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Quotes from The Libertarian as Conservative — Bob Black

born 1951 United States

← All quotes by Bob Black

13 quotes

A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

You can’t treat values like workers, hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure can’t be compartmentalized.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

To my mind a right-wing anarchist is just a minarchist who’d abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

But freedom means more than the right to change masters.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

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.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

Those on the receiving end of coercion don’t quibble over their coercers’ credentials.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

A glance at the world confirms that their utopian capitalism just can’t compete with the state. With enemies like libertarians, the state doesn’t need friends.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

They’ve been mystified by their own metaphors. Like the market, the state is an activity, not an entity.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

The libertarian phobia as to the state reflects and reproduces a profound misunderstanding of the operative forces which make for social control in the modern world. If — and this is a big “if,” especially where bourgeois libertarians are concerned — what you want is to maximize individual autonomy, then it is quite clear that the state is the least of the phenomena which stand in your way.

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Bob Black (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.