Posted by Mark Robinson on March 26, 1999 at 01:09:37:
Bastiat is the shining light of the Libertarians. He seems to be at least a deist like Jefferson. Like Libertarians he seems to have no account of nurture and growth. One supposes that the Libertarian aversion to these topics is that they might open the door to a paternalistic theory of Government. A child after all seems to arrive at adulthood in debt to those who fed and protected him. A child typically lacks self-control and is almost always under the relatively beneficial control of others. A child shares much in common with madmen and criminals, neither of whom deserve self-government since they lack self-control.
The difference between the liberal, the libertarian, and the conservative could be summarized thus in terms of their vision of man: The Liberal: Man is relatively helpless and should remain forever the State's child.
The Libertarian: Man is a self-controlled, rational, essentially well-motivated being who deserves freedom.
The Conservative: Man should become as nearly as possible a self-controlled, rational, well-intentioned being and to the extent to which he does, deserves the right to self-government. The goal of families and governments is to foster that development in children and citizens respectively. It is for this reason that Conservatives who often seem to be in sympathy with Libertarians wish to legislate in favor of the family's responsible exercise of power and to reinforce family relations such as the contract of marriage and the mutual obligations of parents and children.
Bastiat's dictum that the government has no right to do to any individual (or one supposes voluntary organization) what one individual cannot rightly do to another. I accept this and the difficulty it entails of justifying taxation (an involuntary exaction of resources) even for the legitimate collective function of mutual defense. Government after all is distinguishable from other ociations by its involuntary character.
Government and free ociations derive their powers from individual rights and their limitations by limitations on individual actions relative to others.
Can someone give me their justification for taxation for the collective defense? Is such taxation a punishment, a wrong, a payment of a debt, or what?
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