First Principles

You Own Yourself

Every other principle on this page is a footnote to this one.

Start with the only piece of property whose title deed is not in dispute: your own body. You did not apply for it. No legislature granted it. No majority voted it to you, which means no majority can vote it away. If self-ownership is real, then the person with final authority over your flesh, your labor, and your hours is you — not a governor, not a bureaucrat, not fifty-one percent of your neighbors on a Tuesday in November.

Everything follows from that. If you own yourself, you own your labor, because labor is your body applied to time. If you own your labor, you own what you trade it for. That is where property rights come from — not from a government pleased to permit them, but from the simple fact that taking the product of a person’s hours without consent is taking hours of that person’s life.

A right that requires someone else’s forced participation is not a right. It is a claim on another human being, wearing a right’s clothing.

This is the test that separates a real right from a wish list. Your right to speak costs me nothing but my tolerance. Your right to worship costs me nothing at all. Your right to defend yourself costs me nothing. But a “right” to a service someone else must be compelled to provide is a bill, and someone is going to be made to pay it at gunpoint. Call it what it is and then argue for it honestly if you still want it.

The uncomfortable partSelf-ownership includes the right to be wrong

You own the right to ruin yourself. To eat badly, invest stupidly, believe nonsense, marry the wrong person, take a drug that will hurt you, and refuse a treatment that would help you. A liberty you only get to exercise in ways a panel has approved is not liberty; it is a longer leash. Most political disagreement in this country is really an argument about which of your neighbors’ bad decisions justify sending armed men to their door.

The Non-Aggression Principle

The whole philosophy compresses to one sentence. Understanding it takes considerably longer.

The non-aggression principle — the NAP — holds that it is never legitimate to initiate force or fraud against a peaceful person or their property. Not to improve them. Not to improve society. Not because the cause is urgent, popular, or genuinely good.

Read the word initiate carefully, because nearly every bad-faith summary of libertarianism dies on it.

What the NAP is notFour things people insist it means

• It is not pacifism. Force in response to force is defense. You may protect yourself, your family, your home, and your neighbor. The principle forbids throwing the first punch, not the second.
• It is not “no rules.” Fraud is aggression. Pollution that lands on your neighbor’s land is aggression. Contracts are enforceable. Courts exist. Anarchy and non-aggression are not synonyms — the NAP is a constraint on what law may do, not a claim that law shouldn’t exist.
• It is not selfishness. It says charity must be chosen to count. A person who gives is generous. A person who votes to make you give is not generous; he is an activist with your credit card.
• It is not a suicide pact with the naive. Children, the incapacitated, and the defrauded cannot consent, and any serious libertarian account handles that. Anyone who tells you the philosophy has no answer here simply hasn’t read past the bumper sticker.

Why it cuts so deepAlmost all politics fails this test

Apply the NAP honestly and the range of acceptable government collapses fast, because most of what a modern state does is: take money from people who did not agree, to fund things they may oppose, enforced by penalties that escalate to men with guns. We have made that chain so long and so bureaucratic that it feels abstract. It is not abstract. Refuse a tax long enough and the abstraction shows up at your house wearing a badge.

Two Wings, One Bird

The left holds no more moral high ground than the right. It just holds a different hostage.

The most effective thing partisan politics ever did was convince you that hypocrisy is a defect of the other team. It isn’t. It is the operating system of both, because both are coalitions built to capture the same machine, and neither has ever met a power it wanted to dismantle while it held the keys.

Here is the ledger. Read the row, not the column.

Notice what every row has in common. Neither side is arguing about whether the state should have the power. They are arguing about who gets to aim it. Every power your team builds to protect you will be inherited, in full, by the people you were building it against. That transfer has never once failed to happen, and it has never once been voluntarily surrendered afterward.

Design every institution as if your worst enemy will run it next, because eventually he will. The only power that cannot be abused by the other party is the power that does not exist.

So when someone demands to know which side you’re on, the honest answer is that you noticed the sides are a franchise operation. Partisanship is not destroying your freedom by accident — it is the mechanism. It converts every principle into a team jersey, so that the moment your team needs to violate the principle, you have already been trained to call it strategy.

My Body, My Choice — All of It

It is either a principle or it is a slogan. It cannot be both.

“My body, my choice” is the most compressed statement of self-ownership in American political language, and it has been reduced to a single issue by people who go pale when you extend it one inch further. If the phrase means what it says, it means all of this:

• What goes into it. Medication a regulator hasn’t blessed. A terminal patient’s right to try. Drugs the state disapproves of — and the corollary that a person who harms only himself has committed no crime that warrants a cage.
• What stays out of it. A medical intervention you decline, for whatever reason satisfies you, without losing your job, your school, or your ability to move through public life.
• What you do with it. Sell your labor at a wage you agree to. Ride without a helmet. Eat the unpasteurized cheese. Sell a kidney if you understand the risk, and explain to me slowly why a stranger dies on a waitlist so that a legislature can feel dignified.
• When you’re done with it. Assisted dying for the terminally ill, on their timeline, not a committee’s.
• Who you do it with. Consenting adults, in any arrangement, are none of the government’s business — and that has to be true for the arrangements you find distasteful or it isn’t a principle either.

Both parties love the sentence and hate the syllogism. The right will defend medical autonomy against a mandate with genuine passion and then legislate a pregnancy. The left will defend the clinic with genuine passion and then mandate the injection, ban the vape, sue the butcher, and audit your gas stove. Each is certain the other is the authoritarian. Both are correct.

And yes: abortion is the hardest case in libertarian thought, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. It is the one place where two claims of bodily sovereignty may genuinely collide, which is exactly why libertarians disagree with each other about it in good faith. What we do not do is pretend the collision doesn’t exist in order to make a slogan easier to chant. The people who should be embarrassed are the ones who deploy self-ownership as an absolute on Monday and as a nuisance on Tuesday, depending on which vote is being whipped.

Title IX and the Feminism Test

A category that protects no one has stopped being a protection.

Title IX was passed in 1972 to do one specific thing: stop federally funded schools from shutting women out. It worked spectacularly. Girls’ high school sports participation went from 294,015 in 1971–72 to 3,539,596 in 2024–25 — a twelvefold increase. That is not a talking point; it is one of the most successful pieces of anti-discrimination law in American history, and it succeeded precisely because it created a protected category and defended its boundary.

A women’s division is not a bigotry. It is an accommodation, and everyone understood that when it was written. We do not run an open division and a women’s division because women are lesser athletes; we run them because at the elite margin, male puberty confers advantages — in skeletal frame, cardiac and pulmonary capacity, muscle cross-section, and hemoglobin — that training does not erase. Sport is the one arena we deliberately built around that fact. If the physical difference didn’t matter, there was never a reason for the category in the first place, and the entire legal edifice of Title IX was a mistake from day one. Almost nobody actually believes that.

So here is the position, stated plainly and without cruelty: you can hold that trans people deserve dignity, safety, legal equality, and to be left the hell alone by the state — and simultaneously hold that a sex-based athletic category has to have a boundary to function. Those are not in tension. The first is about how human beings should be treated. The second is about whether a protected class remains a protected class.

Calling yourself a feminist while dissolving the only structural protection women have in competitive sport is not progressive; it is asking one group to absorb the entire cost of another group’s inclusion, and then telling them that noticing the bill is bigotry. Meanwhile the right, which discovered women’s sports roughly fifteen minutes ago, has shown almost no interest in Title IX’s actual enforcement — the funding gaps, the facilities gaps, the scholarship gaps — on any day when it wasn’t a useful cudgel.

If you only defend women’s sports when it lets you attack someone you already disliked, you are not defending women’s sports. You are using them.

The libertarian answer to the underlying mess, incidentally, is the one nobody in this fight wants to hear: leagues, schools, and associations are the right level to set eligibility, and they should be free to set it differently and compete for participants. A single federal rule imposed on 50 states and thousands of institutions guarantees that half the country is furious no matter which way it lands. Which brings us, as it always does, to Article IX.

Consumption Is the Only Honest Tax

Tax what people take out of the pool, not what they put into it.

If government must be funded — and even a minimal one must be — then the question is not whether to tax but what, and the honest answer is: tax consumption, not production.

The case against the income taxIt taxes the act of contributing

• It presumes you don’t own your labor. An income tax is a claim on your hours before you ever see them — withheld at the source so you never hold the money you’re being asked to surrender. It is the only major tax deliberately designed to be invisible at the moment of payment.
• It requires total surveillance. To tax income you must know income, which means the state must know what you earned, from whom, where you live, whether you married, how many children you have, what you gave to charity, what you borrowed, and what you own. No consumption tax needs a single one of those facts.
• It punishes exactly what we claim to want. Working more, saving, investing, and building are all penalized. Consumption is not. We tax the thing that grows the pie and leave alone the thing that eats it.
• Its complexity is not an accident. The code runs to tens of thousands of pages, and every page is a door that was opened for someone. Complexity is the product, because complexity is what makes lobbying profitable. Compliance alone burns billions of hours a year — pure deadweight, producing nothing.

The case for consumptionVisible, avoidable at the margin, unavoidable at the top

A consumption tax is paid when you choose to spend, in an amount you can see printed on the receipt, on a base nobody can hide offshore. You want to lower your tax bill? Buy less. That is a lever every person actually holds, unlike the income code’s levers, which are only reachable by people who can afford someone to reach them.

It also catches what the income tax cannot. The underground economy, the untaxed inheritance being spent, the foreign visitor, the person paid in cash — all of them buy things. And the very wealthy, who are extremely good at having little “income” while living extraordinarily well, get taxed on the living rather than on the paperwork.

The honest objectionRegressivity, and the answer to it

A flat sales tax takes a larger share of a poor household’s income than a rich one’s, because the poor spend nearly all of what they earn. That objection is real and it deserves a real answer rather than a dodge. The standard one is a prebate: every household receives an unconditional monthly rebate equal to the tax on spending up to the poverty line. Below subsistence, your effective rate is zero. Above it, it climbs toward the flat rate. No exemption schedule, no means test, no army of auditors deciding whose life qualifies.

Exempting categories instead — food, medicine, “necessities” — sounds kinder and is the trap. Every exemption is a new lobbying target, and within a decade you have rebuilt the loophole economy you were trying to escape, except now it’s in the sales tax too.

And none of this matters much if spending isn’t constrained, because a government that spends beyond its revenue is taxing you anyway — through debt your children service and through inflation, which is the one tax that requires no vote at all. Watch what it costs, not what it’s called. The Numbers tracks the bill in real time.

Capitalism Is Not Corporatism

One is voluntary exchange. The other is a business plan that runs through a legislature.

Nearly every argument about “capitalism” in America is people yelling past each other about two different systems that share a costume.

Here is the part both tribes get wrong. The left looks at a captured, subsidized, bailed-out, regulation-moated economy, correctly concludes that it is rigged, and then prescribes more of exactly the instrument that rigged it — more agencies, more rules, more discretionary power for officials to allocate. Every one of those is a lever, and the entities with a hundred lobbyists and a compliance department will reach it before you do. That is not a bug in regulation; it is the physics of it. Complex rules are a tax on small firms and a subsidy to large ones.

The right, meanwhile, defends the outcome and calls it the free market. It isn’t. There is nothing free-market about a farm subsidy, a steel tariff, a bank guarantee, a pharmaceutical exclusivity extension, or a hospital certificate-of-need law that requires your competitor’s permission to open a clinic. A genuine capitalist should be the angriest person in the room about corporate welfare, because it is the thing most responsible for discrediting markets in the public mind.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators. — widely attributed to P. J. O’Rourke

The libertarian objection to big business is therefore not that it is big. It is that it stopped being a business and became a branch of government with better dental. Break the connection and size takes care of itself — because a large firm that cannot call the state for help is just a large firm with a large target on its back.

Non-Intervention Is Not Isolation

Trade with everyone. Entangle with no one. Declare it or don’t do it.

Isolationism means closing the borders to goods, people, and ideas. Non-interventionism means the opposite: commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none. That is not a fringe position dug up by libertarians; it is the founding foreign policy of the United States, stated in Washington’s Farewell Address and echoed by Jefferson at his first inaugural. It stopped being the policy, and the case for abandoning it has been re-litigated by every administration since — usually after the deployment.

Why it follows from everything aboveWar is the health of the state

• It is the largest possible violation of the NAP, conducted on the largest possible scale, funded by money taken from people who were not consulted and spent on people who were not asked.
• It ratchets domestic power permanently. Every war expands surveillance, secrecy, censorship, executive discretion, and emergency authority. Look at what has been repealed after each one. The list is very short.
• It is fought by the young and poor and decided by the old and safe. Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war since 1942 while conducting armed conflict nearly continuously, hiding behind authorizations written for a different enemy in a different decade so that no member ever has to take a recorded vote.
• The bill comes home. Trillions in direct cost, a veterans’ health obligation running for another half-century, blowback that produces the next enemy, and surplus equipment that flows down to your local police department.

The partisan tell here is brutal. Antiwar energy on the left evaporates the instant its own party holds the office — the drone program went from a war crime to a difficult nuance in the span of one inauguration. Support-the-troops energy on the right evaporates the instant a veteran needs care, or the instant a war becomes unpopular enough that everyone who voted for it needs to have always been against it. Neither wing has held a consistent position on the use of force in living memory. Both have held a consistent position on whether their guy is holding the trigger.

Test It in the States First

Fifty experiments beat one guess — and a mistake you can drive away from is a smaller mistake.

Justice Brandeis called the states laboratories of democracy: a single courageous state may try a novel social and economic experiment without risk to the rest of the country. That is not sentimentality about state government — state governments are frequently terrible. It is a claim about error correction, and it is the most underrated argument in American politics.

Why scale changes the mathThree reasons the federal default is wrong

• You get evidence instead of assertions. When a policy runs in eight states and not in forty-two, you can measure it. When it runs everywhere at once, you get an argument that never ends because there is no control group. Welfare reform, marijuana legalization, school choice, right-to-work, assisted dying, minimum wage floors — every one of these produced real data because it wasn’t imposed nationally first.
• Failure stays contained. A bad state law harms one state and gets repealed, or its residents leave and the legislature notices. A bad federal law harms 340 million people and is nearly impossible to remove, because by then an agency, a constituency, and a budget line have grown around it.
• Exit is the fastest accountability there is. Voice is slow — you get one vote among millions, once every few years, on a bundle you didn’t design. Exit is immediate. People move for tax regimes, school systems, and business climates constantly, and legislatures respond to that far faster than to op-eds. Federalize the policy and you have abolished the exit door.

The hypocrisy here is perfectly symmetrical, and worth stating without flinching: both parties are federalists exactly as long as they are losing. The left championed state authority on marijuana and sanctuary policy and demanded federal preemption on firearms and school curricula. The right championed state authority on abortion and education and demanded federal preemption on marijuana, tech moderation, and municipal policing. Nobody in this argument has a theory of government. They have a scoreboard.

The genuine limit deserves stating too: federalism is not a license for a state to violate individual rights. “Let the states decide” was the argument for segregation, and it was wrong — not because the states lacked authority in general, but because self-ownership is not a policy question a majority gets to vote on. The rule is clean once you separate the two: rights are federal floors that no state may go beneath; policy is everything else, and everything else should be tried locally, watched carefully, and adopted only when it has survived contact with reality somewhere smaller than a continent.

What the Founders Actually Feared

They had just fought a war against a distant government that knew what was best for them.

The men who wrote the Constitution were not designing a government to be efficient. They were designing one to be difficult. Every structural feature people now complain about — the separation of powers, the bicameral legislature, the veto, judicial review, the amendment process, the Senate, the whole grinding machinery — exists to make it hard to do things to you quickly.

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. — James Madison, Federalist No. 45

That sentence describes a country that no longer exists. The federal government today asserts authority over your healthcare, your school’s curriculum, your toilet’s flow rate, your light bulbs, your retirement, your bank’s willingness to serve you, the water on your land, and the contents of your medicine cabinet. “Few and defined” was not aspirational language. It was the deal.

How the fence came downThree doors, all still open

• The Commerce Clause. Written to stop states from erecting trade barriers against each other. Expanded — most famously in Wickard v. Filburn, where a farmer growing wheat on his own land to feed his own animals was held to be engaged in interstate commerce — until essentially any activity qualifies, because any activity in aggregate affects a market.
• The spending power. Congress cannot order you to set a drinking age, so it withholds highway funds until you do. This is how federal control was established over education, transportation, and healthcare policy without ever amending a word of the Constitution. The states are nominally sovereign and functionally on retainer.
• The administrative state. Congress writes vague statutes and delegates the actual lawmaking to agencies. The result is that the overwhelming majority of binding federal rules you live under were written by people you cannot vote out, cannot name, and in most cases cannot identify. Article I vested all legislative power in Congress. Congress gave it away, because delegating is how you get the policy without owning the blame.

And the Ninth and Tenth Amendments — the two provisions written specifically to prevent all of this — have been read down to near-nothing. The Ninth says the people retain rights not listed. The Tenth says powers not delegated are reserved. Together they are the most explicit statement of limited government in the document, and they function today as decoration.

None of this happened in a coup. It happened one emergency at a time, each with a sympathetic story attached, each ratified by whichever party was in power and quietly retained by the party that replaced it. That is the actual mechanism by which free countries stop being free: not a seizure, but a slow accumulation of reasonable-sounding exceptions, none of which is ever given back.

The Objections, Answered

The good-faith ones. The bad-faith ones answer themselves.

Objection“Who builds the roads?”

Mostly the states, mostly from fuel taxes, which is roughly a user fee and one of the least objectionable things government does. This question is usually a way of avoiding the real one, which is not whether roads but whether every function of a modern state has to be federal, monopoly, and immune from ever being measured. Almost no libertarian is arguing about pavement. We are arguing about the other 95% of the budget.

Objection“Libertarians just want to be left alone to be selfish.”

Americans give hundreds of billions of dollars a year to charity, voluntarily, on top of everything already taken. The claim that generosity requires compulsion is contradicted by every collection plate, every mutual aid fund, every fire department that started as a volunteer company. What we deny is that voting to make someone else pay is a moral act on your part. It costs you nothing, which is precisely why it is so popular.

Objection“Without regulation, corporations would run wild.”

Corporations already run wild — through the regulators. See Article VII. The pattern of regulatory capture is not a rare failure; it is the default outcome, because the regulated industry is the only party with the resources and the incentive to be in the room every single day. Liability, transparency, and the freedom of a competitor to eat your lunch are much harder to capture than a rulemaking process.

Objection“This has never worked anywhere.”

Neither has the alternative, if the standard is a system that never produced abuse. But the narrower claim is just false: the direction has worked repeatedly. Deregulating airlines, trucking, and telecom collapsed prices and expanded access. Ending conscription, ending Prohibition, ending sodomy laws, ending marriage restrictions, legalizing marijuana state by state — every one was a reduction in state power over private life, and every one is now so normal that people forget it was ever contested.

Objection“You’re just Republicans who want drugs.”

Read Article VIII and tell the average Republican we want to end the wars, close the foreign bases, dismantle the surveillance apparatus, abolish civil asset forfeiture, open immigration, and get the state entirely out of marriage. Then read Article VI and tell the average Democrat we want the income tax repealed and the agencies stripped of lawmaking power. You will find you have no friends in either building. That is generally how you know you’re not running a franchise.

Addressed to the Partisan

Read in full before assigning this document a team.

Let it be formally and unequivocally understood that everything above, and anything that follows it, does not constitute, imply, or in any way suggest an endorsement of Donald Trump — nor of any individual, entity, or ideology that might be characterized as an ‘Authoritarian CZAR.’ The object of this document is not to champion the ascent of any particular figure to the throne of executive power. We are not shopping for a better master. If you finish a case against concentrated power and come away believing we are recruiting for the next strongman, you did not read it — you scanned it for a jersey.

Which brings us to you, partisan. Not as an insult. As a description of a position you have been maneuvered into, and a trap we would like you to see from the outside for once.

Here is the bind. Sooner or later your side does something indefensible. Not debatable — indefensible. And because you have already committed your name, your friendships, your family dinners, and a decade of public posts to that side, you cannot simply say that was wrong and I am still here. So you are left with exactly two moves, and you will recognize both of them, because you have watched people you love make them.

Move OneThe Lesser-Evil Sale

You concede the thing is bad — generously, even performatively — and then you argue that it is the smaller of two available badnesses, and that only two are available. The concession buys you the appearance of honesty. The framing does the actual work. Note what got smuggled in while you were being so admirably candid: not the claim that your side is good, but the claim that there are only two doors. That premise was never argued. It was assumed, and you defended it for free.

Move TwoThe Reassignment

If the thing cannot be sold as the lesser evil, then the person who did it must be relocated — to the other team. He was never really one of us. He is a RINO, a DINO, a plant, a grifter, a false flag, controlled opposition. The sin is quarantined by redrawing the border of your tribe around it. And notice this works in reverse just as well: someone the other side disowns gets adopted by yours the moment he becomes useful. The label follows the convenience, not the conduct.

The MachineTwo Moves, One Premise

Two moves. One machine. Both are binary reasoning, and that is the whole point. Both require the same unexamined premise — that there are two boxes, that every person and every act must be sorted into one of them, and that the sorting is what settles whether the act was right. It never settles it. A bad law is bad in either box. A war of choice kills the same number of people under either logo. A surveillance program reads your mail at exactly the same speed regardless of which team built it. The conduct does not change when the jersey does.

And that is why this document goes after both parties with the same knife. The perspectives here — which will at times look like critiques historically associated with Libertarian thought — exist to hold a mirror up to the hypocrisy, the convenient amnesia, and the selective outrage that have become the hallmarks of modern political engagement on both sides of the aisle. If a passage feels unfair to you, check whether it is actually unfair or merely unfamiliar — whether the argument is wrong, or whether it just gored your ox this time.

On the RecordWhat This Document Is Not

To be absolutely clear: this is not a campaign advertisement. It is not a call to action for any specific candidate. It is not an endorsement of any party platform. We live in an age where questioning the status quo is routinely misread as treason against one’s chosen ‘team,’ and this paragraph exists as a tiresome but necessary bulwark against exactly that reflex. One can observe the wreckage of political discourse without being a passenger on the train that caused it.

So take the option the menu never lists. Refuse the frame that says you must swallow one evil to avoid another, and refuse the frame that says a man stops being yours the moment he embarrasses you. This is a critique of the system, not a brochure for its next manager — not an endorsement of any candidate, party, or authoritarian figure, current, former, or aspiring. Should you find yourself tempted to read these words as allegiance to any political cause, re-read this section until the absurdity of that notion becomes apparent.

We are not asking you to switch teams. We are asking you to stop letting the existence of a second team be the entire argument for the first.