The case for freedom, an introduction to liberalism...
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1291The liberal sets a very high threshold for the initiation of violence. Beyond the minimal taxation necessary to maintain legal and defense services -- and some liberals shrink even from this -- he denies to the state the power to initiate violence and seeks only peaceful remedies to perceived social ills. He opposes violence for the sake of redistributing wealth, of enriching influential pressure groups, or trying to improve man's moral condition. Civilized people, says the liberal, interact with each other not according to the law of the jungle, but by means of reason and discussion. Man is not to be made good by means of the prison guard and the hangman; should they be necessary to make him good, his moral condition is already beyond salvage. As Ludwig von Mises puts it in this seminal book, modern man "must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police."
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