Kevin Carson: Sigh. There you have it. Just about every single cliche from the Art Schlesinger historical mythology, condensed into one short passage for your convenience.
Roderick T. Long: At a time when emotions run high, how should we go about deciding on a morally appropriate response? Should we allow ourselves to be guided by our anger, or should we put our anger aside and make an unemotional decision?
Thomas L. Knapp: Bourgeois libertarianism is a failure not of theory or of ideology, but of imagination.
Benjamin Tucker: The usurer is the Somebody, and the State is his protector. Usury is the serpent gnawing at labor’s vitals, and only liberty can detach and kill it.
Roderick T. Long: We tend to think of the “ruling class” as a Marxist concept, but the notion has a long history before Marx.
Roderick Long: I’m hoping to make you puzzled about a problem that has puzzled me on and off over the years. Misery loves company, I suppose —
Karl Hess: Americans are misguided in their continuing search for new leaders. Rather, they should seek rewarding social institutions to ensure a better life.
Kevin Carson: The sooner we restore a society where work is something we do, and not something we’re “given,” a society where we’re in control of our working lives, the sooner we can do away with fake machismo, commodified rebellion, and going postal.
Kevin Carson: The vast majority of accumulated capital today is the result, not of the capitalist’s past labor and abstention, but of robbery.
Gary Chartier: Being a libertarian means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. That doesn’t mean it should be understood as involving support for capitalism.
Kevin Carson: The healthcare industry is a textbook example of what Ivan Illich (in Tools for Conviviality) called a “radical monopoly.”
Charles Johnson: For most of the 20th century, American libertarians were mostly seen as — and mostly saw themselves as — defenders of capitalism. Was that an accurate view of 20th century libertarians were about?
Charles Johnson: Individualists believe in individualism precisely because we believe that human beings can and should be both social and civilized to each other at the same time.
Libertarian equality involves not merely equality before those who administer the law, but equality with them.
Roderick T. Long: The question is: can economics or praxeology give us anything more than that? Can it give us any implications for positive ethical theorising?
These aren’t merely cases of some people having more stuff than you do.
Stressing the Hayekian strand within Austrian socioeconomic thought at the expense of the Kirznerian strand can lead to excessive passivity in the face of the omniscient, omnipotent forces of history.
Sheldon Richman: Libertarianism is premised on the dignity and self-ownership of the individual, which sexism and racism deny. Thus all forms of collectivist hierarchy undermine the libertarian attitude and hence the prospects for a free society.
Mandatory restitution to the victim is justified on libertarian grounds as an expression of defensive coercion; but punishment, I believe, constitutes not defensive but retaliatory coercion, and so is not permissible.
Intellectual property is not necessary to encourage innovation, this means that its main practical effect is to cause economic inefficiency by levying a monopoly charge on the use of existing technology.
