John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 50-52, under the heading “Consistency”.

Most people are not consciously aware of the issue of consistency, even though, in their day to day lives, they constantly demand it. Children in particular demand consistent action of their parents. If you, as a parent, say one thing today and another tomorrow, you’ll hear all about it.

We all demand consistency of the people we know, of our employers or employees, of our teachers and our institutions. Particularly, we demand it of our governments. We demand that laws be consistently administered, and that benefits be consistently distributed.

Because people are not explicitly aware of the issue, or of its importance, not enough attention is paid to consistency. Instead, from a personal point of view, it becomes more a matter of convenience, rather than principle. That is, people are often only consistent when it suits them, and are happily inconsistent at other times. This occurs particularly when the needs of consistency conflict with a person’s emotional prejudices or weaknesses, such as greed. There is, therefore, a need to make people more aware of the fact that if they demand consistency of others, they have an obligation to be consistent themselves, and that is something to be taken seriously and not as a matter of casual convenience.

From the study of the world around us, men and women throughout our history have built up a body of knowledge, and are constantly adding to it, correcting it and refining it. Using reason, principles, logic, facts and experimentation, constant effort is applied to build up an internally consistent, totally integrated body of knowledge to explain our environs and everything that happens within it. The ultimate judge, for sciences such as engineering, mathematics, physics and chemistry, is objective reality.

From a personal point of view, to be able to act consistently, we have to first develop an explicit personal philosophy, and then endeavour, at all times, to act consistently with it.

For a start, examine your own personal beliefs. Lay them out and see what order there is to them. Are they just a grab bag of all sorts of things that you’ve picked up through the years — a mixture of truth, myths, rumour, prejudice, emotion, fact and rationalisation? Have you made any attempt to order them into an integrated and consistent system? Are your ideas about education, for example, consistent with your ideas about individual rights? If you believe in principles, what are those principles? Are they consistent with each other? Do you apply them consistently?

The libertarian philosophy presented in this book is, we believe, a consistent philosophy, based on a few fundamental principles.

To sum it up very simply, the libertarian believes in the fundamental principle of non-interference: that is, the right of each person to live their life from the initiation of force, fraud or coercion by others, including governments. The libertarian stand on any issue, from foreign policy to pollution, can be determined by the consistent application of that fundamental principle.

A final point that needs to be made, particularly in the light of much the intellectual activity of today, is that to reason logically is only half the battle for arriving at the truth. The other half is to start from the correct premise(s).

In many cases today, these starting points are accepted without question, and desperately need to be re-examined. This is the true meaning of radical reform — to go right back to the roots, to question the most fundamental premises. We need to re-examine many of the basic concepts that we our building our society on. In particular, we need to re-examine our ideas on the proper role of governments. To argue over whether or not the tariff on imported motor cars should be 27.5 per cent or 20 per cent, for example, is only relevant after one has decided whether any tariff protection at all is morally justifiable.

Current problems besetting our economy and society generally would seem to indicate that it is time, in fact, it is at least urgent, that this sort of re-assessment of our basic premises is made. Nature will not tolerate contradictions. Ultimately, we have no choice but to recognise reality and act consistently with it. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.