Obligations may be universal or particular.

Young people today are being robbed. Of their rights. Of their freedom. Of their dignity. Of their futures. The culprits? My generation and our predecessors, who either created or failed to stop the world straddling engine of theft, degradation, manipulation, and social control we call the welfare state.

Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others.

Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated.

It is obvious that different individuals require different things to live good, healthy, and virtuous lives.

Guardians are necessary for children and abnormal adults, because they cannot make responsible choices for themselves.

Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded.

It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing.

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung.

To repeat, communitarians maintain that we are constituted as persons by our particular obligations, and therefore those obligations cannot be a matter of choice.

Group personification obscures, rather than illuminates, important political questions.