Saturday, April 20, 2013

10 Reasons Why Libertarianism is the Way of the Future

1. It is the only social philosophy that places the highest value on the only common characteristic of all thinking beings - individual liberty.

2. It is the only social philosophy that takes individual rights seriously, consistently refusing to sacrifice them in the name of collective moral and legal fictions.

3. It is the only social philosophy that consistently refuses to glorify the allegedly "necessary" evils of institutionalized violence, aggression, and coercion, while not ignoring the problem of organizing effective protection and defense against these evils.

4. It does not see anyone as an inherent enemy, deemed unsuitable to participate in voluntary social cooperation due to his class, race, gender, or culture.

5. It exposes the alleged tension between spontaneity and orderliness as fundamentally false, and explains the essential complementarity between the two.

6. It explodes the myth that there is a tradeoff between efficiency and equity.

7. It is inclusive of all social philosophies in their peaceful varieties.

8. It can never be justifiably accused of having been tried and failed, since it does not propose any overarching grand scheme, its successes being as numerous as individual attempts of independent thinking beings to make the best of their natural liberty, and its failures as numerous as independent thinking beings who refuse to make such attempts.

9. It embodies the most mundane and platitudinous common sense, consistent with our most ordinary notions of interpersonal decency, known to most of us since our sandbox days - keep your mitts to yourself, don't punch others, don't grab other people's stuff, live and let live - thus being as non-ideological as any social philosophy can be.

10. It will never get old, since voluntary cooperation is endlessly creative and can assume an infinity of forms.

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