Posted on 08/01/2002 3:27:45 PM PDT by Tomalak
Thought for the day
If you believe in a truly libertarian society, your only way to success is in working to build a society based upon traditional morality, shame and chastity. Contradictory? Actually, no. Given a little examination, it turns out to be rather obvious; almost self-evidently true. If you want to live in a country where every man supports himself rather than looking to the taxpayer, where crime is rare and so massive police powers, ID cards and DNA databases are superfluous, you will not do so on the back of the destructive policies of social liberalism.
Libertarians traditionally do not look to history for the sort of society they wish to build. But I sense that the famous passage with which AJP Taylor begins his English History 1914-1945 comes closest to the libertarian ideal: a place where the normal, sensible Englishman comes into contact with the state only through the post office and policeman. The United States that existed before FDR's massive extensions in state power is similarly the model of the sort of America that libertarians across the pond seek to build. What all successful societies in history with small states have had in common is a strictly moral populace. Victorian Britain could survive without a large state precisely because pious ideas of shame, duty and self-reliance ensured that people would look to themselves for what they needed, rather than the state, and because crime was low enough that the state did not need to seek all the powers it could summon to fight back.
One mistake far too many libertarians make is to associate traditional morality with big government, and hostility to freedom. The opposite is true. The more influence morality has over a man's conduct, the less need there is for the state to control it. Crime can be reduced by many police, many laws, tougher sentences and more guns. But most of all, to have a low crime society without an overbearing state, you need to fashion the sort of country whose people are inclined not to commit crime in the first place. Roger Scruton made this point as brilliantly as ever in his call to "Bring Back Stigma":
"The law combats crime not by eliminating criminal schemes but by increasing the risk attached to them; stigma combats crime by creating people who have no criminal schemes in the first place. The steady replacement of stigma by law, therefore, is a key cause of the constant increase in the number and severity of crimes."
To see morality as inimical to liberty, as a threat to libertarian ambitions, is the most statist thing one can do. It is to leave the state as the only thing to pick up the pieces when society fails to function.
It is no mere joke to say that at present libertarians are those who like the liberal society but hate paying for it. Take a recent column on paedophilia in America's leading Libertarian Magazine, Reason, entitled "Sins of the Fathers". Throughout the article, the message is clear: molesting kids is wrong, but 'merely' wanting to rape them is not. The article is a rebuke aimed at all those with a moral problem with lusting after children.
"The issue is not sexual attraction; it is sexual action...
Bibliophilia means the excessive love of books. It does not mean stealing books from libraries. Pedophilia means the excessive (sexual) love of children. It does not mean having sex with them, although that is what people generally have in mind when they use the term. Because children cannot legally consent to anything, an adult using a child as a sexual object is engaging in a wrongful act. Such an act is wrongful because it entails the use of physical coercion, the threat of such coercion, or (what comes to the same thing in a relationship between an adult and a child) the abuse of the adult’s status as a trusted authority.
Saying that a priest who takes sexual advantage of a child entrusted to his care "suffers from pedophilia" implies that there is something wrong with his sexual functioning, just as saying that he suffers from pernicious anemia implies that there something wrong with the functioning of his hematopoietic system. If that were the issue, it would be his problem, not ours."
I believe that the dominance such people seem to have over libertarianism is a source of much of its undeserved failure. Such arguments only make libertarians sound nasty, extreme, and frankly strange. They may explain their defence of paedophilia on the grounds of a philosophical tradition of 140 years standing, but most ordinary people do not see it that way: what they see is a political movement apparently sympathetic to a pervert. Similarly, attacking the welfare state on grounds of economic efficiency is productive before some, but to the majority, it just looks like greed: not wanting to help those in need. Unless one explains morally the evils of trapping people on welfare so that each time they make an economic advance there is a corresponding benefit cut, and of creating a state which appears to remove every citizen's private duty to others, how can one show that they are wrong to put this thinking down to greed?
So morality surely reduces the need for a large state. But does accepting the importance of morality in society mean a greater role for the state in other areas? I do not believe so. Let us look at the actual aims of social conservatives like Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens, Ann Widdecombe, Charles Moore, John Redwood, Roger Scruton and Theodore Dalrymple. How many can you name in mainstream journalism or politics who actually want to change the law to make homosexuality illegal, for example? I do not know of any. Again, we see the reality - the social "authoritarians" are not really authoritarian. They do not want new laws to stop immorality and crime: they want free people to choose to be good themselves. They want a country where virtue is praised and vice condemned.
Ultimately, the enemy of libertarians is state control, not self-control. Morality in ordinary life removes the need for the sort of huge state that politicians have built for us since the 1930s. The more people choose to be good of their own accord, the more convincingly one can question the need for an over-mighty government to keep them in line. But until libertarians give up their crusade against any idea of decent behaviour, I do not see them succeeding.
Ya beat me to it by one post, I said something very similar to tpaine in post #104. I think conservatives and libertarians should work together to turn a lot of these issues back to the states, to restore federalism and the 10th Amendment. That is where I see we have the strongest common ground. From there, the debate on this matter, between conservatives and libertarians, can be much more robust, and through the debate different states can try different approaches, and we can see which approaches have merit and which ones won't work. But we won't get that now with the feds involved. The two guarantees we can get from the feds on any action that they take is that it will be a failure, and the reaction of the feds to the failure will be to do more of what is failing...
Agree entirely. I think pot should be either decriminalized or legalized, with state and county options in that regard. As far as other drugs, I think they should remain illegal, with more emphasis on returning sentencing to judges, instead of these stupid mandatory minimums, and with a wide range of options available to judges, so they can ascertain whether someone is a recreational user of cocaine or an addict who really needs to be forced into treatment. Right now, to a lot of judges, they have two options - send the addict to jail, or throw the case out on the first technicality that comes along because they don't agree with the mandatory minimum sentence involved (I have seen that happen before).
I differ from a lot of libertarian posters in that I think a community as a whole has a right to examine certain behaviors and decide if a certain probability for harm threshhold is crossed. The classic example of this approach is drunk driving. Even though the vast majority of people who drive under the influence make it home without incident, the folks who do cause crashes create a level of mayhem and harm in gross disproporation to their numbers. So society prohibits ALL drunk driving. Some libertarians believe that we should wait for actual harm to happen before we act, for the drunk driver to hit another car, but I disagree.
And I think hard drug use fits this model as well. Pot doesn't, so the actions taken should reflect this. However, this is a tool that should be used very carefully, because in the wrong hands, some anti-fat activists could use it to block a McDonalds from being built in your community.
The election of Bill Clinton represented the ultimate goal of international drug traffickers, stability. The WODs created a black market and gazillions of dollars have been going out to drug cartels. What could they do with all of that money? It had to be laundered back into the American economy because it's all dollars. And now it has. The money has come full circle in the form of investments and political donations. It doesn't even matter to the drug boys which party gets the money, Republicans are naturals because they truly believe in drug prohibition, but Democrats are crooks so it works out the same. All the drug cartels have to do is support candidates who are pro-WODs and they will have it made from now on. That was the mistake that the boot-leggers made during Alcohol Prohibition, they didn't buy high enough on the ladder. But, then again, they didn't have worms like Bill Clinton coming to them.
Wrong. States will work to circumvent federal drug laws in defiance of the feds. Federalism will be reclaimed by the states, through citizen referenda that bypasses their own squishy-kneed state politicians, and that takes back the powers that rightfully belong to the states, or the people, the powers that the feds have usurped in defiance of the 9th and 10th Amendments. I've said it before, and I will say it again, until everyone on FR is sick and tired of me saying it - the only way the republic will be saved is, ironically, by referenda, or unfettered democracy on the state level.
I don't know. That started up while I was on hiatus from FR for a bit. tpaine might be able to fill you in...
It is not possible to restore Victorian social relations or the concept of "scandal". People do not want crime. But then again, they do not want to be stuck all their lives in miserable marriages, to be constantly watched and judged, or see the bastard stigma restored.
Unfortunate in some ways, but true and very well said.
Reading Victorian novels give an inkling of what large scale reimposition of moral stigma and sanctions would mean. Even today, people still do make moral judgements and disapprove of those who are flagrantly immoral or unjust. But the "rights" of individuals, of families or of lovers will always lead to abuses of those rights, and people today won't give up the former to curb the latter.
Raise the banner of individual freedom in an affluent, anonymous urban society and inevitably it will be used against neighbors, employers or landlords who disapprove of illicit sex. It's not inevitable that the state intervene against them, but the same public opinion and consumer choice that once enforced morality eventually comes to enforce the right to immorality. As you imply, in a poorer, less mobile, rural, familial society political liberty may be combined with social control, but it would be difficult or impossible to achieve under present conditions.
I find things to admire in the original article, but it's unconvincing in the end. And he's barking up the wrong tree about British Tories like Widdicombe and Hitchens. Though they do good work championing voluntaristic or non-state moral policing, one can't help thinking sometimes that that's because actual legal prohibitions aren't possible. In another political environment, they might well be championing such policies.
I disagree. IMO the 14th applies the Bill of Rights to the states. But it causes some problems if you use the 9th in conjunction with the 14th. The 9th was fine when it was linked with the 10th. But throw in the 14th, and you have a recipe for judicial activism. IMO the 9th was put in place to keep the feds from restricting rights not enumerated in the BOR. But the states still had powers to restrict those unenumerated rights as they saw fit (some states or localities, for example, ban or restrict the consumption of alcohol). Once the 14th came along, it stood in contradiction to the 9th, a situation the courts have resolved by basically ignoring the 9th.
- And made it clear that while states can make law to 'regulate' public acts using due process, they can not prohibit or infringe upon private victimless acts, - IE - 'sins'.
I would disagree to a certain extent. Please review my post above to Khepera that covers my opinions of DUI laws. There is legal precedent to not just act again harm, but also act against a certain probability of harm. And that is what Khepera is talking about. The most sound debate is, how do we mitigate against harm? Prostitution is often NOT victimless - diseases are spread, families are impacted. So what is the proper role of dealing with that, and what can be done to mitigate harm?
Several states have decriminalized pot posession. Nevada, which only a couple of years ago had the most punitive laws in the country regarding posession of a single joint, looks like it will have a referendum to LEGALIZE posession up to three ounces.
Please allow the facts to work their way into your theories and get back to us.
I guess the governor of New Mexico and the Sheriff of the county around Telluride, Colorado didn't get the memo from Drug War Headquarters. Since you seem to be well hooked into the actions of that bunch, call 'em up and tell them to get those guys back into the program /sarcasm.
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