Capitalism is based on voluntary transactions. People being rational, they will not enter into transactions unless they benefit from them. This is the essence of freedom. The existence of corporations, wealth, rich people or unequal assets does not equate to authoritarianism.

- Property is theft, so libertarians are hypocrites.
Property is not theft, it is a good the same as anything else. Some libertarians will diverge here into Georgism or geo-libertarianism, which involves some theory of land scarcity or collective ownership and a tax based upon the usage of land. Most will not agree with such a scheme, some of these going as far as to call the geo-libertarians ‘land socialists.’ This dispute aside, property of land, of clothes, of your car, of your computer is not theft. Theft is the unjust seizure of property. If property rights are theft, then the socialist solution is to eliminate property rights – but without property rights, there’s no such thing as theft! Therefore, the only other argument is that the community owns the property. Communities have no rights; only individuals can have rights. There can be no community right to property. Arguments that property is theft are poorly thought out and necessarily communist or anarcho-socialist in origin – arguing against individual property rights results in socialism, authoritarianism, or (usually) both.

- Accepting money from your parents or family is welfare, and if they do they’re hypocrites.
Accepting money from one’s parents is voluntary. Before reaching the age of majority (or, earlier, suing for emancipation) parents are required to care for their children because it would be wrong to abandon a child to the elements, in a dumpster, in a field, or to the streets. Parents have an obligation to care for their children until and unless they can find a reasonably responsible proxy – like a relative or an adoption agency. For the vast majority of parents, buying food and clothes for their own children is voluntary and positive, something they wish to do. Welfare should be the same – voluntary and charitable rather than coercive. Welfare and charity are morally great – it’s when they are coerced or involuntary that they became immoral. This is the dividing line, and is really just an excuse for people to expose their anti-wealth bias.

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7. Philosophically, libertarians miss some major points.

- There are no natural rights; we only have rights from law or government.
If this is true then there was nothing wrong with slavery, since the government had not granted rights to the slaves. If governments give rights then there was nothing wrong with the Nuremberg Laws as the government was simply adjusting the rights of Jews. Both of these arguments are unacceptable and false – everyone has rights because we are free people. If a person, company, army or government stomps on our freedom, it violates a natural right, even if the government wrote on a piece of paper that it was okay. It’s important that we separate out civil rights, which are the rights and laws that civic government recognizes, and natural rights, which are the moral freedoms we all deserve. The First Amendment is a civic right, because it’s written down. The freedoms of thought, speech and press are natural rights, because they don’t have to be written laws for human beings to possess them. Just because government writes the First Amendment doesn’t mean government creates the natural right to speech. That’s like assuming that because a science textbook author wrote down the laws of physics it must be true that the textbook author is the creator of the laws of physics themselves.

- Living in America puts you under our social contract and represents implicit consent, and therefore taxation is voluntary and not immoral, as libertarians argue.
If living in America equals implicit consent to the government’s policies then nothing the government does to us is against our consent. This argument justifies anything the government does, and it means if the government starts shooting black people, shutting down bookstores and stealing cars that it was with our consent. When the government takes our money under threat of force and jail time (taxation) it is morally no different than if it took our land, cars, property or businesses under the same threats. Living in America does not represent consent to any crime the government perpetrates on us. Using public goods and services – which are mandatory and legal near-monopolies in many cases – does not represent consent for the government to do as it wishes or take our property.

- No man is an island; we’re all part of society or the community; government and society provided us with education and employment so we don’t fully own anything independent of society or the government.
The community does not own its constituent members; we are each of us individuals. An individual has rights of speech, privacy, economy, market, movement – an individual has liberty. Arguments that attempt to control the individual, subvert it to the state, crush it under the community or question the worth of a single person only serve to weaken our liberties. Interacting with the government, schools or participating in the economy does not represent a compelling argument against the achievements or strength of the individual. Rather than using the economy as some net achievement of the society as a whole we should see it as the achievements of millions of different contributors. Arguments like this try to reduce the debate into a dichotomy between interacting with society or complete hermitude. This is as foolish as it is convenient.

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