The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind. When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.
Dr. Lyle Rossiter
The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. 2006
[H/T to Jeff.
While looking around for an Zune compatible format for my consumption I ran across this:
Rossiter’s dream is to construct a grand, idealized libertarian, nightmarish, dystopia that creates hardships and inflicts wounds. This is dangerous, tragic, and sick.
So both sides accuse the other of being mentally ill.
Interesting.
So one then has to ask, “Which world view has resulted in the worst outcome for the affected populations?” I would presume the United States has best approximated (and poorly at that) the Libertarian viewpoint. But I’m not sure which of the following best represents the centrally planning government of the Liberal viewpoint: Communist China, USSR, Nazi Germany, or the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. But then I decided that it really didn’t matter.–Joe]
There is the moral basis for socialism (or “liberalism” as Rossiter puts it) to consider. It says that property rights are an outdated concept– that property may be confiscated and redistributed by the state as a means of enforcing “the common good” or some such. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is a common enough phrase emanating from statists, yet they never consider the desirability of living under a system where one’s property (and often one’s very life) is forever subject to confiscation. The moral basis for libertarianism is that individual rights take precedence (that to preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men) and that these rights all flow from the concept of property rights.
Even forgetting the extremely lop-sided outcomes of the implementation of the two systems, the libertarian ideal is morally superior in that it is founded in respect for all individuals.
Distilling it down further; socialism/statism sets out to violate human rights, and libertarianism sets out to protect them, QED.
The excuses used for the violations are infinitely varied, and while their particulars are a matter of Great Importance to the statists (in fact they focus on them exclusively) I consider them irrelevant as there is no excuse for a system based on the denial of rights.