The Philosophy of Liberty by Ken Schoolland and Lux Lucre

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The Philosophy of Liberty ... Is based on the principle of self ownership, the idea that you are the owner of your life. To deny this is to imply that another person has a higher claim on your life than you do. No other person or group of persons owns your life nor do you own the lives of others. You exist in time, past, present, and future. This is manifesting the future as your life, in the present as your liberty, and in the past, the product of your life and your liberty. To lose your life is to lose your future. To lose your liberty is to lose your present. To lose the product of your life and liberty is to lose that portion of your past, a product of your life and your liberty is your property. This is the fruit of your labor, the product of your time, your energy, and your talents.

Property is that part of nature which you turn to valuable use. Your property may also be the former property of others acquired by you through voluntary exchange and mutual consent. Two people who exchange property voluntarily are better off, or they wouldn't do it. Only they may rightfully make those decisions for themselves.

But at times some people use force or fraud to take things without voluntary consent. The initiation of force or fraud to take life is murder, to take liberty is slavery, and to take property, is theft. It is the same whether these actions are done by one person acting alone, by many acting against the few, or even by officials wearing hats.

You have a right to protect your own life, liberty, and justly acquired property from the forceful aggression of others. You may ask others to defend you, but you do not have the right to initiate force against the life, liberty, and property of others, thus you have no right to designate some person to initiate force on others on your behalf. You have the right to seek leaders for yourself, but you have no right to impose rulers onto others.

No matter how officials are selected, they are only human beings and they have no rights and no claims that are higher than those of other human beings, regardless of the imaginative labels for their behavior or the numbers of people encouraging them. Officials have no right to murder, to enslave, or to steal. You cannot give them rights that you do not have yourself.

Since you own your life, you are responsible for your life. You do not rent your life from others who demand your obedience, nor are you a slave to others who demand your sacrifice. You choose your own goals based on your values. Success and failure are both the necessary incentives to learn and to grow your action on behalf of others or their action on behalf of you is virtuous only when it is derived from voluntary, mutual consent, for virtue can only exist where there is free choice.

This is the basis of a truly free society. It is not only the most practical and humanitarian foundation for human action, it is also the most ethical. Problems in the world that arise from the initiation of force by government have a solution. The solution is for the people of Earth to stop asking government officials to initiate force on their behalf. Evil does not arise only from evil people, but also from good people who tolerate the initiation of force as means to end.

In this manner, good people have empowered evil people throughout history. The confidence in a free society is to focus on the process of discovery in the marketplace of values, rather than to focus on some imposed goal or vision using governmental force to impose vision on others. This lack of imagination combined with this reliance on force is intellectual sloth. It typically results in unintended, perverse, consequences. Achieving this free society requires courage to think, to talk, and to act, especially when it is easier to do nothing.

http://schoolsucksproject.com/005-authoritarian-absurdities-vs-the-philosophy-of-liberty/