A Few Reasons to Be Cautiously Optimistic About the Prospects for Liberty

Individual liberty is not a new concept, but its ultimate development in the form of the vision of a voluntary society is quite recent. The same can be said about the consistent application of the economic way of thinking to the question of the production of law and order, which provides a powerful intellectual foundation for the vision in question. And the same can most certainly be said about the modern information technology, which allows for disseminating this vision and familiarizing others with its intellectual foundations on a global scale. When so many favourable factors coincide, it is not unreasonable to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for a major but peaceful transformation of society in the direction of a far more civilized and prosperous coexistence, based on the principles of voluntariness, contractuality, competitive diversity, and bottom-up mutual aid. The road ahead may still be long, but the pace of progress in the dissemination of the relevant ideas is nonetheless encouraging.