by Walter E. Block
LewRockwell.com
According to that old aphorism we owe to Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Well, these are the times that try libertarian’s souls too. Here, I do not refer to Covid, to Black Lives Matter, to the riots, to vast unemployment, to the U.S. imperialistic system, etc. Nor, even, to issues on which libertarians disagree: immigration, abortion, voluntary slavery, anarchism, reparations, etc. Rather I have in mind a series of episodes about which libertarians are, if not indifferent, then at least ambivalent. What is ambivalence? It is, according to the dictionary, “the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something…”
So which events engender in us this reaction?
1. Strikes by public sector unions