Posted on 07/30/2002 6:46:04 PM PDT by RANDomScout
In this, my last scheduled contribution to Editor’s Links, I want to say a few nice words about libertarians – a much-maligned, funny, quarrelsome lot of people who were kind enough to foot my bills this summer.
One of the great things about laissez-faire types is that they’re not in power and – truth be told – they have no desire to be. This is seen by some as a bad thing; a sign that libertarians aren’t “serious people.” But the approach is not without its benefits.
Right- and left-wingers are tethered to partisan political movements or political parties, which can be a weights of albatross-like proportions. Advancing a party’s propaganda and interests often contorts and warps reality all out of recognizable proportion. For instance, a recent Washington Monthly review of right-wing bomb thrower Ann Coulter’s new book Slander relayed her claim that “for about twenty years now, all new ideas have bubbled up from the right wing.” The incredulous reviewer asked “All new ideas? All? Air Jordans? The Macarena? Pizza Hut's Stuffed-Crust Pizza?”
Across the aisle are odious pundits like Joe Conason who, in his Salon blog today credited “big government” with saving the Pennsylvania coal miners, reminded readers that Ted Bundy was a young Republican (only one step removed from Ralph Reed), and compared the Bush administration’s attempts to have hiring and firing flexibility in the newly created Department of Homeland Security to the anti-union “obsession[s] of totalitarian regimes and their imitators.” He justified this last charge by explaining – I am not making this up – that if Ann Coulter could be nasty then so could he.
Libertarians are sometimes damned as purists, but at least they aren’t as predictable or as boring as their sniping counterparts on the right and left. They’re also – and I say this from experience – a whole lot more fun. They lack the anti-corporate nervous tics of progressives (“Oh, I couldn’t order Dominos. Do you have any idea what kind of causes they finance?!”) and the woe is us moralistic hang-ups of conservatives (“There was sex on TV last night! We’re doomed.”).
A startlingly diverse group, the only common ground that all libertarians share is a desire to live in a society in which people are truly free – of wars, of petty government regulations, of a creeping Puritanism that holds suspect any fun activity. That might be a pipe dream, but it's one I’ve come to share.
Jeremy Lott is Reason's 2002 Burton C. Gray Memorial intern.
One could look at this as a type of inverse child pornography - 'porn' FOR kids. I wonder what G. Washington would think of us.
Now, from a libertarian perspective my objections are not so much about the porn-for-kids aspect of the situation, it is about force-of-culture and disrespect for how people choose to live.
This is the essence of libertarian morality.
Im awfully curious as to your view of this type of phenomena.
Bingo.
Comments on 141?
And you sound like the typical Liberaltarian that protects one perversion over another.
-- Tell me, are you a gun grabber like tex too?
Heck no, former concealed carry permit holder till I moved to the peoples republic of Maryland.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,In the libertarian paradigm, the Right-to-Life is not a self-evident, unalienable right.
People always suffer the natural consequences of their own actions. That is not the same as shrugging and allowing the drunk driver to just die by the side of the road. "He got himself there, now he will just have to learn to lump it!" No. We rush him to a hospital for care and to heal the broken bones, and then we throw him in jail! This is because we are a Christian culture; we as a society see worth and value in each and every human being. Even before the moment he slammed into the tree, we had done a lot to discourage his unneeded suffering, too. We chose to regulate the sale of the alcohol he had consumed. We discouraged public intoxication through various laws. We made sure he was a licensed, insured driver, and was fully informed that driving while under the influence was wrong and actionable. As he now sits in jail, he is suffering even more consequences to his actions. I can't imagine anything more asinine than mandating the ignoring of a man with a broken femur, but then I am not an ideologue.
The truth is that the "broad brush" is valid as a general criticism of the laisezz-faire, anything-goes platform of the Libertarian Party.
If you don't like being painted with this broad brush, I would suggest that you reexamine your priorities and either change your affiliation or work to change the Party Platform.
Disproven in reply #147
Undermined and cast aside by libertarian influences.
It is why, after close to 30 years, I disaffiliated from the GOP.
Now, now, now; you need to base an opinion on WG's entire body of posts. That would reveal that his ignorance is far more wide-ranging than that.
I have no idea where you get this impression.
The mass-infanticide that has occured in this nation since Roe v. Wade dwarves the Holocaust in sheer magnitude. I am a staunch advocate of the harshest of penalties that society may impose on those committing the atrocities of abortion, rape and pedophilia.
The libertarians are right on this one, personal condemnation of immorality is the way to uphold human dignity --
In case you haven't noticed, the libertarian cockroaches are the ones whining because they're being held up to the harsh light of personal condemnation.
When you lose a war, you end up living the way the victor tells you to live. Given that the war itself was just, and that cultures that breed terrorists deserve no respect, I fail to see the problem here.
It's libertarian freeloading at its worst. They want to allow people to freely destroy themselves even though this imposes enormous external costs on eveyone else (i.e., socializes the consequential damages and costs of the behavior). They strive to enable behavior that invariably gives rise to a nanny state but they claim to despise the nanny state.
How do they deal with the cognitive dissonance? One of two ways: 1) they deny that the externalized costs exist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or 2) they just complain about the externalized costs being picked up by the state while doing everything they can to make that happen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.