Quotes About Libertarianism

My fear is that people associate Rand Paul's social conservatism with libertarianism, when it's not.

The assumption that agents are rational provides the intellectual foundation for the libertarian approach to public policy: do not interfere with the individual's right to choose, unless the choices harm others. Libertarian policies are further bolstered by admiration for the efficiency of markets in allocating goods to the people who are willing to pay the most for them.

Perhaps our own fin-de-sicle decadence takes the form, not of libertarian excess, but of the kind of over-the-top puritanism we see in political correctness and the assorted moral certainties of physical fitness fanatics, New Agers and animal-rights activists.

Some may try to argue that conservatism and libertarianism are contradictory perspectives. But I disagree.

For liberty to expand, government must shrink. For the economy to grow, government must get out of the way.

Libertarian immigration policy would be an experiment in which I don't think we should participate. We should not bet the republic that the results will be good. I suspect the results would be a disaster and the end of the American experiment.

Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched 'Living Marxism' magazine in the late eighties.

Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

Le véritable communisme - l'égalité économique entre les hommes et entre les communautés - exige que chaque communauté organise la planification la meilleure et la plus efficace, en se fondant sur ses nécessités et possibilités locales (...) le communisme est nécessairement libertaire. Anarchiste.

Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out - while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.

My parents both defected from communist Hungary and were what most people would today call libertarian. I grew up with a general distaste for taxation and any policy that intruded on our lives.

At the earliest age, when I saw a 'wet paint' sign, I had to touch the paint to see if it was wet. When I get stopped at the stoplight in the middle of the night, and there's just no cars coming, and the light is red, I go. I don't think I'm putting anyone in harm's way, and I'll just take the consequences. Because I'm a Libertarian.

Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative.

Libertarian arguments about what would or would not be fair in a state of nature are simply irrelevant, because in a state of nature nobody would be getting a $10-million bonus.

Conservatives and individualists support policies that favor more freedom for individuals.

There's an oft-used shorthand for the technologist's view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn't wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.

Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism.

I get along with Democrats really well, and I think that's something that's unreported. I think it's partly my libertarian tendencies.

I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.

Libertarians (like anarchists and Marxists) generally believe that human nature is good, though damaged by certain social institutions. Conservatives, on the contrary, hold that in Adam's fall we sinned all: human nature, though compounded of both good and evil, is irremediably flawed; so the perfection of society is impossible, all human beings being imperfect.

I have no evidence that libertarianism leads to a better life. I just think it is morally right.