Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Lind

Where was the libertarian right during the great struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians.

Civil libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the subordination of politics to religion - issues like the campaign to expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall Street brokerage firms.

Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny.

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.

In the course of the twenty-first century what may be called the "capital wage" could be added to the labor wage and the social wage, so that middle-class Americans - not merely an affluent minority - might derive income from three sources rather than just two.

Because of our peculiar electoral law, the American government is divided between two parties. The American people are not.

If you have free universal health care and free education supported by public school taxes, then you have more bargaining power with your bosses, but if everything is privatized, and ordinary Americans have to pay for everything through their wages, then they're at the mercy of their employers. If the workers know they'll be ruined if they lost their jobs, they're not going to be uppity. You want to break their spirit.

On the conservative side, today's libertarianism is far more dogmatic and devoid of qualification than the liberalism of Adam Smith or J.S. Mill. Like Marxism, libertarianism is a utopian worldview based on an economic-determinist vision of history. Unlike Marxism, libertarianism is highly specific in its predictions about the transition to the utopian world order, rendering it vulnerable to fact.

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.