"My contacts with
Libertarians always leave me with a certain amount of
contempt for their
philosophies, which all seem to rely on the
assumption that, if you can
string together enough
vague and
high-sounding rhetoric, you can
ignore both (1) all of
human history and (2) what everyone else on
earth now wants." -
Anonymous
"To say that governments are evil is on a par with saying that humans are evil. To claim that it is a necessary evil is on a par with saying that cars are a necessary evil. What we are really talking about are subjective preferences which may or may not be satisfied, not some theological notion of right and wrong. The inescapable evils of coercive behavior are not unique to government. Our government is where we choose to channel and regulate them, because the alternative (private, unregulated coercion) gives much worse results, as the history of privately owned states (monarchies, dictatorships, despotisms) and private "law" such as slavery, mafias, warlords, etc. show rather clearly. We have constructed a government that is jointly owned by all, because private ownership gives too much incentive for profit through coercion of others." - Mike Huben
"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
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - H. L. Mencken
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." - Adam Smith
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - James K. Galbraith