedy of the commons wearing an MTA jacket.

The Commons Creates Disorder—Then Demands Coercion to Manage It

Libertarians have made the general point for decades: when resources are treated as “public,” incentives for care, stewardship, and sane governance collapse. Instead of normal rules grounded in ownership, you get politicized rationing and conflict. As Patrick Barron put it, the tragedy of the commons arises because “public” resources are treated as a free-for-all until the resource is degraded.

Transit is a perfect example. The left tends to moralize the issue: “If you object to disorder, you hate the homeless.” That’s not analysis; it’s emotional blackmail. The right often responds with blunt-force policing and sweeping mandates. Both miss the structural cause: a system without real ownership can’t behave like a system with real rules.

And, because the property-rights tool that actually prevents disorder, exclusion is politically taboo in “public” space, authorities reach for the tools they do control: police surges, surveillance expansions, “quality of life” campaigns, and—in the worst cases—expanded involuntary commitment.

Look at New York. After high-profile subway violence and mounting fear, officials announced major spending aimed at homelessness and serious mental illness alongside intensified public-safety measures. Governor Kathy Hochul has also pressed for more aggressive intervention frameworks around people judged a danger to themselves or others—including expansion of subway-based outreach teams that pair clinical staff with police presence. Whether you support those measures or not, notice the logic: when you can’t simply exclude a repeat disrupter from a service, you start debating how easily the state can confine him.

That is the “public” model’s moral inversion: it makes a simple question of access and contract metastasize into a question of cages and institutions.

Fare Gates Are a Quiet Admission That Property Rights Matter

Even transit agencies themselves increasingly behave like reluctant property owners. They’re “hardening” stations, closing open gates, experimenting with tap-to-exit, adding barriers, and cracking down on evasion—not merely for revenue, but because disorder and crime correlate with uncontrolled access.

• BART completed installation of next-generation fare gates systemwide in August 2025—explicitly framing the gates as a way to reduce fare evasion and “anti-social behavior.” BART also publicized sizable crime declines in 2025, while local reporting noted that earlier headline claims were overstated due to a data error—yet still found meaningful reductions.
• In February 2026, the San Francisco Chronicle reported BART’s new gates generated an estimated $10 million annually and reduced maintenance burdens—again highlighting that controlling entry isn’t just punitive theater; it changes system conditions.
• In Los Angeles, Metro experimented with making riders tap to exit at a major station as part of a safety push following violent incidents and rider anxiety.
• In New York, independent analysis has documented the sheer scale of fare evasion and the agency’s physical-environment changes designed to make it harder to freeload—alongside reported declines in evasion rates over time.

These are partial, awkward approximations of property rights inside a politicized “public” system. They are the system’s tacit confession: permissioned access and enforceable boundaries work.

Notably, none of this requires turning every disorderly act into a prosecutorial crusade, it requires treating transit like what it is: a service with terms of use.

Exclusion Is the Non-Carceral Alternative

The current conversation is warped by a false dichotomy: either you tolerate anything, or you “criminalize homelessness.” A property-rights framework breaks the spell.

In normal life, exclusion is routine and often humane. If you repeatedly harass people in a coffee shop, you’re banned. If you smear feces in a gym locker room, your membership ends. No one calls this “incarceration.” It’s a boundary: you don’t get to keep using other people’s spaces while degrading them.

There’s a growing policy literature on “transit exclusion” or “banning” orders precisely because agencies are trying—within the limits of public governance—to replicate what private ownership would do naturally: remove repeat offenders from the system without pretending every infraction is a philosophical referendum.

From a libertarian perspective, this is exactly the point: exclusion is how you minimize coercion. You don’t need to build a bigger carceral machine if you can simply withdraw service from those who violate the contract.

“But What About the Mentally Ill?” The Answer Still Starts With Ownership

Some activists object that exclusion “abandons” people who are mentally ill or addicted. But conflating help with a transportation service is a category error. A private transit firm isn’t a psychiatric hospital; it’s a transportation provider. If a person cannot ride without endangering others or destroying property, the compassionate response is not to force passengers and drivers to endure it. The compassionate response is to build parallel institutions that actually address the problem—shelters, treatment, supervised facilities, etc.—funded voluntarily, competitively, and with market accountability.

Here the libertarian critique of government’s role in social breakdown is relevant. Libertarian writers routinely point to state policies that inflate homelessness and street disorder—especially housing regulation and zoning constraints that raise prices and reduce supply. If government helps create the conditions that push more people onto the street, it’s perverse to then treat the subway car as the moral repair shop for those failures.

Once again, when transit is “public,” the lack of ownership creates political incentives to offload social crises onto shared infrastructure. Even federal politics gets pulled in; in 2025 Reuters reported federal threats around transit funding tied to subway crime and safety disputes in New York. That’s what “public” means in practice: not “the people,” but a permanent tug-of-war among agencies, politicians, and funding streams, with riders stuck in the middle.

The Libertarian Alternative: Transit as a Club Good, Not a Moral Battlefield

Classical liberal and Austrian economists have long argued that transport can be governed by user fees, entrepreneurship, and ownership rather than centralized provision. Lawrence H. White’s scholarship explicitly identifies municipal bus and rail as strong candidates for privatization (“load shedding”), precisely because user charges are feasible and performance can be disciplined by exit and competition. Walter Block’s work on denationalizing transportation emphasizes the core advantage of private provision: failure is punished, incentives are real, and “mistakes” are not frozen into place by politics.

Translated into the messy reality of modern transit: privatization (or genuine owner-like governance) would mean clearer rules, enforceable exclusions, and pricing structures that prevent the system from becoming a default shelter. It would also mean innovation in service models—everything from subscription passes to targeted routes, security staffing aligned with customer demand, and insurance-driven standards that don’t require citywide ideological permission slips.

None of this is utopian. It’s what we already expect from nearly every other service we use.

Stop Asking “What Do We Do With the Homeless?” Start Asking “Who Owns the Space?”

The debate over disorder on public transit is “ridiculous” for the same reason so many public-space debates are ridiculous: they moralize symptoms while ignoring structure. When everything is “public,” no one can act like an owner—yet everyone suffers the consequences of ownerlessness. The system then oscillates between permissiveness (because exclusion is stigmatized) and heavy coercion (because disorder becomes intolerable).

A property-rights approach is not a sneer at the poor, it’s the insistence that civilization requires boundaries—and that boundaries are most humanely enforced through exclusion and contract, not through political theater or expanding state confinement powers.

If we want transit that is clean, safe, and functional—and we want to address homelessness and mental illness honestly—then we should stop using trains and buses as battlegrounds for collective guilt. Treat transit as a service. Let it be owned, governed, and defended as property. And build real, accountable institutions for those who need help—without forcing captive riders to pay the daily cost of a commons managed by politics.