Marxism?? I'm not sure that Marx
would recognize it.
Anyway, Onward, through the fog...
David
"Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of
what's good for people than people do is a swine."--P. J. O’Rourke
On 10/2/2011 4:36 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists,
drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive
political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that
individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and
government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear
conscience to do things society presently restrains, like
make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It
promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous
framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American
history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to
the whole of society. But while it contains substantial
grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.
DRB: Damn. Not very complementary, is he? Let's see, ambitious: Not
particularly; ex-socialists: HELL NO, ya' idiot; drug users: only if
you count pipe tobacco and the occasional beer; and sexual
eccentrics: no. So who the hell is he talking about? Sure, they may
want some things legalized, but not necessarily so that they can
indulge without legal risk. They just don't think that a little pot
deserves a permanent record and a stint in the slammer next to "Josh
the slasher" or "Karl the serial killer."
There
are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law
libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism
(the most), and some varieties avoid some of the
criticisms below. But many are still subject to most
of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I
recently heard a respected pundit insist that
classical liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray
area where it is not really clear that they are
libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the
libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on
editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of
commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to
allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a
vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by
defending a refined version of their doctrine when
challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull
that before.
DRB: Anarcho-capitalism?? Sorry, that is most often
Anarcho-Socialism, and they usually go into the Democratic Party or
the Socialist Workers Party or even the Communist Party. And he even
admits that some of them are not clearly libertarians.
This is no
surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism
of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one
can run society purely on altruism and collectivism,
then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion
that one can run it purely on selfishness and
individualism. Society in fact requires both
individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and
altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism
offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a
complete a priori account of the political
good without the effort of empirical investigation.
Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to
reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism,
it has its historical myths and a genius for making
its followers feel like an elect unbound by the
moral rules of their society.
DRB: Selfishness and individualism? I've always heard capitalism and
individualism. So capitalism must be what he means by selfishness.
Gee, that sounds like President Obama. This guy is a conservative?
I've seen Marxists pull that before.
The
most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very
simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not
the only good thing in life. Simple physical
security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not
freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity
is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to
consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one
can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s
wife. A family is in fact one of the least free
things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of
it derive from relations that we are either born
into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail
obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease
or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are
in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people
and the principal issues that concern governments.
DRB:
They
that
can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.--Benjamin Franklin
DRB: He was a libertarian?? Who knew??
Libertarians
try to get around this fact that freedom is not the
only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods
to it through the concept of choice, claiming that
everything that is good is so because we choose to
partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us
choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But
this violates common sense by denying that anything
is good by nature, independently of whether we
choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by
nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to
its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to
the freely chosen means there are no inherently good
or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to
spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as
worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
DRB: Conundrum: Libertarians believe in Free Will; the Calvinist
generally denies that anything is good by nature because it was all
impacted by the fall of Adam. And it's not the choice that makes
something good. One can choose between two goods, good and evil, or
two evil things. So I must part with common sense, supposedly, to be
a libertarian. I don't know where he gets that. NOT. A. CLUE.
Furthermore,
the reduction of all goods to individual choices
presupposes that all goods are individual. But some,
like national security, clean air, or a healthy
culture, are inherently collective. It may be
possible to privatize some, but only some, and the
efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really
want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the
factory that emitted it and sue?
DRB: No we don't want to trace every pollutant in the air back to
the factory that emitted it and sue, that's what this
administration's EPA apparently supports. They're not libertarian.
Libertarians
rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the
point at which it starts to impinge upon another
person’s, but they radically underestimate how
easily this happens. So even if the libertarian
principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is
true, it does not license the behavior libertarians
claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it
should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like
it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t
do is choose not to live in a culture that has been
vulgarized by it.
DRB: This is now Christian Legalism writ large. We cannot choose NOT
to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by abortion, either.
It is obviously doing harm, so don't spin that too hard.
Libertarians
in real life rarely live up to their own theory but
tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while
declining to live up to the difficult portions. They
flout the drug laws but continue to collect
government benefits they consider illegitimate. This
is not just an accidental failing of
libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic
temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail
whenever tried, just like Marxism.
DRB: I wish for examples, but he provides none. Generally speaking,
if the government coerces me into paying into a given welfare or
entitlement system, I don't consider it a violation of everything
that is holy to libertarianism if I should have the misfortune to
need those systems and actually receive money (or whatever) from
them. I think that this guy is trying, like others you have
presented here, to make perfect the enemy of the good. The
libertarian is held to the perfect standard and found wanting.
Quelle Surprise!!! NOBODY is perfect with the exception of Jesus.
(IMAO)
Libertarians
need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free
society needed to draft its citizens in order to
remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports
to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from
unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force
its citizens to become sufficiently educated to
sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive
landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their
property as a precondition for giving everyone
freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed
to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap
foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners
who would vote for socialistic wealth
redistribution?
DRB: The defense angle is a failing. The oil angle is less so,
because the libertarian would not be as strict with the domestic
production as the current administration and most of them going back
to Carter or perhaps daddy Bush. Considering the ever declining test
scores, I do wish that the schools taught more about math and the
hard sciences instead of Heather and her two mommies or Harry and
his two daddies. In other words, I'm tired of kids being
indoctrinated instead of educated. They should be taught stuff that
they might actually need to get a job some day. That is apparently
too practical for the education bureaucracy; they would rather build
REAL Marxist drones. The Kelo decision has been a disaster. The
planned development has gone bankrupt and the folks are worse off
than before. We need to stop imminent domain abuse, such as occurred
when Jerry Jones built the new Cowboys Stadium, paid for by
Arlington, TX taxpayers on land condemned by imminent domain by that
same city.
In
each of these cases, less freedom today is the price
of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be
a way of running down accumulated social capital and
storing up problems for the future. So even if
libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this
does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is
the right one today on any particular question.
DRB: It doesn't always work out that way. The "more freedom
tomorrow" does not always come to pass. That's a little
Pollyanna-ish. The reverse isn't always true either.
Furthermore,
if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow,
then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the
day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom
may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if
limited freedom is the right choice, then
libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is
simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom,
then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a
Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional
liberties. There is no need to embrace outright
libertarianism just because we want a healthy
portion of freedom, and the alternative to
libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s
traditional liberties.
DRB: It may, but there is no guarantee. Limiting freedom now may
devolve into limiting freedom even more later. Such was the case of
Communism until it all came crumbling down. Eventually the countries
got more freedom, but at the price of millions dead.
Libertarianism’s
abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to
bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism
would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It
has been possible at certain times in history to do
just that by assuming debts one could not repay.)
And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy
when confronted with the problem of children, whom
it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of
compulsory education and all child-specific laws,
like those against child labor and child sex. It
likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.
DRB: Yes, anything taken to an extreme leads to bizarre conclusions.
And to be honest, I've never seen a libertarian write or opine on
slavery. And I haven't met the wild-eyed education dropouts. That
seems more like the homeschooling crowd, where your standard issue
conservative Christian parent is trying to take Jane and Johnny out
of the Godless Public Schools. Libertarianism has not a damn thing
to do with that. Many of them are glad that libertarians have
supported choice in education, but they don't want to abandon the
Religious Right.
Libertarians
argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing
drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because
drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined
by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if
current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict
people were abolished. They claim a “natural order”
of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no
actual empirical proof that this would happen.
Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an
all-or-nothing proposition: if society continues to
protect people from the consequences of their
actions in any way, libertarianism regarding
specific freedoms is illegitimate. And since society
does so protect people, libertarianism is an
illegitimate moral position until the Great
Libertarian Revolution has occurred.
DRB: And The Netherlands hasn't fallen into the North Sea since it
legalized quite a few drugs, nor has total chaos taken over, and the
streets are not filled with drug-addled zombies disrupting society.
So there is likewise no guarantee that all hell would break loose if
we lightened up on the folks who are lighting up.
And
is society really wrong to protect people against
the negative consequences of some of their free
choices? While it is obviously fair to let people
enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer
the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set
limits on both these outcomes. People are allowed to
become millionaires, but they are taxed. They are
allowed to go broke, but they are not then forced to
starve. They are deprived of the most extreme
benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most
extreme costs. The libertopian alternative would be
perhaps a more glittering society, but also a
crueler one.
DRE: Well, the actual thought in Libertarian circles is to educate
folks that overdoses can be fatal, so you over-indulge at your own
peril. In our current society, we try to keep them from this
consequence, but we also stick them with the consequences of a
permanent arrest record, maybe some fines, maybe some jail time and
don't really treat the addiction, we just lock them up. And then
when their sentence is over, we tell them to get a job, which they
cannot do due to the permanent record, felony conviction, and time
in the slammer. So they go back to drugs. Problem solved? Hardly.
And then we have the three strikes folks who give folks life in
prison after the third time with some Mary-Jo-Wanna in their car.
Third strike for a murderer or rapist: same penalty. Because it's
really all the same thing???
Empirically,
most people don’t actually want absolute freedom,
which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian
governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose
absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by
its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good
as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it.
Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to
be libertarians.
DRB: If it were portrayed like this, I wouldn't choose it either. It
appears that most political pieces are polemical in nature. You take
the given ideology, find all of its worst possible outcomes and
positions, and dogmatically assert that ALL people in that ideology
want those very worst or inconsistent things. It is shit like that
which drives my cynicism on things political. If this post is what
someone thinks when they hear the term libertarian, then screw it
all, I just as well tune out and drop out. I can know that I'm not
being heard, but the stereotype is being played back in the brain
instead. Why bother?
I'm going to stop here, because the rest will just have me ranting
and cussing more than I already have.
The
political corollary of this is that since no
electorate will support libertarianism, a
libertarian government could never be achieved
democratically but would have to be imposed by some
kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the
lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other
philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best
for other people impose their values on the rest of
us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction
that it is the one true political philosophy and all
others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind
of society, with all its attendant pluses and
minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be
free to opt out of except by leaving.
And
if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect
a farrago of bizarre policies. Many support
abolition of government-issued money in favor of
that minted by private banks. But this has already
been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to
any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an
explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed
by the concentration of financial power in those few
banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many
other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the
empirical record.
A
major reason for this is that libertarianism has a
naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped
paying attention to the actual history of capitalism
around 1880. There is not the space here to refute
simplistic laissez faire, but note for now
that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan,
has one of the most regulated economies, while
nations in which government has essentially lost
control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly
economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of
over-regulation does not entail going to the
opposite extreme.
Libertarian
naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the
absence of government impingement upon freedom with
freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong
state, individual freedom falls prey to other more
powerful individuals. A weak state and a
freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as
shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.
Libertarians
are also naïve about the range and perversity of
human desires they propose to unleash. They can
imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of
Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some
recreational drug use and work on Monday. They
assume that if people are given freedom, they will
gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but
this takes for granted things like the deferral of
gratification that were pounded into them as
children without their being free to refuse. They
forget that for much of the population, preaching
maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness,
drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of
wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated
self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism,
and libertarians attack this self-restraint.
Ironically, this often results in internal
restraints being replaced by the external restraints
of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not
more.
This
contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a
deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say
about freedom but little about learning to handle
it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best,
useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is
philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of
how to use freedom well because of its root dogma
that all free choices are equal, which it cannot
abandon except at the cost of admitting that there
are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should
know better.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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