[Skybird]

In the end, most of people do not want any change in a broken system at all, but want even more of it: they want the illusions they grew so fond of to come true instead. In other words: their strategy is believing in a miracle so that things all end well without any need to change for the harder aspects of life, and both reason and unwelcomed facts realities bending on behalf of wishful thinking. More nanny state, therefore. More money printing. More voting of politicians promising both. More ignoring of the brutal consequences of this, that one day can no longer be avoided. The world will suffer what it must. The people will get what they deserve.

But complaining about people who are passionate about justice instead of mandatory, undiscriminating solidarity? Passionate about freedom instead of totalitartian collectivism? Self-responsibility instead parasitically robbing the few and bribing the many with the loot? Reason and foresight instead of excessive partying and excesses in spending that the future generations have top pay for by their own sacrifices?

Murray Rothbard: Why Be Libertarian?

from "Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays", Auburn, Alabama 2000 (1974)


Why be libertarian, anyway? By this we mean: what’s
the point of the whole thing? Why engage in a deep
and lifelong commitment to the principle and the
goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our
largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement
with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation which
equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and prestige.
When life is short and the moment of victory far in the
future, why go through all this?

Incredibly, we have found among the increasing number
of libertarians in this country many people who come to a
libertarian commitment from one or another extremely narrow
and personal points of view. Many are irresistibly
attracted to liberty as an intellectual system or as an aesthetic
goal; but liberty remains for them a purely intellectual parlor
game, totally divorced from what they consider the “real”
activities of their daily lives. Others are motivated to remain
libertarians solely from their anticipation of their own personal
financial profit. Realizing that a free market would provide
far greater opportunities for able, independent men to
reap entrepreneurial profits, they become and remain libertarians
solely to find larger opportunities for business profit.

While it is true that opportunities for profit will be far
greater and more widespread in a free market and a free society,
placing one’s primary emphasis on this motivation for
being a libertarian can only be considered grotesque. For in
the often tortuous, difficult and gruelling path that must be
trod before liberty can be achieved, the libertarian’s opportunities
for personal profit will far more often be negative than
abundant.

The consequence of the narrow and myopic vision of both
the gamester and the would-be profitmaker is that neither
group has the slightest interest in the work of building a libertarian
movement. And yet it is only through building such
a movement that liberty may ultimately be achieved. Ideas,
and especially radical ideas, do not advance in the world in
and by themselves, as it were in a vacuum; they can only be
advanced by people and, therefore, the development and
advancement of such people—and therefore of a “movement”—
becomes a prime task for the Libertarian who is
really serious about advancing his goals.

Turning from these men of narrow vision, we must also
see that utilitarianism—the common ground of free-market
economists—is unsatisfactory for developing a flourishing
libertarian movement. While it is true and valuable to know
that a free market would bring far greater abundance and a
healthier economy to everyone, rich and poor alike, a critical
problem is whether this knowledge is enough to bring many
people to a lifelong dedication to liberty. In short, how many
people will man the barricades and endure the many sacrifices
that a consistent devotion to liberty entails, merely so
that umpteen percent more people will have better bathtubs?
Will they not rather set up for an easy life and forget the
umpteen percent bathtubs? Ultimately, then, utilitarian economics,
while indispensable in the developed structure of libertarian
thought and action, is almost as unsatisfactory a basic
groundwork for the movement as those opportunists who
simply seek a short-range profit.

It is our view that a flourishing libertarian movement, a
lifelong dedication to liberty, can only be grounded on a passion
for justice. Here must be the mainspring of our drive,
the armor that will sustain us in all the storms ahead, not the
search for a quick buck, the playing of intellectual games or
the cool calculation of general economic gains. And, to have
a passion for justice, one must have a theory of what justice
and injustice are—in short, a set of ethical principles of justice
and injustice which cannot be provided by utilitarian
economics. It is because we see the world reeking with injustices
piled one on another to the very heavens that we are
impelled to do all that we can to seek a world in which these
and other injustices will be eradicated. Other traditional radical
goals—such as the “abolition of poverty”—are, in contrast
to this one, truly utopian, for man, simply by exerting
his will, cannot abolish poverty. Poverty can only be abolished
through the operation of certain economic factors—
notably the investment of savings in capital—which can only
operate by transforming nature over a long period of time. In
short, man’s will is here severely limited by the workings of—
to use an old-fashioned but still valid term—natural law. But
injustices are deeds that are inflicted by one set of men on
another; they are precisely the actions of men, and, hence,
they and their elimination are subject to man’s instantaneous
will.

Let us take an example: England’s centuries-long occupation
and brutal oppression of the Irish people. Now if, in
1900, we had looked at the state of Ireland, and we had considered
the poverty of the Irish people, we would have had to
say: poverty could be improved by the English getting out
and removing their land monopolies, but the ultimate elimination
of poverty in Ireland, under the best of conditions,
would take time and be subject to the workings of economic
law. But the goal of ending English oppression—that could
have been done by the instantaneous action of men’s will: by
the English simply deciding to pull out of the country. The
fact that of course such decisions do not take place instantaneously
is not the point; the point is that the very failure is an
injustice that has been decided upon and imposed by the perpetrators
of injustice—in this case, the English government.

In the field of justice, man’s will is all; men can move mountains,
if only men so decide. A passion for instantaneous justice—
in short, a radical passion—is therefore not utopian, as
would be a desire for the instant elimination of poverty or the
instant transformation of everyone into a concert pianist. For
instant justice could be achieved if enough people so willed.
A true passion for justice, then, must be radical—in short,
it must at least wish to attain its goals radically and instantaneously.
Leonard E. Read, founding president of the Foundation
for Economic Education, expressed this radical spirit
very aptly when he wrote a pamphlet, I’d Push the Button. The
problem was what to do about the network of price and wage
controls then being imposed on the economy by the Office
of Price Administration. Most economic Liberals were
timidly or “realistically” advocating one or another form of
gradual or staggered decontrols; at that point, Mr. Read took
an unequivocal and radical stand on principle: “if there were
a button on this rostrum,” he began his address, “the pressing
of which would release all wage and price controls instantaneously,
I would put my finger on it and push!”1 The true
test, then, of the radical spirit, is the button-pushing test: if
we could push the button for instantaneous abolition of
unjust invasions of liberty, would we do it? If we would not
do it, we could scarcely call ourselves Libertarians, and most
of us would only do it if primarily guided by a passion for justice.
The genuine Libertarian, then, is, in all senses of the
word, an “abolitionist”; he would, if he could, abolish instantaneously
all invasions of liberty, whether it be, in the original
coining of the term, slavery, or whether it be the manifold
other instances of State oppression. He would, in the words
of another libertarian in a similar connection, “blister my
thumb pushing that button!” The libertarian must perforce
be a “button-pusher” and an “abolitionist.” Powered by justice,
he cannot be moved by amoral utilitarian pleas that justice
not come about until the criminals are “compensated.”

Thus, when in the early nineteenth century, the great abolitionist
movement arose, voices of moderation promptly
appeared counselling that it would only be fair to abolish
slavery if the slave masters were financially compensated for
their loss. In short, after centuries of oppression and exploitation,
the slave masters were supposed to be further rewarded
by a handsome sum muleted by force from the mass of innocent
taxpayers! The most apt comment on this proposal was
made by the English philosophical radical Benjamin Pearson,
who remarked that “he had thought it was the slaves who
should have been compensated”; clearly, such compensation
could only justly have come from the slaveholders themselves.

Antilibertarians, and antiradicals generally, characteristically
make the point that such “abolitionism” is “unrealistic;”
by making such a charge they are hopelessly confusing the
desired goal with a strategic estimate of the probable outcome.
In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not
to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals.
First, goals must be formulated, which, in this case, would be
the instant abolition of slavery or whatever other statist
oppression we are considering. And we must first frame these
goals without considering the probability of attaining them.
The libertarian goals are “realistic” in the sense that they could
be achieved if enough people agreed on their desirability, and
that, if achieved, they would bring about a far better world.
The “realism” of the goal can only be challenged by a critique
of the goal itself, not in the problem of how to attain it. Then,
after we have decided on the goal, we face the entirely separate
strategic question of how to attain that goal as rapidly as possible,
how to build a movement to attain it, etc. Thus, William
Lloyd Garrison was not being “unrealistic” when, in the
1830s, he raised the glorious standard of immediate emancipation
of the slaves. His goal was the proper one, and his strategic
realism came in the fact that he did not expect his goal to
be quickly reached. Or, as Garrison himself distinguished:
Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will,
alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said
that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it
ought to be, we shall always contend.

Actually, in the realm of the strategic, raising the banner
of pure and radical principle is generally the fastest way of
arriving at radical goals. For if the pure goal is never brought
to the fore, there will never be any momentum developed for
driving toward it. Slavery would never have been abolished at
all if the abolitionists had not raised the hue and cry thirty
years earlier; and, as things came to pass, the abolition was at
virtually a single blow rather than gradual or compensated.4
But above and beyond the requirements of strategy lie the
commands of justice. In his famous editorial that launched
The Liberator at the beginning of 1831, William Lloyd Garrison
repented his previous adoption of the doctrine of gradual
abolition:

I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal
recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of
my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having
uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice and absurdity.

Upon being reproached for the habitual severity and heat of
his language, Garrison retorted: “I have need to be all on fire,
for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” It is this spirit
that must mark the man truly dedicated to the cause of liberty.

http://library.mises.org/books/Murra...r%20Essays.pdf