I regard the basic human value that underlies my own [political] beliefs as tolerance, based on humility. I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I am right and he is wrong.… Why do I regard tolerance as the foundation of my belief in freedom? How do we justify not initiating coercion? If I asked you what is the basic philosophy of a libertarian, I believe that most of you would say that a libertarian philosophy is based on the premise that you should not initiate force, that you may not initiate coercion. Why not? If we see someone doing something wrong, someone starting to sin [to use a theological term] let alone just make a simple mistake, how do we justify not initiating coercion? Are we not sinning if we don't stop him?… How do I justify letting him sin? I believe that the … answer is, can I be sure he's sinning? Can I be sure that I am right and he is wrong? That I know what sin is?
He was in favor of liberty and tolerance of differing views and behavior because we cannot know that the behavior we want to outlaw is really bad. In other words, the reason we should not censor dissenting ideas is not the standard libertarian idea that holding or speaking is not aggression, but because we can't be sure the ideas are wrong. This implies that if we could know for sure what is right and wrong, it might be okay to legislate morality, to outlaw immoral or "bad" actions.
To maintain that no such thing as a rational ethic exists does not imply "tolerance" and "pluralism," as champions of positivism such as Milton Friedman falsely claim, and moral absolutism does not imply "intolerance" and "dictatorship." To the contrary, without absolute values "tolerance" and "pluralism" are just other arbitrary ideologies, and there is no reason to accept them rather than any others such as cannibalism and slavery. Only if absolute values, such as a human right of self-ownership exist, that is, only if "pluralism" or "tolerance" are not merely among a multitude of tolerable values, can pluralism and tolerance in fact be safeguarded.
What this demonstrates, fundamentally, is that no simple principle is really adequate. We do not have all the answers, and there is no simple formula that will give us all the answers. That's why humility, tolerance, is so basic, so fundamental.
I recall a personal episode, at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society — the founding meeting in 1947 in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland. Ludwig von Mises was one of the people who was there. I was also. The group had a series of discussions on different topics. One afternoon, the discussion was on the distribution of income, taxes, progressive taxes, and so on. The people in that room included Friedrich von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, George Stigler, Frank Knight, Henry Hazlitt, John Jewkes, Lionel Robbins, Leonard Read — hardly a group whom you would regard as leftists. In the middle of that discussion von Mises got up and said "You're all a bunch of socialists," and stomped out of the room.
It may be that the ideal is — and I believe that it is — to have a society in which you do not have any kind of major or substantial governmental system of welfare. Again, nearly thirty years ago I suggested, as a way of promoting a transition from here to there, a negative income tax as a substitute for and an alternative to the present rag bag of welfare and redistributionist measures. Again, is that a statist solution? I believe not. We have participated in a society in which people have become dependent on government hand-outs. It is irresponsible; immoral I would say, simply to say, "Oh well, somehow or other we'll overnight drop the whole thing." You have to have some mechanism of going from here to there. I believe that we lose a lot of plausibility for our ideas by not facing up to that responsibility. It is of course desirable to have a vision of the ideal, of Utopia. Far be it from me to denigrate that. But we can't stop there. If we do, we become a cult or a religion, and not a living, vital force.
I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm: tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard. (Liberator, January 1, 1831)(For other critiques of gradualism from a libertarian point of view see McElroy, undated; Rothbard, 2005.)
So far as von Mises is concerned, I refer to his methodological doctrine of praxeology. That's a fancy word and it may seem highly irrelevant to my topic, but it isn't at all. Because his fundamental idea was that we knew things about "human action" (the title of his famous book) because we are human beings. As a result, he argued, we have absolutely certain knowledge of motivations of human action and he maintained that we can derive substantive conclusions from that basic knowledge. Facts, statistical or other evidence cannot, he argued, be used to test those conclusions, but only to illustrate a theory. They cannot be used to contradict a theory, because we are not generalizing from observed evidence, but from innate knowledge of human motives and behavior. That philosophy converts an asserted body of substantive conclusions into a religion. They do not constitute a set of scientific propositions that you can argue about in terms of empirical evidence. Suppose two people who share von Mises' praxeological view come to contradictory conclusions about anything. How can they reconcile their difference? The only way they can do so is by a purely logical argument. One has to say to the other, "You made a mistake in reasoning." And the other has to say, "No you made a mistake in reasoning." Suppose neither believes he has made a mistake in reasoning. There's only one thing left to do: fight. Karl Popper — another Austrian like Mises and Hayek — takes a different approach. If we disagree, we can say to one another, "You tell me what fact, if they were observed, you would regard as sufficient to contradict your view. And vice versa. Then we can go out and see which, if either, conclusion the evidence contradicts. The virtue of this modern scientific approach, as proposed by Popper, is that it provides way in which, at least in principle, we can resolve disagreements without a conflict.
How many times have you heard someone say that the answer to a problem is that you simply have to make it private property. But is private property such an obvious notion? Does it come out of the soul?
I have a house. It belongs to me. You fly an airplane over my house, 20,000 feet up. Are you violating my private property? You fly over at 50 feet. You might give a different answer. Your house is next door. You have a hi-fi system. You play your hi-fi at an enormously high decibel count. Are you violating my private property? Those are questions to which you can't get answers by introspection or asking whether A is A or not. They are practical questions that require answers based on experience. Before there were airplanes, nobody thought of the problem of trespass through air. So simply saying "private property" is a mantra, not an answer. Simply saying "use the market" is not an answer.
"What is the answer to socialism in public schools? Freedom." Correct. But how do we get from here to there? Is that somebody else's problem? Is that a purely practical problem that we can dismiss? The ultimate goal we would like to get to is a society in which people are responsible for themselves and for their children's schooling. And in which you do not have a governmental system. But am I a statist, as I have been labelled (sic) by a number of libertarians, because some thirty years ago I suggested the use of educational vouchers as a way of easing the transition. Is that … "simply a futile attempt to make socialism work more efficiently"? I don't believe it. I don't believe that you call simply say what the ideal is. This is what I mean by the utopian strand in libertarianism. You cannot simply describe the utopian solution, and leave it to somebody else how we get from here to there. That's not only a practical problem. It's a problem of the responsibilities that we have.
Άρρωστος κομμουνιστής ο Μίλτον ΦρίντμανΆρρωστος ναρκομανής ο Fringe Elements.
Ρε πουτανόσκυλο ΤΡΟΛΛ, νομίζεις ότι θα κάτσουμε να το διαβάσουμε αυτό το κατεβατό αμερικανομπαρουφολογίας; Τράβα γαμήσου ρε μπαστάρδι από δω χάμου.Καλά όταν γυρίσεις σπίτι σου μια μέρα κουρασμένος από την δουλειά που δεν έχεις και δεις ότι δεν σε θέλει κανένα μουνί και δεν έχεις λεφτά να αγοράσεις καμία ρωσιδούλα της προκοπής, τότε να μου το θυμηθείς ότι δεν σε θέλουν επειδή δεν έχεις καλλιεργήσει το πνεύμα σου. Και αν αναρωτηθείς τι μπορείς να κάνεις για να το καλλιεργήσεις, η απάντηση είναι πασιφανής: να διαβάσεις το παραπάνω κείμενο να υγρανθούν τα μουνιά.