You're Not Really a Liberal If You Agree That:

(But you may already be a Hallerist).

In no particular order,

1. Some people are stronger, smarter, or wealthier than others, whether by virtue of innate talents, hard work, plain good luck, or all three, and that’s just how life is.

2. People you don’t know or have any dealings with shouldn’t get to vote on what you have for dinner when you’re the one paying for it, just because they too are human beings with human rights.

3. A decent person feels a moral obligation to reciprocate favours done for him, and that he freely accepted or asked for.

4. The more power you have, the more good you can do.

5. If you hire somebody to do a job, you may legitimately give him orders concerning the performance of the duties agreed upon in the employment contract, and he has a binding obligation to obey those orders while on the clock.

6. What you legally have is yours, and reject any claim to the contrary.

7. You have a right to set binding rules for the use of what you have by others, should you see fit to allow it, and they have an obligation to abide by the rules you lay down.

8. The confidence you place in the authority of a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or other professional or practitioner you might rely on rests first and foremost on the hard-earned expertise that he has and you need, which expertise doesn’t derive from the elected Legislature that grants him legal authorization to practice.

9. If you hire and pay a guy to paint your house or fix your plumbing, he doesn’t acquire a say in the disposition of your house by having done it.

10. In life it’s generally a very good thing to have friends who are much more powerful than your enemies, and sometimes it’s a good idea to win such friends by making yourself useful to them in some way.

11. You’re not an oppressor of those weaker and less powerful than you just because you exist.

12. You are the rightful superior of your rightful subordinates, not the other way around.

13. It would probably be a bad idea to pay tuition fees in order to take a class that would be taught by you and the other students, not the prof, even though the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal.

14. At the end of day, the owner of a bar has the right to eject unruly patrons from the premises because he owns the place, not in order to secure the greatest good of the greatest number, or any other higher purpose posited by philosophers. The right to bounce a drunk may very well serve such purposes, but does not derive from them; for if it did, everybody would have that right, not just the proprietor.

15. Most men don’t in fact beat their wives and children or want to, even though they easily could; on the contrary, most men like to think that they stand ready to use their superior physical strength to protect their wives and children from being beaten.

16. A fair fight between men ends just as soon as one of the combatants submits; a brawler who keeps whaling on a manifestly defeated opponent is a common criminal who probably belongs behind bars.

17. There’s less of a chance of getting mugged in the street by a rich and powerful than a poor and needy man.

18. A society that maintains the right to punish criminals or take prisoners in wartime is one that practices slavery, and it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise.

19. The full complement of voting and other civic rights in a Republic probably shouldn’t be extended to babies, even though we’re told that they are universal rights enjoyed by all human beings.

20. There’s something inherently wrong with sexual perversion, drug abuse, self-mutilation, hardcore pornography, public drunkenness or nudity, etc. that doesn’t disappear when the State permits those things, when the participants “consent”, or when there is no force or fraud involved.

21. You have rights, because you pay taxes.

22. It sometimes seems that people who gush about “our democracy” don’t mean your democracy.

23. One way or another, the State, as the final authority in a given territory, always decides who gets to reside in its territory, and a State organized as a Republic furthermore always decides who is to be admitted to the privilege of citizenship; there is no getting around it, since whoever has the power to open borders can also close them, and whoever admits new citizens can also refuse to.

24. The principle of the consent of governed means individuals can consent to be governed by a King nobody ever voted for, and hence would be no less free than if they consent to rule by a “democratic” government.

25. Individuals should have a right to bear arms to do justice for themselves, but ought to exercise it prudently, and with respect for the legitimate rights of others at all times.

26. The State can never legitimately expropriate private property, since it doesn’t belong to the State; but it may make rules concerning the use of private property, if that use touches upon the rightful property and rights of the State, or of other private individuals.

27. Power isn’t harmful because it exists, but when it is abused. Just like a gun, it can be used for good, neutral, or evil purposes, depending on who uses it and why.

28. Those who say they want to abolish all power and all States from the Earth often really seek to seize it for themselves, and then exercise it in a much more despotic fashion than those they seized it from ever did.

29. Weak men who have things to prove are more likely to abuse positions of authority than strong men secure and confident in their authority.

30. It is much more degrading to one’s self-respect to have take an order from an equal or inferior than from an acknowledged superior.

31. If supreme power really does rightfully belong to those over whom it is exercised, as democratists have it, then the army would undeniably have a democratic right to overthrow the civilian power that created it and equips, houses, feeds, and pays the troops, and install a military government in its place, which probably wouldn’t be a good thing.

32. The reason people put up posters of champion athletes or guitar heroes as opposed to faceless crowds or the weak and vulnerable in their rooms is because human beings have a natural tendency to admire and attach themselves to the great, those with proven superiority in some field.

33. Human beings shouldn’t be treated as livestock to be improved or alternately, culled by the State in the interest of perfecting the race, creating a new man, making the world safe for democracy, social justice, civilizing putative savages, or any of the other grandiose purposes intellectuals say the State exists only in order to fulfill.

34.It is legitimate to spend one’s own money on oneself, to use it for one’s own benefit, as long as one does no wrong to others in the process, and the same is true of any other form of personal power, including political power.

35. There’s bound to be serious problems with any government founded on a doctrine which holds that governments exist only to protect individual rights, and then gives governments unlimited power to restrict individual rights as far as they deem necessary or expedient in order to do so.

36. The State should administer things more than it does people, as long as they refrain from violating the legitimate rights of the State and one another, and from doing other things that are also inherently wrong.

37. Questions concerning the legitimate powers of the State and the rights of individuals shouldn’t be answered by recourse to avowed theoretical fictions, but on the basis of sound appreciation of how real-life people and social relationships actually are, as opposed to what intellectuals think they should be in imaginary systems.