Marxism of the Right

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.

An interesting critique that draws the distinctions between conservatism and libertarianism.

It does, but sure seems to in a painfully labored way. Almost as if the author is spending his effort in convincing himself, not unexpected from someone in NYC.

How difficult is it to just say "personal responsibility?"

Admittedly that is based on an implicit Christian philosophy, which is EXACTLY why the United States was once interpreted as an implicitly Christian origin. That was the prevalent hegemony of the West in which the United States was born.

JC said it is not Caesar (the Left), not the Pharisees (the Left), but what is in you, the individual. Which of course is conservatism. And that is why "they" hate Sarah Palin.

How obvious is it?

I guess we just don't get paid by the word count at the Suntrade Institute.

Johnny Suntrade

The article is such a bunch of rubbish it isn’t worth responding to except these two points:

“Conservative” tyranny is no better than leftist tyranny and that’s what he wants to justify.

and

Libertarianism ends at the next person’s nose. Anything more restrictive is tyranny and we have been way into it from both ends for more than a century.

Yes this included killing the pre-born.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If one is a Libertarian that believes that life begins at conception then they are definitely **not** wearing that tee-shirt. Many Libertarians are PRO-life. Our most fundamental right is the right to life ( as stated in the Declaration of Independence).

However....I left the Libertarian Party because I think it would do more good if it were a club, similar to the NRA. Energy that is put into running third party candidates would be put to far better use by supporting primary candidates, especially on the lowest levels, that fully support the Constitution. They should do this for both parties. In time we would get rid of the RINOs and stock up on the Blue Dogs.

Let’s take it to another level. If one were to proclaim the government has no say in whether parents should be able to kill their children up to the age of five years, would that constitute defending evil in your eyes?

Is abortion evil? Opinions differ. But for someone who believes it is evil, a position that no restrictions should be placed on it by definition constitutes “defending evil.”

This is the root fallacy of the pro-choice (or libertarian) position. It’s called “begging the question.” What any discussion of abortion should be aimed at settling is whether abortion is evil or not.

Yet pro-choice people, instead of proving by their argument why abortion is a good or at least morally neutral, just assume it is and move straight from this assumption to claims that interference with abortion are unjust.

Well, I would say that the LP’s platform position on abortion is basically a “dodge the issue” position.

While I agree that their position is flawed, I would not say it is “defending evil”. I would say that it is an ideological position that ignores the reality of death and abortion, and chooses individual liberty over law.

I would compare it to the flawed ideology of anarchism, in that society cannot exist without law, just as one’s individual liberty ends when it infringes upon another.

I hope my analogy makes sense to you, becasue it almost does to me...lmao

~SC

[B]ut according to the LP platform, govt has no say in the matter. That is not the same as "defending evil", is it?

If a political party had a platform saying that govenrment should have no say in property rights in what any adult does to any other adult (including battery and murder), would you consider that a neutral opinion or an unacceptable position defending theft and butchery?

Your analogy is not bad, but I disagree.

In 1860 our country split, largely because a large minority was upset about another large minority referring to their peculiar institution as “evil.” They believed any potential government intrusion on their right to hold other men in slavery was illegitimate, a perfectly libertarian position if one ignores the human rights of the slaves.

That is exactly the pro-life or pro-abortion libertarian position. It ignores any possibility of there being a moral issue involved with abortion and therefore declares it to be by definition morally neutral.

To increasing numbers of people in 1860 the position that slavery was morally neutral was not logically defensible. Quite slowly it seems more people are realizing the same is true of abortion.

Pronouncing a practice to be morally neutral does not make it so.

Though I generally agree with most of this piece, I agree with the poster who said the analogies are strained.

Though I think most of the writer's criticisms of Libertarianism are valid, I don't think he did a very good job making his points.

And in one case, he falls flat on his face:

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us.

This is patently ridiculous. It leaves no room for the concept of "we're a small party now, but we're going to try to convince others to join us".

As much as I hate Ron Paul (and I really, really hate that anti-Semitic b*st*rd), I can't imagine him leading a "totalitarian revolution" that ends up "forcing us all to live as libertarians".

The concept is as ridiculous as the writer's awkward attempt to put it into words.

It reminds me a little of the current administration looking for terrorists among the Tea Party Protesters.

The problem with Libertarians is that they do not understand that free markets and capitalism work only because of the Judeo Christian foundation of the cultures that developed those concepts. When the last traces of morality based on the designs of a Supreme Deity(Allah doesn't work) are gone a libertarian world must quickly degenerate into rule by the strongest and life in clans. Business as we know it was developed bu the Jews in the Middle Ages because their religion required them to be bound by their word. They could trust each other to do as they agreed to do. The Christians not allowing them to own land helped that to grow. Christians were able to operate that way also once they got around to it. In Asia that kind of commerce was always the prerogative of royalty and there was no trust of non royalty when out of sight. Asian cultures with some Christian background are able to do business very successfully as Westerners do. Koreans and Vietnamese Christian communities became the business class and the Buđhists adapted and adopted the ways of the Christians in business. Japan had a similar background with a sizeable Christian community in the 160s until it was suppressed but the Christians did not disappear, They hid their beliefs and became businessmen. In China the great corporations until very recently were all family enterprises and government (as weith royalty) enterprises because only relatives could be trusted. Big as those family corporations grew they had an inherent limit because they could not take on the talents of people outside of the family.

The whole world does business, more or less successfully on the Judeo Christian model and when that model fails because it has removed morality and the prospect of judgment in the next world from the business scene then it loses the reason it can exist.

The author's dichotomy is spurious: an alternative to Marxism is capitalism. Yes, Marxism is "collectivist" but in a strict sense: it advocates government's ("collective") ownership of the means of production. The opposite of that is individual property rights, i.e., capitalism.

The author also confounds the economics and the form of government. Marx advocated dictatorship of the proletariat. The opposite of that, logically speaking, is enslavement of the proletariat. This has nothing to do, of course, with any of the stands of the libertarian thought.

The author's logic is unbelievably weak. I am completely appalled by the title and the main idea: there is no equivalent, or resemblance, of Marxism on the right.

His logic suffers also in that one cannot call Marxism delusional: the Soviet Union, which implemented it, existed for 75 years.

| I wonder if the author has friends and colleagues. I don't understand why nobody dissuaded him from publishing such an embarrassment.

The issue is not that Ron Paul or the libertarians will become dictators.

But the society Libertarians envision is as much of a fantasy Utopia as that of the Marxian fantasies. Neither is practically achievable given the state of the human condition.

I think the objection in the article is that both philosophies presume a kind of economic determinism, both presumes that the economics concerns and interests of people are the only things that dictate their actions. Although they differ on how they believe economics affect behavior, both are materialistic in that they do not factor in any non-material motivations of people.

Where as one philosophy considers goodness what the collective considers good, while the other considers goodness what each individual considers good. Neither is willing to acknowledge goodness as something beyond the considerations of either the collective or the individual, but as something that is transcendent.

I understand what you are saying, Truthsearcher, and I essentially agree.

I think the article “overreaches”, however, in the paragraph I quoted, saying that Libertarians are just as apt to turn to force and coercion as are Marxists.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Marxists and Libertarians both share a “materialist” outlook and mind-set, they are as opposed on the issue of coercion as 2 philosophies can be.

Marxism eats, sleeps and breathes coercion. It is the stuff of which Marxism is made.

Libertarianism, while equal in Utopian outlook to Marxism, does not have any coercion “in its bones”.

Marxism takes a “do it now and damn the consequences” to its vision of utopia. Libertarians are content to imagine their utopia somehow magically taking place in some distant future.

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