We Need More "Thou Shalt Nots"

Those things which people -- no matter how combined or labeled -- "shalt not" do to others provide spheres of liberty around each of us which expand until they meet, forming walls which, like Frost's stone fence, are mutually maintained and let us be good neighbors.

Some authors and teachers who have helped me develop this view:

The books and columns of Judith Martin ("Miss Manners") gave me examples of how individuals assert these boundaries and lubricate their society without coercion.

Likewise, Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" suggested that a principled society could hold even the state, like other bullies and moochers, to standards of neighborly conduct.

Lately A.J. Nock's essays have impressed me with the moral urgency and feasibility of replacing force with civilization.

Rose W. Lane has pointed to the obvious nature of our species: we are as likely to transcend individuality and property as clams are to abolish their shells.

I am finally developing confidence in confidence in secular, empirical bases for liberty. In George Borts's Economics class I approached his utilitarian case for free markets skeptically, but could find no flaw in it.

A sociology course has reversed my fear of the word "society" by letting me define it as the rules and relations that exist during voluntary and conditional interpersonal contact, instead of as some kind of transcendent mythical organism or matrix which feeds, shelters and enslaves individuals, taking all blame and credit. To study society is to discuss how Frost's neighbors maintain these fences.