Tom G. Palmer Quotes

21 quotes in 360 categories

• It is precisely because neither individuals nor small groups can be fully self-sufficient that cooperation is necessary to human survival and flourishing.
• If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?
• Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief…
• Libertarians argue that no normal adult has the right to impose choices on other normal adults, except in abnormal circumstances, such as when one person…
• But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both…
• Guardians are necessary for children and abnormal adults, because they cannot make responsible choices for themselves.
• The first census in 1790 asked just six questions: the name of the head of the household, the number of free white males older than…
• The reason the government sells the census as your ticket to getting goodies - rather than as your civic duty - is that distributing goodies…
• It is obvious that different individuals require different things to live good, healthy, and virtuous lives.
• To repeat, communitarians maintain that we are constituted as persons by our particular obligations, and therefore those obligations cannot be a matter of choice.
• At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not…
• Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good.
• Obligations may be universal or particular.
• The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.
• Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be…
• Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.
• Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded.
• Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others.
• Group personification obscures, rather than illuminates, important political questions.
• What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.

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