PENN JILLETTE: HOW I BECAME A LIBERTARIAN
http://www.newsweek.com/penn-jillett...rtarian-453565
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.or...pring-2016.pdf
Before I finished high school, I was out on the road in the USA. I learned to eat fire, and I learned to juggle, and I went to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Clown College. … I met Teller when I was 18, and we started putting together our magic show. I guess we were kind of fast-tracked to be Hollywood liberals …
I really come to [libertarianism] from a purely hippie point of view. I have always been a peacenik, … I was then just kind of your standard liberal … I started giving all the arguments for why the government had to be more powerful, and Tim said a really simple sentence to me. He said, “Do you think it’s OK to punish people who’ve done nothing wrong?” And I said “No”—even though I felt somewhere in my heart that it was a trick question. And then he said, “Why is it OK to reward people who’ve done nothing right?”
He said, “Can’t you see that you can’t reward without punishing? They’re the same thing.” And that shut me up for a little while.
Then Tim started saying, “You know, you’re so against force. You’ve never hit anybody in your life. You’ve been beat up. You’ve been in carnival situations that have gone badly and people have hit you and you’ve not hit them back because you didn’t think it was life threatening. You are insanely peacenik in terms of the way you see war, what the country should do. Why do you think it’s so OK for the government to use force to get things done that you think are good ideas?” …
one really good definition of government is that government is supposed to have a monopoly on force. The government is the guys with the guns, and we are the people who tell the government what they can do. So in my morality, I shouldn’t be able to tell anyone to do something with a gun that I wouldn’t do myself. …
Would I use a gun to build a library? No! Do I think libraries are really important? Wicked important! Really important! …
So will I give my money to help someone build a library? Yeah! Will I ask other people to give their money to help build a library? Yeah! Will I beg other people to give money to build a library? Yeah! Will I lie to people to get them to give money to build a library? A little bit. Will I use a gun to get someone to build a library? No.
And that is, in a nutshell, my entire view of politics …
But I do know that if this is a government by the people, and I’m one of the people, and the government is the one with guns—I know that it is immoral for me to use the government to use force, to use guns, to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself. And that’s how I became a libertarian.
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