seedubya
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 1,019
- Location
- Carlow, Ireland
Easy for Franklin to say, he was a rich landowner with plenty of hired help to defend him. How does an everyday person ensure their safety within a libertarian society? Buy a gun? To be sure of safety in such a society you must shoot every threat dead, preferably preemptively. So the town gets together and hires a sherriff. But what of the one's who don't want a sherriff. Why should they benefit from the sherriff the rest hired? What do you do with the dissenters? Run them out of town? Suddenly you've got a statutory society again.
It's my experience that people quote Rand and Franklin and Mises et al without having really thought about what true libertarianism means. They see the big statements about small (or no) government, no compulsory taxes, absolute freedom and it sounds good. The reality would be very, very different and is probably only achievable when humans have evolved to the stage that greed and violence are extremely rare or entirely absent.
It's my experience that people quote Rand and Franklin and Mises et al without having really thought about what true libertarianism means. They see the big statements about small (or no) government, no compulsory taxes, absolute freedom and it sounds good. The reality would be very, very different and is probably only achievable when humans have evolved to the stage that greed and violence are extremely rare or entirely absent.