[Tao] Common Mistake on Lao-tzu

I found a good example of a common misconception about Lao-tzu in Murray N. Rothbard article in www.mises.org. At first, he says that he was a personal acquaintance of Confucius, and this is a myth, probably invented by early Taoists. Another mistake is Lao-tzu being attributed the saying "[government is] more to be feared than fierce tigers." This is a Confucian allegory about GOOD government : asking to an old crying lady why she staid there in spite of his father, husband and sons being killed by a Tiger in the countryside, she answered "Government here is not that bad". Confucius noted : "Hear this, my friends, bad government is worse than a cruel Tiger". This shows enough that Rothbard talks about what he doesn't know.

The main error is in the first sentence : The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu. This very common mistake is widely spread in the West. Anyone that has carefully read the Tao-te King should know that some (if not many) of those poems are far from what we would call "Liberal", to say the least. Yes, Lao-tzu, or the ones who wrote the book, was against Confucian values, and against an understanding of society as a way to harmonise human relationships. The book show a strong dislike of society of human beings and civilisation, arguing that all new inventions, both in technical and moral fields, are new tools disabling natural spontaneity. But most of the parts of the book were intended for the Ruler, instructing him how to rule without action, how to enforce his power without rushing ahead. And this book had a great influence on legalist philosophy, as the book of Hanfei Zi shows. Legalism (a Chinese kind of totalitarianism) is supposed to be diametrically opposite to libertarianism... Well... Not to mention this : Lao-tzu would probably be more shocked by being called "intellectual", as most of his book is a pamphlet against them !