Atrios-Eschaton-Black, strolling once more onto the field where self-described liberals take shots at the side of the barn . . . and miss wildly.
At heart really is the knee-jerk libertarian reaction against government infringement on some nebulous concept of "liberty." Drop me in the middle of the desert and I am truly free, though it's not really the kind of freedom I am interested in.From people who whine and cry and rend their garments all day about media misrepresentation and conservative strawmen and the lyingest liars who ever lyingly lied and the rest of their on-again, off-again ideological enemies, this is an awfully tawdry effort.
Since every internet kook and law professor with an axe to grind and a fetish for Confederate glory claims the mantle of libertarianism these days, I'm going to speak, in libertarian fashion, well and only for myself. It's not "some nebulous concept" of liberty, lion laying down with the lamb, wars ended and mankind perfected, that I'm looking for. Let's leave the perfectability of man to modern liberalism and the coming of the meshiach to their conservative buddies. Rather, it's that governments use incremental, innocuous intrusions on the private spheres of their citizens to consolidate unnecessary, destructive, and tyrannical powers. What motivates me to oppose government interventions in my life is not at all my belief that I as an individual represent the perfect decision-making unit; that left alone I am infallible; that in no instance can a collectivity deliver a benefit to its members. It's rather the long history of our government and every other government to fall at some point into the hands of venal, incompetent, evil, or simply dangerously well-meaning men who will take the structures of support, dependence, and census and twist them to the purposes of tyranny. Atrios, meet the no-fly list. No-fly list, meet Atrios.
Liberal technocrats and New Deal aficionados endlessly pimp for a society run by people like themselves, ruled by a beatific FDR, united in peace and brotherhood and prosperity, debating only on merits, always telling their superiors when they've screwed up, always fessing up to the public when that's the case. Needless to say that's not the way things happen. The burden of proof is not on the private citizen to show that some new law is onerous, but on the government to show that it is not. It isn't the theory of the Last Man that drives libertarians toward a Utopia, but the corruptibility of man that drives libertarians to oppose John Q. Manager having access to a database of my DNA, retinal pattern, bank records, and porno preferences.
Now Atrios says:
Having said that, I do think libertarians could find their calling by focusing on stupid state and local laws, and I don't mean symbolic but not especially important things like seatbelt laws and smoking bans. Small businesses do face rather onerous regulations and taxation, often applied by corrupt and/or incompetent agencies, in many municipalities. There are genuine and pointless barriers to the kind of economic freedom libertarians talk about, but the federal payroll tax isn't really a particularly important one.And of course, when that's the case, libertarians are accused of "knee-jerk libertarian reaction against government infringement" and relentlessly interrogated as to why we spend so much time yapping about smoking bans and seatbelt laws instead of concentrating on the Patriot Act and habeas corpus. It's a perfectly circular critique. Meanwhile, it's true that there are libertarians with a boner for taking the wrecking ball to the IRS, but me, myself, I'd rather take it to the Pentagon.
25 comments:
When you get to be as big a democratic party shill as Atrios, all that perspective gives you near-infallable political insight. It's true! I read it on dko$!
it's true that there are libertarians with a boner for taking the wrecking ball to the IRS, but me, myself, I'd rather take it to the Pentagon.
The first accomplishes the second neatly.
Well, what government institution any libertarian has a "boner" for wrecking is kind of a red herring, isn't it? If you have a principled objection (e.g. "Man is corrupt") you have a principled objection. On the other hand, if you have a pragmatic objection--if you think that government simply shouldn't be able to fight wars, or spy on houses--or then you should probably call yourself something else, like a "civil libertarian," or a "pacifist." Or something.
I think the liberal critique stated more honestly is that many of the usual problems of human communities are made better by an expansive state and many things are made worse, and that people who call themselves "libertarians" generally don't choose the things they object to in a way that seems very constructive. Since the principle is misplaced, say critics, libertarians either focus on side-issues (smoking) or throw the baby out with the bathwater (taxation). That's not a circular argument at all.
Smoking isn't a side issue, and it isn't taxation per se that's being objected to.
Whatever "people who call themselves libertarians" may or may not advocate is one thing, but it's perfectly clear that folks like Jim Henley, Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko, and even little 'ol me aren't getting on the soapbox to preach the virtues of repealing the 16th Amendment. Advocacy from these quarters is aimed at issues of militarism, police abuse, government secrecy, rights abuses, and so on. That some of us like to poke at folks who'll still shill for Democrats after all these years of failure, after 97 votes to none on the Iran resolution in the Senate . . . well, I for one reserve the right.
Whatevs. Critiquing "libertarians," in my mind, is kind of like saying you don't like "weather." I don't know if I've ever met two of y'all that even agree on what "libertarian" is.
Which is, really, your most endearing quality.
Well, Paolo, ioz just named four. Not all of us "libertarians", whatever the fuck that is, constantly type words on the intertrons just to say that we agree on many many things with these other individuals. Although the fact that they are well-read might indicate that someone does, in fact, agree with them.
Do I have to go find liberals who disagree on something so that we can have a proper anecdote war? Sounds like a hoot. You start without me, though.
As always, IOZ, very well said.
Living as I do in a city that recently passed a widespread public smoking ban, I've participated in a fair amount of debate over whether a smoking ban is a minor side issue that can be safely ignored by the liberty-minded, or an important front in the ancient war between civilization and individuality.
At first, I was inclined to ignore the issue, as I don't smoke tobacco. I gradually came to realize that my fellow non-tobacco-user friends who were vigorously and vocally resisting the smoking ban had the right of it.
IOZ hit the nail on the head when he said "governments use incremental, innocuous intrusions on the private spheres of their citizens to consolidate unnecessary, destructive, and tyrannical powers". Milton Mayer's book about the gradual nazification of Germany through the 30s contains a good account of how this works. Each new intrusion of the powers that be is not much worse than the last, so if you didn't resist the last step toward totalism, it's easy to rationalize not resisting the next. One day, though, we are bound to be shocked when it comes to be our ox's turn to be gored.
The liberal/progressive argument that if you love the benefits of civilization you have to accept the little tyrannies as part of the bargain is also true, though. Every collective is forged from compromise and it generally does take a dangerous amount of power to accomplish big things. Few people really want to live in total isolation or total government. Where to strike that balance is necessarily going to be an individual thing.
I see this as leading to an argument for devolution. The further a government grows away from the scale of an individual, the greater its power for both good and evil. Human weakness being what it is, the relative proportion of good and evil is probably fairly constant, but the bigger and more unitary the government, the less likely it is to correspond to any one individual's ideal balance of freedom.
So I think that most of our institutions are just too damn big to govern justly. I'm not exactly sure where the maximum size of a just government is, but I suspect that most large cities are already past that scale, much more so states, provinces, and nations.
I think Frijoles nails it pretty well. heck, I argue that the defenders of the Articles of Confederation were right, Lincoln may have been wrong, etc. etc. etc.
The only problem is that localism has a history of pretty nasty abuses, too. It took the big ol' nasty federal governemtn to force any political rights at all for Southern blacks (note: I am not claiming the African-American led Civil Rights movement was not the primary player. Just that federal action was a mechanism usable when local governments refused to reform). Or, more exotically, the local governments, close to their people, who think it's a-ok for a village council of elders to gang rape a 13 year old because her brother dated a girl outside the caste boundaries.
Of course,all I am really saying is that localism is not a panacea. But, we know that already. At least the Pakistani tribe doesn't bomb to shreds and kill hundreds of thousands.
There's nothing inherently bad about government.
Whether government does good things or bad things depends on the people.
The smoking ban is a red herring. Governments COULD have chosen to enforce more effective ventilation in public places. Instead they chose to ban smoking. Government WOULD have been justified in banning smoking in public places, if there were no less intrusive rememedy. What I wonder is, why did they choose the MORE intrusive remedy? I think THAT's what people should be concerned about.
Von Laue sums it well enough. For every Jim Henley there's a Glenn Reynolds (probably two).
When I used to share an office with a Cato-spouting armchair whuppassist, I'd get the energy every once in a while to poke him about his alleged libertarian thought. Environmental policy usually, sometimes health care. You know, does my nose begin at the end of your fist or at the end of your noxious cloud? He'd tell me that it all fits under libertarian thought, that it's more about drawing the line for the cases when a government is best suited to ensure liberty. Wouldn't a liberal tell me the same thing?
Von Laue sums it well enough. For every Jim Henley there's a Glenn Reynolds (probably two).
or more than two... yes, a liberal would tell you much the same thing, both the glenn reynolds remark, and the part about drawing lines.
Yes that's all very nice and well, but where do the ferrets come into this?
I don't think Atrios's resentment of libertarians has much to do with any actual libertarians or theories of liberty. He's backed himself into furthering liberalism by furthering the fortunes of the Democratic Party. Every time he's faced with a choice between the two, he chooses the Democratic Party, even if that's incompatible with liberalism. With that as his polestar, he's stuck with the unpleasant task of recruiting for an organization that makes a lot of noise in support of a liberal look and feel, without any liberal principles. He's locked into serial enabling of careerist, opportunistic defectors. There's a limit to the number of people who will go for that. The pool for it is tapped out. He's got to go for people outside the usual targets -- i.e. take votes from other organizations.
Making cold calls to people who think he's a fool and that his platform sucks has taken its toll, poor fellow. All he's got left is calling them names, creating silly conflations to justify that and whining about strawmen.
If the government had called for beefed-up ventilation in public spaces instead of an all-out smoking ban, libertarians would not have regarded that as intolerably intrusive ?
Sorry. No can buy. One reason smoking is a poor way to win converts to libertarianism is because it's demonstrably a public issue in which smokers, left to their own devices, do indeed act in a fashion as tyrranical as the burreaucrats they claim to be fighting. I'm not saying that Government's reasons for banning smoking in public places is necessarily benign. OTOH, I have dealt with smoke in my face and everywhere else in public faces, not to mention dirty butts all over the damn ground and the inevitable speech about how if I don't like smoke, the onus should be on me to leave the public space, not the smoker.
A full embrace of libertarianism would require me to believe against much evidence that the man/woman in the street, left to their own devices, will behave honorably towards those who don't share their likes and dislikes. Unfortunately, I've seen time and time that the man/woman in question does not.
It would also require me to ignore the inescapable evidence that the "freedom" of public smoking is peddled to us night and day by giant corporations intent on keeping their profit margins intact, not by the struggling small-time tobacco farmer they like to use in their lobbying pamphlets to guilt-trip their opponents.
Ms. Xeno, as regards smoking, only wingnuts claim the right to smoke where it's unwelcome. Libertarianism requires nothing more than the opportunity for people who want to cater to smokers to open their own establishments, should they care to do so.
Well, that I have no problem with, Scruggs. If the food was good, I'd probably tolerate a nasty case of ashtray hair to go eat there at least once in awhile.
I guess the problem I have, Mr. Scruggs, is that mosty businesses are looking for that extra margin, so in effect your libertarian position would mean every business (or almost every business) would cater to the incremental smoker demographic. And, given that we )non smokers) have no choice, we would have to put up with it. See, for example, Europe.
ms_xeno,
A full embrace of liberalism would require me to believe against much evidence that the man/woman employed by a bureaucracy or running for public office, left to their own devices, will behave honorably towards those who don't share their likes and dislikes. Unfortunately, I've seen time and time that the man/woman in question does not.
Sure, ultima. All I'm saying is that a pitch for libertarianism ought to use a different example of real-world human interaction if it's going to look good to skeptics. If the point is just to let off steam against people who drive you crazy, though, it's not important one way or the other. IOZ was correct a couple of weeks ago when he pointed out that nobody sympathetic to his philosophy in this space has any real power to influence the power brokers regardless of what philosophy we're officially peddling. So it's pretty useless for us to fight about it, even if it's sometimes entertaining.
I've always been sympathetic to the argument for libertarianism that hinges on how corruptible, greedy and short-sighted the Average Man can be.
I don't think I'm much different (maybe better in some areas, definitely more of a cad in others). And I wouldn't want a worse man than I am to command an army of thugs to rule me.
That's why I'm a libertarian. Others' arguments may vary.
Brian, smoking is banned there too. Even my beloved France, starting on Jan 1, 2008.
Noooooooo Scruggs. What will Johnny Depp do?
That's the crux of our dilemma then, ultima. So many of us have the same good reasons to be misanthropic, but we arrive at wildly different solutions for trying to deal with it.
Ah, well. If not love then IOZ's spectacular way with salted fish will bring us together.
You can all smoke in my backyard if you wanna'. Just please put the butts in the handy coffee can on the porch if you expect to be invited back.
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