Roderick Long: Violence

Roderick Long is American philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on violence.

Roderick Long: 22 quotes0 likes

“Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.”

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

“Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian.”

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 425

“Statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result.”

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

“The violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiated in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence.”

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)