Items21The creator’s order
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Frédéric BastiatBorn 30 Jun 1801Bastiat's essays are where many libertarians start, because they argue with jokes. The "candlemakers' petition" asks parliament to block out the sun to protect lighting firms, and "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" warns that every subsidy has invisible victims. The Law (1850) defines legitimate…0i - 2
Lysander SpoonerBorn 19 Jan 1808A Massachusetts lawyer and abolitionist, Spooner argued that slavery was unconstitutional and later went further: No Treason (1867 to 1870) claims the Constitution binds nobody, because nobody alive signed it, and taxation without individual consent is robbery. He also set up a private mail company…0i - 3
Herbert SpencerBorn 27 Apr 1820Spencer's "law of equal freedom" holds that everyone may do as they wish provided they do not infringe the equal freedom of others. Social Statics (1851) even included a "right to ignore the state", which he later dropped, and The Man Versus the State (1884) attacked the new Liberal reforms as…0i - 4
Henry GeorgeBorn 2 Sept 1839George splits libertarians on land. Progress and Poverty (1879) argued that people own what they make, but nobody made the land, so its rising value belongs to the community; a single tax on land value could replace taxes on work and trade. Free-market economists from Friedman onwards called it the…0i - 5
Benjamin TuckerBorn 17 Apr 1854Tucker called himself both an anarchist and a socialist, which shows how unsettled the vocabulary once was. His journal Liberty argued that capitalist profit, rent and interest survive only because the state grants monopolies over money, land, tariffs and patents; abolish them through free…0i - 6
Ludwig von MisesBorn 29 Sept 1881Mises argued in 1920 that socialism cannot work because, without private ownership of the means of production, there are no market prices and so no way to calculate which use of resources is economical. Human Action (1949) built a whole economics on deduction from purposeful action rather than…0i - 7
Isabel PatersonBorn 22 Jan 1886The God of the Machine (1943) compared society to an electrical circuit: energy comes from free individuals, and the state can only resist or divert it, never generate it. Paterson's chapter "The Humanitarian with the Guillotine" argued that welfare provision by force corrupts the giver. Published…0i - 8
Friedrich HayekBorn 8 May 1899Hayek's case for freedom rests on ignorance rather than rights: "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) argues that the knowledge an economy runs on is scattered among millions of people, and prices coordinate it in a way no planner can. Yet in The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and…0i - 9
Ayn RandBorn 2 Feb 1905Rand is the most widely read name here and the one who most loudly rejected the label, calling libertarians "hippies of the right". Her Objectivism defends capitalism as the only moral system because it rests on rational self-interest, argued in Atlas Shrugged and the essays of The Virtue of…0i - 10
Milton FriedmanBorn 31 Jul 1912Friedman is the pragmatist of the tradition: Capitalism and Freedom (1962) argued that economic freedom protects political freedom, then proposed workable fixes rather than abolition, including school vouchers, a negative income tax in place of welfare bureaucracy and an end to military…0i
