Quotes relevant
to Libertarianism --critical and not necessarily
critical
“I hold it to be the inalienable right
of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”
―
Robert
Frost
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“libertarianism is good because it helps conservatives pass
off a patently probusiness political agenda as a noble bid for
human freedom. Whatever we may think of libertarianism as a
set of ideas, practically speaking, it is a doctrine that owes
its visibility to the obvious charms it holds for the wealthy
and the powerful. The reason we have so many well-funded
libertarians in American these days is not because
libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grassroots
following, but because it appeals to those who are able to
fund ideas. Like social Darwinism and Christian Science before
it, libertarianism flatters the successful and rationalizes
their core beliefs about the world. They warm to the
libertarian idea that taxation is theft because they
themselves don’t like to pay taxes. They fancy the libertarian
notion that regulation is communist because they themselves
find regulation intrusive and annoying. Libertarianism is a
politics born to be subsidized. In the “free market of ideas,”
it is a sure winner.”
―
Thomas
Frank
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“I have always found it quaint and
rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in
the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
―
Christopher
Hitchens
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" No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the
legislature is in session."
Mark Twain
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"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a
sheep voting on
what to have for dinner.“
James Bovard
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"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
Edward R. Murrow
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"Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must,
like men, undergo
the fatigue of supporting it."
Thomas Paine
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"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of
society. If we’re looking for the sources of our troubles, we
shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for
stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power."
P. J. O’Rourke
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"If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all
respect for the law."
Winston Churchill
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Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles
of its association, and to say to all individuals, that if
they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these
principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to
avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we
want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and
pseudo-citizens, on such terms. We may exclude them from our
territory, as we do persons infected with disease.
Thomas Jefferson
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Private property ... is a Creature of Society, and is
subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its
Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing, its
contributors therefore to the public Exigencies are not to
be considered a Benefit on the Public, entitling the
Contributors to the Distinctions of Honor and Power, but as
the Return of an Obligation previously received, or as
payment for a just Debt.
Benjamin Franklin
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Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of
government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and
however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of
their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite
powers.
John Jay, FEDERALIST No. 2
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All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in
every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the
masters of mankind.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations
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Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause
as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough
rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire.
Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
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Far from advocating a "minimal state", we find it
unquestionable that in an advanced society government ought to
use its power of raising funds by taxation to provide a number
of services which for various reasons cannot be provided or
cannot be provided adequately by the market.
Hayek, "Law, Legislation, and Liberty"
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There isn't much point arguing about the word
"libertarian." It would make about as much sense to argue
with an unreconstructed Stalinist about the word "democracy"
-- recall that they called what they'd constructed "peoples'
democracies." The weird offshoot of ultra-right
individualist anarchism that is called "libertarian" here
happens to amount to advocacy of perhaps the worst kind of
imaginable tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. If
they want to call that "libertarian," fine; after all,
Stalin called his system "democratic." But why bother
arguing about it?
Noam Chomsky
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LAND, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as
property. The theory that land is property subject to
private ownership and control is the foundation of modern
society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.
Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have
the right to prevent others from living; for the right to
own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact
laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is
recognized. It follows that if the whole area of _terra
firma_ is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D,
E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
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To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical
albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the
large-scale corporations which control the world economy is
fetishism at its worst.
Bob Black, The Libertarian As Conservative
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In framing a government which is to be administered by men
over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first
enable the government to control the governed, and in the
next place, oblige it to control itself.
James Madison, FEDERALIST. No. 51
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In Madison's famous formulation in the Federalist,
constitutional restrictions on government assume that we
"first enable the government to control the governed." If
the public authorities can be outgunned or bribed, the
vibrancy of the private sector can be pathological.
Stephen Holmes, "What Russia Teaches Us Now"
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Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the
information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and
he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right,
but give him no news or present him only with distorted and
incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting,
with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy
his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less
than a man.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy
books and by eminent people when they are making speeches,
that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we
are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization
advances by extending the number of important operations
which we can perform without thinking about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one,
take this as a sign that you have neither understood the
theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl Popper
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Once we begin distinguishing the many forms capitalism can
take, analytic utility is lost by retaining talismanic terms
like "free market." There is no national economy in the
world today that is not a mixed economy, which also means
that there is no market that is free, or even "mostly" free.
Rather, markets are structures that are culturally bounded,
always regulated, and genetically dependent on government
intervention for their reproduction. Never are they simply
"permitted."
Jonathan Stein
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What I do think is that our lives and ethics and society
should shed the myths from the past and try to create a
better world for our time. Most of us humanists have done
that relative to religion. I think that economic and
political myths deserve the same scrutiny and subsequent
bashing as does the Bible. I think that free market economic
theory falls into this category of myth. Much as faith
healing, the resurrection, or the second coming does. Many
of the theorems and ultimatums from the theory just do not
stand up in the light of historical or contemporary
analysis.
Walter Laffer
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Oh, for an honest Libertarian who would say "Yes, in
Libertopia we'd have rampant quackery, organ-seizure,
baby-selling, slavery in all but name - BUT THAT'S FREEDOM!"
Seth Finkelstein
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Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants
to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the
textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard
to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all
irrelevant--that all you really need to know are a few
simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for
themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in
which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and
even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep
economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure
turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.
Paul Krugman
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In practice, without appropriate government intervention,
Smith's "invisible hand" dons brass knuckles and conducts
gang warfare, creating fierce battles between competitors
who would be more than happy to define and enforce their own
private property interests according to their own subjective
rules.
Denise Caruso
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The libertarian fantasy is very simple... As a matter of
political theory, it says we reverse the process John Locke
described in The Second Treatise on Government: we dissolve
Civil Society and return to the State of Nature which the
libertarians imagine will be a benign wonderfully free place
without any obligation to and coercion by sovereign political
community.
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst
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In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism --
religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal -- we must grant
first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious
conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is
capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own
ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit;
its prayers are for monopolies.
Carlos Fuentes
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Information technology alone cannot provide us an absolute
shield against its evil twin disinformation technology. Our
only protection is law, and that protection is available to
us only if legitimate governments have the power to govern.
Paul Starr, "Cyberpower And Freedom"
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The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like
character to that embodying modern legal institutions and
instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is
a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the
myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling
government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and
income redistribution.
Douglass North
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You know, getting on the Net has done more to turn me off
Libertarianism than -- well, than anything....
Dan Clore
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Ah, the Horatio Alger fallacy. The notion that everybody
can be the exception. It works as well in capitalism as it
does in lotteries.
Mike Huben
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For every complex problem there is a solution which is
straightforward, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
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The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by
market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream
generated by imagining what the world would be like if
everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract
moral ideal--in this case, economic theories that assume all
human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but
scrupulously law-abiding), greed.
David Rolfe Graeber
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... Hayek had no fondness for laissez-faire. Quite the
contrary. He abhorred the term and the principle, insisting
instead that markets do not come from nature or fall from the
sky. "In no system that could be rationally defended would the
state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs
an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal
framework as much as any other." On this view, markets are
constituted by government and law. They depend for their very
existence on legal rules allocating basic rights and saying
who can do what to whom. And in some places Hayek suggested
that the appropriate legal framework would contain and specify
a great deal. In 1945, he wrote that he has always been "in
favor of a minimum income for every person in the country,"
largely but not only in the form of social insurance. At
various times he suggested that he would accept maximum-hour
laws, laws banning dangerous products, and laws protecting
against unsafe workplace conditions and environmental
deterioration.
Cass Sunstein, reviewing Hayek's "The Road To Serfdom"
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How much freedom I have depends on the number and nature of
my options. And that, in turn, depends both on the rules of
the game and on the assetts of the players: it is a very
important and widely neglected truth that it does not depend
on the rules of the game alone.
G.A. Cohen, "Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality"
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We cannot simply say "Well, individuals have a right to do
anything that does not harm another" because that answer
simply dissolves into another value-laden debate about what
counts as "a harm" in the first place.
James Boyle
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... liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as
well as by the abuses of power...
James Madison, The Federalist, no. 63
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