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Friday, July 11, 2025
Libertarianism for Social Conservatives by Jack Hunter Mar 21, 201311:07 AM
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/libertarianism-for-social-conservatives-231/
Some on both the left and right perceive libertarianism as inherently hostile to social conservatism. Some libertarians even think this. This is not only a misperception, but flat out wrong—libertarianism offers social conservatives a better hope for success in our current political environment than the nationalist approach often favored by some social conservative leaders.
Part of the beauty of libertarianism is that you can be socially liberal or socially conservative and subscribe to the label. For the millions of social conservatives who constitute a significant base of the Republicans Party, embracing libertarianism is not an all-or-nothing question of accepting or rejecting deep convictions about life, traditional marriage, or drug regulation. It simply means rethinking the approach to these issues.
The distance between mere rhetoric and tangible success for social conservatives essentially comes down to this question: Does the federal government always have to become involved? Or should certain decisions be made at the state and local level, as the framers of the Constitution intended?
The protection of innocent life is the number one concern of millions of Americans in both parties. Most pro-lifers believe that Roe v. Wade was constitutionally unsound, and indeed, some pro-choice advocates even admit that the legal reasoning was flawed. Given the gravity of what’s at stake, it is understandable that many would demand federal protection of the unborn.
It is also true that the political prospects of this happening anytime soon are nil. But if murder and manslaughter laws are decided at the state and local level, why shouldn’t that approach work for those who believe abortion is the taking of an innocent human life? The more libertarian position is the constitutional one—that any powers not delegated to the federal government as outlined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution are delegated to the states.
It might not be possible to get rid of abortion throughout the nation, but it might be possible to save unborn children in Alabama or South Carolina. National polls have shown that more Americans than ever are now calling themselves pro-life. Fighting at the local and state level to keep pushing attitudes in this direction is certainly a worthwhile effort.
On traditional marriage, public opinion is quickly moving in the direction of allowing same-sex marriage, something still anathema to many people of faith. Libertarians generally take two positions on this issue: One, that states should decide what constitutes a marriage; Two, that government has no business regulating marriage and it should be defined by religious or civic institutions.
Polls show that the entire country, and particularly youth, is becoming more tolerant of the idea of same-sex marriage. In this political climate, allowing more conservative states to define the institution—or better yet, allowing your church to define it—should be more attractive to social conservatives than some of current alternatives.
Concerning the federal war on drugs, it’s hard to measure the damage done to many families whose kids were put in jail for an extended time due to mandatory-minimum drug sentencing. There are countless Americans, and especially young people, who’ve made a single mistake with drugs, get caught, and are then incarcerated longer than rapists and murderers—alongside rapists and murderers.
States should regulate softer drugs like marijuana just like they do alcohol. This might be the tricky issue for some social conservatives, but it is the constitutional position. If we concede that the current federal war against the unborn is wrong, and that President Obama and Congress have no constitutional authority to define marriage, the same is true of federal drug regulation. A war against drug abuse—just like alcohol abuse—should be done at the state and local level, or better yet, the church and community level.
It’s always important to emphasize that this question is not about legalization versus keeping drugs illegal. It is about deciding which level of government should regulate drugs—federal, state, or local. Federal prohibition didn’t work a century ago, and it has failed miserably in our own time.
The drug question also isn’t about surrendering to liberalism or hedonism, but a much-needed, common-sense re-examination of what’s conservative. Conservative icons William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman long advocated the libertarian position concerning the federal war on drugs. So has televangelist Pat Robertson, who has called for marijuana legalization. These men are not exactly “lefties” in any respect.
On traditional values as a whole, some of the most prominent names associated with libertarianism, past and present, are social conservatives—Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Rep. Justin Amash, Rep. Thomas Massie, Fox News’s Judge Andrew Napolitano, Lew Rockwell, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, Jeffrey Tucker, and last but certainly not least—Ron and Rand Paul (both of whom I’ve worked for).
Indeed, libertarianism’s current mainstream success is largely due to the fact that socially conservative, Christian men have been successful in promoting it.
Again, one can also embrace social liberalism and claim the libertarian mantle, though it is telling that the economic collectivism that remains at the heart of American liberalism continues to render left-libertarianism a much smaller and less significant philosophical force than its right counterpart.
Social conservatives have no reason to fear libertarianism and have much reason to embrace it. In the end, libertarianism simply tells us what the state cannot do; our values tell us what we ought to do, and liberty gives us the freedom to do it.
Why All Libertarians Should Be Pro-Life By: James Silberman
To justify their support for abortion, many small-government advocates cite their desire to see the state’s influence in our lives decrease. For example, the Libertarian Party platform on abortion says “government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.” However, this position is irreconcilable with the philosophy of liberty. To begin deriving why, we first must understand the ideological foundation for our rights.
There are two, and only two, possible sources of our freedoms. Either they come from the state’s generosity, in which case the state can rightfully confiscate them, or they are naturally assigned to each of us through being human, in which case they are inalienable and cannot rightfully be confiscated by the state. America’s founders were among the first in human history to acknowledge the latter as the source of our freedoms and implement that revolutionary idea into law.
It Starts with Unalienable Rights
The implications of this philosophical development are far-reaching. It not only means that government cannot rightfully deprive us of certain liberties, but also that it cannot treat individuals differently. Because we are equal in the eyes of our Creator, we must then be equal in the eyes of the law. The rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, those rights listed in the Bill of Rights, and the rest of the unenumerated rights are guaranteed to all of us equally. The government does not have the authority to give these rights to some while withholding them from others.
If our rights are inalienable, that means the role of government is to protect those rights. Once the concept of inalienable rights is accepted, government becomes a project we all share to ensure each person’s rights and freedoms are upheld. If any of these rights are withheld from any of us, government is obliged to step in and restore those rights to that individual.
However, abortion supporters uphold a different foundation for the endowment of rights. They used to argue that a preborn child was not a human person, but science has proven that objectively false, so they have been forced to apply a different argument. To them, the rights to life and liberty aren’t inalienable. These rights are assigned to each of us by our mother, father, grandparents, abortionist, or anyone else who has influence in the decision to abort or not abort us. Because those people assign those rights to us, they can rightfully deprive us of the right to life and liberty.
This fundamental difference is a direct threat to liberty because it is attempting to shift the foundation of where our rights come from. Abortion undermines the very principle of inalienable rights, which should scare all lovers of liberty, along with anyone who claims to be an advocate of human rights.
Each Individual Has Rights
No one owns anyone else. Not if you conquered them, not if you bought them, and not if they currently reside in your body. None of us are God. None of us gets to assign or withhold the inalienable rights to life and liberty from anyone else who is scientifically human. This aspect of libertarianism is crucial to the consistency of all libertarian thought. (The only exception to the absolute nature of these rights is self-defense. One can take a life if it is for the purpose of protecting oneself or someone else from imminent danger.)
It’s no secret that libertarians, conservatives, and all kinds of small-government advocates are losing the battle for the soul of the country. The expansion of government seems unstoppable, and those who speak out against progressives are mercilessly harassed. If we’re going to regain ground, we can’t be content to fight petty battles as the entire rug is swept out beneath us. We must restore the foundation of the concept of inalienable rights. If a government dictates who gets the right to life and who doesn’t, it does so from an ideological foundation of state-assigned rights. This ideology is an existential threat to liberty.
Conservatism, and especially libertarianism, comes from the idea that rights are natural consequences of human existence. As Ron Paul put it, “Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally.” If we cede to the Left, including left-leaning “libertarians,” the idea that our rights aren’t naturally endowed, that rights are assigned to us from the generosity of our rulers, we will have lost the philosophical foundation for the entire spectrum of limited government ideology.
If we don’t fight to restore this foundation of our rights, government growth is inevitable and, detached from any philosophical anchor, puts us squarely on the road to serfdom. Whether libertarians like it or not, fighting for the philosophical foundation of liberty necessarily includes fighting for the right to life of the unborn.
Being Pro-Life Is Necessary to Defend Liberty by Ron Paul
https://web.archive.org/web/20000118101119if_/http://www.l4l.org:80/library/bepro-rp.html
Pro-life libertarians have a vital task to perform: to persuade the many abortion-supporting libertarians of the contradiction between abortion and individual liberty; and, to sever the mistaken connection in many minds between individual freedom and the "right" to extinguish individual life.
Libertarians have a moral vision of a society that is just, because individuals are free. This vision is the only reason for libertarianism to exist. It offers an alternative to the forms of political thought that uphold the power of the State, or of persons within a society, to violate the freedom of others. If it loses that vision, then libertarianism becomes merely another ideology whose policies are oppressive, rather than liberating.
We expect most people to be inconsistent, because their beliefs are founded on false principles or on principles that are not clearly stated and understood. They cannot apply their beliefs consistently without contradictions becoming glaringly apparent. Thus, there are both liberals and conservatives who support conscription of young people, the redistribution of wealth, and the power of the majority to impose its will on the individual.
A libertarian's support for abortion is not merely a minor misapplication of principle, as if one held an incorrect belief about the Austrian theory of the business cycle. The issue of abortion is fundamental, and therefore an incorrect view of the issue strikes at the very foundations of all beliefs.
Libertarians believe, along with the Founding Fathers, that every individual has inalienable rights, among which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Neither the State, nor any other person, can violate those rights without committing an injustice. But, just as important as the power claimed by the State to decide what rights we have, is the power to decide which of us has rights.
Today, we are seeing a piecemeal destruction of individual freedom. And in abortion, the statists have found a most effective method of obliterating freedom: obliterating the individual. Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the "right" of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the "property rights" of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. Unlike Nazi Germany, which forcibly sent millions to the gas chambers (as well as forcing abortion and sterilization upon many more), the new regime has enlisted the assistance of millions of people to act as its agents in carrying out a program of mass murder.
The more one strives for the consistent application of an incorrect principle, the more horrendous the results. Thus, a wrong-headed libertarian is potentially very dangerous. Libertarians who act on a wrong premise seem to be too often willing to accept the inhuman conclusions of an argument, rather than question their premises.
A case in point is a young libertarian leader I have heard about. He supports the "right" of a woman to remove an unwanted child from her body (i.e., her property) by killing and then expelling him or her. Therefore, he has consistently concluded, any property owner has the right to kill anyone on his property, for any reason.
Such conclusions should make libertarians question the premises from which they are drawn.
We must promote a consistent vision of liberty because freedom is whole and cannot be alienated, although it can be abridged by the unjust action of the State or those who are powerful enough to obtain their own demands. Our lives, also, are a whole from the beginning at fertilization until death. To deny any part of liberty, or to deny liberty to any particular class of individuals, diminishes the freedom of all. For libertarians to support such an abridgement of the right to live free is unconscionable.
I encourage all pro-life libertarians to become involved in debating the issues and educating the public; whether or not freedom is defended across the board, or is allowed to be further eroded without consistent defenders, may depend on them.
Why All Libertarians Should Be Pro-Life | JSB Morse
https://thelibertariancatholic.com/why-all-libertarians-should-be-pro-life/
At a gathering of liberty-minded young professionals the other night, someone asked if there was a way to unify all libertarians. The joking answer was, “Don’t bring up abortion.” Libertarians—more than any group of people—can find common ground on just about everything, but when it comes to the contentious issue of abortion, it seems that libertarian principles (and conversational civility) go out the window.
There isn’t an issue that divides libertarians more—it’s probably 50-50 by my unscientific estimate—and it’s no wonder. A pro-choicer will say that libertarianism is, naturally, all about liberty, and women don’t have liberty if they’re not allowed to do what they want with their own body. On the flip-side, however, pro-lifers will argue that the body inside of your body isn’t your body. Libertarian principles should apply to the baby just as much as the mother.
What usually follows is a variation of this conversation:
Pro-choicer: right, you shouldn’t force a woman to do something she doesn’t want.
Pro-lifer: But what about the baby?
PC: Well the baby isn’t a human.
PL: Oh no, what species is it?
PC: …. Well, it’s human, but it isn’t living.
PL: If it’s not living, how is it growing, metabolizing?
PC: Well, it’s living, but it depends on the mother for its survival. It’s taking the mother’s lifeblood without her consent, a violation of the mother’s rights.
Most open-minded, intellectually honest people will come to the scientific and logical reality that inside a human mother, her fetus is a living human being. Most people—especially libertarians will see the immorality of killing a living human being.
There is no affidavit that one must sign in order to become libertarian, but I think in order to consider yourself libertarian, you must basically agree with the non-aggression principle (NAP), which is:
The initiation of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property is inherently illegitimate.
Libertarians believe that all humans have the negative right to not be aggressed upon. It’s clear that killing an innocent human being is a violation of the non-aggression principle. But pro-choice libertarians will claim that fetuses are not innocent because they have initiated aggression on their mothers and have thus violated the non-aggression principle. This is the main libertarian argument in favor of reproductive rights and what has led prominent figures in the movement like Walter Block to support the concept of evictionism, based on Murray Rothbard’s stance that, “no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.” They claim that a woman has the right to expel or evict any fetus from her body whenever she sees fit, just as she could with a parasite, since she has no obligation to care for a trespasser.
It’s probably the best pro-abortion argument I’ve heard but there are flaws.
The non-aggression principle says that it is wrong to initiate force against someone else but there’s a problem when this is applied to a fetus and her mother: the fetus didn’t initiate force. There was no action on the part of the fetus committed that would account for initiation of force. The initiation of force against the mother (if we can stipulate that that’s what it is) occurred between the parents, whether both were consenting or in the case of rape, just one of the parties were consenting. If it was consensual sex, the mother was initiating force against herself and if it was rape, the offending rapist was initiating force against the woman. Either way, it makes no ethical or legal sense to punish an innocent party (the fetus) for someone else’s crime. Killing the fetus or “evicting” her from her life-sustaining environs is illegitimate initiation of force on an innocent person.
The Airplane Analogy
An analogy is a pilot who agrees to take a passenger on a cross-country flight but decides to kick her out somewhere over Kansas. The pilot is bound by a combination of legal, ethical, and professional obligations that prevent him from expelling the passenger from the craft.
If, for some reason, the pilot was drugged and placed in the airplane by someone, he still has the moral obligation to land the plane safely if he has that capacity. The ethical culpability rests on his shoulders even if he didn’t put himself in that situation. The same applies to bystanders with special medical skills. If they are present at the scene of an accident, they are often legally and morally responsible to take care of the wounded.
Another hypothetical will help us understand the scenario more clearly. Imagine if some shady character found you sleeping and drugged you to keep you unconscious until he was able to remove your kidneys and surgically connect you to your mother’s renal system. Abruptly removing you from the system would mean sure death to you. Does this scenario mean you don’t have the right to life? It’s not your doing which made you dependent on your mother. Why should you be punished for someone else’s dastardly actions? The only just thing to do is to endure the situation until you can safely be removed from dependence on your mother’s organs and, of course, prosecute the shady mastermind.
Again, while it’s true that no one has a right to live unbidden on someone else’s body, the accused party in the case of evictionism (the fetus) is innocent of any wrongdoing and punishing her would be unjust.
The answers to these objections should be superfluous since the hierarchy of needs requires all logical libertarians to reject abortion. Libertarians believe in the right to liberty, but that right and every other is dependent on the right to life. Without life, there is no liberty. If one doesn’t have a right to continue living, a right to do what he wants is meaningless. That’s why all libertarians should be pro-life.
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To be pro-liberty is to be pro-life | February 4, 2016 By Joshua J. Paladino
https://hillsdalecollegian.com/2016/02/to-be-pro-liberty-is-to-be-pro-life/
On Jan. 21, a socially left-leaning senator introduced a bill to the Senate that would outlaw abortion. It was libertarian Rand Paul (R-KY), who dropped out of the GOP primaries Wednesday.
Approximately 58 million unborn children have died since 1973, when the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade deprived them of their status as persons. Rand’s “Life at Conception Act” seeks to define the unborn as “persons” and give them the full protection of the 14th Amendment.
Many are surprised by a libertarian advocating pro-life policy, but they misunderstand the libertarian perspective on abortion — as do many libertarians themselves. If libertarians correctly applied their principles, they would be some of the most ardent defenders of life.
Libertarianism starts with a single idea: That the only legitimate use of force is in self-defense. This is called the non-aggression principle. The role of man in society, the purpose of government, and all political policies are derived from this concept.
Pregnancy is a natural biological process, so the unborn child inside a woman cannot be considered a harm to a woman’s health, except in extreme circumstances. Since the fetus does not present an immediate threat of force to the safety of a pregnant woman, then an abortion, in most cases, cannot be in self-defense. If libertarians desire to consistently adhere to their principles, then abortion cannot be allowed based on the argument of self-defense.
Others argue that although it is not an act of self-defense, the non-aggression principle does not apply because the fetus is not fully human, and it is part of the woman’s body. The fetus is not “viable.”
But what is viability? The ability to independently sustain life outside of the womb? In that case, most toddlers, most children, most young adults, in fact, most human beings are not viable. We do not have the necessary knowledge or skills to ensure our well-being without the help of other humans. We rely on the assistance of others, just as an unborn child relies on its mother to nourish and protect it. On the other hand, if it is fully part of the woman’s body, then it should have no ability to survive without the mother at any point, which clearly is not true.
Child-rearing reduces the choices of parents. But a reduction of available opportunities does not permit an act of violence against the unborn child. Parenting requires time, money, and emotional and physical exhaustion. However, this is a voluntary commitment. In simple terms, sex is consent to sacrifice one’s choices for one’s children.
If someone consents to the possibility of parenthood through sex, then the results of any of their actions must be considered voluntary. The non-aggression principle says that all voluntary actions, and by extension the consequences of all voluntary actions are by nature non-aggressive and thus not subject to retaliatory violence.
In the case of rape, consent is never given to the reproductive act and so women are involuntarily entering into the sacrifice of motherhood.
Though defensive violence is allowed against all coercive force, there is no right to indiscriminate violence. The question that arises is against whom retaliatory violence may be used.
Aggression only allows the victim to defend themselves against the actions of the aggressor. All results of the aggressor’s actions cannot be confused as the aggressor himself.
For example, if one man pushes another man into a third party bystander, does the third party have the right to violently defend himself against the man that hit him or the man that did the pushing? Of course he may only use violence against the man that did the pushing, since the man that was pushed did not voluntarily hurt the bystander.
In the same way, the example of rape does not give the mother the right to an abortion in “self-defense” because the fetus did not harm the woman, only the sexual offender did. Why should an act of violence against a woman result in an act of violence against an unborn child?
Libertarians need to reevaluate their policies based on their principles. Libertarianism should promote an across the board pro-life ethic. Their principles cannot oppose the death penalty and foreign intervention while they simultaneously remain silent and allow the slaughter of millions of fetuses. Libertarians should follow the lead of Senator Paul and support consistently pro-life policies, starting with the abolition of abortion.
Doris Gordon’s Introduction to Prolife Libertarianism
https://libertariansforlife.com/doris-gordons-introduction-to-prolife-libertarianism/
A prominent libertarian writer once told me he was confused and conflicted on abortion — and requested that I not try to unconfuse him. The articles in this issue are not for such as him. They are for people willing to examine substantial arguments showing why abortion is not libertarian.
If you have read articles by libertarians on abortion, chances are what you read supported keeping it legal. However, libertarians are very divided on the subject. A significant minority is pro-life, and even the abortion-choice side is itself divided. One can find even within their ranks a wide spectrum of conflicting opinions, and many of them keep hoping in vain to find a middle ground for all libertarians to stand on. If any of the abortion-choice factions had a substantial argument for their position, such a disarray would not exist.
But you might be unfamiliar with or might not care about libertarianism. If so, you might be wondering why you ought to spend any effort to examine a libertarian case against abortion. Those of you who disagree with libertarianism may already have lost interest. Yet it is precisely the reason why many disagree with libertarianism that makes the libertarian case against abortion important.
The reason is, in brief, that libertarianism would place severe limits on governmental action — too severe, many would say. From the libertarian perspective, government may act only against clear violations of strict commutative justice. It may act only to prevent or retaliate against aggression — against murder, rape, theft, fraud, and the like. If laws protecting prenatal human offspring against abortion can be justified within a libertarian framework, then the abortion debate is over, philosophically.
In order for libertarians to want government to stand against choice on abortion, the pro-life side has to make the hardest, clearest case of all. To libertarians, the fact that something is popular or unpopular, moral or immoral, wise or unwise, democratic or undemocratic is insufficient to invoke government action. Libertarianism demands the strictest test before we would say that government has a just power to prohibit or to compel an act. It should do neither, unless what we are dealing with is clearly a matter of aggression, an initiation of force or fraud. Libertarians would not outlaw victimless, i.e., consensual, “crimes.” To be subject to the use of government force, an act must be the sort of case where each of us as individuals would have the right and the just power to intervene with force on behalf of the victim.
The debate over abortion is ultimately that sort of debate: Is abortion a victimless crime — or is it the unjust killing of an innocent human being? Is compelling a pregnant woman to carry to term slavery, or is it not? In other political philosophies, such questions are often sidetracked into questions of personal morality, religion, personal or public benefit, etc. Libertarianism discourages such digressions as being irrelevant to justice and unalienable rights.
Within the libertarian movement, there are some who wish to reject or weaken the libertarian non-aggression principle. However, the intellectual atmosphere of libertarianism is usually so open, they tend to do so explicitly. Such openness allows everyone to confront the component issues raised in abortion or in any other debate. Abortion, more than most issues, can try everyone’s patience and good will. Libertarianism is intellectually a very contentious place; at times, being there can make one really appreciate its non-aggression principle. In thinking about abortion, both libertarians and non-libertarians can learn from that willingness to confront hard questions – a process I had to go through myself.
How I Got Involved
I came to the libertarian movement in 1959 through Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. It was her book Atlas Shrugged, arguably the most influential novel of the Twentieth Century, that got me started. Rand, who claimed the being in the womb was “nonliving,” supported choice on abortion. Following along, so did I. Later on I realized why the onset of a human being’s life, biologically, is at fertilization. I remained abortion-choice, however, because of women’s right to control her own body. I saw unwanted pregnancy as slavery, or at the very least, as an insoluble conflict of rights between her right to be free versus her offspring’s right to life, to not be killed.
In 1967, I co-founded Students of Objectivism, a Washington, D.C.-area study group that met monthly in my home. One speaker I invited to our meetings was a practicing abortionist. He was proud that he had done abortions even in the eighth month of pregnancy. As I recall, nobody objected, not even me.
In 1971, the national Libertarian Party began to organize. When I joined in 1973, I helped organize the LP of Maryland. I have attended almost every national LP convention since 1975 as a Maryland delegate. During the Vietnam War, I was an anti-draft activist. In 1975 at the national convention which met in New York City, I persuaded the Platform Committee to call for the exoneration of draft evaders and other war resisters. I wrote letters and did television editorial replies on this and other issues.
Also at the 1975 convention, I joined the Association of Libertarian Feminists (ALF). Responding to a call from Sharon Presley, one of its co-founders, I helped publicize its panel at the 1976 LP convention held in Washington, D.C. The ALF panelists’ abortion-choice views were aired on NBC-TV, much to my distress. By then I was no longer an abortion choicer; I had become pro-life.
What pushed me over the line? Ironically, it was Objectivism. One article in the December 1962 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter was on what parents and children owe each other. I had returned to it to see if they were talking about morality or rights. There it was. They said that the support born children receive from their parents is theirs “by right.” Given that human offspring begin life when conceived, and then given parental obligation, it follows that parental obligation begins not at birth but at fertilization. I had to conclude that even given women’s right to control her body, prenatal human offspring have the right to be in the mother’s womb.
Wondering whether my heretical views on abortion had merit, I timidly began to share them at the 1976 convention. I spoke to the author of that Objectivist article on parental obligation, Nathaniel Branden. In a letter he wrote me earlier that year, he had denied that parental obligation pertains to a fetus, because, he said, “A fetus is not a human being.” I asked him how he would define “human being.” He and Rand taught me the importance of defining one’s terms, and perhaps he and I were defining the term differently. But instead giving me his definition, Branden asked me how I would feel if my fifteen-year-old daughter got pregnant. In Objectivism, evasion is evil. I was stunned.
I wanted to discuss my change of mind with Presley, too. She begged off, pleading exhaustion. More importantly, she told me she felt herself unprepared to argue the issue. Such intellectual inability didn’t fit the picture I had of her as a competent spokesperson for libertarianism. (To her credit, Presley eventually co-authored with Robert Cooke a paper for ALF, “The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense.”) But she kindly referred me to her “expert” on the issue, ALF panelist Lucinda Cissler, a co-founder of NARAL, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Cissler gave me time to ask her only one question: “Is the fetus a human being?” She replied with one word, “Yes.”
If I was correct and they wrong, then something was terribly amiss. If, however, I was wrong and they correct, I wanted to know why. I had spent many years investing a lot of myself in libertarianism, and I wanted to build on my investment, not lose it. I didn’t just fret; I decided to do something. I decided to found Libertarians for Life, one reason being to provoke serious debate. To my knowledge, there had been hardly any debate on abortion among libertarians before then.
Fortunately, I soon was able to round up other pro-life libertarians who were knowledgeable in fields relevant to abortion, such as biology, philosophy, Constitutional law, and religion. LFL’s articles focus mainly on the substantive issues central to the pro-life libertarian case, such as the ethical foundation of rights, the libertarian non-aggression principle, personhood, the killing- eviction distinction, parental obligation, the proper function of government, and what happened – – who did what to whom.
In arguing that abortion should not be legal, pro-lifers generally focus on proving that a human being’s life begins at conception. Although essential, this argument does not confront another crucial argument: the right of the woman to control her own body. Many pro-lifers talk as if they have lost the rights argument — or worse, that they can never win it — and they end up painting rights as irrelevant and running away from it. Turning this weakness on rights to their advantage, abortion choicers contemptuously attack abortion opponents as “anti-choice” and claim that to be anti-legal-abortion is to be anti-liberty. Actually, however, pro-lifers own the libertarian high ground. The articles in this issue will show you why.
Libertarians for Life’s argumentation is logical, consistent, and comprehensible. We do not merely assert the position that abortion violates rights; we demonstrate how we arrive at that position. Abortion choicers have the intellectual obligation to take our arguments on their merits — and disprove them on their merits. Of course, both sides have the intellectual obligation of proof. If you find any serious or fatal flaws in LFL’s case against abortion choice, please let us know.
About the articles
In “Libertarianism Is Pro-Life: An Introduction,” Bruce Earnheart explains that libertarianism is not a general code of morality for human action. It is, rather, about one moral principle: the obligation not to aggress. This principle is libertarianism’ s starting point, its basic premise.
In “Being Pro-Life Is Necessary to Defend Liberty,” Ron Paul explains the fundamental importance of the abortion issue to everyone’s rights. Mincing no words, he attacks the abortion- choice side’s two-tiered attitude toward human offspring under rights as statism at its worst and argues that “a wrong-headed libertarian is very dangerous.”
“How I Became Pro-Life: Remarks on Abortion, Parental Obligation, and the Draft,” is a talk I gave at a Maryland Right to Life convention. Its focus is not on personhood but on areas in which pro-lifers are generally weak: individual rights and parental obligation. Understanding them properly helps explain why having to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term is not slavery, why there is no conflict of rights between a pregnant woman and her prenatal offspring, and why prenatal human offspring have the right to be in the mother’s body.
For most audiences, however, one must show what marks the onset of a human being’s existence. To do this, we must look at both science and philosophy. In “When Do Human Beings Begin? ‘Scientific’ Myths and Scientific Facts,” Dianne N. Irving points out some of the scientific errors that surface when the issue is abortion or others related to it.
Edwin Vieira, Jr. and John Walker discuss the philosophy – the moral status of human offspring from fertilization. In “A False Assumption,” a very brief article, Vieira challenges those who deny immediate personhood at fertilization to check their premises. He simply aims at the abortion-choice premise of delayed personhood – and pierces its heart.
Walker addresses personhood in two articles. In “Abortion and the Question of the Person,” he shows why treating personhood as a matter of degree rather than of kind leads only to chaos. He wrote “Power and Act: Notes towards engaging in a discussion of one of the underlying questions in the abortion debate” to draw attention to a key argument in the debate over the onset of personhood, which the abortion-choice side has failed to tackle.
In “Why Parental Obligation?“, Walker discusses two meanings of the word “rights” and shows how they apply to procreation. In “Abortion in the Case of Pregnancy Due to Rape,” he discusses the peculiar situation for everyone’s rights when sex was not voluntary for the woman.
Most of the articles in this issue were written to present Libertarians for Life’s case against abortion. Three of them, however, were designed as responses to certain arguments on the abortion-choice side. One of them is “What Do Abortion Choicers Mean When They Tell Us: ‘Let’s Get the Government Out of Our Lives’?” As I explain there, most of them don’t really mean it.
“Fetal Rights: Enforceable in Principle, A response to ‘The Implication of a Supposed Ought,’ by Tibor R. Machan” is by Edwin Vieira, Jr. According to some libertarians, if the law were to affirm prenatal personhood, this would give rise to “pregnancy police.” Vieira examines Machan’s arguments for such a claim and shows why they are weak.
“Abortion and Thomson’s Violinist: Unplugging a Bad Analogy” is my response to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s, “A Defense of Abortion,” the most influential article on abortion. Of special interest to me was her noting it possible that a mother has “a responsibility that gives [her fetus] rights against her which are not possessed any independent person.” I show why the responsibility exists, and I point out several fatal flaws in her article.
I comment further on Thomson in “Abortion and Rights: Applying Libertarian Principles Correctly.” The most wide-ranging of all the articles in this issue, it gets into all that is central to the libertarian debate on abortion and more.
We hope you find these articles interesting, and we welcome your comments.
Rand Paul: Pro-life from Libertarian Principles
Seven Reasons for libertarians Not To Privatize Marriage and defend True Marriage
John Stemberger is an Orlando Attorney who is President of the Florida Family Policy Council.
The libertarian wave gaining momentum in America has brought powerful arguments to reduce the size of government, eliminate the national debt, and lower taxes. All are goals which conservatives would heartily agree with. But while some libertarian ideas have contributed strength to the body politic in America, the movement has also brought some ideas that would have destructive and unintended consequences.
One of those ideas is summarized in the phrase “Get government out of the marriage business”. This saying is consistent with much libertarian thought which argues for an unfettered “liberty” to engage in any consensual sexual activities people choose without government regulation or interference.
The idea of privatizing marriage by reducing the relationship to merely private contracts, maybe on file with the state, seems to have been introduced largely in response to the same-sex marriage controversy. Many politicians appear to be using the idea as a “solution” or a political “way out” of the controversy. While there are some serious minded people advocating for the idea, truth be told, the vast majority of proponents are using it merely as a convenient political shield attempting to deflect criticism taking a stand on the issue.
There are at least seven reasons why “marriage privatization” would be damaging to the future of a civil society.
1) Private “relationship contracts” would immediately legitimize and permit polygamy, group marriages, incest and other aberrant relationships. Harvard-educated anthropologist Stanley Kurtz has written that marriage privatization would be a “disaster”. He argues that government “still has to decide what sort of private unions merit benefits… under this privatization scheme”, and that “we also get the same quarrels over social recognition that we got before privatization.” He commented that the government will have to deal with polygamous, polyamorous, and incestuous relationships also attempting to obtain contracts under the new scheme as well as attempts by heterosexual acquaintances to make “marriages of convenience” to obtain things such as spousal medical insurance. Legitimizing these aberrant relationships would only serve to further dilute the meaning and significance of natural marriage in society as a desired institution.
2) Abolishing marriage laws could increase the sexual exploitation of children through human sex-trafficking. Marriage laws which currently regulate the age at which a person can be married protects children from human sex-slavery or even desperate parents from certain impoverished countries who may seek to exploit or manipulate minor children into “arranged” marriages for financial gain.
3) Relationship contracts would overburden courts with rising litigation disputes and would side-step legal protections for children and abandoned spouses replacing them with court ordered damages, penalties and state-coerced action. If a legislature repealed marriage statutes and did nothing to define or regulate the creation and or dissolution of marriages, then by default, parties would be left with only using legal contracts to address child custody, visitation, alimony, and property rights. If the parties breached these private contracts, litigation would ensue regarding the intent, interpretation, and enforcement of those agreements—many of which would likely be drafted by non-lawyers with vague and confusing terms. Courts would issue penalties, damages and specific performance ordering private parties to enforce contracts often with draconian results. Real-life economic and practical hardships would befall untold thousands of single mothers where men abandon their families – or even take forcible physical custody of small children– where no such contract was in place.
The creation of plural marriage and group marriage contracts would add further to the uncertainty of this new “wild-wild-West” of legal results. These “prenuptial-like” marriage contracts would also further undermine the idea of marriage as a lasting, life-long covenant, serving to further weaken and destabilize society. Instead of keeping government out of the marriage business, this move would do just the opposite. The great irony of marriage privatization is that it would only increase the state’s involvement in the lives of her citizens.
4) This solution is by adults, for adults, and ignores what’s best for children. Arguments to privatize marriage, whether made by scholars or politicians, are never discussed in terms of what is best for children. Jennifer Roback Morse, a libertarian author and scholar with the Witherspoon Institute, is a critic of marriage privatization and argues that the logic of marriage privatization “at the expense of children, is a concept developed by adults that will benefit only adults.”
In the common law, whenever children are involved in divorce, custody disputes, adoption or dependency proceedings, the legal standard has always been “what is in the best interest of children?” As in the same sex marriage debate, when personal autonomy meets the best interests of children, courts routinely allow “adult desires” to trump what’s best for children. Deregulating marriage law would have the same effect. When men divorce the mothers of their children without these private agreements, single mothers would be left with no laws to protect or support their children.
5) The consequences could further sink our society into new depths of social maladies, broken families, and human suffering. Throughout history, marriage has been always been regulated. When societies were cohesive or small, marriage has been regulated by strong social mores, by religious institutions, or by cohesive cultural norms. In more diverse and modern societies, marriage has been regulated through law and public policy. This is part of what separates civil societies from more primitive ones. For this reason, completely deregulating marriage could be a sociological disaster.
Today’s inner cities are “Exhibit A” to the poverty, crime, fatherlessness, and devastation that emerges when marriage and family structures are weak, fragmented, or nonexistent. This measured collapse in inner cities would move even faster into every area of communities if marriage is legally abolished and reduced to private contracts.
6) The taxpayer’s costs resulting from family fragmentation and unwed childbearing would sky rocket under marriage privatization. National Review Columnist Maggie Gallagher has called marriage privatization a “fantasy” since “[t]here is scarcely a dollar that state and federal government spends on social programs that is not driven in large part by family fragmentation: crime, poverty, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems.” A study by the Institute for American Values concluded that the cost to U.S. taxpayers from family fragmentation as a result of divorce and unwed childbearing was $112 billion annually.
Sadly, the political left in America feeds on divorce, broken families, and unwed childbearing. Strong marriages and families help break the grip of an ever-growing socialist-leaning state, freeing her citizens from poverty to reach their fullest economic potential as creators of wealth rather than being chronic recipients of distributed wealth.
7) A free society with minimal government interference depends on legal norms for marriage, family structure, and child bearing. Government has a compelling interest in defining, regulating, and promoting marriage because of the self-governance it creates when children are socialized in this environment. At the most basic level, marriages—and the families they create—produce social order in homes, neighborhoods, states, and nations. Marriage channels masculine energy in socially productive ways, protects women, and increases almost every category of human flourishing. Research is clear that a married biological mother and father is objectively the optimal context for rearing children. Marriage benefits not just those in the relationships, but the businesses, economies, and communities around them. Marriages, and the families that flow from them, tend to produce more productive citizens who create wealth and contribute to society.
The failure of marriages and families has caused the rapid expansion of the welfare state, dramatic tax increases, and has contributed to increasing the national debt. Roback Morse argues “[i]t is simply not possible to have a minimum government and a society with no social or legal norms about family structure, sexual behavior, and childrearing. The state will have to provide support for people with loose or nonexistent ties to their families. The state will have to sanction truly destructive behavior, as always. The destructive behavior will be more common because the culture of impartiality destroys the informal system of enforcing social norms… A free society needs marriage.”
In conclusion, it is important to realize that marriage is not merely a private, religious institution; it is also a public institution deserving of public protection. It is remarkable how many educated people believe that defining and regulating marriage cannot be justified in any other way than citing to the Bible or some religious authority. Many young people view efforts to legally define marriage as illegitimately advancing a purely theological doctrine. Therefore marriage is commonly misunderstood as an exclusively Christian belief rather than a necessary and universal human institution. Marriage serves not only people of faith but also the common good of society. Princeton professor Robbie George states, “Family is built on marriage, and government—the state—has a profound interest in the integrity and well-being of marriage, and to write it off as if it were purely a religiously significant action and not an institution and action that has a profound public significance, would be a terrible mistake”.
Removing the protection and regulation of marriage by law could be more destructive to the institution than anything we have seen to date. Reducing marriage to legal contracts would harm the future of marriage in culture and society. It could produce profoundly negative changes leading not just to the further damaging of this vital public institution, but also destructive to maintaining a civil society itself.
This article was originally published on The Stream on July 5, 2015
The libertarian argument against redefining marriage
"As a libertarian myself, I have been quite disappointed that the “default” libertarian position on marriage has become little more than a sound-bite: “Let’s get the state out of the marriage business.” With all due respect, this position is unsound.
I will not be able to respond to this sound-bite with another sound-bite. The issues surrounding marriage are too deep. But I am not deterred from trying to persuade thoughtful readers who are up to the task of following a complex and unconventional argument wherever the search for truth may lead.
I make three points in this series of articles. First, in today’s article, I show that it is not possible to privatize marriage. Second, in tomorrow’s article, I show that the attempt to privatize marriage will not result in an increase in freedom, but will actually increase the role of the state. Finally, in the third article, I show that attempting to privatize marriage will perpetrate great injustices to children. Any of these reasons is sufficient to put an end to the “get the government out of the marriage business” mantra. All three of these reasons taken together form a compelling case for absolutely opposing the redefinition of marriage and for working tirelessly to create a robust cultural norm of one man, one woman, for life."
Monday, July 7, 2025
Jonathan McIntosh - Towards a Natural Law Libertarianism
Jonathan McIntosh: Theonomy, Westminster, and Libertarianism
Sunday, July 6, 2025
How would Government be funded in a ideal society?
By posting this video I am not in anyway endorsing Ayn Rands personal philosophy of Objectivism.
In fact I am dead set against it as it goes against The Word of God. However, I agree that our current taxation system is theft on a grand scale and breaks the commandment Thou Shall Not Steal.
Nor do I condone or support anyone rebelling against the current government via not paying their current taxes. Well we have taxation we are to pay it rendering to Ceaser what is Ceasers and God what is God's.
The Machan Option for future funding of the State without taxation.
It is always interesting to research the various ideas on funding governments in a free society. One of these options comes from Tibor Machan and that is a user fees for services rendered scenario. I will provide the following description of how this would work below.
Tibor Machan has made a well-reasoned case that a libertarian legal order or government could provide critical yet exclusive private as well as public goods for fees, thus making it possible to obtain the financing of government voluntarily. The supplying of the private goods can be linked to the citizen-consumer, who would pay for these goods. Given that each of these private goods is also a uniquely political good, it would produce the occasion to raise funds for the public good that is also necessary.
Machan explains that contract protection is a private good that government supplies at some level of the adjudicatory process. This service has the essential public feature of due process because even if a controversy is handled by a private arbitration board, the governmental legal structure must exist as a last resort or ultimate protector to ensure due process in concerns such as arrest, trial, seizure of property, and imprisonment, should the arbitrators’ decision be refused by one of the parties.
The classical public good that government would provide is the national military defense. Machan details how the government would both protect contracts and provide for the national defense with payments for the contract services being used to also fund the defense of the nation. He posits that having one’s freedom protected and maintained with respect to contractual relationships would be one of the most popular services sought in a free society. A system of contract fees, collected when contracts are registered or signed, with provisions for additional payments in the event of special services needed throughout the period of the contract, would supply funding for the legal system and its administrators required to interpret and enforce contracts and to settle disputes if they should arise.
Fees for other governmental services deliverable to individuals could be established in much the same manner as for contract protection. In addition, if criminal actions are involved, fees could be assessed and distributed according to the determination of legal responsibility. Court costs could be charged to guilty parties and criminals could be made to defray other costs such as police services.
Machan expands his case by observing that the government has overhead costs, including those needed to provide for the defense of the system of laws itself. Foreign aggression is a clear threat to the system. It follows that government charges for providing its various services could reasonably include some component to offset the cost of defense against foreign aggression. Private goods, obtainable from the government, such as the protection of voluntary contractual agreements, could thus be legitimately used to support the public good of national defense.
Machan’s fee-for-services-plus-overhead approach is one possible way to finance government in a free society—one in which the scope of government would be confined to protecting life, liberty and property. Given the soundness of this idea, it should be conceded that it is not only feasible, but also desirable, to give up taxation for some other noncoercive arrangement.