The following was written by Charter Team member Ajibola Adigun.

Liberty, like nationalism, is everyone’s excuse and reason; the tyrant’s as well as the patriot’s. When the query of why liberty was answered in twelve essays by eleven people in a 141 page book, it seemed like a belated effort in publishing a libertarian handbook for dummies. But unlike most handbooks for dummies, the book presented topics like, ‘The Political Principle of Liberty,’ ‘The Tangled Dynamics of State Interventionism’ and ‘The History and Structure of Libertarian Thought’ in simple terms that even a freshman can understand while answering the call of nature.

So why liberty ?

‘Why not’  was how the essayists answered the probe. The authors explored various subjects from a variety of lenses. One of the essayists, John Stossel , did not pretend to know as much as an attorney knows about law or about the universality of liberty as he portrayed in his interview of another essayist, Alexander McCobin. Instead, he argues why there ought not to be law.

Alexander McCobin’s response in the Fox interview was as succinct as his essay: liberty is a universal concept. He throws behind himself and his arguments philosophical justifications from Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utility; Robert Nozick’s principle of autonomy; Locke’s natural rights; Randian rational pursuit of happiness, and some more, like the philosophy teacher that he is. He makes abstract concepts real with his diverse, simple presentation of them. He is humble enough to justify liberty by Fredrick Hayek’s teachings on the pretense of knowledge.

After so much as been written and bantered about the structure and justifications of liberty in history (libertarianism  as abolitionism), in politics (libertarianism as radical centrism) and some philosophy, the reader gets a breather with the discussion of art as sine qua non to liberty. Sarah Skwire, the author of Writing with a Thesis, argues that not only is freedom essential for art, but that art in fact paves the way for freedom. If Ovid’s exile from Rome for his poem is too far away in classical history, think the imprisonment of Pussy Riot in Russia or times in history where pens and poems have been taken to gun fights. The conditions of artists show the health of a nation.

While music may be food to the soul, we all still must have a healthy body for it. But the state makes Sloane Frost sick with its immiserating interventions in health care. And she did not mention the Affordable Care Act, which readily comes to mind, in her essay. She provides examples of the ‘incoherent and irrational outcomes’ that are the result of state interventions in health care decisions. Her illustration of college students as the victims of these interventions is prescient; college students being among the first victims of Obamacare.

When reading Why Liberty, one is forced, if just for one’s vanity, to claim that they too are libertarian, especially with the arguments of the editor that being libertarian is being civil. Reading these essays makes one ponder, why not ?