• Tag Archives libertarians

  • 3 Minute Critique of Libertarianism

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                         Waning Honey Extraction Moon
    “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

    Of course, we know where Bonaparte’s style got him.  Elba.  Even so he does cut against the grain of paralysis by analysis, the peculiar disease of intellectuals where worrying the problem like a bone often stands in for actually doing something about it.

    Libertarians have a long, yet rather ineffective, track record in American politics.  That’s because most Americans hold libertarian views on social issues like no draft, keep the government out of the bedroom, no censorship, no government issued identity cards at the national level.  Many also agree with their hands off approach to adult drug use and other matters where personal choice collides with well-meaning, or not well-meaning, social engineers.  Think the pro-life movement, the anti-gay folks, the militarists who want everyone to have national service.

    In other words this side of the libertarian thought experiment matches up well with a frontier ethos and the spirit of the bill of the rights.

    On the other hand libertarians have had little effect on national politics and on state politics, too. Why?  They want to privatize social security, end all government support to individuals, cut government spending by at least 50% (which would mean closing military bases over seas, at least) and shut down corporate welfare.

    Most US citizens agree that self-government should apply to social issues (matters of choice in our private lives), but also agree that there is an appropriate role for government in our public life.  A strong defense is a near universal among US citizens considering an appropriate role for government.  Many of us also agree that the promise of equality extends to such areas as health care, income support and affordable housing.  Since Teddy Roosevelt, we have also recognized government’s role as regulator of the economy, a role it engaged to good affect (though not great affect) in the recent financial crisis.  A free market blinder, worn by advocates of neo-liberal economics, blocks view of the wreckage in personal lives occasioned by capitalism’s creative destruction. (Schumpeter)

    Scott Nearing, an economist at the New School, advocated a mixed economy.  We already have a mixed economy.   The government funds or controls defense, police and fire service, mail service, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, social security, medicare and various other combinations of services at state and local levels.  The market economy deals with goods and services outside of those sectors though there are overlaps.   When the goods and services are not necessary for human existence, e.g. cars, bicycles, televisions, phones, computers, appliances, insurance, most legal services, then the market does a good job of allocating capital according to the desires of purchasers of goods and services.

    When housing, medical care and food, essential to human existence, are up for sale, then the market usually skews access to these away from the poor and toward the wealthier.  Equality, as a matter of simple justice, demands that we consider this bias toward the wealthy a failing of the market approach to these essentials.

    Just how we mix our economy will depend on many things, but to my mind, only a cavalier approach to the obvious human costs of unfettered capitalism will demand that the many surrender access to those things essential for existence to those able to pay for them.  Therefore, I am not a libertarian.


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  • The Self & The Other

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                Waxing Strawberry Moon

    Finally, some sun.  That’s good for the bees, good for the veggies and good for the spirit.

    I collect articles on certain subjects:  art, aesthetics, philosophy, political theory, modernism, individualism for instance.  Over the last few months there has been an interesting increase in the number of articles I’ve found with new takes on individualism.

    Let me give you an example.  You might think of the existentialist as one end of the continuum, radical individualists, almost, sometimes actually, solipsistic.  That’s me philosophically and in terms of deep belief about matters often called religious.  On the other end you might consider the Asian cultures in which the individual has no unique identity except as they function within the family or the state.  You might be the second son, the first wife, a citizen of a particular city or region.  Feudalism, too, had a class based view of the person.  Peasants were a large, amorphous group who worked the land, did jobs like tanning, blacksmithing, weaving, but whose individual qualities were of little obvious merit.

    It’s not surprising that the enlightenment with its focus on reason, blended with the Renaissance emergence of the individual as a psychological reality had such a powerful and corrosive affect on feudal culture.  It moved away from class based political and social structures toward more democratic and meritocratic ones.

    Anyhow, here’s the interesting piece I read the other day.  Those of us, like me, who believe in the inviolable isolation of our Self, forever walled off from the rest by the flesh and our peculiar, ineluctably unique internal world have it wrong.  The Self, in this view, is socially constructed.  We are who others see us to be, or, said another way, we see ourselves in the way that others see us.  In this perspective the political libertarian, the leave me alone and let me do it my way Rand Paul crowd, denies the very nature of the system within which they live.  That is, at one level, it is a system made of up of intimately connected parts, parts that could not be without the other.   There is, from this perspective, no alone; we are always apart of, perhaps not in the more rigidly defined feudal or Asian family way, but in a manner much closer to them than to the live alone, die alone types like me.

    In fact, this article goes on to compare the socially constructed self and the democratic state with love, a bond in which we are only who we are in relation to each other.  This makes us, if we deny this bond as libertarians do, jilted lovers when our dependence on the state and each other is revealed.

    Politically, I find this argument compelling, explaining as it does the Tea Party anger as the anger of lovers in denial.

    Personally, the socially constructed aspect of the self cannot be denied.  Even the stance of the existentialist comes from reading, say, Camus or Sartre or Kierkegaard, a fellowship of lonesome strangers.  Yes, the fingers of the other does reach into the interior, switching on certain perceptions, switching off others.  Yet, this much is still true:  no one knows my inner world.  No one except me.  No one has lived my life.  No one but me.  No one else will die when I wink out.  No one.  These radically separate realities keep me on the existentialist end of the bell curve.  At least for now.


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