Boundaries of Order Author:Butler Shaffer Boundaries of Order by Butler Shaffer is in that tradition, scholarly yet passionate, and a completely fresh look at a marvelous intellectual apparatus by a mature intellectual who has been writing on law, economics, and history for four decades. It is the treatise on liberty and property for the digital age, one written in the Rothbardian/Hayek... more »ian tradition with a consistently anti-state message but with a unique perspective on how the great struggle between state and society is playing itself out in our times.
Its value added is a vision of the completely free society that is idealistic, practical, and thoroughly optimistic. In a through-composed work that builds from foundations all the way through an inspiring conclusion, he presents a vivid portrait of how human cooperation within a framework of liberty and private property yields results that produce human betterment in every conceivable way. Just as powerfully, however, he shows that right now, even amidst an epoch of despotic state control, we owe all that we love in the course of our daily lives to the institution of liberty.
What's striking is how this is not a book that merely bemoans a bygone era. In fact, Shaffer's view is that the state itself represents a bygone era, ruling with dated ideas over a world that no longer exists. Reality is at once hyper-localized and hyper-internationalized with the two ends of the spectrum connected through digital communication and infinitely complex forms of ownership that never stop yielding unpredictable change.
The nation-state as we know it is constructed to deal with static institutions that are largely mythical, that are not part of our daily lives, and to that extent the state has become an artificial structure governing an artificial reality but with very tangible costs.« less