Voluntaryism

Featured Posts:
What Voluntaryists Believe
and Why
The Case for a
Voluntary Society
What it Means to Be an
Anarcho-capitalist
What Does Democracy
Look Like, Actually?
What Can Voluntaryists
Do Now?
If Men Were Angels
Voluntaryism Transcends
Anarchism
The Fundamentals of Nonvoting

From Everything Voluntary:
Persuasion versus Force
Coercivists and Voluntarists
Fundamentals of Voluntaryism
The Anatomy of the State
Thoughts on Nonviolence
Charity in the Land
of Individualism

Recommended Books:
The Ethics of Liberty
Our Enemy, the State
I Must Speak Out
Private Means, Public Ends
The Conscience
of an Anarchist
The Economics and Ethics of
Private Property
Big list of voluntaryist literature.

Websites to Follow:
FFF.org
Voluntaryist.com
LewRockwell.com
C4SS.org
Praxeology.net/molinari.htm
CompleteLiberty.com
Strike-the-Root.com
ZeroGov.com

Voluntaryism, or voluntarism, is a philosophy according to which all forms of human association should be voluntary. This moral principle is called the non-aggression principle, which prohibits the initiation of aggressive force or coercion. The word "initiation" is used here to make clear that voluntaryism does not oppose self-defense.

As government is defined as a monopoly on the initiation of aggressive force and coercion in a given geographical region, voluntaryists call for its abolition. One of the goals of voluntaryism is the replacement of the government or state by a voluntary society in which autonomous self-determination is had by each individual and in which association among people occurs by mutual consent. A voluntary society entails a stateless society; voluntaryism entails (or is compatible with) a variety of anarchist positions, and is often compared to anarchism without adjectives.

Voluntaryists advocate radical stateless pluralism. While voluntaryists as individuals have particular values and preferences for stateless socioeconomic arrangements, voluntaryism as a philosophy does not specify the arrangements that a society without government ought to embrace; only that initiative force be abandoned in bringing about such arrangements, so that individuals and communities may flourish. For example, many voluntaryists advocate societal arrangements in which property rights exist and are respected, which they regard as compatible with non-coercion and part of pre-institutional natural law. On the other hand, some voluntaryists may be non-propertarians, believing that inhabitants of a society can voluntarily choose cooperative arrangements of land and resources that are not privatized. What both camps of people would agree on, insofar as they are voluntaryists, is that no initiation of aggressive force or coercion should be used to bring about or maintain either arrangement, and neither should be forced on the other.

Voluntaryists believe that consensual and volunteer-based action itself should be the means to achieve the goal of a stateless society, rather than the initiation of force. Voluntaryist movements are distinct in their rejection of both electoral politics and initiative violence as means by which to bring about a voluntary society. Because voluntaryists consider electoral politics to be counterproductive or immoral, they prefer to dismantle the state by non-political means such as secession, self-defense, counter-economics, civil disobedience and education, rather than voting.

From the Wikipedia entry on Voluntaryism, emphasis added. Enjoy the below video: