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Libertarians: How to Win Friends & Influence People
Libertarians: Please stop telling me I’m no better than the Left.
As for libertarians who don’t believe that, you need to call out your fellow travellers who go too far. In the past week I’ve been told by self-proclaimed libertarians that I don’t believe in property rights, that my belief in liberty is no better than Obama’s, and that I don’t really believe in individual rights in general.
I’ve grown weary of libertarians pretending their political philosophy is uniquely free of basic assumptions beyond “Do no harm,” or suggesting that everything can be built from there. Imposing the interpretations of “no harm” I’ve seen here would eliminate all local laws on such things as zoning, smoking in public, and the preservation of historic districts.
Not all conservatives want to use the point of a gun to control what consenting adults to in their own bedrooms. In fact, I’ve never seen a call for that on Ricochet. What I have seen libertarians call for is the use of the point of a federal gun to do away with local laws that libertarians don’t like.
So permit me gently to suggest, if you’re truly interested in winning converts, a different tactic.
Thanks to the posts of the past month, I am now less disposed to listen to self-proclaimed libertarians. Surely that’s not the goal. I get that we have differences. Perhaps we also have points of agreement. But insulting conservatives, and insinuating or outright saying we are no better than the progressives and leftists, is not a good strategy for figuring out where we might agree — or even winning us around.
Published in Domestic Policy, General, Religion & Philosophy
No, it’s not you! The funny part is how easily donnish earnestness (or X or Y or Z) can be taken for snark – especially when the topic is civility!
Now, there’s something about discussions of civility that does seem to draw the snark out of certain people, but these discussions also sensitize people to snark that was never there to begin with. It is something I have noticed across multiple Ricochet civility threads.
Though of course there are many self-identified libertarians who’d disagree with that, and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure they’re wrong:
It’s conceivable that a really local government isn’t too different from a private firm, and private firms, of course, should be free to do as they please. I confess to not knowing nearly enough about the internal politics of either HOAs or small towns to say for sure that they are too little alike to be compared to one another, but I think it’s pretty obvious where the sentiment “Large HOA, small town – what’s the difference to the residents, anyhow?” comes from.
As soon as the governing authority has a monopoly on violence it ceases to act like a private firm.
Being thrown in jail because you violated Federal House Color Regulation 1446-27.03 or because you violated Local Town House Color Ordinance B is rather immaterial to the man in jail.
I don’t know why you would say that. Do think the man in jail is incapable of rational thought about what he’s going to do when he gets out?
Uh, what?
Ironically I detect a hint of snark in that last line, though I doubt you intended it.
Do think the man in jail is incapable of rational thought about what he’s going to do when he gets out?
What color people can paint their houses isn’t a debate I care about, but Jamie’s question is a good one.
As someone who has been reading prison stories all his life, I think it would matter a great deal to a person’s sense of despair or hope to know what recourse he is going to have when he’s out. And that is going to vary a lot depending on whether a big, monstrous federal system did it or a local government did it.
If the penalty is the death penalty, then it’s relatively immaterial whether the feds or locals did it, but the example as presented didn’t say anything about the death penalty.
Its a proxy argument for how one approaches the role and scope of government. Petty dictators may be the least destructive, but they are the most annoying.
You may be surprised, but I’m not far off. It’s not that I want state/county/city governments to be paternalistic or intrusive, but that I’m less bothered when they choose to be. If Tooele, UT decides to outlaw marijuana I think that is wrong, but it’s entirely different from the federal government doing the same. Charles C.W. Cooke is right to emphasize federalism as the issue that can unite libertarians and conservatives (and probably a handful of leftists).
On the other hand, life is annoying. And “least destructive” beats “not least destructive”.
One doesn’t have to feel warm and fuzzy about local governments, or fail to be a “real libertarian”, to believe that pushing government away from the central and toward the local is usually a push toward the less-bad. Decentralization is decentralization, even when it doesn’t go as far as you would like.
Are you trying to tell me that in this imperfect world that we cannot always have what we want? That we are, dare I say it, constrained in application of our principles by this physical world and that we cannot have it perfectly.
This is something that always erks me about individuals that argue as if public policy was some simple one strike win kind of operation. Just because the left always talks about it like its some seminal epiphany of the majority of society does not even remotely mean that is what its like.
Most, if not all, of the time quick public policy is a marriage of convenience and compromise but long game public policy change requires winning over the culture at which point government policy begins to and eventually fully reflects the culture. This is why we need to win culture and continue the fight at state and national government. If we can win culture we will eventually win absolutely.
I’d like to emphasize that I’m not trashing either federalism or subsidiarity. I’m a fan of both. My point is that those who claim to be a “libertarian at the federal level” are not actually libertarian in any real sense (and I don’t really expect them to care much care much about the label). They are constitutional federalists. It’s true that overweening government is less harmful the more locally it applies, but that’s only because it applies to fewer people at the local level.
No, not only because of that.
It’s also easier to change, especially by those subject to it.
Knowing Sal, he’d say that’s already built into “it applies to fewer people”. Sal is a wily one. Comes with being a hotshot lawyer and general reprobate.
This is probably too much of a generalization, but this comment thread reminds me of another problem with libertarians. They tend to be moral absolutists. Things that are morally bad are morally bad. With them, there are no gray areas. Laws that would get you thrown in the clink for painting your house the wrong color are bad, bad, bad. There are no two ways about it.
Those of us who are conservatives, especially those who take their religion seriously, tend to be moral relativists, just as the founder of the Christian religion was a moral relativist. Laws about house color? Probably bad, but it depends on other things. We can sometimes be squishes about these things. Life goes on.
There is a theological and practical sense in which you can say that Christian conservatives are moral absolutists, but it usually leads them to moral relativism in their politics. When it comes to politics, we might even be so squishy as to vote for libertarians, as I did for President in 2000, 2004, and 2008, as well as a few other elections.
Like I said, perhaps I’m over-generalizing. I’m too much of a moral relativist to say all this is true absolutely.
Now I follow. The connection between your question and the subject wasn’t obvious. I agree that a local government is relatively easier to influence, but is it true that the federal government has harsher penalties?
Your last paragraph reminds me of the Op-ed from awhile back that called for imprisoning parents that don’t vaccinate their children. It was lost in the debate that the writer only advocated for a couple days in jail. There are still legitimate arguments against his position, but people were acting as if he was planning on filling our prisons with Alex Jones listeners (which to be fair is already what Alex Jones listeners think).
Christ himself was not a moral relativist. He proposed an objective ethical code. The difference is that there are absolutists (utilitarians; utility or nothing), morally objective (Virtue or Deontological ethics; moral permissible, wrong, and right) and then relativists, there is no objective morality (both culturally and individually, subjective) and even if there was one we would lack the knowledge to find it or communicate it to others properly.
Christianity is not morally relative and is definitively objective (it applies to all humans and prescribes moral action). Its not absolutist though in the terms of utilitarianism where its either what creates utility (good) and what does not (bad) and applies to all living beings (not just humans).
The point, I think you are emphasizing (perhaps unknowingly) is that as Christians we see moral worth as spawning from an individual’s will and that means the individual needs to be free in order to be evaluated. Only when a will imposes itself onto another and at detriment to that other will’s existence should force be applied. In such a sense, the color of a house might offend your sensibilities but not your will and those characteristics of it (we call them rights, right to free speech and defense/2nd amendment) and thus does not warrant any legal punitive action.
Possibly, but that is less than obvious, especially when the word “only” is used. I think stating the point I made better makes the case for federalism/subsidiarity.
Also, a tryanny reigning over one city would be in competition with a better government in another city. (Is that written into “applies to fewer people”? Maybe. But it seemed good to say it explicitly.)
It is true, I think of myself as conservative, not libertarian.
I also think of myself as for property rights even though I like zoning laws.
I think of myself as a conservative, although I don’t like zoning laws.
We have a near neighbor here in Madison with an almost puce purple house. Maybe more government is the solution, but it seems pretty harmless to me. Granted, we’re in a short rental, not owners, but I suspect I’d be fine with it if we owned the place, too.
I think that Sal is being too precise in his definitions of libertarians, though. Historically, the left libertarians have the stronger claim to the term than Sal does. Sal can quite rightly claim that the meaning of the term has been changed by its adoption first by individuals, then by groups like the Libertarian Party.
The modern meaning, then, as revealed by the policies of the Libertarian party, is essentially that of fringe Republican, with very little policy consistency to what that fringe believes other than generally being into drugs and disliking the police (not necessarily unrelatedly). The Libertarian Party’s chief priority in the last Presidential election was the promotion of public financing for private political campaigns. Their candidate was the creator of the modern film subsidy system, almost universally recognized as one of the most statist creations of modern times.
You can be a libertarian and like free markets and open borders, or you can be a protectionist and immigration enforcing libertarian like the Pauls, the most prominent modern libertarians. You can be pro-life or pro choice, or whatever you want really; it’s not a label that has a very strict content when it comes to actual policies.
You can add litmus tests, just as conservatives can say “rape and incest exceptions? Get lost, commie!”, but we’re using private languages when we set up a more stringent barrier to entry for our labels than general discourse allows.
As an aside, my great grandfather ran the Border Regiment and Mrs. of England and I met at St. Andrew’s, but I suppose Sal will tell us that that doesn’t make me a Scotsman.
And if all else fails, one can vote with one’s feet.
Fair enough. Now, Conservatives might be similarly warned that they aren’t winning over libertarian minded persons by writing them all off as ‘pot heads’ and rainbow chasers because they want to get the government out of peoples lives as much as possible?
Yeah, I concur with that too. And a similar remark much earlier in this thread, which I currently lack the time to track down and link.
I disagree. If you move into a town you make yourself a member of that political community. Now granted there are situations where an area is incorporated into a municipality after someone has lived there but it is a relatively rare occurrence.
The beauty of federalism is it balances the level of potential intrusiveness with the relative ease of relieving one’s self from it. Easier to move from one town to another than to a new state but easier to move from one state to another than moving out of the country.
Yes.
Subsidiary is nice and all, but there’s no magical fairy dust that makes tyanny somehow better when it’s practiced by local politicians rather than state or federal.