The Myth of Libertarians as Social Liberals

National Review Online ^ | 2009-02-11 | Jonah Goldberg

[Philo-Junius]

We are glad as well that your seared conscience, evidently, can still be troubled to yawn at the mention of abortion.

[KC Burke]

Sorry to jump in but I have a way of presenting the distinction that corrects the straw-man of all conservatives as theocrats which other libertarians, as well as conservatives will often agree with after review.

In reading Freedom & Virtue, The Conservative Libertarian Debate a great set of essays trying to find the common ground and differences between the modern version of these traditions it occurred to me that the process of government for the two factions could be understood with a flow chart.

This flow chart contains an item called Order which includes Moral Order and Social Order, both prized and seen as an end to the good state and not a creature of government itself. In addition, any fair reading would say that both traditions call for a limited and small federal state or national government and much of the difference often lies with general government purposes at the State/Local level (but lets leave that aside for now). When we use "state" below we are using it as "nation".

Conservatives see the state as:
Virtue ==> Order ==> Liberty
with the earlier component fostering the following component.

Libertarians see the state as:
Liberty ==> Order ==> Virtue
with the earlier component fostering the following component.

Now what happens when we change the state to "State" still follows the above model but when we change from the small federal national state to the general government of a State, the conservative is much more comfortable, and the libertarian less so, with that state having laws framed by legislators first relating to personal sources of Virtue which are often individually religious in nature for the source of the Moral Order that the conservative sees as being secured by society's order yielding a society with Ordered Liberty.

The Libertarian often holds that legislated liberty is not the way to produce a virtue filled society and all virtue must be freely chosen.

There is never going to be a way for libertarians to shed the limitations of the J. S. Mill heritage which carried the issues of individual control of what entered ones body being outside of regulation and to still claim the strong points of his clear arguments in the balance of On Liberty. Likewise, conservatives can't shed the history of denominalationism from finding its way into their Virtue and endlessly creeping into their public Order. Our Constitution provided a process to allow for both of these to be mitigated in their most excessive forms.

I always find that both sides have some interesting things to learn from each other if we can get beyond the doper versus statist labels.

[IronJack]

The flaw in Libertarianism is that it exalts the individual above ALL else -- community, ideology, even God. As such, it becomes humanist and ignores the rigors of transcendent morality. It demands moral equivalency.

In elevating the individual to the status of God, Libertarianism makes each man an island, and destroys the social contract. At its extreme lies anarchy, since it embraces no unifying or shared principle save -- paradoxically -- the absence of community.

To use your construct, the fallacy is that Order arises from Liberty. In fact, the opposite is true. Liberty unbounded by morality breeds Chaos, not Order. And how does one create a morality when every man answers to no one but himself?

[KC Burke]

What you say is correct for some libertarians, but I have also met on this site a number of christian libertarians who seem to paradoxially be able to seperate themselves from that limitation. I have likewise met some Conservatives that seem to me completely outside of the Ordered Liberty tradition that want a law passed about everything.

Thanks for the commentary and it proves again that dialogue is what is important for those two traditions to find common ground against the collectivist marxist.

[cizinec]

. . . and of course I, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, need *you* to tell me what “transcendent morality” is. For some of my family members that means:

no beer
no bikinis
no rock music
no dancing . . .

NO THANKS.

I’ll take the freedom to choose my own religion and will ask the state (and you, by the way) to stay out of defining “transcendent morality.”

Now, you may proceed to claim that I think murder is okay, that I’m a stoner (I’ve never even touched the crap), or some other bull crap that says nothing about what I really believe.

[IronJack]

I’ll take the freedom to choose my own religion and will ask the state (and you, by the way) to stay out of defining “transcendent morality.”

I didn't say anything about religion. But if your nominally transcendent morality doesn't extend beyond YOU, then it's neither transcendent nor absolute, which makes it simply moral relativism, and argues my assertion.