Suckas

American liberals like Ezra Klein are totally unable to understand why Ron Paul is always talking about taxes and monetary policy and the scope of government when, in their minds, the only thing he could possibly be saying that would attract attention and support is that he's going to end the occupation of Iraq. That's because American liberals understand the invasion and occupation as a terribly aberrant, uniquely un-American act foisted on a frightened country and unprepared world by the avatar of awfulness, notre dauphin, Gee-Dub Bush. Their liberalism is essentially personality-driven--ironically, given their loud disdain for the Bushite personality cult. It is the liberal-progressive conviction that the necessary component for good government is good people. People, you know, like them. Young progs like Klein are the worst in this regard because they've never had real jobs and have therefore missed out on the practical education that most of us get in the futility of good intentions and decent management against the systemic corruption of all large institutions. The young Democrats' faith in electoralism and disdain for any generalized critique of the American state is based on the faulty idea that if only the right people were running the policy apparatus, then the power of government would be used for good and we would only invade countries when, you know, it was really important. They are naturally immune to the idea that good managers cannot buck institutional imperatives, putting their trust, as they do, in people power and, lord help us, the "democratic process." They are interested in "good government," not "limited government," and the argument that all governments seek inevitably and inexorably to expand their own power is impossible for them to grasp, because, after all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, QED.

People like Ron Paul confound them by insisting that horrors like the Iraq invasion and occupation are necessitated by the system itself. Foreign aggression is endemic to powerful nations and empires, and the United States is surely the former and--can anyone dispute this anymore?--surely the latter as well. And from such ideas comes the general libertarian critique of government: that if you empower the government to do something, it's going to do it. If you empower the government to collect information on its citizens, it isn't only going to collect the minimum necessary to pay a social security stipend. It is going to collect as much as possible. If you create and fund a vast military establishment, the state is going to employ it. Why do we have this magnificent army, Madeline Albright notoriously mused, if we're not going to use it? The libertarian says neither ask what you can do for your country nor what your country can do for you. He says instead: How can we most effectively circumscribe the power of government so as to prevent the very possibility of invading Iraq, of setting up a ubiquitous surveillance state, of deciding to use eminent domain to subsidize strip mall develoment, and so forth and so on. The libertarian doesn't believe that so long as you're careful and make sure that good people are strolling the Aaron Sorkinian halls of power, snapping dialogue here and there, then all will be well. He does not share the Progressive's Soviet confidence in the power of good management and planning.

But even the libertarian position has at its core the flawed idea that state power can be constitutionally constrained, that if we write it down and enforce it vigilantly, the state can be confined to a limited sphere of acceptable action that will secure life and liberty and property and a few other basic rights. Yet in order to achieve even these limited ends, the libertarian concedes that the state must at least be granted a minimal monopoly on the use of force, and in particular the use of deadly force, and in that exchange he gives up everything in return for nothing, for the moment he hands the gun to the policeman and says, "Protect me from thieves," he has handed the state the mechanism through which it will go on to invalidate all its bargains and charters with its citizens.