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After reading Albert Stichka’s opposing view of government in our joint article in the July issue of The Fayetteville FEED, I decided that a response was in order to some of his key points and assumptions that I believe attempt to distort and marginalize the views of small-government advocates and the libertarian position.

I have a lot of respect for Albert, both as a professional and intellectual, and think that his positions on government stem from an honest belief that the role of government in modern society to is to help people, particularly the less fortunate. However, it was Supreme Court Justice William Brandeis who said that “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent…The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” I believe that truer words have probably never been spoken. Large government advocates like Albert, who are well-intentioned but naïve to the nature of economic law and to the secondary and tertiary consequences of their actions, are most likely to harm the economic and civil liberties of everyone in the name of helping a select few. They don’t understand that their policies often harm those they wish to help.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to write a brief introduction to Libertarianism for the local magazine, the Fayetteville FEED. The FEED will print the article in their July issue, alongside a rebuttal of Libertarianism by another contributor. I'm going to post a brief snippet of the article below, and encourage you to pick up a copy of the magazine when it publishes next week.

Also, visit The Fayetteville FEED's website HERE. They are a great source of local information about music, artists, and all of the quirky things that make Fayetteville a pretty decent place to live.


Introduction to my article on Libertarianism to appear in the July issue of the Fayetteville FEED Magazine.

Medicare is going bankrupt, Social Security is going bankrupt, we are involved in two wars with no end in sight, we are facing the worst economy since the 1930s, and we can’t control a major oil leak in the gulf because our politicians and major corporations would rather worry about how they look on the evening news than actually work to solve the crisis.

Have I left anything out? Oh yeah, and as a nation we currently owe $54,000,000,000,000 in debt. That’s $175,000 per person.

We’re in bad shape. Yet, Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, the answers given to us by government are always the same: “Give us more power and we can stop that problem,” or “give us more money and we’ll be able to fix or avert that crisis”. You’d think that we would have wised up by now, instead of electing the same bureaucrats who continually dig us into deeper holes.

There is an alternative to this mess and the endless cycle of economic recessions, wars and the loss of your inalienable rights and civil liberties. That alternative is libertarianism...

Read more when The FEED publishes in July!