Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom G. Palmer

Palmer’s line is a scalpel aimed at a familiar political move: smuggling hierarchy into law by treating human variation as a warrant for unequal treatment. By stressing “normal adults,” he narrows the claim to the baseline case where most rights disputes actually live: competent people capable of consent, responsibility, and reciprocity. That qualifier matters. It preempts the easy rebuttal that rights must flex for children or those lacking capacity, while also revealing the libertarian bet that political equality is best grounded in agency rather than in shared identity or shared outcomes.

The rhetorical engine is the word “simply.” It’s not just a stylistic shrug; it’s a provocation. Palmer frames libertarianism less as an ideology with a thousand policy positions than as a moral constraint: whatever our differences in talent, wealth, charisma, IQ, productivity, virtue, or social status, none of that authorizes different “fundamental rights.” The subtext is a rejection of both aristocratic logic (“the better should rule”) and technocratic paternalism (“the expert may coerce”), and it quietly indicts contemporary habits of ranking people by merit, risk, or usefulness and then letting those rankings dictate who deserves what.

Contextually, Palmer is writing in a world where “difference” is constantly weaponized: to justify discrimination, to rationalize unequal legal protections, or to recast rights as conditional privileges. His sentence tries to lock one door: no matter how unequal the scoreboard gets, the rulebook stays the same. That’s the libertarian promise, and also its pressure point, because it insists that dignity is not something society awards; it’s something the law must presume.