20 quotes
Libertarians support free trade, but it doesn’t take the five hundred plus pages of the NAFTA agreement to say ‘no more restrictions between us.’
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
When tariffs are eliminated, consumers pay less for foreign goods. They therefore have more money to spend on other things. Their spending creates more new jobs than those that are lost.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Government is, in essence, the privileged class dominating the disadvantage. The Big Lie is that government is the friend of the poor and the foe of the well-to-do.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Actually, libertarianism assumes people will look after their own selfish interests. Because interaction is voluntary in a libertarian society, people can only cater to their own selfish interests by paying attention to what others want.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
In a libertarian society, aggressors would be required to compensate their victims and pay for costs of their trial and apprehension. Studies show that such restitution is one of the most effective deterrents known.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
By the late 1970s, armed citizens were killing more criminals in self-defense than the police. Many more would-be attackers and robbers are deterred from their crime when their intended victim simply brandishes a firearm.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Our greatest polluter is the government (i.e., U.S. military), not corporate America. Putting government in charge of protecting the environment is like asking the fox to guard the hen house.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
An armed society is a polite society, and the not-so-wild West was rather peaceful, in spite of Hollywood’s violent portrayal. As a legacy, in the rural West where every household still has firearms, crime is less than in eastern cities.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
As for charitable giving, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the high level of generosity he observed during his travels in the early days of the United States. People who are free and prosperous are more likely to share with those who have less.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Libertarian societies also create immense wealth primarily because the poor are not excluded from the labor market. Studies show that the closer a country is to the libertarian ideal, the more even is its distribution of wealth.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Libertarians don’t want to do away with force, just ‘first-strike’ force. If neither of us strike first, no fight is possible. If you are behaving peacefully, and I assault, defraud, or steal from you, then defensive force is permissible in a libertarian society.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
In a libertarian society, big business wouldn’t be so big, since they couldn’t destroy their competition through government regulation. Without government control of the airways, more radio and television stations would be available and could not be shut down on political whim.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Libertarians are the ultimate decentralists: libertarians want to take government from the nation, state, and community down to the level of the individual. The closer to this ideal that we come, the more libertarian our society should be.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Libertarians believe that no one should be forced to support another. If a woman has chosen to gift a fetus with life, it does not necessarily follow that she is obligated to continue to support it with her body, especially if that support threatens the woman’s life. A woman’s body is her property, to do with as she wishes.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Of course, in a libertarian society, laws discriminating against gay people would not exist. For instance, same-sex couples find themselves facing the same laws against intermarriage as blacks and whites once did. In a libertarian society, marriage would be a private contract between two willing individuals who could set the terms to suit themselves.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Most non-Western governments make it difficult to get clear land titles. Approximately 60-80% of such property is ‘extralegal,’ making it difficult to borrow against or transfer. As a result, while the poor in these countries ‘hold’ a great deal of land, they cannot easily use its full potential.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
One way to eliminate the Federal Communications Commission would be to auction off all of the frequencies and allow them to be bought and sold like other property. Trespass by other stations would be handled just like trespass on land. Bandwidths useful for new applications could be ‘homesteaded’ just as land once was.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
A free-market is the only way to control corporations! As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government!
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
When courts found the military liable for illness and death after careless nuclear testing in Utah, the government claimed sovereign immunity and refused to pay damages. In a libertarian society, no one would be immune from the consequences of their actions, especially not a government charged with protecting us.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)
Most economists believe that the Great Depression was primarily a result of the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the national currency. Had the government not interfered with the banking industry by giving the Fed a monopoly on money, the Depression might have never occurred. Too much government, not too little, was the culprit.
Short Answers to the Tough Questions: How to Answer the Questions Libertarians Are Often Asked (2012)