Quotations Popular With Libertarian Evangelists p2

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This article is from the Libertarian FAQ, by Joe Dehn jwd3@dehnbase.fidonet.org, Robert Bickford rab.AT.daft.com, Mike Huben mhuben@world.std.com and Advocates for Self-Government http://www.self-gov.org/ with numerous contributions by others.

44 Quotations Popular With Libertarian Evangelists p2

Alexander Fraser Tyler

* "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can
only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves
money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the
Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over
loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." From: "The
Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic".

I wasn't aware that there was any "permanant form of government".
However, we could make a pretty good case that voters in the US have
always known that they could vote themselves benefits from the Public
Treasury. Indeed, it's been done pretty often. Yet we've lasted 200+
years.

Unlike the Athenian Republic, in the USA the money in the Public
Treasury comes directly from the pockets of the majority, the middle
class. This might be the most significant deterrent to loose fiscal
policy.

Ayn Rand

* "I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters."

Did Ayn Rand pay her taxes out of friendship then? That's a new one on
me.

Andre Marrou

* "Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want
government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an
adult."

Libertarians want to kill mommy and daddy so that they can stay up
later and buy more ice cream than they can now.

Bumper sticker analogies are as poor a method of understanding
libertarianism (let alone anything else) as science fiction. Too bad so
many libertarians make such heavy use of those methods.

James A. Donald

* "We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the
kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from
the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state."

The two red-alert-for-a-whopper phrases in this quote are: "the kind of
animals that we are" and "true law".

People who compare us to animals usually know little about animals and
less about people. If we look to animals for models we can find all
sorts of unacceptable (and conflicting) behaviors which are entirely
natural. Characterizations of humans as animals for most philosophical
purposes have historically ignored sociological, anthropological, and
sociobiological knowledge in favor of conveniently parochial
observations.

There is no "true law". Innumerable political and religious sects might
claim it, but I'd think that if there was such a thing, people could
recognize it and agree on it.

Quotations Popular With Libertarian Evangelists p3

Description

This article is from the Libertarian FAQ, by Joe Dehn jwd3@dehnbase.fidonet.org, Robert Bickford rab.AT.daft.com, Mike Huben mhuben@world.std.com and Advocates for Self-Government http://www.self-gov.org/ with numerous contributions by others.

45 Quotations Popular With Libertarian Evangelists p3

Unattributed

* "Mob rule isn't any prettier merely because the mob calls itself a
government."

Corporate feudalism isn't any prettier merely because the corporations
prattle about free markets. Strawmen are SO easy to create.

The presumption that the US government is the equivalent of mob rule is
ludicrous. The assertion that libertarian anarchy would be better is
unsupported by real examples. (Libertarian minarchy doesn't change the
form of government from "mob rule".)

* "It ain't charity if you are using someone else's money."

Almost all charitable organizations use other people's money. Their
real point is that the money used for government social programs is
"coerced" (libertarian newspeak for taxes.) What they overlook is that,
in many philosophical and religious systems (including Judaism and
Islam), charity isn't a virtue of the giver: charity is the relief of
the receiver.

* "Utopia is not an option."

This is the libertarian newspeak formula for overlooking problems with
their ideas. Much like "Trust in Jesus". Used the way it commonly is,
it means "libertarianism might do worse here: I don't want to make a
comparison lest we lose."

It is also another motherhood and apple pie issue; it applies to EVERY
political theory. The question is what provisions are made for coping
with necessary imperfections; libertarians tend to assume "the same as
today but better", without any experience of what their proposed
changes actually will do.

According to Perry Metzger, who claims to have popularized the phrase,
the correct usage is "you *have* to make a comparison of libertarianism
against the existing system rather than against your ideals of what
you'd like your system to do." However, since there is no real example
of libertarianism, that would be comparing the real current system
against an ideal libertarian system. That's hardly a fair or valid
comparison.

There is one valid way of using this phrase: to indicate that
perfection is not a possible result. That is a rare usage.

* "Democracy is like three wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for
lunch."

We are not a simple democracy: we are a representative democratic
republic: there are not direct elections of laws and there is a
constitution that limits what laws can be enacted. Extend the analogy
to take that into account and lo and behold, it becomes: "deciding what
to have for lunch that is not meat."

Now, if you were making the analogy about anarcho-capitalism, it would
become "three wolves competing to be first to 'add value' to the sheep
by slaughtering it and sell it to the others."

This is really a classic libertarian strawman, used by many flavors of
anarchists for centuries. The authors of the US Constitution were well
aware of this: they devoted a segment of the Federalist papers to it:
"... it may be concluded that a pure democracy... can admit of no cure
for the mischiefs of faction... A republic, by which I mean a
government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a
different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking."
Federalist No. 10, James Madison.

Non-Libertarian FAQ: Libertarian Philosophy

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This article is from the Libertarian FAQ, by Joe Dehn jwd3@dehnbase.fidonet.org, Robert Bickford rab.AT.daft.com, Mike Huben mhuben@world.std.com and Advocates for Self-Government http://www.self-gov.org/ with numerous contributions by others.

46 Non-Libertarian FAQ: Libertarian Philosophy

Libertarianism does have a lot of philosophical literature which is much
more sophisticated than the evangelistic and bumper sticker arguments
critiqued above. However, much of it can be critiqued as fundamentally
flawed. James K. Galbraith, criticizing many economists, might well have
been criticizing libertarians when he wrote (in a letter in Slate, Nov. 5,
1996):

I don't accept that much of use can be learned about policy in
this way [well-structured deduction from metaphysical first
principles.] When the world deviates from the principles, as it
usually does, the simple lessons go astray. This is not a
complaint against math. It is a complaint against indiscriminate
application of the deductive method, sometimes called the
Ricardian vice, to problems of human action. Mine is an old gripe
against much of what professional economists do; not against
science but against scientism, against the pretense of science. To
combat it, I spend my research time wrestling with real-world
data, and I spend much of my writing time warring against the
policy ideas of aggressive, ahistorical deductivists.

A thorough discussion of problems of libertarian philosophy would be well
beyond the scope of this FAQ, though an overview might one day be developed.
In the mean time, a few sources are available at the "Critiques of
Libertarianism" site ( http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html ), and
still better are a number of the excellent critical references listed below.