ABSTRACT
In ethics Jasay voices a strong preference for the ideal of the free society, the presumption of liberty, property, and innocence. However, in contrast to libertarians like Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, he provides a legitimating argument in favor of freedom, property, and innocence in terms of logic. Jasay presents a knock-down argument against contractarianism: If contracts would require an enforcer, and according to contractarian theory a "last" enforcer can be created only by a social contract, then that contract too would need an enforcer, and so on ad infinitum. the guiding maxim is that, if politics at all, then make the domain of politics as small as possible; examine ordered anarchy, self-enforcing voluntary social orders. The market is based on individual choice, whereas politics by definition is collective decision. Jasay wishes to eschew value judgments, and thus he tried to base his arguments for liberty solely on descriptive sentences.
