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Two and a half centuries ago, on December 16, 1773, a group of ordinary people ignited a spark that would illuminate the path to liberty the Boston Tea Party. This historic event, born out of frustration with unfair taxation practices and government monopolies, continues to reverberate through the ages and finds resonance in the principles of the modern-day Libertarian Party.

In the early days of the American colonies, tensions brewed over taxation without representation. After American patriots nullified the Stamp Act, Britains first attempt to tax North American colonists directly, the British government created new schemes to extract money from the region. One way to they sought to do this was by granting a legal monopoly to the East India Tea Company through the Tea Act of 1773, making it illegal for any colonial competitors to sell tea. Outraged by this blatant violation of their rights, a group of colonists took matters into their own hands on that fateful night in Boston Harbor.

The Boston Tea Party was not just an act of defiance; it was a resounding declaration that ordinary people would not tolerate unjust taxation and government monopolies. The colonists, much like modern libertarians, believed that individuals have the right to decide how their hard-earned money should be spent, and that competition is the best driver of prosperity.

Fast forward to the present day, and the principles of the Boston Tea Party find a powerful echo in the Libertarian Partys unwavering stance Taxation is Theft and central economic planning is immoral. Libertarians argue that individuals should be free from the burden of coercive taxation and monopoly schemes, allowing them to retain the fruits of their labor and make decisions about their money that align with their values and priorities.

The notion that taxation is a form of theft underscores the libertarian belief in individual autonomy and limited government. For libertarians, the Boston Tea Party serves as a symbol of resistance against overreaching authorities and a call to uphold the principles of self-determination.

As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the Libertarian Party stands as a modern torchbearer of the spirit of resistance that fueled that historic event. Libertarians advocate for a society where individuals are free to live without the shackles of excessive taxation, where personal and economic freedoms are paramount.

In the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, the Libertarian Party champions the idea that individuals should be trusted to make decisions about their own lives, including how their money is spent. The legacy of those colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor lives on, inspiring libertarians to challenge the status quo and forge a path toward a more liberated and equitable future.

As we raise our tea cups today in a metaphorical toast to the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, let us also celebrate the enduring legacy of liberty it has bestowed upon us. The Libertarian Party, rooted in the principles of individual freedom, carries forth the spirit of those defiant colonists, reminding us that the fight against unjust taxation and for personal autonomy is a cause worth championing. May the echoes of the Boston Tea Party resonate for generations to come, inspiring a world where liberty triumphs over tyranny.

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A Legacy of Resistance to Unjust Taxation - Libertarian Party

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Dan Mollers Governing Least: A New England Libertarianism is one of my favorite books on libertarian philosophy. In it, he discusses one idea that I think is underrated, and deserves to be highlighted. The idea is what he calls residual obligations.

First, Mollers approach to libertarianism is not based on a hardline approach like many associate with Rand or Rothbard. Moller does not think in terms of exceptionless rules, or rights that are inviolable in all circumstances. He acknowledges that sometimes, rights violations can be justified. Suppose I find myself in the following scenario:

I am hiking on a mountain pass and have become trapped in a massive snowstorm. My life is in peril if I cannot find shelter and food. Luckily, I stumble across an unoccupied hunting cabin. The cabin is clearly marked with Keep Out and Private Property signs. However, I can easily break into the cabin and take shelter against the storm until it has passed, saving my life at the cost of causing some property damage to someone else.

People with an absolutist view of rights might argue that Im morally obligated to stay outside and freeze to death. Common sense morality, however, says this is a case where its permissible to violate someones property rights. However, Moller points out whats often overlooked is that a rights violation being justified isnt the end of the moral analysis. Too many people speak as if overriding a right necessarily means the same things as erasing the right altogether. But this is a mistake. As Moller puts it, an overridden right is not a deactivated right. A justified rights violation is still a rights violation. The reasons that exist to avoid harming someone, though overridden, have not ceased to exist, and harm was still caused to someone who did not deserve it.

As a result, Moller says, the overridden reason to avoid harming you still being in effect produces residual obligations for me. If you see that Ive broken your cabin window and taken some of the supplies you kept stored in there, would be wrong of me to merely shrug and say well, the emergency situation I was in overruled your property rights, so unfortunately for you, this is all your problem. Instead, I now have some residual obligations to you. Moller suggests these obligations include restitution if I caused $300 worth of damage to your cabin in order to break in, I should repay you for the damage. There is a further obligation of compensation to the extent that you are otherwise harmed by my actions, and I should take efforts to compensate you for those harms. I should express sympathy even though my action may have been justified, it was still regrettable, and it still caused harm to you, and for me to treat that as a matter of indifference would be wrong. And there is an obligation of responsibility which is not just backward looking, but forward-looking.

The forward-looking nature of responsibility is of particular interest. For example, if the mountain pass in the above thought experiment was widely known to be a hazardous place to hike, and I also knew that there was a major snowstorm coming in, and could have easily anticipated that taking a hike that day could place me in a situation where I might need to break into someone elses cabin in order to survive, that gives me a strong obligation to avoid putting myself in that scenario in the first place. As Moller puts it, If I can reasonably foresee that some action of mine will put me in the position of facing an emergency that will then render it permissible to harm you, I must take responsibility to avoid such actions of possible. I should not think that I have less reason to take responsibility because I can avoid harms by transferring them to you instead. And failing to take responsibility weakens my claim to impose costs on others when the time comes.

I think this is basically right. If I had been the hypothetical hiker above and was later trying to take moral inventory of my life, I wouldnt find myself thinking If only I had been a better, more moral person, Id actually be dead already. Id have had the decency to do the morally correct thing, and Id have frozen to death outside that cabin years ago. But if I failed to live up to my residual obligations, and never attempted to make things up to the cabin owner, I would feel like I had done something wrong to that extent. As Ive written before, I dont want to be the kind of person who feels comfortable with making others bear the costs of my choices, or of my misfortunes. As Moller phrased it, the core impulse isnt outrage about being asked to give, it is in the first instance a bewilderment at the suggestion that we are entitled to demand. And Moller goes on to argue, persuasively in my view, that if we recognize even modest strictures on making others worse off to improve our lot then we quickly run into a form of libertarianism.

A simple question we should all ask ourselves about any belief we hold is If I was wrong about this, how would I know it? What would it actually take to convince me that Im mistaken? If you cant answer that question, that should be a big red flag. This is hardly an original observation on my part, of course. Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example has written that a belief is only reallyworthwhileif you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind. Similarly, if your mind ends up in the same state regardless of the evidence or arguments you encounter, then intellectually you have been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs. To illustrate the point, Yudkowsky goes on to say this holds true even for things as basic as 2+2 = 4, and that he finds it quite easy to imagine a situation which wouldconvinceme that 2 + 2 = 3.

So, what would it take to convince me I was wrong about the moral argument for libertarianism? Well, as mentioned, I dont think its right of me to demand and compel other people to carry the costs of my actions or my misfortunes. If someone could provide me with a convincing argument that I would become a better, more moral person if I did adopt such a belief and began to act in accordance with it, that would in turn convince me I was wrong about the moral argument for libertarianism.

What about you, EconLog readers? Whats a core belief you hold, and what would it take to convince you that you were mistaken about it?

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Residual Obligations And The Morality of Libertarianism - Econlib

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Harris, Raff to face Libertarian candidate in election for Edmond's seat in Oklahoma House - Oklahoman.com

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Reason magazine has an article that argues for the existence of free will. I dont plan to debate that issue, but I am a bit disturbed by the implicit claim that the argument for libertarianism is stronger in a world with free will than in a world of determinism. If thats their argument, its clearly wrong. The argument for libertarianism has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of free will. Heres Reason:

What is free will? Can a being whose brain is made up of physical stuff actually make undetermined choices?

InFree Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, the Trinity College Dublin neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell argues that evolution has shaped living creatures such that we can push back when the physical world impinges upon us. The motions of nonliving thingsair, rocks, planets, starsare entirely governed by physical forces; they move where they are pushed. Our ability to push back, Mitchell argues, allows increasingly complex creatures to function as agents that can make real choices, not choices that are predetermined by the flux of atoms.

Sorry, but choices made by the flux of atoms in peoples brains are real choices, regardless of whether people have free will or not. Determinists dont argue that people dont make real choices, they argue that the outcome of those choices is determined by a mix of brain chemistry and external stimuli. Libertarian determinists favor a free society because they believe that better choices will be made if governments dont impose regulations that prevent people from making choices that their mix of brain chemistry and external stimuli view as being in their interest. The term freedom in a free will sense is vastly different from freedom in a political sense.

Reason continues:

How can that be? After all, just like air and rocks, bacteria and sharks and aardvarks and people are made of physical stuff.Determinismholds that, per the causal laws of nature, the unfolding of the universe is inexorable and unbranching, such that it can have only one past and one future. Human beings do not escape the laws of nature, so any and all of our choices have been predetermined from the beginning of the universe.

This view poses a moral problem: How can people be held accountable for their actions if they had no choice but to behave the way they did?

This is a non-sequitur. We hold people accountable because doing so provides an external stimuli that nudges their decisions in a more socially optimal direction. Thus we threaten potential bank robbers with long prison terms in order to deter people from robbing banks. Those deterrents make people less likely to rob banks, regardless of whether the free will or the determinist position is true. Even if determinism were shown to be true, we would not legalize murder on the mistaken assumption that killers should not be held accountable.

Its dangerous to tie your ideology to scientific models that might be discredited. Some progressives deny that there are innate differences in IQ. Wiser progressives argue that their ideology makes sense even if innate IQ differences exist. In the old days, some Christians denied that the Earth went around the sun. When this view was discredited, it pushed some scientists toward atheism. I would hate to see libertarians tie their ideology to the hypothesis of free will. If determinism were later shown to be true, this would (unfairly) tend to discredit libertarianism.

In my view, a free society is best regardless of whether decisions are made by individuals with free will, or brains in flux responding to external stimuli.

Continue reading here:
Libertarianism and free will - Econlib

One item stood out at last weeks Republican presidential primary debate: There was not an explicitly nor implicitly identified libertarian candidate. Ron Paul represented the libertarian faction in Republican debates in 2008 and 2012, and his son Rand Paul assumed the mantle in 2016. Prior libertarian-leaning Republican primary candidates include Barry Goldwater in 1964, Jack Kemp in 1988, and Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000, yet no such candidate can claim the position in this years Republican primary. The lack of a libertarian candidate is emblematic of the rights shift away from free-market fundamentalism and toward a more robust social conservatism.

My own ideological evolution is demonstrative of the rights shift away from libertarianism. Eight years ago, The Federalist published my essay making the Christian case for libertarianism. At the time, libertarianism seemed ascendant in contemporary politics. The New York Times wondered aloud if Americas libertarian moment had arrived, and Time Magazine featured Sen. Rand Paul on its cover describing him as The Most Interesting Man in Politics. But libertarianisms political triumph was short-lived.

There are many possible reasons for this shift away from libertarianism, but among the most decisive were the disruptive events of the Covid-19 pandemic. Americas response to the pandemic exposed two fundamental truths that libertarianism was ill-equipped to answer: First, our institutions have been seized by ideological activists who have weaponized them against core American values; second, the left is on an evangelizing mission to impose its values across society unless resisted.

Covid exposed the deep moral rot of key institutions, such as academia, journalism, science and medicine, and corporations, among many others. In a liberal society, these institutions play a vital role in tempering concentrated political power by serving as neutral actors leveraging their unique expertise and interests to better society. During the pandemic, however, these institutions revealed themselves as political activists weaponizing their unique positions of authority to enact the lefts political agenda.

This rot was evident when public health officials published a public letter during the height of the pandemic insisting that the George Floyd riots did not violate their previously asserted guidance against mass gatherings because the rioters were rioting for a supposedly virtuous cause. This letter exposed those bureaucrats as mere political activists rather than the neutral experts they claim to be.

When critical race theory (CRT) became a polarizing, mainstream issue, many libertarians claimed CRT was protected by academic freedom. But thats not true. Public school curriculums are inherently political because public officials ultimately decide what is taught in a public school. But for decades, curricula have been developed by progressives leading to a left-wing indoctrination of students evident in declining civic knowledge and patriotism.

The activist takeover of institutions allows leftists an additional avenue to exercise political power without ever explicitly enacting legislation. Therefore, conservatives must be willing to cripple their ability to exercise power by either externally dismantling these institutions or through their own hostile takeover. Neutrality toward these corrupt institutions will only allow the left to continue to subvert conservatives political interests.

Recent years have also made it clear that the left wont leave you alone. Leftists have a missionary zeal to impose their mores upon society. Again, the George Floyd riots are demonstrative. In their aftermath, the left demanded that you demonstrate your solidarity with leftist social causes or else youre complicit in systemic racism.

Lavishly funded diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants infiltrated corporate boardrooms to inject racial identity politics into the workplace. Then the left came for your children, secretly using public schools to compel children into experimental mutilation under the guise of gender theory. Parents who objected to this radicalism were deemed domestic terrorists or threatened by Child Protective Services. There is nowhere to hide. Leftists insist on your acquiescence.

The lefts cultural aggression is a product of the rights refusal to assert our own cultural values. Adherence to a neutral public sphere under the guise of secularism only creates a vacuum for the left to leverage the powers of the state to promote their own values. When the state stopped promoting traditional Christian values, the left filled the void by promoting cultural Marxism.

A less libertarian conservatism must leverage tools such as public school curricula, public television, military ethics training, and other professional training in the bureaucracy, etc. to educate Americans on traditional virtues.

Institutional rot and the lefts missionary zeal thus resurface a timeless wisdom: Liberty requires virtue. Absent said virtue, institutions and culture will inevitably culminate in tyranny and social disorder. In recent years, conservatives have relearned that a culture cannot sustain degradation without catastrophic effects to individual liberty. By contrast, libertarianism is at best agnostic on the need for a state to cultivate individual virtue.

Social righteousness as a prerequisite for liberty is an insight our Founding Fathers understood. In his farewell address, George Washington implored that America must be a virtuous nation for the republic to endure. He wrote:

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Of course, libertarians and the left will accuse conservatives of wanting to enact a Christian theocracy, but thats a lazy smear. Again, George Washington is illustrative. In his first annual address to Congress, President Washington wrote that Americans must understand the difference between order and oppression, and also liberty and licentiousness. He wrote:

by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of Liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last

Libertarianism fails to heed Washingtons advice by mistaking all encroachments on personal behavior as oppression. On the contrary, the conservative appreciates that in a free society, the state must proactively promote social virtue to prevent society from descending into cultural degradation. Disorder and licentiousness inevitably result in tyranny.

Despite these critiques, libertarianism still offers a lot to the right. The free market remains the greatest path toward material prosperity, and the rights ability to promote wealth creation is among our biggest political advantages that should not be ceded. But of course, conservatisms goal is about more than material wealth. Rather, its about shaping the conditions for human fulfillment. Any such new fusionism between libertarians and conservatives requires finding libertarian solutions to conservative objectives.

For example, among the rights policy priorities is to rebuild the natural family. While this can be done via the tax code through an expanded earned income tax credit, or paid family leave policies, libertarians might help deregulate childcare services to drive down the cost of childcare.

Surely there are plenty of ways libertarians and conservatives can and should find common cause, but any shared agenda between libertarians and conservatives must aim toward retaking institutions, restoring social virtue, and rebuilding the family. Absent those objectives, libertarianism offers little to the right in our current political moment. Americas current state is characterized by cultural decadence and institutional rot that can only be remedied by an aggressive conservative agenda unafraid to assert its values throughout society.

Brian Hawkins is the policy coordinator at the American Legislative Exchange Council. Brian graduated from Azusa Pacific University in 2011 with a BA in political science. Upon graduation, Brian commissioned into the U.S. Army, where he deployed to South Korea and Afghanistan. The views expressed are his own.

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Libertarianism Is Ill-Equipped For The Task Of Saving America - The Federalist