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Why government won’t leave us alone — 26 Comments

  1. “This doesn’t mean libertarianism should be abandoned; not at all.”

    Not at all, at all. It does mean that you’ve got to shoot fascists first.

  2. I’m more the social con, and though I’ve learned a lot from the libertarians here, especially during the health care debate, I have to say that a lot of times libertarians seem to want a sort of negative utopia, where legal power is very limited and we eliminate a lot of history and precedent, but somehow everything hums along nicely and we’re very civilized nonetheless. I know libertarian thinking is more sophisticated than that, but, really, it doesn’t often come off that way. Just my impression.

  3. Vanderleun, I keep delivering that message to my wife in so many words, and she warns me that they will come for me if I don’t shut up.

    Neo, sad to say that the cultural conservative mantra that you cite sounds too much like Statism in different clothes. The problem with buying into that argument, in my view, is that once it is accepted then you are stuck with it. On cultural issues you really leave yourself open to the admonition that “society has evolved, so bow to the will of the people.” Having already ceded to government, the right to intrude into private lives, you have lost the high ground.

    It is so easy to get caught up in semantics, but I really think that the founders and authors of our Constitution were more Libertarian than Conservative. They attempted to design a government that would stay out of individual lives to the greatest possible extent, and tried to write safeguards into law that would perpetuate the arrangement.

    Somewhere along the line, the government’s nose inched under the edge of our tent, and government has intruded more and more ever since–sometimes for seemingly laudable reasons at the moment; but, always advancing, never retreating.

  4. It seems that Man really just wants to be cared for. Freedom is just too uncertain. Yet we don’t want to be slaves of the state. That implies too much work. No, we’d rather be more like monkeys in the zoo. Essentially worthless but free to fornicate and fling dung as long as Government occasionally hoses out the cage, pays for the internet and phone, and provides plenty of bananas.

    will someone please cure me of this cynicism? At least try??

  5. Oldflyer said…
    I really think that the founders and authors of our Constitution were more Libertarian than Conservative. They attempted to design a government that would stay out of individual lives to the greatest possible extent, and tried to write safeguards into law that would perpetuate the arrangement.

    But the only reason they could do that was because everyone shared a common culture based upon Judeo-Christian values.

    Isn’t that basically what made America tick according to de Tocqueville?

  6. Lurch: well, I certainly won’t try to cure you of this cynicism, since I pretty much share it.

  7. Oldflyer –

    The Founders were not libertarian. Their principle was ordered liberty, and that included a strong national government and an AWESOME amount of power in the states, up to and including the establishment of religion, the abridging of free speech, the outright criminalizing of sexual acts, etc., etc. Oddly enough, the only reason the Founders seem so libertarian to us today is because the original and very unlibertarian federalism they prescribed has been eradicated by the Judicial left via the Incorporation Doctrine. Richard Epstein astutely alludes to this in the piece neo linked to yesterday.

    The working assumption among the Founders was that American citizens were already basically virtuous. But they could not be guaranteed to be so in the future. For republicanism to work, virtuous citizens are necessary. Not optional.

    By contrast, libertarianism as a political philosophy doesn’t give a shit, pardon my French, if people are virtuous or not. The whole point is to let people do what they want short of outright murder or violations of the harm principle enshrined in law. Otherwise, anything is kosher. If we all want to be cokeheads and live lives of lechery and debauchery, that’s perfectly kosher. Individual libertarians might be opposed to that – let’s grant that ALL libertarians are personally opposed to that. Doesn’t matter. The philosophy governs, and a society of vicious cretins is totally acceptable so long as the current understanding of the harm principle is respected.

    No Founder would ever have consented to that. There were ways they provided for in the federalist system to assert some control over the inculcation of virtue, short of outright tyranny or monarchy, but well long of what a libertarian would consider acceptable.

  8. will someone please cure me of this cynicism? At least try??

    Was it Lincoln who talked about the “better angels of our nature”?

    In any case, I still cling to the notion that we do have them. And that we’re more than monkeys in a zoo.

  9. Ann:

    I think they prefer to be described as simian derivatives. Not even they want to be called a monkey or his uncle. It’s all very sophisticated and selective.

  10. I keep delivering that message to my wife in so many words, and she warns me that they will come for me if I don’t shut up.

    That’s true. Which is why you should avoid too much strong drink: it will cause you to shoot at such people. And miss.

    As I asked rhetorically on another blog, What is your condicio sine qua non beyond which you storm the barricades?

    Living under moral busybodies on the right is no less odious than living under moral busybodies on the left. The reason the moral busybodies on the left are winning is free stuff! and free sex!

    They’re not going to chide you for shacking up with someone. What they will chide you for is a 20 oz soda or driving a gas guzzler. But they won’t chide you for your 20 oz latte that you loaded down with sugar, or the environmentally unfriendly batteries in your hybrid vehicle…

  11. I am with Ann and Kolnai on this. Libertarians too often seem to rely too much on their own set of moral principles and assume everyone will have the same types of self control. I was taught certain things as a child by my family and my Catholic school. I couldn’t steal, bully, lie about anything important (no you don’t look too fat is not a lie), or judge people on their clothing and expensive cars. These things are so much a part of me that I can’t even remember specifics of how or when they were implanted. But what happens when people are taught no values and rules or when they are taught very different ones? Society can afford a few deviations from the norm, but at some point chaos will prevail if too much is tolerated.

    We are in a situation today where mobility limits the effect of community values on kids, and where popular media often teaches them values that sharply contradict those of parents. Hillary said it takes a village, but there aren’t many villages left. It seems like bigger entities have step in to maintain values necessary for a functioning society.

    People today get rich selling vulgar clothing to the young, calling girls hos, and pushing drugs to young teens. The libertarian principles only work when people stand against these trends. Otherwise, the govt (usually unsuccessfuly) steps in. Yet, our kids are taught to be tolerant of everything in the schools, parenting is no longer valued, and religions are portrayed as neanderthal traditions.

    So it seems to me that libertarians need to spend less time talking about their rights and more time talking about responsibilities. If the latter are devalued, the former will be taken away. I would like to hear them say, Sure, you can smoke a joint, but when you do, you are funding a dealer who will be at the schoolyard tomorrow. Sure, you can look at porn, but this same porn will also be seen by kids who don’t know yet how to treat members of the opposite sex. Is your few minutes of fun really worth the damage you are doing to others?

  12. Change, of one sort or another, will happen when the bananas run dry, which should be about any minute now.

  13. expat –

    That was remarkably well put. I particularly like this formulation,

    “If responsibilities are devalued, rights will be taken away.”

    That should be a part of any bullet-point list of conservative maxims.

  14. Robert A. Heinlein said:

    Political tags‚ such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth, are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

    Needless to say, the first type tends to be attracted to government employment, at whatever level.

  15. “Cultural conservatives see this as naé¯ve. The state, they reason, will never leave us alone. “

    Bingo. The debate over gay marriage is about a lot of things, but one of them is not marriage.

    What the militant gay left doesn’t want is to let them marry so that they can go off and live happily ever after. They want a positive affirmation from us. They want it taught in the schools. They want to punish churches and businesses that don’t go along. My prediction is that they will seek to take away the tax exempt status from churches that refuse to marry gays.

    Look, if all gays were like the guys at http://www.gaypatriot.net/ then I’d be ok with it. Sadly, they’re in the minority.

  16. As a liberty spousing grown up man, i favor the side that promotes the most individual liberty. 99% of the left do not support individual liberty except when it come to the sexual matters and abortion which is actually an offshoot of sexual sexual conduct. Otherwise, the left is all about state control of every aspect of the lives of individuals.

    Many on the right seek control over our lives but in different areas. Left or right both seek to control power and maintain their status as the gatekeepers. The difference is each side has palette with 100 shades of gray. Leftits are perfectly content to murder to achiever their agenda. Rightist have a good slower appoarch.

    Libertarians want the least controls in the hands of DC, a bit more control at the state level, and more control at the locale level. We want common sense laws (from all levels of government) that are few & simple to understand, and that address issues that put recognizable and easily agreed upon limits on individual liberty. We want direct, simple laws that oversee what happens in the market place.

    That’s my take.

  17. @expat: “Libertarians too often seem to rely too much on their own set of moral principles and assume everyone will have the same types of self control.”

    This is the impression libertarians leave more than the actuality. So often they’re emphasizing how something should be legal that they forget to mention that they also believe it’s wrong.

    But believing it’s wrong itsn’t enough–it also has to be discouraged, actively, albeit through non-governmental means. Libertarians need to reassure the socons that they’re essentially on the same side by promoting moral behavior in the ways they deem legitimate.

    Libertarians often agree with social conservatives in the type of society they’d like to have, they just disagree with how to go about it.

    One of the reasons my social conservatism has made me into a libertarian (republitarian) is that I think that when we outsource something to the government, it makes us less vigilant about it. In Europe, where they have a stronger social safety net, people don’t give very much to charity. Likewise, if people count on the government to enforce their morality, as superior as that morality may be, they won’t do as well by their kids and communities.

    We left it up the government to protect us from pornography, and then when the courts legalized it, the socons were powerless against it. Had they not outsourced that to the state for so long, perhaps they might have done a better job at getting people to voluntarily abstain from it.

    Also, it’s important to remember that any institution strong enough to promote your morality is strong enough to promote its opposite. Public schools used to teach our kids Christian valies. It kept teaching values, but it dropped the Christian part and became hostile to it. Today, public education is one of the most anti-religious institutions we have.

    “So it seems to me that libertarians need to spend less time talking about their rights and more time talking about responsibilities. If the latter are devalued, the former will be taken away. I would like to hear them say, Sure, you can smoke a joint, but when you do, you are funding a dealer who will be at the schoolyard tomorrow.”

    I totally agree with the first two sentences, but disagree with where you take it. The only reason your joint funds the dealer who will be at the schoolyard is that you can’t buy the joint in a store (which is also why it funds gangs and terrorism).

    And the same argument can be used against gun manufacturers and breweries.

  18. Funny how many right of center blogsters regularly reference Dylan – among them Neo, Gerard and our friends at Maggie’s Farm.

    He and I are contemporaries. I have always been of a conservative bent. I suspect that he realized he was also when he was castigated for going electric (at Woodstock?). How some ever I have always been an ardent fan. I now waste/spend my time plating Eve Online and listening to a playlist that includes Dylan, Elvis, Patsy and a bunch of classical pieces. Life is good.

  19. Martel –

    An excellent defense of the libertarian position.

    I would add some caveats though.

    1) Much of the age of “small government” in America – roughly from the founding to the early 20th Century – was a period in which government was more of a register of local sentiments and standards, and not a vessel for social change or experimentation.

    Conservatives and libertarians both express admiration for the idea of states as “laboratories of democracy,” but, whatever else it might be, this was not a founding ideal – it was a position articulated by progressives, most notably Louis Brandeis, as a way to empower enlightened elites over against the people whose delegates they used to be.

    Even if there were occasional expressions used by the founders suggesting such a notion, they were not in fact suggesting such a notion – the idea that a state government would “experiment” with pornography legalization or gay marriage was absurd. That would not be an experiment; that would be an abomination.

    Point is, the people were pretty homogeneous across state lines in terms of their basic notions of what the universe was like and what constituted virtuous behavior within it, denominational differences in Christian belief notwithstanding. It wasn’t that these things were not expressed in law – they definitely were, in ways we now find appalling (sodomy laws, blasphemy laws, establishments of religion, censorship laws, and on and on and on) – but rather that not many people felt particularly sour about this, because they all tried to behave accordingly anyway.

    This was an era, as I like to put it, of a “common law” understanding of government (the thrust of the common law being to issue judgments according to the standard of a sensible man in the community). What eventually emerged was a totally different understanding, which might be called “administrative.”

    Consequently, I think the issue is more one of the respective benefits and drawbacks of the common law and administrative understandings, rather than one of leaving social issues to social sanction vs. using government to promote them.

    That is not, in short, an argument for libertarianism in the strict sense – anarcho-captialism – but rather for something like subsidiarity or localism. There never was a period in which social sanction was the dominant conduit of virtue; indeed, the basic belief was that anything worthy of being severely socially sanctioned was worthy of being legally sanctioned – just not be the federal government.

    I think conservatives kind of downplay just how authoritarian the conception of state (small s) power was throughout most of American history.

    2) Thus, the problem is not so much that setting up the “deliberate sense of the community” in law removes the incentive to sanction immoral behavior socially, but rather that increasing diversity combined with the importation of highly activist conceptions of government by the progressives led to a shattering of the consensus which had formerly allowed for harmony between social sanction and legal sanction.

    In effect, one by one, on each of these moral questions, the deliberate sense of the community broke apart into several different deliberate senses.

    Exacerbated by the progressives, who took every opportunity to stoke the fires in order to bolster their standing as the Ones With The Solution To The Problem, state (small s) power was proclaimed to be a chaotic mess where a gaggle of petty tyrannies “raced to the bottom” and ignored the cries of the marginalized. They legislated, they ruled, they conquered.

    3) On another note, I find it odd how often conservatives and libertarians both assume that local government equals more freedom. Unless local government means one block in a neighborhood (and maybe not even then), this is pretty counterintuitive.

    As communities get smaller, they get more like-minded and thus more tribalistic, which means more confirmation bias, less skepticism, and more boldness is putting moral and “social” issues into the purview of the ruling element. This is universal. We see it in the Amish, in the different groups represented by identity politics, in tribal societies throughout history, and of course in American history.

    Whether or not this is a desirable increase in liberty is one thing; whether it is a situation in which virtue is sustained solely by social pressure and private activity is another. The latter it is not.

    Personally, I think localism is preferable not on libertarian grounds, but on grounds of checks and balances. Intermediate powers between the people and the central government are essential to a free republic – not, note well, a libertarian republic – and that is my concern, which I also believe was the concern of the Founders. The friction and resistance between the intermediaries horizontally, and between them and the central government vertically, draws energy and attention away from the people, and it becomes harder to set up How Best To Tyrannize them as the central question of government. It also helps ensure that we are tyrannized (speaking loosely) in a way we like or are at least comfortable with.

    And I do believe that the closer to home a decision is, the more seriously virtue will be taken, simply because matters are closer to pure concerns of self-interest. But that doesn’t mean the elevation of the local sense of the virtues to enshrinement in the ruling element won’t occur. It will. Arguably it should. But at any rate, it will.

  20. “”Point is, the people were pretty homogeneous across state lines in terms of their basic notions of what the universe was like and what constituted virtuous behavior within it””
    kolnai

    People are still homogenous about what virtue is. Even the staunchest liberal/Progressive that by chance found himself hitch hiking on a dark road, would hope a devout Christian be the one to stop and pick him up.

    But something else is going on that seemingly short circuits people’s common sense about what virtue and goodness even is. And what that dynamic is, is the immense peer pressure campaign coming out of media and academia, that seeks to make judgement and discrimination of others and their behavior to be the biggest social taboo of them all.

  21. Another problem is that locals usually have to leave their locality for education, and they return home with new ideas to implement. This is good on one hand because we want the people who run the sewage treatment plant to know the latest techniques. We want teachers up to date on their subject matter, and we need computer stores. On the other hand, if these people are not well grounded, they can return with a sense of shame in their town’s backwardness to the extent that they overlook its strengths. Then they try to implement projects the town can’t afford or doesn’t really need just to be like more sophisticated bigger localities.

    I once worked with NOW to host a workshop on rape at a time when some changes in state laws were being debated. Things discussed were how police should collect evidence and how ER personnel could better handle victims. It was the first time these topics had been discussed in a public forum in the area. But then, some of the younger, more activist types started talking about setting up a volunteer hotline for victims. I was amazed. In our area there was a very low incidence of rape, and the idea of having people man phones 24/7 seemed stupid. I thought that it was more than enough to raise the topic among the people who would already deal with victims and they would then do their jobs with a bit more awareness.

    Now, years later I see how senior citizen aid groups have pushed for a new and very expensive center, where essentially old people can go to play cards. Using and perhaps tweaking existing resources isn’t fancy enough. Governments have to get involved, and if state funding for projects is offered, then you will get more spending and less local control. Everyone who is paid with govt money has the potential to become a professional advocate and to diminish the strengths of people who have been providers of help. My hometown still has lots of volunteers, lots of churches that get involved, and a newspaper that writes about and praises these people, so the area hasn’t lost all its strength yet. I keep my fingers crossed.

  22. Kolnai,

    “3) On another note, I find it odd how often conservatives and libertarians both assume that local government equals more freedom.”

    I view local gov’t more as an opportunity to be able to influence the control of my life. In theory I should be able to effect change more with a government closer to me.

    I call it out as theory since I live in the Chicago Metro area, so between Illinois and Chicago, it’s obvious theory doesn’t always translate into practice.

  23. @ kolni & JuliB:

    Very astute regarding local government. While it’s true that local government tends towards more liberty in that we each have more of a say in what happens there, that’s not necessarily the case. Anyone who’s ever come across a corrupt small town cop knows this to be so.

    We assume that local control facilitates greater liberty, and that’s usually the case, but not always.

    Hence, an eternal conflict and unresolvable conflict. If a small town arrests somebody passing through and jails him for five months and confiscates their vehicle without a trial, a larger government (state of federal) needs to step in and do something about it. However, the more often larger governments do so, the more prominent said governments and the less control communities have over their own lives.

    Washington should not be our primary guarantor of liberty, but something needs to hold localities in check when they abuse their power. At the same time, if Washington gets too vigilant in its protection of liberty (and its definition of it), our communities are destroyed.

    The closest thing to a solution we’ve got is a society with a strong moral foundation. The more individuals and localities preserve individual liberty, the less we’ll need Washington to come in and solve our problems for us.

  24. I’m days too late to this conversation, but I’d really like to see the author follow up on this with respect to the paucity of vision reflected in our entire conception of culture and the way it’s shaped.

    What I mean is that it always makes me sad to see how readily we’re accepting the leftist framing of every societal problem. The frame is always thus: Problem X exists, Governmental Solution Y exists, and no other solution besides GSY exists. The assumption we’re always allowing to be smuggled into these conversations is that the only tool capable of addressing broad social issues is government.

    The voluntary association of a free people with free-standing cultural institutions used to be one of our greatest American traditions. Foremost of course is our association with formal religious institutions, but we also have community organizations like the Knights of Columbus or the Rotary Club or the lowly neighborhood association. There are tens of thousands of fragmented cultural institutions occupying niche work in niche causes, but what is lacking on the right-libertarian side is the consciousness that we really can build a culture of freedom through millions of individual choices to voluntarily associate with groups that intentionally cross-pollinate with one another.

    The left, on the other hand, gets this instinctively, to the extent that it has become part of their DNA. Take the Open Source Civilization movement for example. Despite the fact that it is currently floundering because of Jakubowski’s managerial issues, the fact remains that thousands of people have caught sight of an over-arching vision of a culture not currently in existence, and they are now applying the vision to areas of technology, ecology, law, the concept of community, and on the list goes. Or witness the continuity between lefty community organizations, academia, the foundations, the NGO’s, the media–basically every non-governmental cultural institution, all banging the same drum all the live-long day, supporting and feeding off one another.

    Virtually all of leftist philosophy is anti-human. I believe that to my very core because I see it in the solutions they propose. But in this one respect, they have tapped into a profound insight regarding human nature. Of course they use it against us, but that doesn’t negate the truthfulness of the insight.

    For most people, a vision of some broad contours within which to work is always going to be more compelling than a vision of nothing but a blank canvas and the prospect of formulating it all yourself. Right-libertarians offer the latter, without any significant effort to nurture the non-governmental institutions that give people the broad contours of the wider culture. Government will always care about those contours, whether libertarians care or not.

    So we are simply going to have to show up in that space. Otherwise, the only contours being offered will continue to be those envisioned by the perpetual work of Government Justifying More Government.

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