And so does mine. "Government" as a monopoly on law, force, property, and everything else is simply an iron fist inside a soft glove at the best. At the worst, it is an iron first crushing your ...

I know it is hard to give up the idea of at least a little government; it was for me. I therefore understand those of you still trapped in the literal myth that big government protects you as you think your god does. It is simply false --- read history.

And as corporations extend their control to people outside their employ, with DRM and increasingly prevalent, shameless propaganda and their own armed forces and even co-optation of the nominal forms of governmental authority, the truth of our next useful sentence becomes ever more manifestly clear, that sentence being:

“Corporations are governments.”

I hate to break it to you but this government monopoly on force is a figment of your imagination. If it weren't then Iraq would be totally placid as our soldiers would be the only ones with guns.

Government, like the value of currency itself is only held together by the consensus of the population to treat it as an authority able to settle conflicts. If that isn't a voluntary association then I don't know what is.

Most American Libertarians have precious little grasp of the history of their political philosophy. They seem to think that the Libertarian school of thought sprang fully formed like Athena from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein as attending midwife. Libertarianism’s true origins, however, unsettle most Libertarians to the point where the mere acceptance of that history often starts those rusty old mental gears grinding again. To wit, and here is tactical nuclear sentence number one:

"Libertarianism originated in the philosophy of a left-wing French political philosopher who also influenced Karl Marx."

The French Philosopher in question is, as some of you have guessed (and with whose description a few of you are no doubt ready to quibble), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously penned the Libertarians’ Sekrit Motto, "Property is Theft." Of course unlike modern Libertarians, Proudhon meant that as a condemnation. Among the pre-Marxist political thinkers strongly influenced by Proudhon was Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who under the pen name Max Stirner wrote one of the first true capital-L Libertarian texts, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, which can be translated either as "The Ego and Its Own" or, more literally and more tellingly, "The Individual And His Property." Stirner became a nucleus of a nascent school of political thought then called "individualist anarchism,"*** whose inheritance-tax-free heirs include Ludwig Von Mises, The Austrian and Chicago Schools, Murray Rothbard, Alan Greenspan, and so on.

(...)

Clarke is right to point out the influence that Proudhon had on Von Mises, Rothbard, the Austrian and Chicago schools, and others who have built American libertarianism. This is not news to libertarians. But I think that Clarke is right in that some libertarians do need to be criticized for their view of history. There is a constant claim within libertarianism that the movement is nothing more than the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers still alive in today's modern world. Not all libertarians make this claim, but enough do for it to warrant deeper discussion.

Find yourself a copy of the United States Constitution. Perhaps you have a copy handy on your bookshelf, otherwise you can just look it up online. A lot of Libertarians will hold up the Constitution as a great and sacred document, a kind of a political Garden of Eden that we have fallen from. Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian Presidential nominee, styles himself a constitutional scholar for the masses; 1988 Libertarian Presidential nominee Ron Paul votes no on anything that isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Even without directly mentioning the Constitution, the right-libertarian Cato Institute talks about "the principles of the American Revolution--individual liberty, limited government, the free market, and the rule of law." Over and over again, the modern day libertarian movement turns to our founding document as a patriotic reassurance that they are in the right. Yet they are unable to overcome a simple problem: the Constitution is not a libertarian document.

To equate libertarianism with the classical liberalism that influenced our Founding Fathers is a philosophical error. While no doubt many classical liberals call themselves libertarians today, the modern movement has been heavily influenced by Austrian economics and Murray Rothard and takes a far more negative view of the state than the old men with wigs who wrote the Constitution. Even the minarchists (libertarians who believe that society needs a state, in contrast to anarchists who believe that society doesn't need a state) who stop short of outright anarchism and the abolition of the state would have been seen as the most radical of radicals in the early Republic; they would have made the Locofocos look mainstream. John Locke, Adam Smith and the rest of the classical liberal gang did express a mistrust of state power and its granting of monopolistic privilege, but they also supported a state for the maintenance of law and order in the face of natural anarchy. A quick glance at the Constitution reveals that the Founding Fathers, far from consistently favoring a system that viewed the state as a necessary evil, saw a role for government to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

The minarchist may still argue that these broad general principles are fully compatible with a limited government favored by modern day libertarians. But the Constitution is also the source for Congress's power to lay excises (the ancestor to our modern day sin taxes, which libertarians often criticize), to lay tariffs and regulate commerce (protectionism, a huge no-no to libertarianism), to borrow money and therefore establish a national debt (say goodbye to balanced budgets, another libertarian ideal), to establish post offices and post roads (see my previous complaints about this monopolistic agency), and to grant patents and copyrights (which is a contentious subject within libertarianism, some favoring it and some opposing it). Even a strict interpretation of the Constitution would grant the government powers that libertarians today complain about.

General welfare, that loosely defined term that continues to drive libertarians crazy in discussing constitutional interpretations, was a very real concept to these classical liberals...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/27/15718/5328