When I leave university and get a job, I want to live and die by my own efforts, but if they are especially productive, I want to enjoy the fruits of my labour without being penalised by the state for my success. I don’t want to see people starve, or to go without basic needs, but rather than having the state steal my money and use it to pay them to stay poor, I want them to have the opportunity to work, earn and live for themselves. I also want, through free charity, to be able to decide for myself in whose aid the money I donate will be spent: perhaps I might find the starving Iraqi child a more deserving cause than the perpetually-unemployed Dundonian who can’t afford the monthly satellite television subscription; perhaps I won’t think that the fact that one has been born in closer geographical proximity to me gives them a greater claim to the money I worked for. I don’t want these choices to be taken from me and decided centrally, by those whose very jobs require them to please as many local people as they can.
– David Bean, part of the St Andrews Liberty Club’s new committee, writing on The Liberty Log
Just received my letter from social security- “these are the benefits you would receive if became disabled now, this is how much you have paid into the system,” etc. Interesting little line in small print stating that social security will go broke in 2042. Exactly around the time that I will be eligible to retire. Why am I paying for this when even by the government’s own ENRONed numbers I will never see it? Do I really have to support baby boomers beyond my own parents? Revolution anyone?
“(…) perhaps I might find the starving Iraqi child a more deserving cause than the perpetually-unemployed Dundonian who can’t afford the monthly satellite television subscription (…)”
And what about this: perhaps I might find having 3 gorgeous girls in my bed tonight plus a 3-million-euro cheque a more promising prospect than having cancer at once & be obliged to eat living insects while being slapped in the face with an iron glove.
This kind of statement is gross populism on offer for donkeys. The alternative is biased. The underlying idea is that all unemployed people are lazy spoilt twerps who deserve a good kick in the ass by losing State support, which in turn gets also in a kick in the ass by losing the tax money this noble gentleman is really fed up to pay…
You prefer to send your money to Iraki children, do you…
What an irony !!!
Instead of sending your fucking money to Iraki children, just refrain from sending bombs on them.
By the way: where are the Weapons of Mass Deception? In Mr Kelly’s pockets? Or in Phony Bliar’s office?
Kodiak, argue your point if you have any. Please refrain from abusive language. That’s our prerogative…
And what about this: perhaps I might find having 3 gorgeous girls in my bed tonight plus a 3-million-euro cheque a more promising prospect than having cancer at once & be obliged to eat living insects while being slapped in the face with an iron glove.
Thus, theft.
Dear Admin,
Thank God you intervened on that one: you too could have been unemployed, weren’t it for non-libertarians…
Correction: “Instead of sending your stinking money to Iraki children, just refrain from sending bombs on them”.
Is that new phrasing pleasant enough to the eyes of your highness?
While I’m always delighted to see young people embrace the individual over the state (you have to worry that all the libertarian has been kicked out of them by the school system), I’ll be more interested in what he thinks after he’s left university and fended for himself for a while.
I may be disappearing down the bottomless well of old-fart-hood, but few things depress me more than the way our news media trample all over themselves to discover “what young people think” about this or that.
Honestly…who cares?
What they think may be of secondary importance.
I care that people, young or old, do think. That they may only think and reinforce prefabricated thoughts worries me a bit. But without actually thinking how will anyone learn to change their own mind?
S Weasel:
“I may be disappearing down the bottomless well of old-fart-hood, but few things depress me more than the way our news media trample all over themselves to discover “what young people think” about this or that.”
Surely what is depressing is that the young people in question are invariably reported as having standard eco-fascist socialist-ish views (presumably absorbed by osmosis from their doctrinaire Statist teachers).
Don’t be depressed. Picking up the standard view is what kids do. Learning that sort of stuff is what childhood is there for in the first place. Then comes teenage, in which they chuck it all out of the window and (try to) think for themselves.
I have a strong suspicion that soon enough libertarianism is going to become the new “shock, horror, you aren’t one of those are you?” teenage trend.
S. Weasal “While I’m always delighted to see young people embrace the individual over the state (you have to worry that all the libertarian has been kicked out of them by the school system), I’ll be more interested in what he thinks after he’s left university and fended for himself for a while.”
Test case: I’m more extreme libertarian now than I was at college (and I was a fairly hardcore individualist then). Paying large amounts of taxes for no perceptible reward, having to reject perfectly good business proposals and reject people for jobs due to compliance with pointless red tape, and being unable to defend my home or person are some reasons; further research into governments and their actions throughout the world and across time are others.
I dunno, I feel uneasy about rising individualism amongst “the kids,” it could become the new loony left. Subject to a bit of a still birth, if you will.
People seem more alarmed by stark, clear ideology than ever these days. Collectivism’s mainstream sucess must in part be because it doesn’t seem like ideology or dogma or moral absolutism or whatever. It’s essentially a sensible balance of pragmatism and niceness, so who wouldn’t want that?
I agree with Cobden Bright. Whilst at University, freedom from state interference is somewhat academic. Now working in the productive sector, I can say that I see the need for libertarianism far more than ever.
“When I leave the university and get a job ..”
Lucky you. I started working at 17 and went to university on a scholarship for tuition but worked for my room an board.
“I want to live and die by my own efforts”…
But where did you get your abilities? Who helped you in tuition? Who established the university? Will you work with “40 acres and a mule” or will you work for someone who worked to establish your job?
I don’t like socialism, but libertarians forget that their freedom is enabled by a lot of quiet people who worked “not for my own efforts” but because they knew they were given gifts from the creator to be used productively for the sake of their own good, the good of their families, and the good of society.
Libertarianism, as Mary Ann Glendon points out in her books “rights talk”, is based on the philosophical assumption that the free and independent man of ancient times is the ideal. But, as she pointed out, these philosophers never thought about what the “free women” or free children were doing in those mythical times.
The opposite of socialism is not libertarianism but small communities taking care of each other. Classical libertarians like Ayn Rand discuss responsibility, i.e. for family and neighbors, but few modern libertarians bother to recognize the shallowness of their “me ism”.