I linked this piece in a comment yesterday, but it is such a brilliant essay that it deserves its own post—and deserves to be untarnished by my interpolations.
Alas, that second bit just ain’t gonna happen, as interpolation to me is like catnip to a fat Tabby. Cathy Young, “Enforcing Virtue” (Reason, March 2007 print edition):
It’s the debate that won’t die: the endless face-off between conservatives and libertarians over the tension between liberty and morality. In his foreword to the 1998 anthology Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate—much of it composed of essays from the 1950s and ‘60s—editor George W. Carey described it as the main fault line dividing the two philosophies.
In Carey’s words, conservatives “believe that shared values, morals, and standards, along with accepted traditions, are necessary for the order and stability of society” and that some restrictions on individual freedom, including censorship, may be needed to preserve this social cohesion. Most libertarians, he continued, share the conservatives’ alarm about the “erosion of both public and private virtues” but regard individual liberty as the highest value and free choice as the prerequisite for true virtue.
So far, so good. But beyond rejecting moral enforcement by government, what is the libertarian view of moral and cultural standards upheld by a voluntary social consensus? Some conservatives accuse libertarians of treating all shared values or conventions with contempt.
On many occasions here I’ve noted that my problem with social conservatism is with some of its ideas—but that its ideas, so long as they are given free reign in the greater marketplace of thought and allowed to sink or swim on their own (without the aid of judicial activism, which many social conservatives called for in the Schiavo case, for instance). In short, I oppose nannystatism in all its forms, whether it comes from the left or right—though in my experience, I’ve found the social conservatives to be far more willing to try to bring about change with social pressure than with judicial fiat, which is why I’m far more impressed with social conservative activism than I am with the more anti-liberal activism of many “progressives”.
And yet I don’t call myself libertarian—preferring instead to call myself a classical liberal, for reasons Young’s argument, the way I read it, will make clear (though only tangentially). She continues:
Take W. James Antle III, a reporter for The American Spectator (and occasional contributor to Reason) who describes himself as a “conservative-libertarian hybrid.” In a May 2003 article in Enter State Right, he pointed to the response to the then-recent flap over virtue czar William Bennett’s gambling problem.
Antle acknowledged that Bennett “was an unrepentant drug warrior and leading force for using the federal government to promote traditionalist conservative objectives.” But he charged that “libertarian criticism was not limited to Bennett’s designs for the state: many were clearly put off by his propensity to judge lifestyles, criticize individual choices and espouse limits on personal appetites.” In a Wall Street Journal article published around the same time, Journal columnist Susan Lee, while basically sympathetic to the libertarian viewpoint, wrote that libertarian tolerance “comes from indifference to moral questions, not from a greater inborn talent to live and let live.”
Is that a fair description? Libertarians certainly have been known to criticize and ridicule moralists even when they aren’t calling for government coercion—for instance, when they wring their hands over the loss of cultural constraints on sexuality. Of course, such hand wringing is often an inviting target.
Consider a November 2006 rant on the American Spectator website by the blogger Carol Platt Liebau. Liebau lamented our culture’s alleged failure to stigmatize the crotch-flashing antics of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and the alleged message to young girls that such tawdry displays are a path to empowerment. In fact, Spears’ indecent exposure was cruelly mocked by the same gossip outlets that publicized it, and Rosie O’Donnell, hardly a right-wing moralist, pleaded for a cover-up on ABC’s “The View.”
But the merits of specific conservative pleadings aside, is there anything illiberal about an argument for the cultural stigmatization of, say, casual sex? Does supporting the free speech right to chronicle your sex life or explore your sexual fantasies online mean that you cannot regard such porno-blogging as tacky and narcissistic? Must you oppose not just state censorship but the social conventions that generally compel such bloggers to conceal their activities from relatives and employers?
Few libertarians, I think, would argue that stigmatization as such is abhorrent. While no libertarian worth the name would support legal prohibitions on hate speech, the overwhelming majority would agree that racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic slurs should be socially unacceptable, penalized through severe disapproval if not outright ostracism.
[…]
Within the libertarian milieu, there is a tension between political libertarians, whose chief concern is limiting and reversing the expansion of the state and its powers, and social or cultural libertarians, whose central interest is maximizing individual opportunities and freedom of choice.
For some political libertarians, the centralized government is so unquestionably the greatest enemy that they not only oppose civil rights laws banning private race and gender discrimination but reject the post-Civil War constitutional doctrine that state governments must abide by the Bill of Rights. (That was the position espoused by the late Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne, who opposed Jim Crow laws but felt they should have been fought on the local level. State infringements on individual rights, he argued, posed a far smaller danger to liberty than expanded federal power.) Meanwhile, some cultural libertarians are concerned about constraints on individual freedom from government as well as from traditionalist familial, religious, and community institutions—the same civil institutions that conservatives see as necessary for ordered liberty to thrive.
In his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek wrote that his real quarrel with conservatives was not their opposition to drastic change in institutions but their readiness to use government force to curb such change. To Hayek, moral and cultural standards were the product of spontaneous order emerging from the interplay of economic and social forces, from evolution and experimentation unguided by any central authority. Yet noncoercive criticism of what some of us deem to be negative social and cultural trends is itself a vital part of that evolution. It’s one thing to demand a federal virtue police; it’s another to write and market a book about virtue and hope that its lessons will catch on.
Young then goes on to note, dubiously, I’d say, that libertarians are right to be fearful of social conservative coercion so long as “he Bill Bennetts of the world are intent on using not just persuasion but force (and public funds) on behalf of their favorite virtues—promoting premarital abstinence through federal programs, banning legal protections for same-sex unions, censoring sexually explicit materials, waging the war on drugs”, the counter to which litany would be that, in many of those cases, a compelling state interest exists to justify the “intrusion”; that is to say, if you find it socially beneficial to curb out of wedlock births by teenage mothers, it makes a degree of sense to “promote” a program intent on curbing it, if in fact that program is coupled with, say, a full sex-education program, and it is very limited in scope (this is where classical liberals break from libertarianism). And while I don’t agree at all with most governmental bans on legal protections for same sex unions, I think it important that we not conflate a ban on legal protections with a governmental ban on same-sex marriage, which has its own specific set of problems—one, too, that can be traced by to compelling state interest.
But beyond those few particulars, Young’s larger point is well-taken, and echoes the position held by classical liberals: namely, that forcing your pet moral issues into law at the expense of individual choice is not the same as agitating for the adoption of your moral positions by market pressure or persuasion—something both Mayor Bloomberg and Presidential wannabe Huckabee would do well to keep in mind this election season while they are lecturing us the necessity of banning trans fats.
This would seem, too, to echo the sentiments of libertarians—or at least, many of those who style themselves as libertarians—but such is not always the case, as Young goes on to note in the most pointed passages of her piece:
[…] it’s important to remember that cultural progressives have not hesitated to use the government on their side: to promote liberal attitudes toward sexuality and sex roles through public education, say, or to compel landlords to rent to unmarried cohabiting couples even if they have religious objections to such a lifestyle. The backlash from the social right is directed at such social engineering as well as spontaneous cultural change.
It is also true, of course, that even noncoercive moralizing can be egregiously misguided. If criticism of modern cultural trends is a part of the spontaneous order, so is anti-traditionalist countercriticism. But this is where libertarian discourse can benefit from a greater variety of viewpoints and a more calibrated approach to social issues.
Just because conservatives are quite wrong (in my opinion) to argue that young women are victimized by sexual freedom doesn’t mean that only right-wing killjoys can have misgivings about prepubescent girls parading in T-shirts with vulgar messages and gyrating to music with sexually explicit lyrics. Just because I think the right is wrong to cling to a family model based on rigid gender roles doesn’t mean I’m happy about the growth of single parenthood.
The Hayekian principle that “neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion” is one most Americans will readily embrace. But if libertarians are seen as championing not simply freedom of choice but a rigidly nonjudgmental attitude toward all choices—if we are seen not simply as tolerant but as indifferent to moral questions—then many people who might be sympathetic to liberty will be pushed into the arms of the authoritarians.
In short, the problem with libertarianism is that in its effort to appear non-judgmental (and champion individual rights), it is, in fact, passing judgment on those who use market forces and persuasion to argue their positions—and in so doing, often aligns itself with cultural progressives, who use coercion to a far greater degree, in my opinion, to enforce their virtues.
It is perfectly fine for a libertarian to belittle attempts by social conservatives to use market forces to bring about behavioral changes; but that belittling should be tempered by a respect for the methods being used to try to bring about change.
Which is why, in my opinion, the libertarian trend to belittle traditionalists is misguided; because the truth is, their energies would be better spent taking to task cultural progressives who, though their positions on certain subjects (mostly related to sex, drugs, and certain forms of “censorship”) often better align with those of libertarians, are nevertheless going about securing the social adoption of those positions the wrong way, by the standards of Hayek.
Picking on food warriors is easy. Picking on sexual liberation warriors who use dubious legal rulings to enforce their virtues is something that might get the libertarians dismissed from the cool table.
And lately, many libertarians seem more concerned with appearing hip than in protecting what it is they claim to stand for.
Of course, I could be terribly mistaken. But it seems to me that the libertarian attitude among many prominent libertarians has begun to coalesce with the progressive agenda.
See, for instance, Mona.
The idea of social stigma as the de facto enforcer of morality has mostly died the hellpaved death of good intentions: as a society, when we correctly recognized former stigma-inducing qualities (race, sexual preference) as undesirable, we started reprogramming ourselves to view almost any stigma for something not so obviously harmful as to be illgal as unacceptable; thus law becomes morality itself rather than morality’s humble, cautious servant.
The coercive power of the state is a ravenous beast fed by legislative demagagues. Thus in Illinois we get not just laws requiring seatbelts but also an accompanying PR campaign warning us the irresistible force of civil authority watches us (“even on short trips!”), poised to visit Leviathan’s wrath upon those miscreats who would dare go unharnessed—for their own good, of course. The ridiculousness of this is self-evident, but generally unnoticed, flowing as it does from indisputable truism – “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone wore seatbelts” – and our conditioning to view authority as beneficient.
I got ya beat Talldave.
In Delaware, which has only one cable TV station, we are now getting on the nearby PA stations idiotic commericals stating that “ you wouldn’t run your lawnmower or operate a grill indoors, so why smoke indoors”? Lawnmowers being run anywhere other than a lawn. This is the government of the state of Delaware at work.
For my part, the real meat of this conflict lies not in the tools (the state vs. social stigma) so much as the evolutionary context within which those tools are used. Is civilization finished, evolutionarily speaking? Are there some truths that civilization has adduced which are inviolable? If evolution is still occuring, what mechanism facilitates it?
Both law and social stigma seem to me to be constitutionally conservative–they act to prevent deviation from accepted practice. From where I sit, innovation seems to happen in spite of these forces and definitely not because of them. I can imagine that monogamy was an innovation somewhere at some point; an innovation that fortunately overcame any coersion or stigma.
In my way of thinking, libertarianism should be the guarantee that those with the temerity to think they know better than everyone else aren’t incarcerated or killed for it. I couldn’t find greater resonance with Hayek’s notion of evolutionary ethics/morals, I just think that evolution requires the balance (and occasionally an imbalance) of the stigmatization and tolerance of the unorthodox. Else, it’s not really evolution; it’s just stasis.
This makes less than no sense. first, anyone who believes in any sort of external stimuli (positive or negative) toward certain behaviors is authoritarian?
Second, can it be proven that anyone can or is being ‘pushed’? If so, how?
Third. Frankly, if you happen to hold opinions regarding ‘certain moral questions’, but deliberately choose to mask them, then how in Hell is anyone supposed to know that you have them? And even if we knew, who cares? It makes about as much difference as people lauding ‘choice’ while professing personal distaste, or avoiding awkward discussions of the original ‘peculiar institution’.
Fourth. What ‘freedom of choice’ pertains to persons under 18? If this freedom is not absolute, then to what degree is is limited, and by whom? How are such limitations defined and conveyed? This relates to that thread we saw on the teenagers taking pictures of each other and transmitting them, albeit just to each other.
BH
Maybe not “pushed” as so much that many themselves leaving the libertarian camp (big or little “L”) as the ideology becomes more libertine than classically liberal.
I agree that the rhetoric is a bit hyperbolic in that passage, but I don’t think Young is arguing that anyone who believes in any sort of external stimuli toward certain behavior is authoritarian—just that the authoritarian impulse, on both the left and the right, is more likely to take hold if libertarianism presents itself as non-judgmental rather than judgmental, but careful to keep its own virtues from being legislated at the expense of individual liberty.
And Young is noting that libertarians shouldn’t mask their opinions—that in fact masking them at the expense of appearing non-judgmental is precisely the kind of thing that smacks of the relativism so many people are rightly wary of.
Libertarianism has certainly lost it’s self in BDS and such.
The idea behind libertarianism is supposed to be all about choice and the lack of coercion. I don’t think it’s ever been credibly argued that this included not making judgements about things around you.
It’s rather sad how noble ideas get hijacked by looney toons.
And lately, many libertarians seem more concerned with appearing hip than in protecting what it is they claim to stand for.
yep, pretty much
Okay, that’s helpful. But wouldn’t the ‘unmasking’ be a manifestation of social stigmata, or stimulus?
Essentially, what’s the difference between a Libertarian and a social conservative when making public an opinion on a topic?
Crikey, who cares how it appears? Libertarianism wins regardless. We have civil evolution over time. QED.
Libertarianism is a description of civil evolution, not a prescription for it. The fact is that some people aren’t orthodox. These people are the ones who foment change – NOT CONSERVATIVES. Libertarianism is merely the political acknowledgement of the existence of the heterodox. Authoritarians (and conservatives) have been trying to repress this heterodoxy all along. It’s just that they have always failed to realize this goal.
Innovation/civil evolution is non-partisan. Innovations can be vile or beneficent, but they always appear to be at minimum, ridiculous, and at maximum, dangerous from within the reigning philosophical/social paradigm. Libertarianism is just a political construction that allows the purveyors of heterodoxy to do there thing and society gets to make of it what it will.
Casting libertarianism as slouching toward the libertine strikes me as facile. In fact, I think it is this characterization that does libertarianism more damage than the actual rhetorical proclivities of libertarians. Just as the press does more to damage our mission in Iraq than our strategy does.
I don’t understand people that want to let people max out their credit cards on online gambling but then get bent out of shape about sub-prime loans.
I do know the difference between their and there. Really.
Libertarians err on the side of wanting to do what they like rather than what will help democracy survive and continue. They see liberty as an end, rather than a means to do what is right.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe discusses one strain of the libertarian view in his book, Democracy, The God That Failed, and other writings.
His argument is that in the absence of a powerful central state, people tend to become MORE conservative.
They do so because it is in their interest to do so. Private organizations such as churches and civic groups are certainly undermined by the growth of state power.
As a practical matter, the rise of the State and the decline of social cohesion over the course of the 20th century certainly bears this out.
He’s got it backward. The lack of conservatism and social structure makes people turn to a stronger central state. They replace virtue and individual responsibility with laws. The detonation of a shared cultural morality has led to the calls for greater government intervention and power – as C. S. Lewis said, the more laws a society has, the more lawless it has become.
This breaks down because you can’t make people good with laws, you can only make them suffer for being caught at being bad. Which leads to calls for more laws. Which eventually leads to either tyranny or chaos.
The content of the opinion.
Unless, of course, one of the two tries to get his opinion foisted on others through coercive legislation.
This is happening more within progressive circles than conservative circles, which is why today’s conservatives are far closer to classical liberalism than are today’s left “liberals.”
Progressives are statists, more or less. And they tend to favor the primacy of the group over the singularity of the individual.
When libertarians align themselves with that camp because their interests align (say, over a more permissive attitude toward sex education), they are in danger of violating their own principles if they don’t stop and say, “sure, we want more permissive attitudes toward sex education, but at the same time, we don’t want somebody forcing that opinion on a public that clearly resists it.
Or maybe that’s more the federalist conservative. Any libertarians wish to comment on that point?
Don’t forget that in the absence of any state, the strong find the way clear to oppress the weak and create their own little tyrannical regimes as far as their power extends (cf. most of recorded history).
Which eventually leads to either tyranny or chaos.
I assume the tyranny is when all those laws are strictly enforced, and chaos is when the people say to blazes with it and rebel.
C.S. Lewis is right: the more moral the people are, the fewer laws are needed.
It bugs me that some on the left complain about how Christians are getting uppity and trying to “impose their views” on everyone, as if Christian virtues were formerly absent. Christians didn’t mobilize politically until recently because they didn’t feel it necessary: those things that Christians found abominable were either illegal, disapproved of, or Just Not Done.
It wasn’t until the counterculture revolution that Christians and other religious folks saw the need to roll back some of the rot that had sprung up. You don’t spray for roaches if you have no roaches, but when they show up, you spray, and it’s smelly and icky.
Libertarians tend to think that people are better than they are, IMO–that if you let everyone do their own thing, things will pretty much work out to the good of all. So what if my neighbor wrecks his life with a meth addiction? No skin off my teeth.
But some people are predatory, and some people self-destructive (and can’t help but bring others down with them), and all of us are fools about one thing or another.
Though I would prefer to keep government out of as much as possible, I’ve also lived in a country where few laws are made or enforced, and you have the situation where houses are built without standards (jury-rigged electrical wiring, for example), stray dogs run by the hundreds on the streets, mating openly and defecating all over the sidewalks, and it’s caveat emptor in all transactions.
No idea what’s been put into your food and no regs to prevent people from outright lying in their advertising. All bodies of water reek of sewage because there are no environmental laws.
So of course there’s that evasive balance between too many regs and too few. (I’m now working for a healthcare equipment manufacturer, and the FDA regs are wholly insane.) You can argue that legalizing drugs has a net benefit or that it’s a net loss (scroll to first break), but you’ll have a hard time arguing that all regs are bad, or that all are good.
TW: That opinion and seven65 will get you a super-sized meal at BQ
Happyfeet —
The folks at Reason support both online gambling and sub-prime loans. The latest issue print issue has an article in defense of sub-prime loans.
Frank, a Dem, should be expressing his outrage toward Edwards, who I believe is tied up financially to sub-prime lending outfits.
Those are good points, dicentra.
Classical liberals believe that the government can and should, in limited situations, shape the “culture.”
But this power should be used very judiciously, and it should not be used to reduce individual liberty. Basically, follow the Constitution, strictly read, and all should be fine.
How a conservative jurist ends up supporting Kelo or Raich I have no idea—but it’s telling that Thomas, a libertarian justice, did not.
Which is why I’d love to see janice Rogers Brown on the bench—a pair of libertarians would surely shake things up.
Did more reading, and the sense I got was that Frank is going to talk a good game on “regulating” sub-prime loans but not actually do a whole lot at the end of the day. So if I had had much of a point to start with, it was mostly a red herring, looks like.
What about the pubescent ones?
Ideally, the government should be decentralized as much as possible and local as much as possible, with cooperation for some sense of standardization between local areas. Some things such as roads, for example, require standardization everywhere you go: you can’t have some roads only big enough for a Yugo at the state line. Communications require standardization too (everyone using and reserving the same frequencies). So I don’t have a problem with the federal government using its power to ensure standardization in these areas, anything that involves 2 or more states is their realm of power.
Other than that, though, the less government the better. I agree largely with libertarian ideals in terms of smaller, cheaper government and its benefits, but I believe many in the movement go too far, carry it too far.
The problem with talking about libertarianism is that so many different blends exist that it’s hard to pin down exactly what the movement means. You have Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul in the movement alongside more sane and reasonable folks. That’s where the “legalize all drugs and prostitution” claim comes from – some people are in favor of that in the libertarian movement. Some aren’t.
In my opinion, libertarians are their own worst enemies, they are so laissez-faire that only the really nutty members run for office.
Jeff,
As a conservative who supports Kelo, let me enlighten you. What the SC said in Kelo was the federal constitution doesn’t protect people from seizure of their property by local authorities, only from seizure by the Federal government. Because that’s something left up to the states. I wholeheartedly support that view, as well as the idea abortion, drugs, and a whole host of contentious subjects have no place in federal law.
The constitution was supposed to be a document enumerating the powers of the Federal government, not every layer of government. For decades after ratification states had official state religions – because the constitution doesn’t have anything to say on the matter. That church-state separation thing was only supposed to apply to the Federal government.
Now, Raich? Well, you’re on your own there, partner. That kind of crap makes most of the rest of the document meaningless, since it effectively removes any strictures on the powers of Congress.
I should think that its obvious that any right enumerated and protected by the US constitution applies to the states as well as the federal government. Even being protected from states seizing land.
Ideally, the government should be decentralized as much as possible and local as much as possible, with cooperation for some sense of standardization between local areas. Some things such as roads, for example, require standardization everywhere you go: you can’t have some roads only big enough for a Yugo at the state line. Communications require standardization too (everyone using and reserving the same frequencies). So I don’t have a problem with the federal government using its power to ensure standardization in these areas, anything that involves 2 or more states is their realm of power.
This would fall under “promoting the general welfare” Which the left has completely misread.
Libertarianism falls short on several of its platforms. Not the least of which is strict isolationism. They can’t seem to visualise a situation when stepping outside ones own boarders would prevent a crisis within ones boarders. In may repects their strict adhesion to their credo makes them seem more conservitive that conservatives and more than a little rediculous.
Isolationism would work just fine if there were no such thing as global communication networks, international trade, or travel outside one’s country. Any country.
But we can’t be isolationist politically because we’re not isolationist economically. Any “self-sufficient” country these days is an extremely poor country, with nothing to eat but an abundance of coal and bauxite and flax.
Christopher Taylor,
That’s not obvious to me at all. In fact, legal scholars have divided up the constitution, including the bill of rights, based on which clauses are supposed to apply to state laws and which aren’t. That division has changed over time in favor of the “apply everywhere” standard.
I think it’s a mistake. While I’m sympathetic to the idea that some rights are inviolable at any level of government, I don’t think the federal government should be involved every time someone’s home is condemned. What New London did was legal under state law, and if shouldn’t be the case then the law in that state should be changed.
Apples, oranges.
Anyway, back to your point—I’ve known some serious libertarians (I’ve even met—and been personally denounced by—Hoppe, long story) and I have to say there’s a difference between those folks and the sort that seem allergic to the application of any species of moral judgment, even personal disapproval. Expressions of disapproval without any coercion backed by force seem to me to be totally within-bounds to libertarians.
I try to limit my own criticisms of behaviors to “hey, that’s self-defeating or maladapted” but maybe I’m just fooling myself and subconsciously wagging my finger at wickedness. I think I’m square with my own principles until I start calling my Congressman.
TW: trial77, error78, adaptation79, goto77
Sure, some of the bill of rights clearly state that some of them apply only to the states (the 10th says so), but I can’t think of any part of the bill of rights other than that I’d say states are not required to follow. Freedom of Speech? Search and Seizure? Right to bear arms? Are you kidding me? These are all basic rights, they aren’t federal only.
I am a pretty strong federalist but I draw the line at rights being restricted by the states that the constitution protects.
For the record, Lyndon LaRouche has never, ever been a libertarian or a Libertarian. To my knowledge, he’s always run under the Democratic party banner.
Young, and Jeff, are right about libertarians and I say that as both a small- and big-L libertarian. If we insist that merely making moral judgements on behavior is illegitimate, then we aid the cause of authoritarianism by providing no possible expression of moral opprobium outside of legislation. We must insist that non-state, non-violent action is entirely legit while simultaneously resisting the urge to cement our preferences using law.
Anyway, that’s my view67.
I am a pretty strong federalist but I draw the line at rights being restricted by the states that the constitution protects.
But the Constitution is a document meant to codify the powers, and limits of said powers, upon the federal government. By and large, it was accepted that the BoR did not apply to the states until well into the 20th century. It was then that the “incorporation” doctrine took hold, and the 14th amendment was made to magically make the BoR applicable to the states. If the Framers of the 14th had this desired outcome, they would have said so directly.
But that ship has sailed. Even originalists like Robert Bork concede that some long established practices – like incorporation – become engrained principle after a sufficient period of time. Personally, I would jettison the incorporation doctrine, but that’s not likely to happen.
My tribe is the bestest.
We don’t call ourselves libertarianists.
What about responsibility? A libertarian can look at a drug addict and say ‘his choice, man.’ What about his kids? What about if said drug addict is abusing his kids? What then?
What’s the principle? With conservatives there is a principle to apply. Abused kids more often end up as dangers to society. There is self interest for a conservative to protect kids from abuse: to protect society from the harm that can occur when an abused kid grows up. A conservative is part of society, a creator and protector of society. A conserative takes responsibility for his society.
With Christians and lots of other religions there are other principles that apply. What’s the libertarian principle in this situation? Libertarians take no responsibility for society, do they? I know libertarians won’t accept child abuse but don’t they have to put their libertarianism aside first?
If you find a libertarian principle that allows you to coerce parents to prevent child abuse, couldn’t that same principle be used to coerce pregnent women to not abort their babies? Can libertarians take that much responsibility?
paul –
In lieu of incorporation, what should/did form the predicate for protecting, say, speech at the state level?
State coercion, even to all but the most extreme libertarian, is justified to punish and/or prevent the use of aggressive force against individuals. That includes children, though I’m sure there are caveats around the margins for corporal discipline of wayward kids.
As for the abortion question, let me introduce <a href=http://www.l4l.org>Libertarians for Life</a>
I have noticed that a lot more people are self-identifying as libertarians lately, and some of them seem a little unclear on the concept.
There are the civil-libertarian libertarians: These people tend to be lawyers. In my opinion they equate liberty with procedural due process, and they have no visceral understanding of the concept. They are especially lacking in sympathy for economic freedom.
Typical logic: We are living in tyranny because the Executive branch violated the 1970’s-era FISA statute, but nationalizing the healthcare industry is cool as long as all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.
There are the drug culture libertarians: These people seem to have a hard time understanding the distinction between libertarian and libertine. For these people it is not enough for libertarians to oppose they drug war: We must also indulge their fatuous, 60’s-nostalgic image of recreational drug users as hip, bohemian rebels. No one who harshes their mellow by criticizing drug culture in the era of crack, meth, and Oxy-Contin pandemics could possibly be a real libertarian.
Worst of all are the Libertarian Democrats, who have stolen our identity and language to press for a statist agenda that is the opposite of true libertarianism in every way. Here is the Kos definition. Notice that there is no sphere of life outside the province of the state:
“And so on.” No shit.
Gah…HTML implosion…you get the idea.
There is an excellent series of articles at the Mises Institute discussing how national control over the “public” (i.e., seized) airwaves delayed the advancement of radio technology by decades.
Hoover did this. He was a proto-FDR. FDR’s greatest political coup was to out-Republican the Republicans, who were all about “managed trade” and regulation back then. We call this “triangulation” nowadays. Since FDR, the free-market, small-government types had to move back over and become Republicans, just to get away from the FDR Democrats!
Anyway, by using a national bureaucracy that had the power to dole out the right to use particular frequency ranges, they froze radio technology at 1928 levels. Now, 80 years later, we are finally seeing “the stations between the stations” which is just a marketing way of saying that transmitters could have been using narrower frequency bands all along.
The actress Hedy Lamar and a business partner invented “frequency hopping” technology that allows multiple users to essentially occupy the same spectrum space. They did this in 1941.
This is the method that (in digital form) is used to allow thousands of mobile phone users to use a relatively narrow band. (Cell phones are just radio transceivers, basically.)
This could have been implemented over 50 years ago had it not been for the economically depressive effects of national regulation of the radio spectrum.
Communications do NOT “require standardization.” To the extent that standardization is economically beneficial, businesses standardize on their own. What you are talking about is forced conformity to some arbitrary scheme that some bureaucrat then controls.
That’s patently ridiculous.
Sure it will, once the US government collapses under the weight of its own corruption. It will probably come about as the result of a combination of currency manipulation (via the Fed) and the welfare state. It has happened that way once or twice before, you know.
The word you are looking for is “control.” A conservative takes control of his society.
Eric —
I “debated” John Hinderaker of powerline on Kelo when the decision came down. He, too, takes the conservative position that the decision was correct. I believe that to be wrong, in the same way as Raich is wrong: it gives local government unlimited power to define “public good,” making the right of property meaningless. Everything is potentially leased.
When your Constitution is born of the Lockean rights of life, liberty, and property, allowing municipalities to decide that they can do with your property as they please is not only legally outrageous, but it is dangerous, as well.
Now I agree that the states should be furiously passing laws to prevent the abuse—but why would they? They are the beneficiaries of the abuse, and so they will drag their heels and dither until they’ve sucked up all the property they can for the “public good.”
Justice Thomas wrote in his dissent, “Something has gone seriously awry with this CourtÂ’’s interpretation of the Constitution.” And I couldn’t agree more.
More here.
I submit that the source of libertarianism is epistemic. It is rooted in the duality of synthetic/analytic judgements. To what degree are we justified in the attribution of necessity to any judgement? Obviously, we are constitutionally incapable of recourse to empiricism in determining this necessity. (To demonstrate the necessary effecacy of, say, the war on drugs, requires an infinite set of tests, which we obviously don’t have time to carry out. The more rarified and abstracted the system, the easier it seems to apply necessity, but government ain’t reducible to maths–at least as far as I’m concerned.)
So, libertarianism is the political recognition of the limits of empiricism. It says, “things seem pretty good and they’re working and all, but it can always get better and there needs to be respect for views that seem wooly-headed because those views may be part of that betterment.” To my mind, libertarianism is not synonymous with classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is/was the enlightenment politically codified. Classical liberalism doesn’t seem to recognize the limits of empiricism. Or if it does, it effectively ignores them.
On the other hand, I really have very little idea what I’m talking about. This fact is compounded by a nasty head cold and some really loopy decongestants.
I think classical liberalism is libertarianism that recognizes the need of a state to protect natural rights.
Maybe it’s your cold medicine talking, but this sounds vaguely familiar to the Misesian proposition that socialists can’t calculate—the idea that any time you cease to have a market involving the free exchange of private property operating on a mutually voluntary basis, you lose the ability to calculate benefit and loss. You lose the metrics to base decisions on.
There is no market in a government endeavor. Either the object of a government actor’s behavior is being acted upon at the point of a gun (tax collection, regulation of commerce), or the enterprise is funded by seized money (the Post Office).
Those who run these operations (even with the theoretical “best intentions”) can’t<i> make economic decisions based on whether their options will increase or decrease the success of the enterprise. So, instead, they base their decisions on personal convenience and benefit.
The State makes things worse. A State is a mafia organization with a penchant for cloaking itself in respectability.
In lieu of incorporation, what should/did form the predicate for protecting, say, speech at the state level?
State constitutions. Most of them have/had the same speech protections as does the federal constitution, and in fact the federal constitution was modeled after the declaration of rights found in some of the earlier state constitutions.
But lacking a state constitutional protection, the answer is nothing. Again, the federal constitution is concerned with federal powers. There is little said of the states except that which delineates respective jurisdictions between the feds and states, and the guarantee of republican forms of government.
Yes, it’s true, the federal constitution permits states to make laws that we would construe as violative of certain rights. It was not intended to be a perfectionist document that made sure the states always made the right decisions. The Framers shot down Madison’s idea, proposed in the convention, to allow the federal government to veto state laws. The states were granted freedom to set their own laws, within limits.
Now, we might want the federal government to intervene in these state matters regarding the Bill of Rights and similar isssues, and the Courts did. And what has been the result of this nationalization of the BoR? For every “good” national mandate there’s been an oppressive one (like abortion). I don’t think you have to be a libertarian to find this state of affairs distressing.
But let’s not forget that even as dedicated a libertarian as Nock made the distinction between government and the State.
I was using “state” to mean government. It’s a natural rights argument, essentially. The government is supposed to guard our natural rights, one of which is property ownership. Compare with the idea that property rights extend from the state—which is the kind of thinking Kelo was decided upon.
The State makes things worse.
You know, Phin, I’m reminded of something I read from time to time by people who think police “do no good”
Obviously people who have never lived without police…
…or without a State of any kind.
The state is not synonymous with government, although in modern usage they largely overlap. Government once meant any mechanism for regulating behavior, even if those whose behavior was being governed had submitted to the governing voluntarily.
A state is different. It is a monopoly over the final arbitration of the use of force that extends to everyone in its territory, agreement or not.
This is the cloak of legitimacy I mentioned. A state exists by and for the purpose of depriving us of our property.
Even after it is done taking its funding by force, it does a counter-productive job at achieving its stated mission, wasting millions along the way.
Phin
Describe how a society/community of several million is to practically function without a government
(are you a leftist/”libertarian”/syndicate anarchist?)
A state does not exist for the purpose of depriving property, you have no property without a state. You have anarchy and lose everything to the strongest.
I apologize for associating Lyndon LaRouche with the Libertarian party, that is an error – although a common one.
And Hoover… the proto FDR? He of the “tax cuts stimulate growth” originator? Excuse me?
Imagine a nation without standardized communications. Does that phone number work over state lines? Nope, they use the telegraph in Texas and in New Mexico you have to dial the person’s name! Can you get emergency by using channel 9 on the CB? Not here, that’s the channel K-Rock uses, classic rock on channel 9. Radios have to be built for each state, separately. There’s no satellite TV either: every state has their own protocols and systems.
Sorry. Some things have to be standardized, to work together, and if they cross state lines, that’s federal government material. At least, according to the founding fathers.
I’ll take them over the latest radical Libertarian, thank you.
Ain’t that the truth!
Christopher Taylors observations about standardization is a metaphor for libertarians.
You basically know what a democrats positions are going to be on most issues. Same with republicans.
Libertarians…not so much.
I like libertarian judges. I don’t so much like libertarian legislators.
Geez this libertarian threads are wordy. But at least nobody used the word ‘usurp’, and I don’t smell pot smoke.
I guess you are advocating for a Tribe where the monopoly on force and pooling of resources is done voluntarily.
I’m with Jeff–let’s just stick to the Constitution as written (and, hopefully, interpreted by libertarian Justices).
You are coming dangerously close to using the libertarian touchword ‘usurp’.
Or maybe we need a big libertarian post about ‘throwing punches an inch from your nose’ with a big whiff of pot smoke….
I don’t see how the utility of standardization necessarily militates against libertarianism. Why can’t standards obtain through emergent strategies? Stochastic processes? I would be willing to bet that standards that obtain through fiat are far less robust and well adapted than those that obtain through market forces. But then I don’t have a lick of evidence for that assertion.
libertarianism != anarchism
Thank Gaea for our benevolent all powerful World Government that proactively made telephone communication with India (the real one, not Indiana) possible. Now please excuse me for I must quickly respond to a Nigerian prince who will trust me with his vast sums of money.
And thank you Jeffersonian for explaining how a principled libertarian can oppose abortion. I also found this blog post and comments to be educational, now that I’ve googled the question.
This is exactly the thinking that Jeff was criticizing when he said, “The government is supposed to guard our natural rights, one of which is property ownership. Compare with the idea that property rights extend from the stateâ€â€which is the kind of thinking Kelo was decided upon.”
Yes, he was.
Rather than write a tome in Jeff’s comment section, I will refer you here, here, and here.
I am most certainly not a leftist of any stripe. I am a plain-Jane, garden-variety market anarchist. An anarcho-capitalist, if you will.
Yeah, thank God Al Gore passed the regulations that created TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, and SMTP.
I should think that its obvious that any right enumerated and protected by the US constitution applies to the states as well as the federal government.
Its not. See the topic of “incorporation” and what people like Thomas want to do with it.
Beat me to it!
I don’t see a U.S. Department of Digital Media Standards anywhere. There’s no entry in the Code of Federal Regulations that says, “Thou shalt use MPEG-4.” Not yet, anyway.
Language itself is a product of anarchism. People learn to communicate in whatever way is useful and economically beneficial to them. There’s no US Department of Language and Meaning. Not yet, anyway.
Look, in a similar vein as what Malcalypse mentioned upthread, anarchism is not something that I am trying to implement. It’s not the sort of thing that one needs to argue into existence. The world is naturally anarchistic. That is a positive statement, not a normative one. It is a description of how human society actually works.
You can try to control people with the use of force, and develop ever-more complicated social organizations designed to implement that force. But it can never actually achieve this goal. The State can’t even control what goes on in prisons! Prisons are filled with violence, drugs, prostitution, etc., despite the fact that the State has a level of direct control over prisoners’ daily lives as nowhere else. Yet it still fails.
If you refuse to see the self-organizing economic anarchism that is ALL AROUND YOU ALL THE TIME, I can’t make you see it. It won’t cease to exist merely because you refuse to acknowledge it.
The modern State is just a corporation that, for some strange reason, pretends that it is in charge of everything. It thinks it always has the last word. It thinks that it has some special status of legitimacy and authority. It thinks that it has the special, righteous ability to take people’s money at gunpoint, tell them how to run their businesses, and generally boss everyone around.
But it’s just band of thugs, dressed up in nicer clothes.
Just because they claim that they are your rulers doesn’t mean that you have to acquiesce to their assertion of legitimacy. You don’t have to fall prey to a form of Stockholm Syndrome where you actually start to believe that their violence and aggression is genuinely good for you.
-Robert A. Heinlein
A very interesting lecture on morality by Heinlein is “The Pragmatics of Patriotism” given at the US Naval Academy.
a copy is here:
http://www.ericsgrumbles.net/the-pragmatics-of-patriotism/
Heinlein is one of the heroes of the libertarian movement.
Oh, HELL YES.
And why that is? Right here:
Again, HELL YES.
This is exactly why I say “libertardian.” I don’t know if this is something primarily seen on teh intarweb, but there are a hell of a lot of conservatives who fancy themselves “libertarians” for God-knows-what reason other than appearing hip. “I support the 2nd Amendment; therefore, I’m a libertarian,” “I’m an atheist/I don’t get my views from a religious creed; therefore, I am a libertarian,” “I don’t like Big Gubmint, therefore…” et cetera. Bullshit.
Who says conservatives can’t be all the above? Hipsters (or hipster wannabes).
REAL libertarians are the ones like Ron Paul (for example)–isolationist, want to legalize drugs and prostitution (“victimless crimes”), oppose a security structure (the Patriot Act, DHS, etc.) and want to dismantle all public social support. OK, fine, but I’m sure not gonna pretend I want any of that shit. They’d say that makes me a statist, no different from the Left, but they’d be dead wrong. That’s just being realistic. I’d counter that Libertarianism is like Marxism–another Utopian theory that cannot work in practice due to the inconvenient existence of actual human beings within such systems.
Libertardians.
Phinn
I haven’t had time to explore all your links but even anarcho-capitalism backs into government the minute you try and organize a system of laws, courts and enforcement. “Mutually agreed upon” means a mechanism like voting and elections to get such laws.
[insert quote about quacking ducks here]
My right to my property (fruit of my labor) is a natural right … but securing that right, keeping my next door neighbor from moving into my house and burying me in the back yard, is mine, even if I get with all my other neighbors and we vote to fund a security force and set up a committee to arbitrate disagreements. Such nascent government doesn’t transfer my natural rights TO the government.
Jaysus on a Pony, I don’t know what planet you’re from, but getting rid of “law, courts and national defense” will last all of the five minutes it will take for the human predators to smell the fresh blood.
Beth
Michael Medved refers to ‘em as Losertarians. I think the labels are pretty interchangeable.
Darleen, the greater the distance an ostensible “government” is from the governed, the closer it is to tyranny. THAT is the point of libertarianism. That’s why libertarians are often seen extoling the virtue of state’s rights. Move the government closer to the people. The bigger and more distant it becomes, the more it falls prey to the problems of scale and recursion.
Consider Robert Anton Wilson’s “Celine’s Law”.
What prevents the human predators you fear from acting through the instrument of government? Ever been sexually assaulted by a police officer? One of my dear friends has.
For my part, the Constitution strikes me as a wonderfully rich and subtle framework for governance. I respect it and the system that has developed around it. Is it not clear, however, that in a historical context, our model elucidates an evolutionary motion? An inexorable motion away from authoritarianism? Why should we assume this evolution is finished?
But then perhaps you and Beth and Medved would prefer to eschew such discussion in favor of the aesthetically bankrupt pursuit of punny, sophomoric name-calling.
You realize he wrote fiction, right?
I’m sorry for your friend. All human institutions can have human refuse in ‘em.
On the whole, however, I’ll take police over the alternative
and on that, I’m off to work…to help process stacks of police reports detailing in no small part the predation of humans on each other.
You realize that snark hardly substitutes for substance, right?
Although I do generally cheer your comments, Rob. I’m rather certain I actually went to the same university you did at the same time you did. I remember enjoying the stuff you wrote back then. Weren’t you involved in the Mothership Connection?
But why does Wilson’s fiction disqualify his insights from perspicacity? Anyway, many of his books would be more accurately called a collection of essays than fiction. So, meh.
No, it doesn’t. Voting and elections are mechanisms that are designed to attempt to legitimize the use of force on those who don’t consent. That’s its entire purpose.
Everyone who buys from a business does so voluntarily. The State exists in order to do what ever it does contrary to the will of those affected.
The key difference between a voluntary organization and a State is the territorial monopoly. If you join a voluntary organization, you affirmatively consent to its rules and so forth. If, at some later point in time, you don’t like how it acts, you have a choice: either submit to the organization’s decision or withdraw, thereby losing the benefits that membership afforded you.
The State claims control over you regardless of whether you EVER affirmatively consented to its rules. “Consent of the governed” is a preposterous lie. The “social contract” is not a contract at all. It omits the key element of a real contract—mutual assent.
You can’t withdraw from a State. If you do so, they imprison you and take all your stuff, as though they owned it and you in the first place. Even if you do no harm to anyone.
Were you aware that businesses the world over have effectively withdrawn from the government-run law-making court system? They arbitrate their disputes—i.e, they mutually agree to hire private tribunals to resolve their differences. They voluntarily submit to these arbitration service providers, and submit to the decisions (even the ones they disagree with) because in the long run, they WANT the benefit of these arbitration services.
Western contract law developed in exactly this sort of system of 100% voluntary, private courts centuries ago. It created a working, stable body of law.
Nation-states eventually came along and co-opted this private, efficient system of law and made it subordinate to their monopolistic “rule,” and commercial law is of poorer quality, and comes at a higher cost, as a result. Just like everything else the government does.
Now I do.
Short on time, so I’m commenting without reading all the previous comments. Sorry ‘bout that.
Weeelll, read this bit from Cathy Young again:
So.. we’re allowed to hold a wide range of opinions on some topics, but must toe the line on others if we wish to be “worth the name”. “Stigmatization as such is abhorrent” but we won’t let that stop us from pointing out that if you don’t agree with us you’re not a true libertarian. Sweet.
I agree with a good deal that Reason has to offer, but I’ve noticed of late that they do tend to enforce a certain libertarian orthodoxy that sometimes belies their “free minds” philosophy. I’m really tired of the phrases ‘no true libertarian could think’ or ‘no real libertarian would disagree’ and I’m seeing them all too often in the pages of Reason.
If I should abhor legal prohibitions on hate speech, by all means tell me why and there’s a good chance I’ll agree; but please don’t tell me that I’m not a libertarian if I don’t agree with the party line on some topic. That’s just not a Reasonable argument. Especially don’t do it in the same breath that you tell me that “stigmatization as such is abhorrent”. /rant
Okay, I misread the bit about stigmatization. So I guess it’s okay to stigmatize people as not being worth of the name ‘libertarian’. Carry on.
Hmm, this is why I never considered myself a Libertarian. We got things like HTTP and so forth out of necessity; there was no way to do things at all if they didn’t exist. As for Gas volume per ‘gallon’? There’s nothing that requires that standardization unless it is enforced. Your example, coming from the standpoint of a computer scientist, is bunk. Those standards coming into existence is the same as saying the fact that all wheels are round, and so on, is proof that all standards will arise naturally. Some will, others will not. That is why the government can handle such things. But only if required.
I am 100% for social coercion on moral issues, because that is the definition, really, of morality, what is accepted socially. You cannot really be ‘moral’ while not allowing any kind of peer pressure about morality. There are in all cases going to be some broken eggs. If you want to argue about bad social coercion then argue about bad social coercion. Bad social coercion is a result of bad philosophy and ideas regarding morality. Hypocrites exist. Get over it; nobody is so perfect that they can in all cases be completely practicing what they preach. It is all in all a childish argument; what we want is virtue not ‘lack of hypocrisy’. ‘Lack of hypocrisy’ is like saying lack of humans.
I’ve been a ‘classical liberal’ or, rather, a ‘Jacksonian Liberal’ for a while now; I think that liberty is our most important right and that it is guaranteed ultimately by our personal right to own and possibly use deadly force. Liberty is not an end in and of itself, it exists to elevate man towards God and orient him towards him; I know this because my religious study tells me that no man can be forced to accept God he must do it on his own.
The government is only as much as a mafia as you make it, because you make the government. The government, same as corporations, are people like you and I. So if you are saying governments are mafias you are saying, more or less, that you yourself may as well be one too. Unless, you think that people are suddenly ‘transformed’ once they are in government? What then does that say about their character?
Like old Nick said, you can’t have a democracy of thieves; they’ll just sell their rights away… (or something like that.)
Virtue is IMPORTANT, real virtue aligns one towards the Good, the True and the Beautiful; and only liberty allows one to realise Virtue. This is the whole point of the exercise. Everything else is just an exercise in petty modernism, the elevation of methods over principles and surface over substance.
Call it what you wish; I just say what I think. (Isn’t “sophomoric” name-calling in itself?)
But tossing that aside, I agree with Darleen–my heart bleeds for the victim of violence at the hands of a rogue cop just as it does anyone else. But clearly, the police as an entity are not the “enemy.” As a female, I feel a far greater threat to my personal security on a daily basis from any random Joe Schmo rather than the random cop.
Honestly, I don’t understand the seemingly automatic rejection of police/authority, except when it exists in teenagers. I feel no threat from “authority,” because I don’t feel subservient to or victimized by it. Subject to law, yes, but as a civilized adult, staying within the confines of the law and common social standards isn’t exactly an effort.
I know libertarians guffaw at (well, despise) the mindset that some of us have about the Patriot Act (for example), where we say “I’ve got nothing to hide,” but it’s the truth. It’s not “the principle” or theoretical in our case. I just don’t live in the theoretical, which is why I don’t subscribe to utopian ideologies.
See, this is why I won’t refer to left-wingers as “liberals.” They aren’t. As Jeff said, more often it’s the conservatives who look like “liberals.” (I also don’t often say “progressive,” either, because they’re old-school leftists–hardly “progressive.” George Bush is more “progressive” than the average lefty.)
It’s rather ironic, but you could call yourself a “liberal” conservative these days, and not be incorrect. But still, I don’t even see the need to qualify “conservative” with the “liberal” descriptor. That is, unless, you’re a Pat Buchanan paleocon, but that’s another whole ball o’wax.
I think something about this statement is not clear. Could there be, say, some difference between what happens if someone from the US decides to move to Mexico and say someone from Cuba decides to move to Mexico?
A government, for good or ill, is the arbiter of last resort for a group of people. Can that power of last resort be abused? Of course it can. A government is as good or bad as the people that compose it, and like any form of power, has the tendancy to corrupt those who wield it. But abolishing the state does nothing to remove from people the tendancy to abuse power.
There has to be some method of resolving disputes between parties, and one that is effective if both parties cannot reach an agreement. A precedent-based legal framework, decided upon by a majority vote and subject to inherent rules protecting the minority is what America has decided on. It’s not perfect and certainly not foolproof, but it’s the best we’ve been able to come up with.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting the smallest, least intrusive method of resolving disputes between parties that don’t agree, but imagining that there is some way to resolve disputes without some sort of coercive arbiter strikes me as naive.
Civilis: Quite, because the Government ultimately wields the sword (for good or for ill) that is it’s role. The Founders understood this and were determined that it would wield it for good, for authority only exists where that is so. When it is not wielded for Good it is called tyranny.
That’s because you refuse to see what’s right in front of you.
Did you not read the basic, introductory article about how the government has stifled telecommunications technology for most of the 20th century through its licensing and regulation of the “public” airwaves?
What about the investment and economic development that will NEVER HAPPEN because of the gross waste and inefficiency created by the forcible diversion of money away from productive economic activity by State taxation? Do you think that you are somehow exempt from the economic effects of all this?
What about the constant inflation that has devalued US currency by 95% since the inception of the Federal Reserve? Think that has affected you, Beth?
What about the easy-credit policies of the US government that have driven up the prices of (a) housing and (b) education to astronomical levels? Bought a house lately, Beth? Sending any kids to college? Well, bend over and get out the Vaseline, Beth, because the “authorities” have decreed that ye shall take it up the ass financially. Every extra dollar that you are forced to spend on these things is a dollar you will never get to use for other purposes.
Honestly, I don’t know how anyone with the ability to operate a computer doesn’t understand any of this. Murray Rothbard summed it up nicely:
No, it claims to be the ultimate arbiter for anyone and everyone within in a geographic territory.
The emphasized parts, which you left out, are the objectionable parts.
For that power to even be asserted in the first place is “abuse.” Where does that claim to legitimate power come from? Not from consent. I never consented to it. No one I know consented to it. Maybe you consented to it, which is fine by me, but keep your hands to yourself, would you?
Read every book on the list that I posted above (starting with Rothbard’s, which is online), and then report back to us about your conclusions.
It’s not about having an arbiter, it’s about having ONE arbiter that claims to be the ULTIMATE one.
And note, Good means alignment with truth, and no amount of good intention without grounding in transcendent truth (something the founders had) will make any authority good. In this sense I can respect either the Atheist or Agnostic who despite disliking this explicit God I so dearly adore can assent to the idea of transcendent Truth, Goodness and Beauty. And to the wholeness of it despite the incidences of reality, and that our job is to best mould reality what is True, which is to say each ourselves. For truth known is actually truth lived which is the act of becoming truth.
If what someone becomes and does despite their claims of ‘truthiness’ or ‘honesty’ is something that makes the evil good, or the senses revolt, or words meaningless, then they lie.
It is somewhat tautological, but in the end everything refers back to itself on the grandest scale. This is to say, if you redefine ‘good’ you in turn must redefine ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ which is in turn to remake ‘reality’ (which is actually impossible.) Or, that ‘Truth’ ‘Goodness’ and ‘Beauty’ actually refer to the same thing in a different way.
I reject Libertarianism because it fails in many cases to grasp the idea of Government and Morality as what they actually are.
Phinn, if the government does not wield the sword on behalf of all of those within its claimed borders than it either is not an authority or does not hold authority over certain areas.
And as they say, the man without a state is… not a man at all.
RiverCocytus, everything you say is vague and metaphorical, and none of it leads anywhere. Nothing you have said shows how the Goodness and Beautiful Moral Truth of the State leads to the conclusion that majorities are somehow inherently legitimate simply because they are majorities, or that there should be an FCC or a Federal Reserve or an income tax.
Maybe being an economic libertarian isn’t as “hip” as being one of those pot-oriented libertarians, but as far as I can tell, everything comes down to economics anyway.
RiverCocytus avers:
What are they? The admission of the possible existence of transcendental truth is not tantamount to having adduced any. Why is God ineffable? The models we use to point to truth are not transcendental. By the tenets of your own faith (assuming you’re something in the area of orthodox christian,) we are fundamentally errant.
That knowledge is the biggest predicate for libertarianism (or anarchism for that matter.) It’s not narcissism, it’s dubiousness about any one system’s capability to act as a conduit for that transcendent truth of which you speak. Our republic strikes me as the most profound example of a system of governance that seeks to limit its own potential to run afoul of transcendent truth, but that doesn’t mean it’s the last word on the subject.
Tellingly, these same appeals to truth, beauty and the like were wielded by defenders of monarchy. Governance (in the guise of the state) has been slowly but surely evolving away from authoritarianism. Is the world ready for libertarianism in practice? Perhaps not, but it strikes me as more ready for it than it has ever been; and I don’t see that trend reversing. But then I’m an optimist.
<b>Beth
opines:
So how do you explain, well, anything? You suppose language was created whole-hog and dropped on humanity fully-formed? You suppose language itself is not an abstraction? The theoretical is perhaps the defining quality of humanity.
In my conception, the difference between government, which is to say state, authority, is that it wields the power of life and death over its subjects. To claim that no central power should do that in my mind is do defacto declare that government should not exist, and thus your opinion is similar to that of a anarchist.
Phinn: such is not the point of these things. These things do not tell us the decisions we are to make but make us able to come to those decisions. If they were concrete they would lose their power and truth. The bridge between them is the man, between the concrete actions and the metaphysical truths.
You’re missing the point completely. The whole point is that without the things I mentioned everything is economics.
And that is why you are wrong, but are as right as you can ever be from your own understanding.
I’m fairly finished here.
tw: respect38 – ain’t gonna get none here, but that’s fine w/ me.
The State should not exist. I am an anarchist, you dolt.
Actually, I take that back. I want to address one more point:
Anyone can appeal to anything, the Islamists appeal to God, the truthers to ‘truth’ and so on. You have made an excellent and shallow rebutting non-point.
The question you have to ask yourself is, what is the difference between the appeal made by Monarchists and the appeal made by perhaps the Founders, or myself? IS there a difference? How would you know?
My assertion? The only thing that really matters is to know that – everything else is just dust and constant shuffling.
Otherwise everything you say right now is meaningless unless I want it to be otherwise. Same for you!
You cannot find the truth from the ground up, as Aristotle might’ve thought, though there is a lot you can learn (and ought to) from such a method. But unguided by the things that come from the top down, which is to say, from beyond the horizon of man, are what guide these things.
You inherit great knowledge and proceed to abase it beyond definition. I’m not choleric, so I’ll leave it there.
Anyhow, its all economics, and I can’t sell this ‘truth’, so it will soon disappear. Fear not.
Phinn, then a man you are not.
Whatever you say, Yoda.
RiverCocytus is happily demonstrating that one cannot be reasoned out of a position that one wasn’t reasoned into in the first place. I asked this before, but it seems it was ignored; what mechanism do you use to adduce this transcendent truth? Eh? If government is beholden to these transcendent truths, upon what system can it rely to determine them? The Christian Bible? Did the founders happen upon a lost book of the Bible wherein the transcendent source of government is laid bare?
This is not true for all libertarians, but for all too many – as shown on this comment section – their positions are taken more from “I want to do what I want and authority is bad” than careful philosophical consideration, study of great thinkers in the past regarding liberty, and a discerning consideration of the consequences of their ideas.
We all could benefit greatly from reading the great thinkers in the past, almost every single argument we have today was covered by them, and far better.
what mechanism do you use to adduce this transcendent truth?
Philosophical and moral ones. In other words: you abandon the idea that scientific method is able to discover truth and all of reality, and limit it to the things it is designed and meant for. You discover other things by other methods.
Thomas, a libertarian justice,
Thomas, a libertarian justice, thinks that states have the right to establish official religions. He, a libertarian justice, thinks this right of the states is what is protected by our constitutiion against federal interference. Thomas, a libertarian justice, does not think that individuals are granted this protection against establishment, only the states.
Phinn, I fear we are speaking past each other, although at least are debate is one that has its feet planted in fact and reason.
First, where do the terms “abuse” and “legitimate” come from without referring to a source? Who defines them? What if I don’t consent to your definition?
I don’t make claims to power being “right” or “good” or “legitimate”. Power just is. Because of the nature of the human condition, the power of life or death is ultimate whether we like it or not. If you are dead, you are dead. Sometimes, that power must be used. If I see two people in peril, and the power to save only one, I have to make a choice. I have that power whether I want it or not, and whatever I do, I will have made a choice and at least one person will be dead. There’s no voting, no arbitration.
Sometimes, that choice falls to a group of people. Some mechanism will exist for determining how the choice gets made. It can fall to the strongest, the wisest, or to pure luck. But whatever choice is made is final. I would prefer that the mechanism for making that choice be decided on ahead of time, and be fair. The mechanism is not going to be perfect, but a mechanism that I can opt out of at will is not a mechanism at all. Call that mechanism what you will, but for a large enough group of people, it boils down to a government.
If I were an atheist, I’d look at the number one advantage of a religious worldview as the existence of an omniscient, infallible ultimate arbiter.
Thank Gaea for our benevolent all powerful World Government that proactively made telephone communication with India (the real one, not Indiana) possible.
Not Gaea, but maybe the ITU
The State should not exist. I am an anarchist, you dolt.
Posted by Phinn
The meetings should be a riot. No. Really.
You want a libertarian book?
Read Robinson Crusoe.
Since I live in a city of a few hundred thousand other humans with plans and desires of their own, none of whom are related to me, then I want something to appeal to beyond the tribe and beyond the momentary advantage of my fellows.
Bad law can be changed; bad humans…less so. Once you get beyond the clan, the tribe, you need organized government. How it is organized, what feedback you can give it is the key. And it is a perpetual challenge and fight. And a republic, with a wide franchise, and free voting, is the only way I know of that can keep ten thousand humans from tearing at each other, let alone three hundred million.
Of course the system will be manipulated – you are dealing with humans! We’re survivors, we grift! But failure to have order means that the strongest in each field, each trade, each walk of life, have no check but of their fellows in that field. Liberty must wed with order or there is no liberty and there is no stable order.
Both must be kept in balance or there is no standardization of manufacturing or service and no innovation. Like a human must balance his reason and his irrationality, a society of many unrelated humans must balance between liberty and order. Otherwise you have the stultification of the old Soviet Union or the anarchy of Somalia. I desire neither. I desire neither for my nephews or neices.
So welcome to this republic – channeled chaos, ordered liberty. Advocate your positions – please do so, do not stop – but the two cannot exist separately or it will be total ruin. No progress or safety but what the reach of your arm can achieve or your ability to bribe your way through the bureaucracy.
The Lord of the Flies would have ended with a mass slaughter without the intervention of an adult; 1984 would have ended with a mass collapse of the Party as everything locked solid and fell over.
Never forget you are dealing with humans.
Whatever floats your boat.
I realized long ago that life is too short to spend it overthinking every damn thing, and that most people are far more concerned with their own daily shit than persecuting me. Needless to say, I’m no fan of the paranoid delusions of anarchists and certain/most Libertarians. Sure, the theoretical has its place, but it’s no place to live.
I suppose now you’ll write that off as babble from a less-serious person than you are, or more likely, a simpleton–most Libertarians (not the faux-libertarians, mind you) are pompous, obnoxious, and completely out of touch with what actually makes us human. Which, I suppose, is why you/they are Libertarians.
I’m just not going to argue or solve the answer to the essence of humanity in a blog comment. But if you want to, I’m sure not gonna stop you. (Note: That’s a colloquialism; not to be taken as an actual threat of stripping your right to free expression.)
That’s what it all boils down to, and it’s why Marx and Engels (and their followers to this day) were and are farking idiots.
THAT is what I mean by not living in the theoretical; I live in a world with other human beings.
So, Beth. You find the idea behind eugenics, the perfect ‘Aryan’, the ‘New Soviet Man’ repugnant?
So do I. It is liberty and order; balancing the reality of our humaness that is the fighting ground. I would not be a slave; nor would I be a savage.
Balance. How do we keep the balance? That is the key; and shouting down debate on either side – or allying yourself to those who would shut down some debate – is wrong and treacherous to being human.
Finding balance is key to being a human; or being a human-friendly society. And because we are not perfect, democracy is the best tool I have seen to correcting imbalances – over the long run.
And the long run is decades in length. Failure to protect either democracy or the speech of the minority is the way to chaos or slavery. Neither of which are ‘good for children and growing things’.
As such.
P.S.: Beth, I am agreeing with you.
Just to be clear; sometimes I am not and I recognize that failing.
At other times I play the clown. This is not one of those times.
For the record, Phinn, my objections to Libertarianism have nothing to do with economics. I’m more in agreement with you than you think (assumed) I am w/r/t economic libertarianism/capitalism.
Just sayin’. But I don’t call myself a L/libertarian; I’m a capitalist and a conservative.
Well said, Mikey.
Here’s a good example, I think, of what Jeff’s talking about. Kiddie pr0n on teh internets, and the ease with which children have access to regular pr0n.
Social conservatives like me raise hell about it and will bust our asses to eliminate the threats and yes, we do a lot of hand-wringing about it. Some will mentally explore all options–some saying “censor the internet” (whatever that means from one person to the next). Libertarians tend to get outraged by the hand-wringing and the hint of those who want to “censor” the internet. (“Control your kids” is an oft-repeated demand, but that almost requires you have KGB-style surveillance on your kids at all times–it’s just not that simple in reality.) I’ve been involved in several heated debates between social cons and libertarians, where the libertarians expressed precisely that outrage at the conservative position.
What they fail to understand is that none of “us” really wants to regulate the internet; it’s a question of protecting and shielding our children from inappropriate (and/or dangerous) content. There are some libertarians who would let anything go, assuming that all humans are mature, able, competent adults with pure intentions, but the truth is, all humans are not so. Of course any rational person knows this, but the libertarian argument is always the “slippery slope,” the theoretical, the “principle.” However, the facts on the ground demand *something* be done, and yes, the preferred method for combating inappropriate/dangerous things on the internets (again, just an example) is stigmatization. Where stigmatization works, it’s ideal, but (obviously) sometimes it doesn’t. And then you get the moral relativists arguing against stigmatization, saying, “once upon a time, blacks/gays/Irishmen/whatever were shunned.” I have no use for that kind of nonsense (is there no right or wrong?), and really, it’s exactly what the so-called “progressives” argue.