The question of questions for the politician should ever be "What type of social structure am I tending to produce?" But this is a question he never entertains, even though vast evidence exists that all legislation expands beyond its original intent.
We are born into this world believing that success in anything will be met with praise and acclaim. We are not often told the truth that we see in this film: success is more likely to be met by envy, hate, disparagement, put downs, and loathing, sometimes from the most unexpected sources.
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others.
How would appeals work in a voluntary system of private law? Would defendants be able to appeal clearly outrageous convictions? If so, then what's to stop a murderer from indefinitely appealing his cases?
Everyone knows something is wrong here. Everyone. Except perhaps for patent lawyers, federal judges, and Orrin Hatch. I take that back. I think even most patent lawyers know something is wrong.
A parent who puts a child behind a loom for ten hours a day does so, not out of callous greed, but because this is what brings food to the table. Economic development is the precondition for all that is good and humane.
The well-known problem of the tyranny of the majority is present in both corporate/investor democracies and political democracies. What sets one apart from the other are the remedies available to the disgruntled minority.
Libertarians have not come to promise human beings a technocratic utopia; we have come to bring everyone freedom, the freedom of each individual to pursue whatever his or her dreams of the future may be. Or even to have no vision of the future.
Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in <em>The Smart Set</em> in 1922, "a libertarian of the most extreme variety."
