Joe Haldeman
Tools of the Trade
Quoted here
N.B., I have no idea whether
Haldeman-san
would describe himself as a Libertarian.
But I think the quote fits.
American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed.
Everyone wants freedom, and there is always a need for a party which pushes toward the maximum individual liberty and the minimum of governmental restriction. But of course the problem is that my freedom may infringe upon yours. As far as I'm concerned, government is that agent of society whose role is to balance (as a "final authority") competing claims for freedom.
"In thinking about the "Libertarian Premise" and the various versions of it in existence, it occurred to me that perhaps we can profit from a statement of its opposite: what I'll call the "Statist Premise". I realize that this idea almost surely isn't original with me, but since I haven't heard it yet, here goes:A page on this site on / Statism /
The Statist Premise "You don't own your life, the State does, and it may regulate or limit any area of it, and may even terminate it, if necessary. Period." "
"... these "libertarians" are against the State only in so far as it sometimes gets in the way of their being able to exploit the poor more thoroughly. They want to roll back the Welfare State, but their opposition to the State doesn't extend to dismantling the Army, Police, or to challenging the concept of government itself. These people would more correctly be called free-marketeers and laissez-faire capitalists."
"The famed "Bill of No Rights" was written in 1993 by Lewis Napper, a self-described amateur philosopher and Libertarian from Mississippi. Napper is running for the Senate in 2000 as a Libertarian."
"A liberal, in the current sense of the term, is a person who favors a massive welfare state, expansive and intrusive government, high taxation, preferential allocation of social goods to designated “victim” groups, and deference to international bureaucracies in matters of foreign policy.
It is not difficult to see why such a person would favor lax policies towards both legal and illegal immigration. Immigration, legal or otherwise, concerns the crossing of borders, and a liberal regards borders, along with all other manifestations of the nation-state, with distaste. ... The preferences a citizen might have for his own countrymen over foreigners, for his own language over other tongues, for his own traditions and folkways over imported ones, are all, in the minds of a modern liberal, manifestations of ugly, primitive, and outdated notions -- nativism, xenophobia, racism. The liberal proudly declares himself a citizen of the world, and looks with scorn and contempt on those narrow souls who limit their citizenly affections to just one nation.
And in the realities of the world today, immigrants to the USA are mostly people of color, who can be recruited into those cohorts of designated “victims” that form such a key legion in the modern liberal alliance. ... Any expression of unhappiness with mass illegal immigration can therefore easily be construed as racism, the most shameful of all sins in the liberal lexicon -- a form of mental illness, according to some.
Further, modern liberals have come to an understanding with capitalism. The modern liberal is not a socialist. He understands perfectly well that common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange is a total no-hoper. The lavish government programs he favors need to be financed, and socialism is not capable of financing them .... Only a thriving capitalism can fund all the programs, all the departments, all the bureaucrats that modern liberalism wants.
How, then, can capitalism thrive in such a way as to necessitate a huge welfare establishment? Simple: privatize profits, socialize costs.
Private profit is of course the essence of capitalism; but how to socialize costs? The cost of your labor force is their remuneration, which ought to be sufficient to allow them to pay for their housing, health care, children’s education, and so on. To the degree that your workers’ remuneration is not sufficient for those things, you are throwing your workers on the mercy of the welfare state -- socializing your costs. Thus, in an odd historical reversal, liberals are keen on a capitalism that pays the lowest possible wages. To its everlasting shame, the labor movement, dominated nowadays by public-sector and welfare-state unions, is similarly inclined. The political Left is now the party of low wages kept down by endless mass immigration."
"PeaceWORKS: Dr. Chomsky, why do you call yourself a "libertarian anarchist" rather than a plain "anarchist"?-- Pages on this site on:
Noam Chomsky: The term I usually use is "libertarian socialist," which is fairly standard usage in the anarchist tradition. Anarchism covers a pretty broad range. One major sector in Europe regarded itself as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement. Unfortunately, the term "libertarian" has a different usage in the United States, which departs from the tradition. Here the term "libertarian" means anarcho-capitalist."
"There are, indeed, libertarian anarchists, and it is even possible to argue that John Locke's own principles make it difficult to avoid anarchy. On the other hand, neither Locke, nor Smith, nor Washington, nor Jefferson, nor Mill, nor F.A. Hayek, nor even Ayn Rand were anarchists. To them "minimalist government" meant, indeed, government; and such a government needed to exercise maximal power but only for certain purposes, as never expressed better than by Jefferson himself, in his First Inaugural Address of 1801:
Still one thing more, fellow citizens -- a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.