Trego's Mountain Ear

No one whom I have read sums up the libertarian stance half so well as the late L. Neil Smith.  In his career as a science-fiction author and a libertarian activist, he wrote many comments that applied libertarian philosophy to specific instances.  For example:

“We’re all a bunch of badminton birdies who just got batted from the Republican side of the court to the Democrat side. We’ll eventually get batted back again, of course, unless libertarians can manage to do something about it. If your principal concern, like mine, is freedom, there’s absolutely no discernable difference between the two ‘majors,’ and for all practical purposes, they’re one big party – the Boot On Your Neck party – pretending to be two.

Never Forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn’t allow him to do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians.

The first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists – or ever existed, or ever will exist – is a kleptocracy, meaning “rule by thieves.” Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.

We’re most likely to lose our rights when we allow ourselves to be persuaded to deprive others of theirs.

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

The Bill of Rights isn’t about us, it’s about them . It isn’t a list of things we’re permitted to do, it’s a list of things they aren’t allowed even to consider.

Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn’t say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers “the security of a free state”? And if it’s treason,then it’s punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

Government can only do two things: It can beat people up and kill them. Or it can threaten to do so. When it seems to be doing something else – for example, handing out money or, say, surplus cheese – what’s actually going on is that something has been taken away from one set of individuals by deadly force or the threat of deadly force, a hefty middleman’s fee deducted, and whatever is left thrown to peasants delighted to receive stolen goods.

Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moment’s respite deserve only the end of a rope.

You cannot force me to agree with you. You can force me to act as though I agree with you but then you’ll have to watch your back. All the time.

No one’s ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It’s just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.

Know when to give up a lost cause. Anyone who needs to be persuaded to be free, doesn’t deserve to be.

People in the mass media tend more and more every day to look and act like elected and appointed officials.

Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal – or have stolen for you what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leeches, and mosquitoes.

Few things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied.

America didn’t have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people — the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering — they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.

Choose your allies carefully: it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.

Any politico who’s afraid of his constituents being armed, should be. Leaders of the anti-gun movement (for the most part, politicians who enthusiastically advocate confiscatory taxation and government control of everything) realize that a populace is much easier to herd, loot and dispose of if it has been stripped of its weapons. The naked fraud and transparent fascism of victim disarmament must be eradicated through the repeal of all gun laws at every level of government.

Elections amount to little more than choosing between the scum that floats to the top of the barrel and the dregs that settle to the bottom.

A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatsoever; nor will a libertarian advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.

What I want to accomplish artistically amounts to nothing more than fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution.

Most libertarians agree that all rights are, in effect, property rights, beginning with this fundamental right to self-ownership and control of one’s own life. As owners of their own lives, individuals are completely free to do absolutely anything they wish with them provided, of course, that it doesn’t violate the identical right of others whether the people around them approve of what they do or not.

Economists tell us that the ‘price’ of an object and its ‘value’ have very little or nothing to do with one another. ‘Value’ is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while ‘price’ reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a ‘fair price’ betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.

A libertarian presidential candidate isn’t going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn’t the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft.”