A DEFINITION OF THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY “Liberty is the freedom to do what you wis

A DEFINITION OF THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY

“Liberty is the freedom to do what you wish with yourself and the property that you have obtained by voluntary exchange or homesteading, where such use of your body and your property causes no involuntary transfers from others, either indirectly or directly by asymmetry of knowledge, fraud, theft, or violence, except for the single involuntary transfer we sanction in order to create the evolutionary market, and the evolutionary market’s benefits of increasing variety, and declining price: competition.”

– Curt Doolittle

This definition of the ethics of liberty is (I think) complete and correct. The Rothbardian definition of property is incomplete and therefore incorrect. It fails to account for the totality of demonstrated human behavioral preference regarding property. And that failure explains the rejection of Rothbardian Ethics as immoral. Rothbard’s error is similar to the reasons that Misesian Praxeology is incomplete and therefore incorrect when it claims apodeictic certainty. Mises failed to account for opportunity costs in praxeology. Possibly because doing so would have undermined his arguments. However, the only thing that changes if we complete Misesian Praxeology and Rothbardian Ethics is that we end up with Aristocratic warrior and the high trust society rather than the ethics of the Ghetto and Bazaar and the low trust society.

(Reposted from a comment I made elsewhere)