We have unfortunately created a little class of mini bureaucrats who are more concerned with keeping their jobs and perpetuating the institution as an institution and raising money than they are with spreading the message. When we started out our goal was to spread the word, it was sort of evangelical, to spread the word of liberty out to the world at large and we had people like Murray Rothbard and John Hospers and many other distinguished thinkers of that era involved in the party. Now we’re down to the level of people who are I think for the most part well intended, but when compared to those men are several orders down the intellectual scale and they are absorbed with minutia they are concerned with budgets, they are afraid to say anything that might scare people, that might keep people from voting for us. So it’s become a very timid organization in the past 6 or 8 years. —David Nolan
We have unfortunately created a little class of mini bureaucrats who are more concerned with keeping their jobs and perpetuating the institution as an institution and raising money than they are with spreading the message. When we started out our goal was to spread the word, it was sort of evangelical, to spread the word of liberty out to the world at large and we had people like Murray Rothbard and John Hospers and many other distinguished thinkers of that era involved in the party. Now we’re down to the level of people who are I think for the most part well intended, but when compared to those men are several orders down the intellectual scale and they are absorbed with minutia they are concerned with budgets, they are afraid to say anything that might scare people, that might keep people from voting for us. So it’s become a very timid organization in the past 6 or 8 years. —David Nolan
It is rare to find a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate abolition of evil and coercion. Utilitarians, with their devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of upsetting or radical change. Hence, utilitarians are never immediate abolitionists. They became mere gradualist reformers.
But in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably into the position of advisers and efficiency experts to the State. In other words, they inevitably came to abandon libertarian principle as well as a principled libertarian strategy. The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the existing order, for the status quo. Thus, they wound up as the image of the thing they had fought. —Murray Rothbard (For a New Liberty)
"Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowsky:“When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.”Sadowsky's definition highlights the crucial distinction between a man's right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right. —Murray Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty)
In an environment of State coercion, voting does not imply voluntary consent. Indeed, if the State allows us a periodic choice of rulers, limited though that choice may be, it surely cannot be considered immoral to make use of that limited choice to try to reduce or get rid of State power. —Murray Rothbard
By forcing man to act morally — in reality would deprive man of the very possibility of being moral. For no action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen. —Murray Rothbard
By forcing man to act morally — in reality would deprive man of the very possibility of being moral. For no action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen. —Murray Rothbard
