Quotes About Libertarianism

It has been said that I am not a 'real' Libertarian. A certain faction of the Party has come to believe that the writings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman are the holy texts of Libertarianism, and I disagree. I believe that the Libertarian movement is and should be more encompassing than the narrow-minded advocacy of economic anarchy.

Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest.

Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won't. I wish it were so, and I live that way. I help panhandlers, but other people are, 'Oh look at that - why doesn't he get a job?' While I believe in all that freedom, I also believe that no one should suffer needlessly.

The libertarian can have no truck with 'left' or 'right' because he regrets any form of authoritarianism - the use of police force to control the creative life of man.

The great thing about libertarianism is it really is the American dream: It's the ability of everybody to live their life and build their life according to what they want, so long as they don't hurt anybody else.

What I was really saying in 'The Examined Life' was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before.

Libertarianism, the political philosophy of rugged individualism, ought to hold a natural appeal to tolerant, anti-statist, free-trade conservatives who deplore the turn taken by the party of Abraham Lincoln toward racial prejudice, authoritarianism, and mercantilism.

the continuous and systematic onslaught against political machines and insiders by progressivism, populism, and libertarianism—three very different political reform movements which nonetheless all regard transactional politics as at best a necessary evil and more often as corrupt and illegitimate. This attack, though well intentioned, has badly damaged the country's governability, a predictable result (and one accurately predicted more than fifty years ago).

As a religious person, I do agree with much of Ayn Rand's profoundly negative view of religion. Still, to minimize her contribution to philosophy is ridiculous. Her espousal of capitalism is incredibly important, today more than ever before. With taxes rising and government intervening in all sectors of life, her libertarian philosophy is required at least to balance the debate.

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.

Since my libertarianism puts me on the side of the victims of the state, I began to understand that the Palestinians were the latest in a long line of groups oppressed by political power. Jews, of course, have been similarly oppressed in many places; now some Jews, the Zionists, were in the role of oppressor. My childhood view of Israel was unraveling.

Like academic Marxists, who are their sisters under the skin, libertarians are far more interested in an ideal world than in the one where ordinary humans live.

When 9/11 happened, it changed things overnight, giving the biggest shock treatment to individual agency. People in the U.S., the absolute stronghold of individualism and libertarianism, had to give up many cherished freedoms and privacies in exchange for the promise of public safety.

This emphasis on the need for a conservative, traditionalist cultural context for libertarianism in his later years—and the way he turned venomously on every part of the libertarian movement not under the paleo tent in the pages of the newsletter he and Rockwell launched in 1990, the Rothbard/Rockwell Report—lost Rothbard many of his old fans and friends in the movement.

Libertarianism is based in economic theory, as economic science teaches how workable order can arise from the seeming chaos of free actions uncoordinated by a single outside intelligence, and how government intervention is apt to upset that balance.

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ.

My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts.

Why does she [Borowski] rail against other women's choices? Surely a core libertarian value is neutrality between different conceptions of the good?" Actually, no. I replied: "The core libertarian value is nonaggression. 'Neutrality between different conceptions of the good' has nothing to do with libertarianism. If you were truly neutral between different conceptions of the good, you wouldn't be arguing against Julie's conception of the good.

One noted software libertarian, Richard Stallman, even refused to protect his account with a password.

Thus, throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Fifield and like-minded religious leaders advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics, and politics that one observer aptly anointed "Christian libertarianism.

Working in lockstep to advance Christian libertarianism, these three movements effectively harnessed Cold War anxieties for an already established campaign against the New Deal.

Libertarianism, like Marxism, is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to super-smart engineers and others who never really grow up.

People think that libertarians are probably greedy and anti-social, and I'm sure some of them are. But the nice thing about it is, it's really an umbrella term that covers a lot of different people.