Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from David Boaz’s January/February 1994 Cato Policy Report essay, “Rights and Responsibilities“:

Libertarians are often charged with ignoring or even rejecting moral responsibilities. There may be some truth to the first charge. Libertarians obviously spend most of their time defending liberty and thus criticizing government. They leave it to others to explore moral obligations and exhort people to assume them. Why is that? I see two reasons. First, there is the question of specialization. We do not demand of the AIDS researcher, why aren’t you searching for a cure of cancer as well? With government as big as it is, libertarians find the task of limiting its size thoroughly time consuming. Second, libertarians have noticed that too many non-​libertarians want to enforce every moral virtue. As Bill Niskanen puts it, welfare-​state liberals fail to distinguish between a virtue and a requirement, while contemporary conservatives fail to distinguish between a sin and a crime. (The unique contribution of communitarians to the current debate may be that they make both of those grievous errors.)