Harriet Tubman to appear on U.S. $20 bill

Harriet Tubman From a Libertarian POV - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Nick Gillespie:

April 21, 2016 - "Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) is going to be the new face of the $20 bill. Great choice.... Here are four ways that Tubman isn't just a great choice in general but a great choice from a specifically libertarian perspective.

1. She chose to live free or die and articulated that message for all to understand. 'I had reasoned this out in my mind," she said, recalling the death of her master and the necessity of escape. "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.'
2. She exemplified higher-law theory, which holds that laws violating basic human rights are null and void regardless of the repressive superstructures created to legitimate and maintain them, and risked her life freeing about 70 other slaves as the 'Moses' of the Underground Railroad.... At the same time, she didn't advocate violence in the mode of John Brown, whose goal of ending slavery she shared.
3. She believed in armed self-defense, a radical-enough concept for poor whites, let alone renegade blacks. During her Underground Railroad missions, she carried a pistol both for protection against slave-catchers and, reportedly, to keep ambivalent "passengers" in line. To this day, blacks have a strong and yet routinely overlooked belief in the Second Amendment, leading one historian to argue that 'guns made the Civil Rights movement possible.' The desire of relatively powerless minorities to arm themselves can still be heard in pro-Second Amendment remarks made by rappers such as Ice-T.
4. She was a suffragette who, after helping slaves escape and working as a spy and scout for the Union in the Civil War, committed herself to women being allowed to vote and have equality under the law. According to Wikipedia, when Tubman was asked whether she believed women deserved the vote, she replied, 'I suffered enough to believe it.'

"A year ago, when Tubman's name was first floated as a possible figure for a new $20 bill, a number of anti-capitalist commenters observed that Tubman of all people shouldn't be on money because, by their reckoning, slavery is the essence of capitalism. As Damon Root noted at the time, this is not just ahistorical in the extreme, it flies in the face of the explicit thought of leading former slaves.... [T]he abolitionists were extremely clear that slavery violated fundamental rights in a liberal order, one that shouldn't countenance slavery for exactly the same reason it should promote free labor. As Frederick Douglass, who corresponded with and thought extremely highly of Tubman, wrote in a scathing letter to his former owner, 'In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living.'"

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/21/4-ways-harriet-tubman-totally-kicked-ass
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Why Eric Garner was innocent

Eric Garner: 100% innocent under libertarian law - Ilana Mercer, Return to Reason, World Net Daily:

December 11, 2014 - "Eric Garner was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him. It can be argued, if anything, that Garner was being entrepreneurial. He had been trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s 'slave patrol' and 'Comrade' Andrew Cuomo’s 'Cigarette Strike Force'.... Had Garner’s naturally licit trade not been criminalized by today’s Tammany Hall, he’d be alive today....

"Garner was selling his own cigarettes. The 'law' he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property – 'loosies' – at will.

"In libertarian law, Garner is thus 100 percent innocent, for the good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. When enforcers of the shakedown syndicate came around to bust him, Garner raised his voice, gestured and turned to walk away from his harassers. He did not aggress against or hurt any of the goons.

"To plagiarize myself in 'Tasers ‘R’ Us,' 'Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or policeman] unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, even killed.'

"Again: Garner had obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully. In the same spirit, he turned to walk away from a confrontation. Befitting this pacific pattern, Garner had broken up a street fight prior to his murder....

"The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law – it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, 'What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just'....

"Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law [is] not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law – a system of ethics – knowable through reason, revelation and experience. 'By natural law,' propounded McClellan in Liberty, Order, And Justice, 'we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.'

"Eric Garner was on 'public' property. Had he been trespassing on private property, the proprietor would have been in his right to remove him. However, Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on a street corner and peddling his wares – that is unless the malevolent competition that sicced the cops on him has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t."

Read more: http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/eric-garner-100-innocent-under-libertarian-law/
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The first libertarians: the Levellers

England’s Levellers: The World’s First Libertarian Movement - Epoch Times - Roberta A. Modugno, Ludwig von Mises Institute:

March 27, 2014 - "The first-ever libertarians were the Levellers, an English political movement active in the seventeenth century. The Levellers contributed to the elaboration of the methodological and political paradigm of individualism, and they are at the origin of the radical strand of classical liberalism....

"Rothbard notes that '[i]n a series of notable debates within the Republican Army — notably between the Cromwellians and the Levellers — the Levellers led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, worked out a remarkably consistent libertarian doctrine, upholding the rights of self-ownership, private property, religious freedom for the individual, and minimal government interference in society. The rights of each individual to his person and property, furthermore, were natural, that is, they were derived from the nature of man'....

"Lilburne defended natural law as 'Nature and reason' and 'the grounds of all just laws' and that 'therefore against this Law, prescriptions, statutes, nor customs may not prevail. And if any be brought in against it, they be no prescriptions, statutes nor customs, but things void, and against justice'.

"Overton advocated religious tolerance, even for the much-reviled English Catholics, and also denounced the practice of impressing men into the army and navy as a form of enslavement.

"Moreover, the Levellers advocated property rights and the freedom to contract and trade, as against monopolies and privileges guaranteed by the state. They celebrated the benefits of economic freedom to society and opposed the government taxes, customs, excises, and regulations that inhibited competition." 

Read more: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/586090-englands-levellers-the-worlds-first-libertarian-movement/