Liberty is the right of the individual to invoke sole dominion over their own life to act as they see fit, provided the act in and of itself does not directly infringe on the right of another individual to do the same. —Derek Wills, The Liberty Solution
Voting cannot be a substitute for individual consent, as voting is forced upon all people whether they agree with having a vote in the first place or not. —Jack Lloyd, The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism
People born into families with every advantage of wealth, education, and social position may be able to achieve a high level of productivity without any great struggle that would indicate individual merit. Conversely, people who have had to struggle to overcome many disadvantages, in order to achieve even a modest level of productivity, may show great individual merit. But an economy is not a moral seminar authorized to hand out badges of merit to deserving people. An economy is a mechanism for generating the material wealth on which the standard of living of millions of people depend. Pay is not a retrospective reward for merit but an incentive for contributing to production. —Thomas Sowell
As far back as 1969, academic women who never married earned more than academic men who never married. A study from 2005 showed that among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000. The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differently among jobs and have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. —Thomas Sowell
The intelligencia in the media can decide what to emphasize, what to downplay and what to ignore entirely when it comes to race. These may be individual choices, rather than a conspiracy, but individual choices growing out of a common vision of the world can produce results all too similar to what is produced by centralized censorship or propaganda. —Thomas Sowell
