XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.politics.usa, alt.politics.obama   
   XPost: alt.politics.economics   
   From: mars1933@hotmail.com   
      
   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 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...   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)