by Robert Locke
Libertarianism is the idea that individual freedom should be the sole
rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism makes it legal to do
things society presently restrains, like get more money, have more
sex, or take more drugs...
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...
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?
the libertarian principle of "an it harm none, do as thou wilt"...
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free
society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free?...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 naďve 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 naďveté 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 naďve 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...
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.
http://www.ihr.org/ http://heretical.com/
http://national-socialist-worldview.blogspot.com