leadbyexample on Nostr: https://i.imgur.com/TUwRvTz.png Let's try this. Second post dedicated to Murray, he's ...

Let's try this.
Second post dedicated to Murray, he's my favourite author from the austrian school after all.
I mean his second name is Newton.
Murray fuckin-Newton Rothbard, how badass-er can that get.

This time I'll do an intro to The Ethics of Liberty.

This is his masterpiece imho, it's something that you can cite to hush any statist npc with, as long as he's got at least an IQ score of 70 and thus is able to follow basic logical reasoning.

I would suggest you rather use the Candles in the Dark method by Larken Rose, if you want to -hopefully- convert a statist into an anarchocapitalist, but if you instead would rather trigger the moron into utter defeat (for self-satisfaction and to catch the attention of witnesses), then Murray is the tool for you.

So here's a sneak peek of The Ethics of Liberty (mind that I am going by memory, some things might be approximate).
Murray starts by defining what natural law and universal principles are, and that the former should only be based upon the latter.
So, universal principles can be truly universal only when they can be always applied, even in edge cases, right?

Let's take a quite existential issue:

Who is the owner of the body of a human being?

Most of us would have no doubt, the person corresponding to that body is the sole owner of the body.

Well, Murray Newton will not have that, he has to logically prove that to be correct.

He uses logical exclusion to find an answer.

The only possible alternatives for human body ownership are:
a) Someone else is the proprietor of the body
b) Every existing human, collectively, is equally proprietor of a proportional share of the body of everyone on planet earth, including themselves
c) The person corresponding to a body is the sole, exclusive proprietor of that body

Let's examine point (a).
If someone else was the owner of "my" body, it would mean that there is a special class of human beings that, other than necessarily owning their own body, would also own that of someone else (they couldn't own someone else's body if they were not owners of their own body as well, since the body of a person is the manifestation of the person itself, and said person couldn't "own" anything if he hadn't access to the physical tool of ownership, that is, a body); this in turn would imply that there is a subset of people who own their own body and someone else's too, and another set of people who own nothing, not even "their own" body, but that contradicts the nature of a universal principle, because then "body ownership" wouldn't be applicable to everyone in the same way. So, it must necessarily follow that it is false that someone else can own my body (and in a fell swoop, slavery is also obliterated as a logical possibility; well, not quite yet, there's something more to be added about slavery, and Murray does that later in the book).

Let's examine point (b), where everyone is entitled to an equal share of ownership to everyone's body.
In such a situation, every single action I would need to take, would require to ask everyone else for permission to do it.
Let's say I want to scratch my nose.
Me and everyone else on the earth would be the owner of an equal share of both my arm and my nose, and me+everyone else on earth would need to agree for the arm to move and for the nose to be scratched.
This in turn would cause a complete immobilization of every human action on earth, leading to the extinction of the human race.
Hence, (b) is false, as well.

This leaves (c) to be the only viable option.

If you managed to follow through here, that's a royal mindfuck eh?
But also a damn sexy mindfuck.
Well this is just the beginning of The Ethics of Liberty, and Murray Newton applied sound logical principles to build up from this first principle, to define every possible ethical law that should be applied to men in a voluntaryist society.

The above does sound scarier than it actually is, and I do suggest you to listen to the audiobook read by Jeff Riggenbach, on youtube.
It's a treat I promise you.