Libertarianism and Fearful Statists

"If I have a fault, it's candor."
--Rafe McCawley (Pearl Harbor)

To the question of why hasn't libertarianism won the day, Jacob Hornberger offers a direct answer. Many, if not most people, are statists. Statists do not want to be free to manage their lives and be responsible for their actions. They want the government to take care of them and to keep them safe.

They are ok with the strong arm of government taking resources from some and giving those resources to others. Statists do not see anything wrong with the process--as long as it is the government doing the taking and the redistributing. It is a way of getting more for less without breaking the law.

Hornberger posits that many statists live in fear--of starving, of dying from disease, of terrorists, of communists, of illegal aliens, etc. Consistent with the tenets of threat-rigidity theory, statists are willing to centralize decision-making authority to the federal government in order to cope with their fears.

Hornberger observes the folly of giving up freedom for security. As Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and others astutely observed long ago, trading freedom for security results in neither over time. Government, with its insatiable appetite for power, assumes ever more control.

Progress is made under conditions of freedom, where people act in manners to advance their interests, standard of living declines when people cede liberty to government.

Understandably, a growing fear of statists is this: the ranks of libertarians, those people who want to dismantle the welfare and warfare state in favor of freedom, are growing by the day.