Monday, August 04, 2014

Matt Zwolinski is Why the Libertarian Movement Can't Have Nice Things

If I wanted very badly to rob the term "libertarian" of all meaning, I'd write an article and title it something like "The Pragmatic Libertarian Case for a Basic Income Guarantee." And then I'd try to convince some establishment "libertarian" think tank to dedicate a symposium to the topic.

If we want to be pragmatic and libertarian, how about this:

Let non-libertarians come up with and promote bad, non-libertarian ideas, while libertarians come up with and promote good, libertarian ideas.

Libertarians don't need to dream up anti-libertarian crap to promote. We've already got people who are willing and able to do that. They're called statists and they are perfectly well-qualified to vomit up nonsense like "BIG, even if it is not ideal from a libertarian perspective, is significantly better on libertarian grounds than our current welfare state ..."

Doing what we do well and letting the other guys do what they do well is about as pragmatic as it gets, right?

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