An essay by Sheldon Richman, Speaking to Nonlibertarians, suggests how libertarians should speak to nonlibertarians about government.
As an exercise, I tried to turn the topic around:
Speaking to Libertarians
If ordinary people want to change how libertarians’ think about government, they will need to understand how libertarians think about government. By “libertarians,” I mean the minority of people who spend lots of time pondering political theory, or what Murray Rothbard called political ethics. They may focus at times on particular government programs and actions, or on proposals for new programs, but rarely about government as a beneficial/friendly institution.
This is not hard to understand. Libertarians come into a world full of national governments that present themselves as providers of a social safety net, guarantors of products and services, protectors of workers, defenders of the national borders, and dispensers of benefits to an assortment of deserving groups (farmers, exporters, too-big-to-fail banks, low-income people, and so on), but rarely ever delivery on their promises.
So for libertarians, the waste and corruption of the state is a natural, ever-present part of the landscape. This is reinforced through their “self-education” in economics, history, and political science. Few ever see the necessity, much less wonder about all the benefits that a larger more powerful government could do for them. Some libertarians may think that some government programs work okay in this matter or that, but the benefits of expansion of the social-service state itself never comes under examination.
So how can ordinary people speak to these libertarians in a way they will understand? How do we get them to question deeply held beliefs that they articulate all the time? My basic advice is to continue doing what governments always do – make them do what we want. This may be distasteful, but there is no need to persuade libertarians. The government has the power, and can force them to do what we want. So when you talk to libertarians get them to understand that having a government means you don’t have to convince someone you are right, just make them understand you have the power to make them do what you want them to do.