Shepard Humphries, a.k.a. “Shepard the Voluntaryist” (one of my new Wyoming neighbors) has a new book out: The Consent Principle: The Moral Line Between Freedom and Force (2026), available on Kindle and in paperback.

The book’s thesis is simple: any human interaction can be judged by one question. Was there genuine, voluntary agreement? Humphries applies that test to laws, institutions, and relationships, and he applies it consistently, with no carve-outs for the reader’s favorite causes. Along the way he covers the nonaggression principle, self-ownership, political authority, “manufactured consent,” spontaneous order, and voluntary alternatives to the state. He builds the argument on what he calls his REELS framework (Reason, Empirical Evidence, Logic, and Scientific Methodology), and he writes for general readers, not just the already converted.

A few lines give the flavor:

“No institution can possess rights that individuals do not possess.”

“Need, however urgent, does not generate a right to someone else’s property.”

“A right that requires the compelled labor of others is not a right. It is a claim.”

“The hallmark of a civilized creature is the transition from the crude reign of force to the luminous realm of consent.”

Consent is the right thing to focus on. Aggression just is the use of someone’s body or property without his consent, and consent is what turns an otherwise invasive act into a legitimate one: a trade, a handshake, a surgery.¹ The radical libertarian tradition has long pressed this to its logical conclusion: if legitimate authority requires consent, then the state, which never obtained it, has none.² Humphries’s book is a fresh, accessible statement of that case. Fittingly, he also maintains Stoic Voluntaryist, a mirror of Watner’s voluntaryist writings.

It belongs on the shelf next to other accessible introductions to the case for a stateless society—see reading lists linked below. (I’m also working on a new curated list of introductory and other classic libertarian treatises, and will post it when it’s ready.)

For more on the book, see Mark Maresca’s interview with Humphries on The White Pillbox (May 22, 2026). Pick up a copy, and if you like it, leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Books from independent authors live or die by their reviews.

Related

• Anthony de Jasay, Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1991) (a rigorous restatement of classical liberalism grounded in individual choice and voluntary agreement, with strict conditions on when government may override people’s voluntary choices; a more academic treatment of the theme of Humphries’s book)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Anarcho-Capitalism: An Annotated Bibliography,” LewRockwell.com (Dec. 31, 2001) (Hoppe’s annotated guide to the core literature of anarcho-capitalism; the natural next step for readers who want to go beyond an introduction like Humphries’s)
• Kinsella, “Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 1, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 85–93, reprinted as ch. 20 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023) (my review of de Jasay’s later collection on government, anarchy, and order, for readers who want more of de Jasay after Choice, Contract, Consent)
• Idem, “Top Ten Books of Liberty,” Mises Blog (Aug. 3, 2006) (my response to Liberty magazine’s list of the ten best libertarian books, faulting some of its picks and noting the absence of Rothbard and Hoppe)
• Idem, “Other Top Ten Lists of Libertarian Books,” Mises Blog (Aug. 7, 2006) (proposes fresher categories for book lists than “the usual suspects”: neglected titles, books by non-libertarians, histories, fiction, pre-twentieth-century precursors, and works not originally in English)
• Idem, “The Greatest Libertarian Books,” LewRockwell.com (Aug. 7, 2006) (my own picks, led by Hoppe, Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Bastiat, the Tannehills, and Spooner, with honorable mentions and fiction; the online version adds updated suggestions, including de Jasay’s Choice, Contract, Consent among the older works, and links to other libertarian bibliographies)
• Idem, “Attention Minarchists: Mind Your Manners (2008),” StephanKinsella.com (Aug. 2, 2026) (an unfinished 2008 piece addressed to limited-government libertarians; its recommended-reading section includes Hoppe’s bibliography above)
• Idem, “The Relation Between the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights: A Response to Division by Zer0,” Mises Blog (Oct. 4, 2011) (argues that the nonaggression principle presupposes a theory of property rights, with aggression understood as using another’s body or property without his consent; the theoretical backdrop for Humphries’s focus on consent)
• Idem, “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?” (NYC LibertyFest, Oct. 11, 2014), revised as ch. 25 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023) (a retrospective on the modern libertarian movement that traces the books that shaped it, from Rand, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard through the Tannehills, David Friedman, Nozick, and Barnett, to Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed)
• Idem, “Foreword to A Spontaneous Order,” StephanKinsella.com (June 22, 2015), foreword to Chase Rachels, A Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Stateless Society (2015) (surveys the libertarian literature, from Rand, Paterson, and Lane through Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, to more recent books, and places Rachels’s introduction to anarcho-capitalism in that tradition, where Humphries’s book also belongs)
• Idem, “Michael Malice’s The Anarchist Handbook: Supplemental Readings,” StephanKinsella.com (May 20, 2021) (supplemental readings for Malice’s anthology of anarchist writings, featuring my favorites such as Molinari, Rothbard, and Hoppe; an update notes that Keith Knight’s The Voluntaryist Handbook collects many of them)

1. See Kinsella, “The Relation Between the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights: A Response to Division by Zer0,” Mises Blog (Oct. 4, 2011).
2. See Carl Watner, “‘Oh, Ye Are For Anarchy!’: Consent Theory in the Radical Libertarian Tradition,” Journal of Libertarian Studies (1986).

Ira Katz, “Hierarchy, Oligarchy, and Democracy,” IK’s Substack (Nov. 6, 2026), reprinted at LewRockwell.com (Nov. 10, 2026):

Everyone lives within hierarchies. They are natural and necessary. This is obvious in our daily working lives. This short video is good at explaining hierarchies in organizational structure, Are Hierarchies Evil? | Jacob Morgan. Thinking way back in my life, I recall playing time on the high school baseball team as my first overt hierarchical experience. I am amazed that as a young 24 year-old engineer I had the foresight to keep a copy of the organization chart of Y-12 ENGINEERING BOMB SEARCH COORDINATORS shown below and the insight that this would be the highpoint of my organizational life. My managers did not even know what the bomb search coordinator was supposed to do. I might have been the only person to investigate the library of notebooks with procedures to find the page that explained that I, and my team, where to stay in the building to look for the bomb after an alarm was sounded. I did exhibit my leadership potential in the unprecedented practice of holding an occasional meeting where we ate the best donuts I could find.

The title of this organization chart is “Y-12 ENGINEERING BOMB SEARCH COORDINATORS.” The highlighted box reads, “I. M. Katz COORDINATOR 9733-1,” where 9733-1 is the building number and my room and phone number are below.

I have written about the Constructal Theory of Adrian Bejan through the review of his book (see Bejan in Panic Reading) Freedom and Evolution: Hierarchy in Nature, Society and Science. He states from a physical basis that, “Inequality is an alternative description of the nonuniform hierarchical distribution of movement on earth. This alternative is common when it refers to two equivalent measures of movement, namely, fuel use and wealth. Inequality has a negative connotation implying lack of justice, empathy, and access to wealth. This implication is in total contradiction with the natural origin of hierarchy, which is freedom of movement. The origin of hierarchy lies in the equal access that freedom provides to the whole, to morph its flow architecture, and to liberate its flows.”

Read more>>

Related

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “A Realistic Libertarianism,” LewRockwell.com (Sept. 30, 2014), reprinted in Hoppe, Getting Libertarianism Right (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2018); see also “PFP128 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Realistic Libertarianism as Right-Libertarianism (PFS 2014)” (libertarianism has to rest on a realistic view of people: inequalities of talent and the hierarchies they produce are natural and not unjust, which is why libertarians belong with the right rather than the egalitarian left)
• Stephan Kinsella, “Classic Hoppe on the Realistic Right vs. the Egalitarian Left,” PFS Blog (June 9, 2026) (libertarians have more in common with the right, which accepts natural human inequality, than with the left, which uses the state to fight it)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State,” Mises Daily (July 21, 2006) (every society has natural elites who earn authority voluntarily and once served as judges and peacemakers; the state, and democracy above all, displaced them with politicians and court intellectuals, which explains why the “wrong people” rise to the top)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001) (democratic rulers are temporary caretakers rather than owners of the state, and open entry into government rewards demagogues: an institutional explanation of the problem Katz borrows from Hayek)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy: A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2014) (a short history of how voluntarily recognized natural aristocracies were turned first into monopoly monarchies and then into democracies, each step worse than the one before)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Political Economy of Monarchy and Democracy, and the Idea of a Natural Order,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 11, no. 2 (1995) (whether rulers own government privately or merely hold it in trust for the public determines how much they exploit their subjects; this answers Katz’s question of why some oligarchies “care” more than others, and points to a stateless natural order as the real alternative)
• Doug French, “The Trouble with Democracy: Maslow Meets Hoppe,” in Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2009), ch. 24 (applies Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: democratic politics draws status-seekers, in contrast to Hoppe’s natural elites)

Ron Paul on the GOP’s midterm wipeout: voters noticed the broken promises on Iran, and the party won’t recover until it purges its neocons. From Ron Paul, “Will Republicans Learn Their Lesson from the ‘Disastrous’ Midterms?” LewRockwell.com (Nov. 10, 2026; originally published by the Ron Paul Institute, Nov. 9, 2026):

Politicians break campaign promises with hardly any hesitation and usually they get away with it. Americans have come to put up with broken promises for so long, they hardly even seem to notice. Last week, however, voters noticed. They showed the Republican party just how angry they were over President Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and how angry they were with Congress for abandoning its Constitutional authority over matters of war and peace.

The results were dramatic. Voters even turned Texas blue, as Democrats took firm control of both the House and Senate. …

… The pain will continue until the Party finally rids itself of the neocons and warmongers and returns to its roots as exemplified in the past by the late Sen. Robert Taft and in the present by Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Kent, Tucker Carlson, and many others who genuinely care about peace and liberty.

Read more>>

Related

• “45 Illinois Counties and Counting: Downstate Votes to Explore Secession” (Nov. 6, 2026)
• Tom DiLorenzo, “Did Trump Just Admit Failure for the First Time in His Life?” (Nov. 5, 2026)
• “Pozeram, The Wreck” (Nov. 5, 2026)
• John Leask, “Midterm Elections in America, Then and Now” (Nov. 4, 2026)
• “Raico, ‘The Case for an America First Foreign Policy’” (Oct. 28, 2026)
• Saifedean Ammous, “Escalating from Suez to Waterloo: Trump’s Three-Card-Monte Takes on the Chess Grandmasters” (Mar. 29, 2026)