Let us consider, for example, a transition demand set forth by various libertarians: namely, that the government budget be reduced by 10 percent each year for ten years, after which the government will have disappeared. Such a proposal might have heuristic or strategic value, provided that the proposers always make crystal clear that these are minimal demands, and that indeed there would be nothing wrong—in fact, it would be all to the good—to step up the pace to cutting the budget by 25 percent a year for four years, or, most desirably, by cutting it by 100 percent immediately. The danger arises in implying, directly or indirectly that any faster pace than 10 percent would be wrong or undesirable.
An even greater danger of a similar sort is posed by the idea of many libertarians of setting forth a comprehensive and planned program of transition to total liberty, e.g., that in Year 1 law A should be repealed, law B modified, tax C be cut by 20 percent, etc.; in Year 2 law D be repealed, tax C cut by a further 10 percent, etc. The comprehensive plan is far more misleading than the simple budget cut, because it strongly implies that, for example, law D should not be repealed until the second year of this planned program. Hence, the trap of philosophic gradualism, of gradualism-in-theory, would be fallen into on a massive scale. The would-be libertarian planners would be virtually falling into a position, or seeming to, of opposing a faster pace toward liberty.
There is, indeed, another grave flaw in the idea of a comprehensive planned program toward liberty. For the very care and studied pace, the very all-embracing nature of the program, implies that the State is not really the enemy of mankind, that it is possible and desirable to use the State in engineering a planned and measured pace toward liberty. The insight that the State is the permanent enemy of mankind, on the other hand, leads to a very different strategic outlook: namely that libertarians push for and accept with alacrity any reduction of State power or State activity on any front; any such reduction at any time is a reduction in crime and aggression, and is a reduction of the parasitic malignity with which State power rules over and confiscates social power.
For example, libertarians may well push for drastic reduction, or repeal, of the income tax; but they should never do so while at the same time advocating its replacement by a sales or other form of tax. The reduction or, better, the abolition of a tax is always a noncontradictory reduction of State power and a step toward liberty; but its replacement by a new or increased tax elsewhere does just the opposite, for it signifies a new and additional imposition of the State on some other front. The imposition of a new tax is a means that contradicts the libertarian goal itself.
