driftingjackal5 said:The whole philosophy of liberty boils down to self-ownership—you know, individual sovereignty, autonomy, whatever you want to call it.
The core principle is dead simple: you own your life. Period. Saying otherwise is just a fancy way of claiming someone else has a bigger stake in your existence than you do. No person, no group, no government... nobody owns you, and you don't own them.
You exist through time—past, present, and future. That temporal stretch is your life, your freedom, and everything you've built with it.
Lose your life, and you lose your future. Lose your freedom, and you lose your present. Lose what you've earned, and you're losing the very history that shaped who you are.
Your life and your freedom represent your property. Your stuff is the result of your work—it's the literal product of your time, energy, and talent. Property is just nature that you’ve transformed into something useful through labor. It also includes stuff owned by others that you acquired through voluntary trade and mutual consent.
Voluntary exchange means both sides actually benefit from the deal—otherwise, why bother? Only the people involved can legitimately decide to make that swap.
Sometimes, people use force or fraud to snatch property without consent. Using force or fraud to take a life is murder. Using it to take freedom is slavery. Using it to take property is theft. Simple as that.
It doesn't matter if it's one guy acting alone, a mob ganging up on one person, or a bunch of "authorities" using their power to crush you—the outcome and the immorality are exactly the same.
Everyone has the right to defend their life, their freedom, and their rightfully earned property from aggressive interference. You can ask for help defending those rights, sure. But nobody has the right to initiate force or aggression against someone else's life, liberty, or property. And because of that, you can't delegate to some third party the right to go out and initiate aggression on your behalf.
You have the right to find your own leaders, but you damn well don't have the right to impose a ruler on anyone else. No matter how they get picked, leaders are still just humans—they don't have any special rights or privileges that put them above anyone else.
I don't care what fancy titles they hold or how many people cheer for them—officials and leaders have zero right to kill, enslave, or steal. You can't hand over rights to someone else that you don't even possess yourself.
Since you own your life, you're responsible for it. You aren't renting your existence to people demanding obedience, and you aren't a slave to anyone demanding you sacrifice yourself for them. You pick your own goals based on your own values. Success and failure—both are necessary for learning and growing. Actions done for others, or by others for you, are only moral if they're based on voluntary, mutual consent... because morality can't exist without freedom of choice.
That's the bedrock of a truly free society. It isn't just the most practical and humane way to live—it's the only ethical one.
All those global messes caused by governments initiating force? There's a fix. The fix is to stop demanding that officials use force on your behalf. Evil doesn't just come from bad people—it comes from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as a way to solve problems. That's how, throughout history, the good guys have kept handing power to the bad guys...
Trusting a free society means focusing on the market process of discovering moral values—not some forced vision or preordained goal shoved down everyone's throats. Using the state to force a specific vision on people is just intellectual laziness, and honestly, it almost always ends in unintended, messy consequences...
Building a truly free society takes guts—guts to think, speak, and actually act. Especially when doing nothing is the easy way out.
This whole thing is based on the epilogue from "The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible" by Ken Schoolland. If you ask me, it’s one of the most punchy texts ever written explaining the political philosophy of libertarianism—or even more accurately, voluntarism. Just two basic principles:
1. You own your life. Nobody has a greater claim to your life than you do. Life isn't just existing physically; it's a timeline stretching from your past into your future.
2. Initiating force against peaceful people—for any reason whatsoever—is morally disgusting and totally unacceptable. The only time force is okay is in self-defense, after someone else has already crossed the line against you.
I don't see anyone on this forum—or even in broader American society—having a serious conversation about this stuff, so I'm hoping for a more concrete discussion here. 🙂
What you’ve laid out here flies in the face of every conceivable—and frankly, impossible—law regarding infinite economic growth. Anyone foolish enough to try and obstruct that momentum is looking at being laughed out of the room at best. At worst? You end up like Swartz, trapped in an endless loop, or if you're truly stuck in the gears, you'll find yourself facing a Kennedy-style magic bullet to the head.
What exactly is it you're looking to dive into?
We’re all just chickens in a coop, really. Our radius of movement is dictated by whoever happens to be hunting us, and we spend our precious little scraps of existence trading away our time just to stay fed—even though, if we're being honest, we don't actually have much time to begin with. Right?
Every once in a while, you see someone actually pull it off—they find a way to grab some capital, maybe through a clever side hustle or a lucky break, and use it to carve out a bit of genuine freedom for themselves. It’s that ability to just move through the world without being tethered to someone else's whims. But honestly? It’s a rare thing to witness. And I’m not even talking about those career politicians or the usual vultures circling the taxpayer dime; they aren't "securing freedom," they're just padding their own pockets. No, I mean the real outliers.
The average person... just stuck in that middle ground. They sleep about as much as they actually live—eight hours a day, give or take. That leaves you with maybe three or four hours of actual "life" left in the tank. Everything else? It just dissolves into the commute, the grind at the office, and then resting just so you can go back and do it all over again. It’s a cycle of working to rest and resting to work.
It feels almost pointless to even debate the concept of freedom at this stage. We essentially signed off on our own exploitation nearly a century ago. Sure, we might sit here feeling content because we have access to clean running water and electricity, but that doesn't change the underlying reality—we’re still just slaves in a different guise. Look at what's happening in places like Vietnam; people are scraping by on a few meager dollars, trapped in poverty with absolutely no way to save money or actually get ahead in life.
Thank God that the wonderful West gives you money upfront—provided you promise to be industrious for the next few years and actually pay it back. It really highlights how much poorer we are compared to Vietnam. If we didn't have this option to borrow against our future, we’d just be living paycheck to paycheck. I can't help but wonder what life would actually look like for some hypothetical Person X working for the average guy. $1667Forget all that talk about having a "safety net" or some family estate to fall back on. I’m out here on my own, just a renter navigating the world without any way to take on debt.
It seems like you may have cut off mid-sentence. I’m standing by—just let me know what you need me to rework. $1667 Maybe there’s some kind of uprising brewing over in Vietnam, but this? This isn't Vietnam. We're just broke.
In this day and age, being broke and being free are two things that just don't go together. It’s a hard truth. I often think about someone who decides they've had enough of the rat race—someone who chooses to just live in a tent, completely off the grid without electricity. In the real world, the police would probably just come along and kick them out for being there. It's difficult to claim independence when you lack the means to defend your own space.
Freedom in the 21st century? It’s a bit of an illusion. At the end of the day, what we really have is just varying levels of bank balances. Even money itself isn't some magic wand that lets you do whatever you want; honestly, more often than not, having cash actually ends up being its own kind of constraint. Take that old TV show Nightmare, for example. For years, people labeled it this bastion of "democratic" discourse because anyone could basically walk in and say whatever they pleased. But looking back, that wasn't true freedom at all. It wasn't about liberty; it was just about the host's deep pockets and his connections to powerful politicians who decided, quite conveniently, to let him talk like that.
It went on for a while, I suppose, until they finally stepped in and shut it down.
Television is always censoring the hard stuff. You’re never going to see anything explicit during the day—it's just constant censorship. Sure, maybe you'll catch some breasts here and there, but full-on nudity? Forget about it. It's almost impossible.
A gun? No. A bullet? Not really. An explosion? Nah. That’s all just business as usual. You can watch Obama’s cronies butcher Gaddafi without blinking, but suddenly people can't handle watching Lisa Ann swallow someone's junk? Make it make sense.
So much for 21st-century freedom.
It’s a myth. We live in a world where pharmaceutical lobbies hold so much sway that growing a specific plant—one with proven medicinal properties—is still treated like a crime. Cigarettes? Sure, go ahead.
That’s just more proof of what "freedom" looks like today. And frankly, I couldn't care less what the conservative zealots think about it; this isn't some hippie demagoguery. Marijuana—and I loathe that term, really, it's just corporate branding designed to distance itself from actual "herb"—is just a plant. It's no different than Swiss chard. Except, apparently, I can plant chard whenever and wherever I please, but marijuana is off-limits?
I remember mentioning this to my mother once, and she told me that even growing tobacco is prohibited. I can't say for certain if that's strictly true, but if it is, then there you have it: the state of freedom in the 21st century.
It is truly fascinating, the narrative they've managed to sell us. Working eight hours a day until you hit sixty-seven... you're away from home for eight hours every single day starting from when you're seven years old, yet they still have the audacity to lecture us about liberty.
It's all quite ridiculous, really.