Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto Read Free

justify the oppression and murder of their countrymen as a means to retain power.
    All of these “isms” are really just about the dominance of government insiders over individuals, and the arbitrary rule of man over men. Unlimited governments always hurt people and always take their stuff, often in horrific and absolutely unintended ways. The architects of America’s business plan were keenly aware of the dangers of too much government and the arbitrary rule of man. James Madison states it well in Federalist 51:

    But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

    Government should be limited, and it should never choose sides based on the color of your skin, who your parents are, how much money you make, or what you do for a living. And it should never, ever choose favorites, because those favorites will inevitably be the vested, the powerful, and the ones who know somebody in Washington, D.C.
    That’s why our system is designed to protect individual liberty. “[I]n the federal republic of the United States,” Madison writes, “all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.”
    3. T AKE R ESPONSIBILITY
    Should you wait around for someone else to solve a problem, or should you get it done yourself? Liberty is an individual responsibility. The burden always sits upon your shoulders first. It is that inescapable accountability that stares you in the mirror every morning. If it didn’t get done, sometimes there’s no one to blame but yourself.
    Free people step up to help our neighbors when bad things happen; no one needs to tell us to do that. We defend, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, what makes America so special. Freedom works to make our communities a better place, by working together voluntarily, solving problems from the bottom up.
    This is the “I” in community. Communities are made up of individuals and families and volunteers and local organizations and time-tested institutions that have been around since long before you were born. All of these things work together to solve problems, build things, and create better opportunities. But notice a pattern that should be self-evident: Families are made up of free people. So are churches and synagogues, local firehouses and volunteer soup kitchens, and the countless community service projects that happen every weekend. All of these social units, no matter how you parse it, are made up of individuals working together, by choice. It does take a village, but villages are made up of people choosing to voluntarily associate with one another.
    I was introduced to the philosophy of liberty by Ayn Rand. I found her work compelling because it focused on individual responsibility. Do you own yourself and the product of your work, she asked, or does someone else have a first claim on your life? I thought the answer was obvious.
    Rand’s critics love to attack her views that individuals matter, and that you have both ownership of and a responsibility for your own life. They usually set up a straw man: the caricature of “rugged individualism” and the false claim that everyone is an island, uncaring of anyone or anything, willing to do anything to get ahead.
    “Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up,” Barack Obama tells Rolling Stone . “Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in