What I said and what you say I said ...

I said ... government today is a net negative for humanity. It does more harm than good and is in the long run unsustainable. It should be reduced, decentralized and voluntarized. 

I did not say ... that I want anarchy. I did not say there is no need for laws.

I said ... Welfare statism entrenches poverty, creates intergenerational dependancy, and engenders ever-expanding parasitism. Poverty is empirically reduced by economic freedom. 

I did not say ... that I don't care about poverty, that I hate poor people, or that I think they are lazy people who should be ignored. 

I said ... Freedom is a precious end in and of itself. Freedom should be a factor in any and every cost-benefit analysis. 

I did not say .... that I want to see the world plunged into chaos and the misery of destitution. 

I said ... wealth is not a fixed variable out there to be controlled and re-distributed. It is dynamic, emergent and created by individuals in real-time. You help everyone by making the pie bigger. 

I did not say ... I hate minorities. I did not say I want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. 

I said ... using institutional coercion to force people into collectives is neither moral or efficient. Humans naturally cooperate voluntarily.

I did not say ... I think people shouldn't work together.

I said ... government is just people like the rest of us. They have incentive and calculation problems that lead to resources mis-allocation and distortion. Government failure > market failure.

I did not say ... that I think government wants to kill me or that a free market is 100% perfect utopia.

I said ... the system is broken, unsustainable and will only be fixed once everyone accepts the fact that it is broken and shows an interest in fixing it

I did not say ... all government, politicians and civil servants are bad

I did say, that for a variety of reasons, they are unresponsive to our most urgent priorities and that too many citizens are uninformed or misinformed, disengaged, blind conformist who believe 'someone more capable than they' will take care of their interests for them ... and that is simply, logically, and demonstratively unrealistic.

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place, legal plunder. And now that the legislators and statists have futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems. And try liberty.

~Frederic Bastiat, French economist