Questions and Answers about Liberty
excerpted from Liberty Magazine, www.libertysoft.com
The Rights of Children
"Many libertarians. . . assign to the parents the role of final arbiters of a child's fate.
But not all agree; I once asked Ayn Rand about parents who physically abuse their children; and she replied, though without her usual high-voltage energy, that presumably the children should be forcibly taken from the parents, to protect the rights of children."
-from Axioms and Egoisms by John Hospers (6/99)
"The most fundamental question you can ask a libertarian about his political philosophy is: Why is liberty good? And the way a personThere are two ways that libertarians answer this question.
answers this question reveals a great deal about the kind of libertarian he is. What's so good about liberty? Why should people want to be free?
The first answer,
one that generally dominated libertarian thinking prior to the 1960s, is
that freedom is good because of its consequences:
it maximizes
people's ability to flourish, to achieve their goals and to be happy.
The second answer
to this question is that people should be free because all people have
a moral obligation to respect the life, liberty and
property of
others. This school of thought became popular in the 1960s and '70s, thanks
primarily to Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard,
who developed,
articulated and popularized it with considerable energy and skill.1
Rand and Rothbard
begin their political theory by arguing that people by their nature possess
inalienable individual rights to life, liberty and
property. From
this, Rand quickly concluded that "no man has the right to initiate the
use of physical force against others."2 For Rothbard,
the very meaning
of a right is the obligation it imposes on others not to initiate physical
force.3
From this moral
law — the non-aggression imperative
— comes virtually the whole of political philosophy and
policy proscriptions for
libertarians
of this type. If a policy entails the initiation of force, it is wrong
and ought not be undertaken. Establish religion? Fix a legal
minimum wage?
Control prices? Restrict immigration? Require professional licenses? Regulate
trade? To these and a thousand other
policy issues,
this kind of libertarianism says, "No! That involves the initiation of
force." Indeed, it condemns just about any known function
of government
on the grounds that it involves initiating force. Even those functions
that can be implemented without initiating force — state
aid to victims
of natural disasters, for example — are prohibited because the money that
pays for them comes from taxes, which are
raised under
threat of force."
- from The Old Liberty and the New by R.W. Bradford (2/99)