THINGS I WISH I HAD SAID
True Liberty is not license. Those who think as you, sir, pervert liberty, and destroy the fundamental principles that allow a culture to thrive economically. This is the error of libertarian philosophy.
What libertarianism proposes is moral relativism under the pretense of “non-interference.” However, in the final measure, the result is that guaranteed outcome of any morally ambiguous system, which denies human nature and the transcendent truths that govern all cause and effect relationships. In practice the imagined utopia of the libertarian is identical in its altruistic deception to that of atheistic communism; and the outcome is predictable: the destruction of the individual and the corporate body of humanity we call society.
Libertarians think they may advance the cause of “social liberalism” simultaneously with “fiscal conservatism;” but this duality of purpose is folly, and works diametrically and insidiously against itself. The social plagues induced by such novel philosophies invariably drain the public treasury, render the distinctions of absolute right and wrong to ambiguity, destroy public confidence in justice, and dissolve private wealth.
Human society does not and cannot exist in a moral vacuum. A society that having no absolute standards of conduct defers all decisions to the individual, exercising little or no restraint on behavior, abdicates the single most legitimate purpose of the state: to increase the common good and uphold the moral order. To quote Edmond Burke:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
-— Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
A corrupt society, filled with men of licentious inclinations, cannot maintain its economic stability; or do you suppose the folly of the Roman Republic is worth revisiting in our times? “Give us bread and circuses!”
Economics does not transcend moral absolutes. Economics does not trump the Natural Law. History proves conclusively that no immoral or amoral culture can long prosper, nor survive its growing litany of perversions against the Natural Law; for such a corrupt body becomes its own undoing. Unfettered liberty generates unfettered vice.
Vice is not virtue; even if for a time libertarianism may advance a nation’s economic standing, it remains a foundation of sand because it denies the absolute transcendent truth indelibly stamped on the consciousness of every man by He who created all things. God is not mocked.
I agree with most of your post.
However, the fact is that people like you and me, don’t want to be “Told” what to think or believe. People need to discover those truths for themselves.
Any form of government that insists on enforcing a belief system will encounter rebellion.
To equate Libertarianism to moral relativism is a mistake on the surface.
The difference being the governments ability to force moral relativism on the populace, which is what we have now, and the people having the ability and freedom to figure things out on their own.
Yes, it is “Non-interference”, but it is not moral relativism.
It is peer pressure without redress.
It is a leap of faith. This is what liberals and progressives can’t handle. They don’t trust their fellow man, primarily because they don’t trust themselves.
I agree with that as a hypothesis. Do you know if there are any books that have been written that establish a link between the decline of civilizations and moral decadence?
“Under this philosophic instructor in the ethics of vanity, they have attempted in France a regeneration of the moral constitution of man. Statesmen, like your present rulers, exist by everything which is spurious, fictitious, and false; by everything which takes the man from his house, and sets him on a stage — which makes him up an artificial creature, with painted, theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare of candlelight, and formed to be contemplated at a due distance.
Your practical philosophers, systematic in everything, have wisely begun at the source. As the relation between parents and children is the first amongst the elements of vulgar, natural morality... Your masters reject the duties of his vulgar relation, as contrary to liberty; as not founded in the social compact; and not binding according to the rights of men; because the relation is not, of course, the result of free election; never so on the side of the children, not always on the part of the parents.
The next relation which they regenerate by their statues to Rousseau is that which is next in sanctity to that of a father. They differ from those old-fashioned thinkers, who considered pedagogues as sober and venerable characters, and allied to the parental...Thus they dispose of all the family relations of parents and children, husbands and wives. Through this same instructor, by whom they corrupt the morals, they corrupt the taste. Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulation of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure; and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.”
A Letter From Mr. Burke
To A Member Of The National Assembly In Answer To Some Objections To His Book On French Affairs
1791
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/burkee/tonatass/index.htm
This is common ground for both marx and libertarians
Marx hated the nuclear family as an artificial construct of, God, patriarchy and bourgeois economics. Libertarians view the nuclear family as an artificial construct of God and in their moral relativity, discriminatory against any other definition of a family, 3 men, 1 man 10 wives, 1 man prepubescent girls, etc.
If it feels good, do it.
it has been my long term , direct observation , here in Hawaii , which is one of the most pot soaked places in America ; that most pot smokers , the vast majority , are inclined to be low information seeking Liberal voters . Too laid back to care if they get the facts right , trending to voting for anything that implies ‘ more fun and less authority ‘ and certainly voting for the candidates that appear ‘cool’ , and not even barely thinking about the safety of the nation or the wider world . later in life these same pot smokers tend to bog down in depression and often experience deep financial insecurity , because like the old story of the grasshopper and the ants , many of them fiddled away their best ,most potentially productive years , while the ants worked their little butts off . Another pot smoker observation I have made; here at least NONE of them serve their country in the Armed Forces , none are inclined to enlist . It’s ‘not cool’ . This of course does not apply to the many aging Vietnam War veterans that enjoy a good puff , out in their secluded homesteads . They EARNED the right to relax any damn way they want to . Talking about the younger folks who blow the boo non-stop , and then go vote for Obama ( et all)
Another one over the fence by Burke.
I don't know how many times John Adams and James Madison said it, this Republic needs Judaeo-Christian morals in the People, to remain a free republic. Libertines, they warned, cannot remain free.