It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus.

I look on a right of property--on the right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves, as essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society. If, therefore, I did not suppose, with Mr. Locke, that nature establishes such a right--if I were not prepared to shew that she not merely establishes, but also protects and preserves it, so far as never to suffer it to be violated with impunity--I should at once take refuge in Mr. Bentham’s impious theory, and admit that the legislator who established and preserved a right of property, deserved little less adoration than the Divinity himself. Believing, however, that nature establishes such a right, I can neither join those who vituperate it as the source of all our social misery, nor those who claim for the legislator the high honour of being "the author of the finest triumph of humanity over itself."

The freedom of each finds its limits in that of others; no one has a right to absolute freedom. The limit where freedom begins and ends, where its rights and duties come together, is called law, and the State itself must bow to the law.

It would be impossible to enumerate even in a thousand pages all the crimes which the State has committed and continues to commit. This is no idle statement. but the conclusion of some of the best observers of the time. We are told by the great philosophers, historians and scientists that the State originated in violence and crime, and has continued to the present day in its original elements, although they are refined and probably less insolent in its assumptions than in earlier periods. But not much.

Libertarians, in stark contrast to political and media elites, have the courage and humility to recognize that people are not cattle to be managed. Only libertarians admit that no individuals or governments have the knowledge to organize human affairs; that in fact such a pretense of knowledge is absurd. Only libertarians can explain how the chaos we see in the world today is actually caused by economic interventions, military interventions, and central bank interventions. Only libertarians offer a viable alternative to Left and Right, because we don’t favor one kind of intervention over another and we don’t seek to impose laws or use force. Only libertarians understand that real peace, community, prosperity, diversity, tolerance, and democratic action can be found all around us, in the day-to-day actions of ordinary people in the marketplace.