Re : 3/22/2012 7:39:42 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected])
" Houston, we have a problem." First, you are always free to circulate other quotes for consideration of the group. Second, who constitutes "the group" ? There are the regulars, about ten+ of us who chime in most days or, anyway, every now and then. But then there are the others, and my private mailing list and the mailing lists of anyone here who has one. Which is to say that comments about Libertarianism that I make, or articles that I may circulate every so often, always --rare exceptions-- are intended for the whole shooting match, our 25 or so lurkers, and some are quite important, the ten or twelve regulars, and the people who I e-mail stuff to privately. Sometimes just 2 or 3 people, sometimes 20 or 30. Its not just about you personally, in fact, more often than not, if it was possible, it is not about you at all. As Ernie once said, waaaay back in 2004 or 2005, you are sort of a "virtuous Pagan" by Radical Centrist standards. As well, as a person, not exactly a secret, I think well of you and enjoy our exchanges both in the group and privately. For all our differences we also have a good deal in common. And, some day, I look forward to having a few beers with you to talk about a subject dear to both of us, top level college football. But in a way its like a hypothetical game between Illinois and the Aggies. No disrespect whatsoever for A & M, which I think very highly of, but make no mistake about it, I'd want Illinois to win and the higher the score the better. As a True Believer Radical Centrist my opinion of other kinds of political outlooks is similar. And as things now are in the real world, the main competition for any allegiance that RC may one day have for the hearts and minds of Independents consists of Libertarians and Libertarianism. I fully intend to poke holes in Libertarianism as much as possible. The more holes I poke into Libertarianism the better. Its a war to the death between RC and Libertarianism is how I look at it. Billy ==================================================== OK, so I guess that I will have to leave Libertarianism and be a shithead. That's enough pounding on my head-I'm going to quit giving a shit. HAPPY NOW??? David _ "I am so Libertarian that I don't think lawyers and doctors should be licensed by the government. I am so Libertarian that I make some Libertarians cringe."--Neal Boortz On 3/19/2012 10:39 PM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: 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_ (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7715.Robert_Frost) -------------------------------------------------------- "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_ (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30845.Thomas_Frank) ------------------------------------------------------------------- "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_ (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3956.Christopher_Hitchens) --------------------------------------------------------- "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -- _George Orwell_ (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3706.George_Orwell) , _A Life in Letters_ (http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/9174091) ------------------------------------------------------ " No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." Mark Twain ----------------------------------------------------- "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." James Bovard ---------------------------------------------------------------- "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." Edward R. Murrow ------------------------------------------------------------ "Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." Thomas Paine --------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------- "If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law." Winston Churchill -------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- 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" ----------------------------------------------------------- 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" ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------------ 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 -------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------- 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 --------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------- 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 --------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------- 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" ------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- You know, getting on the Net has done more to turn me off Libertarianism than -- well, than anything.... Dan Clore ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- For every complex problem there is a solution which is straightforward, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken ---------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------ ... 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" -------------------------------------------------------------- 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" --------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------- ... liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power... James Madison, The Federalist, no. 63 -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
