I recently began reading Murray Rothbard’s For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. If you’re not familiar with Rothbard, a one-sentence description of him might be “the most brilliant and articulate proponent of individual liberty the world has ever seen.” As I read For A New Liberty I am overwhelmed at the amount of wonderful, quotable material regarding libertarianism. Here is my favorite so far:
The libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even nonlibertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription’”; and it lives and has its being in the practices of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.
More to follow.
