<blockquote>"...Rothbard grounded his political ethics on the principle of self-ownership: each person rightfully owns his or her own body. Few libertarians would dissent; but few, if any, have seen the implications of this principle so clearly as Rothbard.
To many libertarians, freedom of contract is the be-all and end-all. As Rothbard notes, unlimited freedom of contract, far from being a consequence of self-ownership, in fact contradicts it. Given self-ownership, and acquisition of property through "mixing one's labor" with unowned property, of course, one may enter freely into all sorts of agreements with others.
<blockquote>"Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make contracts, hold the contract itself to be an absolute, and therefore maintain that any voluntary contract whatever must be legally enforceable in the free society. Their error is a failure to realize that the right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property, and therefore that the only enforceable contracts … should be those where the failure of one party to abide by the contract implies the theft of property from the other party. (
p. 133)"</blockquote>
You cannot then, sell yourself into slavery. You can voluntarily submit to the will of another; but, should you change your mind, no legal force can compel you to obey another's bidding. Why not? Contract, to reiterate, does not stand as an absolute: only what fits together with self-ownership can be enforced. You can only give away your property, not yourself.
...
To our imagined objector, Rothbard would demur. He does indeed derive an ought from an is, but he denies that he is guilty of fallacy. Instead, he maintains that ethical principles follow from the nature of man. Because man has free will, it does indeed follow that he ought not to be coerced by others, unless of course he initiates violence: then, Rothbard holds, one may respond with all necessary force.
Is Rothbard right? If he is, he has overthrown the dominant way of doing moral philosophy today. In making his case, Rothbard displays his remarkable scholarly ability to extract just what he needs from a vast array of sources. The works of little-known Aristotelian philosophers, such as John Wild and John Toohey, SJ, figure to great effect as Rothbard builds his argument."
- David Gordon,
Private Property's Philosopher, 9/25/2009</blockquote>