Libertarianism For Beginners Quotes

“One of the founding European settlements of what would become the United States, Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, first attempted communal farming on the “assumption that it was the most fitting economic arrangement for a unified religious community. Growing hungry and despairing of the experiment, however, the settlers soon switched to individual family plots, which proved far more fruitful. As the governor of the colony observed, the farmers were far more industrious in tending family plots than they were working the communal grounds. The lesson would be relearned, with a much higher body count, by communist regimes in the twentieth century after their attempts at collective farming.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“From this point of view, government is the constant, all-pervading, systematic violator of property rights and the “misallocator” of resources. It takes resources away from the highest-valued uses to which free individuals otherwise would put them and steers them toward lower-valued uses. Government constantly destroys happiness.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“Just as libertarians reject the Marxist notion that every exchange has an “exploiting” and an “exploited” participant in favor of the idea of mutually beneficial exchange, so libertarians reject the idea that profit is a bad thing. On the contrary, if the human race benefits from transferring resources from lower-valued to higher-valued uses, profits are a vital signaling device that someone is producing things that people want, that somewhere things are being done a better way.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“The idea that government “helps” us somehow is, in strict libertarian terms, a mere superstition.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“In reality, libertarians argue, government interferes with trade—resulting in a reduction in overall happiness—virtually every time it acts (with the possible exception of its purely defensive, rights-protecting functions). In essence, government, despite its appearance of having thousands of functions, really does only two things: forbid people from making the trades they want, and force them to make trades they don't want.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“Rather than a world in which there is a fixed quantity of already-distributed goods—and a fixed, unchanging amount of happiness—the possibility of mutually beneficial exchange posits a world in which constant trading between billions of ever-changing pairs of individuals or parties can make everyone better off than they were the moment before the trade.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners

“It is not because of government that most people clean their apartments rather than try to set them on fire on a regular basis.”
― Todd Seavey, Libertarianism For Beginners