Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.
The libertarian approach is a very symmetrical one: the non-aggression principle does not rule out force, but only the initiation of force. In other words, you are permitted to use force only in response to some else's use of force. If they do not use force you may not use force yourself. There is a symmetry here: force for force, but no force if no force was used.
It is easier for a libertarian to attack the science of global warming than to alter one's core libertarian beliefs.
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.
Unfortunately for ethical egoism, the claim that we will all be better off if every one of us does what is in his or her own interest is incorrect. This is shown by what are known as "prisoner's dilemma" situations, which are playing an increasingly important role in discussions of ethical theory. . . At least on the collective level, therefore, egoism is self-defeating - a conclusion well brought out by Parfit in his aforementioned Reasons and Persons.
I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation.
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
Dependence leads to subservience.
Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.
Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance.
A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.
The power to tax is the power to destroy.
We own ourselves. This is the core of a libertarian theory of rights. But on this theory, while we are at liberty to kill ourselves (regardless of the consequences of others), we are not allowed to kill others, not even if this means that there we be fewer murders in the future, totally speaking.
I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.
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.
One of the things that makes me a conservative, or a libertarian, or whatever the heck it is that I am - a person who doesn't much like big government - is that I do not like the concentration of the power.
Conservatism is constitutionally opposed to public reason, and this explains the abandon with which so many conservative pundits embrace flagrant simulations of reason, constructed through the methods of public relations, and exhibit so little regard for the real thing.
By going on the defensive. . . libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from "polite" company.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending