Anticipating Spencer's Law of Equal Freedom, Warren asserts that recognizing individual sovereignty will bring "the greatest practicable amount of liberty to each individual." Practically, this often means simply avoiding "combinations" when at all possible, and carefully delimiting the power of associations when it is expedient or necessary to combine.

As an example of a permissible combination, Warren supposes that twenty people may see a need to build a bridge. There will be costs, and leadership is necessary. Warren suggests that the participants should be allowed to opt out with their portion of the costs returned to them, or that each person voluntarily but permanently invest a specific amount with the full understanding of the risk. Since the investment is a certain specified amount, only property is surrendered, not liberty. As each person's cost is definite and limited, even if it is ultimately lost it does not affect his security. "If each one is himself the supreme judge at all times of the individual case in hand, and is free to act from his own individual estimate of the advantages to be derived to himself or others, as in the above instance, then the natural liberty of the individual is not invaded."

Warren's Economics

After asking why so many people are poor, despite "the enormous advantages of division and exchange," he comes to an erroneous answer. Warren believes that virtually all economic problems stem from selling products for more than their cost. He expresses this economic principle as "Cost the Limit of Price," and bases it on a normative version of the Labor Theory of Value. Thus, Warren can justifiably be considered the father of socialist economics. (Not the father of socialism, since Robert Owen was already espousing non-economic arguments for the ideology.)

While Warren was sophisticated enough to worry about equalizing supply and demand, he somehow expected people to engage in occupations and produce amounts of goods and services without what Friedrich Hayek would later refer to as the information function of price. While modern economists would find Warren's economics naive, to say the least, one must realize that he lived before the marginalist revolution, and even Adam Smith and David Ricardo fell for the Labor Theory of Value. At any rate, Warren's facile economics need not detract from his political theories. No doubt to Warren the economic and political theories were complementary, but with our 20-20 hindsight we can separate them.