Tom G. Palmer
Tom G. Palmer
Tom Gordon Palmeris a libertarian author and theorist, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Network...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
CountryUnited States of America
choices matter obligation
To repeat, communitarians maintain that we are constituted as persons by our particular obligations, and therefore those obligations cannot be a matter of choice.
profound intellectual kim-il-sung
At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung.
pluralism-is liberty world
Libertarians recognize the inevitable pluralism of the modern world and for that reason assert that individual liberty is at least part of the common good.
political important groups
Group personification obscures, rather than illuminates, important political questions.
libertarian normal arguing
Libertarians typically argue that particular obligations, at least under normal circumstances, must be created by consent; they cannot be unilaterally imposed by others.
children differences insane
Libertarians recognize the difference between adults and children, as well as differences between normal adults and adults who are insane or mentally hindered or retarded.
rights differences different
What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.
has-beens
Obviously, all of us have been influenced by those around us.
mean equality rights
Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated.
government tickets census
The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.
may obligation palms
Obligations may be universal or particular.
believe choices normal
But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.
rights people generations
Young people today are being robbed. Of their rights. Of their freedom. Of their dignity. Of their futures. The culprits? My generation and our predecessors, who either created or failed to stop the world straddling engine of theft, degradation, manipulation, and social control we call the welfare state.
individuality born obligation
If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?