Libertarianism Quotes

“Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person's right to life, liberty, and property - rights that people possess naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have themselves used force - actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud. ”
― David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer

“It’s the exercise of power, not the exercise of freedom, that requires justification.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“The people who benefit from the existing system won’t willingly downsize government even if all the customers desert it.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Some forms of socialism and collectivism are – explicitly or implicitly – based on the notion that many people are not competent to make decisions about their own lives, so that the more talented should make decisions for them. But that would mean there were no universal human rights, only rights that some have and others do not, denying the essential humanity of those who are deemed to be owned.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“3. We believe that people spend their own money more prudently than they spend other people’s money. So goods and services produced in the competitive marketplace are likely to be produced more efficiently and with more regard for real consumer demand than goods produced by government, and thus we should try to keep as many aspects of life as possible outside the control of government.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“the most important factor in America’s economic future—in raising everyone’s standard of living—is not land, or money, or computers; it’s human talent.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“the political left, would argue that the “right to life” means that everyone has a fundamental right to the necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, maybe even an eight-hour day and two weeks of vacation. But if the right to life means that, then it means that one person has a right to force other people to give him things, violating their equal rights.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Those who claim to believe in liberal principals but advocate more and more confiscation of the wealth created by productive people, more and more exceptions to property rights and the rule of law, more and more transfer of power from society to state, are unwittingly engaged in the ultimately deadly undermining of civilization.”
― David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer

“Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.”
― David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer

“Every state and national capitol should have a sign on the door: Stop me before I legislate again.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Slower growth and the increasing perception that rewards are handed out by government on the basis of political pull, rather than earned in the competitive marketplace, encourage polarization and social conflict.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“1. Privatize government services 2. Reduce government spending, borrowing, and taxing 3. Deregulate the market process and stop protecting established businesses from the rigors of competition 4. Restore to individuals the right to make the important decisions in their lives”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“As a moral matter, individuals must be free to make their own decisions and to succeed or fail according to their own choices. As a practical matter, as Frum points out, when we shield people from the consequences of their actions, we get a society characterized not by thrift, sobriety, diligence, self-reliance, and prudence but by profligacy, intemperance, indolence, dependency, and indifference to consequences.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“When rights become merely legal claims attached to interests and preferences, the stage is set for political and social conflict.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Only when government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups for a piece of political power.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Economic freedom means that people are free to produce and to exchange with others.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Every time local politicians propose to tax people in order to build a stadium for a billionaire major-league owner, they hold out in their right hand the promise that the increased business activity will more than replace the money spent. But they don’t want you to look at the left hand—the jobs and wealth created by the money that people would have spent if it hadn’t been taxed away for the stadium. •”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Today, when a new federal law is proposed, many libertarian-minded people on both the right and the left look to the Bill of Rights to see whether the law would violate any constitutional rights. But we should look first to the enumerated powers to see if the federal government has been granted the power to undertake the proposed action. Only if it has such a power should we move on to ask whether its proposed action would violate any protected right.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“The fatal conceit of intellectuals, he said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell. Libertarianism holds out the goal not of a perfect society but of a better and freer one. It”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Thus”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“Yet today, all over the developed world, welfare states are on shaky ground. The tax rates necessary to sustain the massive transfer programs are crippling Western economies. Dependence”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“People employ what economists call “rational ignorance.” That is, we all spend our time learning about things we can actually do something about, not political issues that we can’t really affect. That’s why most of us can’t name our representative in Congress. And why most of us have no clue about how much of the federal budget goes to Medicare, foreign aid, or any other program. As an Alabama businessman told a Washington Post pollster, “Politics doesn’t interest me. I don’t follow it. … Always had to make a living.” Ellen Goodman, a sensitive, good-government liberal columnist, complained about a friend who had spent months researching new cars, and of her own efforts study the sugar, fiber, fat, and price of various cereals. “Would my car-buying friend use the hours he spent comparing fuel-injection systems to compare national health plans?” Goodman asked. “Maybe not. Will the moments I spend studying cereals be devoted to studying the greenhouse effect on grain? Maybe not.” Certainly not —and why should they? Goodman and her friend will get the cars and the cereal they want, but what good would it do to study national health plans? After a great deal of research on medicine, economics, and bureaucracy, her friend may decide which health-care plan he prefers. He then turns to studying the presidential candidates, only to discover that they offer only vague indications of which health-care plan they would implement. But after diligent investigation, our well-informed voter chooses a candidate. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t like that candidate’s stand on anything else — the package-deal problem — but he decides to vote on the issue of health care. He has a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of influencing the outcome of the presidential election, after which, if his candidate is successful, he faces a Congress with different ideas, and in any case, it turns out the candidate was dissembling in the first place. Instinctively realizing all this, most voters don’t spend much time studying public policy. Give that same man three health insurance plans that he can choose from, though, and chances are that he will spend time studying them. Finally, as noted above, the candidates are likely to be kidding themselves or the voters anyway. One could argue that in most of the presidential elections since 1968, the American people have tried to vote for smaller government, but in that time the federal budget has risen from $178 billion to $4 trillion.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“On the contemporary American left-right spectrum, libertarianism is neither left nor right. Libertarians believe in individual freedom and limited government consistently, unlike either contemporary liberals or contemporary conservatives.”
― David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer

“every government intervention in the marketplace tends to reduce wealth and the overall standard of living.”
― David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom

“A Government is not free to do as it pleases…. The law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others.”
― David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer