Freedom ≠ Polygamy and Heroin: Conservatives are wrong to worry abut libertarian policies

Cultural conservatives can’t be too happy about the country’s growing tolerance for gay marriage and legal marijuana, both of which a slim majority now supports. This erosion of traditional moral codes, they fear, will put America on the highway to Gomorrah.

But removing government from the business of enforcing morality doesn’t mean that individuals will celebrate their liberation by smoking crack and throwing orgies. It means that they’ll become active agents in choosing their own morality.

The late Robert Bork famously warned in his 1996 jeremiad Slouching Toward Gomorrah that America would succumb to moral decadence if Uncle Sam didn’t censor pornography and promote traditional marriage. Eighteen years earlier, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a literature Nobelist who served time in the Gulag for criticizing Stalin, offered an identical prognosis in a Harvard speech. American society, the anti-communist hero lamented, “has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence.”

Conservatives no longer speak in such overwrought tones, but that doesn’t mean their worries about America’s moral decline have vanished. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote that gay marriage will further sever the link between marriage and procreation, presumably opening the door to incest, polygamy, and other sexual arrangements. Likewise, former drug czar Bill Bennett has exhorted the administration to go after Colorado and Washington, which recently legalized marijuana, lest they pave the way for harder drugs.

The assumption driving such worries is that individuals are inherently hedonistic and, absent the threat of punishment in this world and damnation in the next, they’ll seek only their own pleasure and ignore family and community, ripping the social fabric.

But life doesn’t work that way. Individuals don’t simply discard an old order in favor of no order. They look for a new order that better accommodates their personal goals and social needs.

There is no better evidence for this than the modern recalibration of the feminist movement. In the ’60s, when feminists such as Alice Walker were comparing motherhood and family to slavery, alarmed conservatives warned of rampant abortions, wholesale child neglect, the devaluation of fathers, and family breakdown. For a while such fears seemed borne out by soaring divorce rates, increasing pro-choice sentiment (which I share), and Murphy Brown–style celebrations of single motherhood.

Fast-forward a couple of decades. Walker’s own daughter, Rebecca, has condemned her mother’s views and become an evangelist for motherhood and family. And many indices are now trending conservative. Divorce peaked at 50 percent in the 1980s and has dropped about 10 percentage points since then. A 2013 USA Today/Gallup poll shows that support for unregulated abortion is declining, with a slight majority now describing itself as pro-life, a startling reversal from a decade ago.

Such trends have prompted the former neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama to observe that “Great Disruptions” produced by social movements such as feminism don’t necessarily lead to a net “decrease in social capital.” Instead, the capital —cultural norms and mores—gets reconstituted, and even expands.

Why? Freedom allows individuals to sort through existing social rules, discarding ones that don’t work and embracing ones that do. In a free market, early adopters signal to others whether the cost of a new invention is worth the return. Likewise, in a free society, social mavericks who defy conventional morality indicate to others whether risking social opprobrium is worth the personal gain.

There is no a priori reason to believe that widespread polygamy and heroin use, for example, would pass this social test. “Flexibility of moral rules…makes gradual evolution and social growth possible,” observed F.A. Hayek, a libertarian but also a great defender of tradition. This, he added, “allows experience to lead to modifications and improvements.”

William F. Buckley exhorted conservatives to “stand athwart history” and yell stop. But conservatives can save their breath. Free individuals are perfectly capable of yelling themselves.

-- Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia is a Washington Examiner columnist and a Bloomberg View contributor.

Horrible article.

“Individuals don’t simply discard an old order in favor of no order. They look for a new order that better accommodates their personal goals and social needs.”

Yes, they did that in Russia towards the end of WWI.

Here are the facts. Drugs and marriage are policed not for moral reason, but for practical reason. You can argue the merits of those reasons, but you can’t just shrug it all off by saying its a ‘morality law’.
People who use drugs are to varying degrees burdens on society, from the meth addict who murders someone to pay for his habit to the pot smoker who drives while stoned. This is why drugs are controlled substances. Again, not arguing for or against, just saying its not a moral law.
Homosexual marriage is like something from an Orwell novel, going against basic biological facts. It legitimizes a mental illness that does worse damage to its indulgers than many drug addictions.
You want to go find some nutjob church to marry you to someone of the same gender, go ahead. But I should not be forced to recognize it, bake you a cake, or discard my right to criticize your immoral actions under the banner of free speech, and THAT is what the homosexual activists want to force on us.

The article scoffs at the idea that people are hedonistic. Really? Look at places like Amsterdam, a paradise of sexual freedom. Is it hedonistic? Sure as hell looks like it.
Man at the base level is hedonistic, he is greedy, selfish, and a whole host of other terrible words. That’s why we strive to be better than our nature, but when we have people telling us that there’s nothing wrong with these immoral acts, most people are all too willing to take that as an easy out. We now have transexual camps for 6 year olds for crying out loud! Would this author sanction that under freedom? I’d call it child abuse.

Kind of funny that the article mentions pornography, since many studies are now showing that it has had devastating effects on Western sexuality, particularly how men view women.

John Adams said it best.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

If we are not people of good moral conduct, we will do with freedom what Egyptians did with democracy.

Yeah, things are peachy keen, and America will return to conservatism any day now, even though the GOP just ran it’s first pro-homosexual, pro-abortion, pro-gay military, presidential candidate who introduced gay marriage to America as a Governor.

Libertarians are not conservative, they are radical leftist except on economic issues.

Here is the leftists agenda hidden behind the Libertarian Party curtain.

Libertarian Party Platform:

Throw open the borders completely; only a rare individual (terrorist, disease carrier etc.) can be kept from freedom of movement through “political boundaries”, eliminate the Border Patrol and INS.

Homosexuals; total freedom in the military, gay marriage, adoption, child custody and everything else.

Abortion; zero restrictions or impediments full 9 months.

Pornography; no restraint, no restrictions.

Drugs; Meth, Heroin, Crack, and anything new that science and marketers can come up with, zero restrictions.

Advertising those drugs, prostitution, and pornography; zero restrictions.

Military Strength; minimal capabilities.

Libertariansm claims to want conservative economics, but promotes quickly attainable social liberalism which guarantees more liberal voters.

This is libertariansm’s position on the border, which do you think will come first, Open Borders, or the fantasy of the ending of Welfare and Social Programs, and how do you think that the social liberals and new immigrants will vote, for more govt, or less?

IMMIGRATION:
“”THE ISSUE: We welcome all refugees to our country and condemn the efforts of U.S. officials to create a new “Berlin Wall” which would keep them captive. We condemn the U.S. government’s policy of barring those refugees from our country and preventing Americans from assisting their passage to help them escape tyranny or improve their economic prospects.

THE PRINCIPLE: We hold that human rights should not be denied or abridged on the basis of nationality. Undocumented non-citizens should not be denied the fundamental freedom to labor and to move about unmolested. Furthermore, immigration must not be restricted for reasons of race, religion, political creed, age or sexual preference. We oppose government welfare and resettlement payments to non-citizens just as we oppose government welfare payments to all other persons.

SOLUTIONS: We condemn massive roundups of Hispanic Americans and others by the federal government in its hunt for individuals not possessing required government documents. We strongly oppose all measures that punish employers who hire undocumented workers. Such measures repress free enterprise, harass workers, and systematically discourage employers from hiring Hispanics.

TRANSITIONAL ACTION: We call for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration, the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, and a declaration of full amnesty for all people who have entered the country illegally.””

There is no political philosophy that will save mankind from himself and his sin. That is why Christ came into the world, to save the world. I think libertarianism ignores that human nature is flawed, having been corrupted by sin. But that does not mean that conservative politics will save mankind.

If I could change one thing politically in our society it would be to restore the rights retained by the people. By that I mean there are powers reserved to the federal government, powers reserved to the states, and powers retained by the people; and the rights of the people are not just individual rights. They also include the right of free association to form communities of likeminded people.

If people want to be liberal, let them. If they want to be libertarian, let them. If they want to be Islamic, Catholic, Buddist, atheist or whatever; let them. Just also allow people to do what the early settlers came here to do which is to practice their faith according to their conscience with likeminded people without interference by those who do not share their views.

The freedom to do this was shortlived in our nation. It is what made our nation unique and what made us great. Where can people find a place to live with such freedom now? The ocean? The desert? Outer space?

I think libertarianism is fundamentally flawed, but I do not object to anyone forming their own communities around such beliefs and proving me wrong, as long as others can also do the same with their beliefs. Libertarians should not have a problem with that.

It is not tricky. It is actually quite simple. Classical Greeks had it pretty well figured out thousands of years ago-—it is why Western Civ surpassed the East-—with added perfection/insight from St. Thomas Aquinas.

Socrates and all Western Civ until Karl Marx-—who came after our Constitution, knew that all “Just Laws” had to be Virtuous since without Virtue, Justice can NEVER exist.

Vice can never be promoted in “Just Law”-—because as St. Thomas stated (and Cicero, Marshall and Blackstone) that when “Law ceases to be Just, it ceases to be Law”.

Nuremberg Trials reiterated that concept-—since the Germans followed laws to a “T”-—and all the soldiers during the war, were always obeying the laws.
The court stated -—that evil laws are unjust and if the officers were obeying “evil” laws—they were guilty of a crime (since the laws were against Natural Laws.)

When Laws go against “The Laws of Nature and nature’s God” they cease to be “Just Law” according to our Jurisprudence system/Constitution set up by John Marshall and Jay and the Founders-—following the above concepts ALWAYS that our ‘Rights” are from Natural Laws and God-Given.

Justice is the Queen of Virtues. The Cardinal Virtues are Justice, Wisdom, Courage and Temperance.

Justice (a Virtue) can NEVER exist without the other Virtues. In other words—Western Civ Legal Systems ALWAYS promoted JUSTICE (a virtue)—so it can not escape the “Morality” element.....it is a particular Ethical System—ours is the Christian Ethical system which was built on the Ancient Greeks because of Cicero and St. Thomas and Locke (Common Law/Magna Carta—Christian Documents).

Now, we are promoting Vice (unconstitutional)-—killing babies and sodomizing others-—as Rights from God—which they are not and NEVER can be-—which is a Marxist/atheist twist of definitions of Rights/Virtue/Vice and a flipping of our Ethical System to a promotion of the religions of Satanism/occultism/atheism or paganism-—all virtually the same.

Before we condemn libertarianism for the decline and fall of Western civilization let us step back and gain some perspective.

Libertarians are telling us that our drug war has failed and the war is lost. In 1933 we repealed prohibition because the war on alcohol was lost and the collateral damage, the unintended consequences of our good conservative intentions, were causing more harm than good. In fact, prohibition was accelerating a very dangerous trend and spreading contempt for law, funding corruption of law enforcement and the administration of justice, making the Mafia rich and extending their tentacles into legitimate businesses and corrupting our politicians, our judges and our police.

Today, the drug war is lost and the same unintended consequences of a self-righteous and aggressive "morality" are causing the degradation of our society on a scale even worse than we experienced in prohibition. Our drugs policy is even confounding our foreign policy in places like Afghanistan.

When we repealed prohibition we did not enter into a phase of utter lawlessness concerning the manufacture and sale of alcohol, we passed a series of laws which reflected local mores about the consumption of alcohol. For the Irish in New York and Boston the pub culture was accepted under the law. For the Southern Baptist in Virginia, the regulations and restrictions were far more severe.

In other words, whatever the platform of liberalism says, the consequences of reform are not necessarily anarchy and unrestrained debauchery.

We conservatives of whom I count myself one but with an acknowledged pesky libertarian streak, should ask ourselves why we lost the battle over homosexual marriage? After we discount the influence of a biased media we must ultimately deal with the reality that there is never been a persuasive demonstration of harm of homosexual marriage to the institution of marriage. This is especially true when sodomy has been explicitly held by the Supreme Court to be constitutionally protected provided done in private. Further, civil unions as well as contractual arrangements have vested in homosexuals nearly all of the collateral benefits of marriage and the average American can see no real life connection between those arrangements and the decay of Western civilization.

We conservatives lost the battle over homosexual marriage long before the issue came up. We lost it when we lost the battle of federalism, we lost it when our major institutions, not just the media, became infected with the virus of the critical theory, we lost it in our churches, and we lost it because the average American ultimately saw no personal stake in the issue.

We also lost it because when we say that we could not demonstrate to the satisfaction of the people that there was a connection between homosexual marriage and the decline of marriage in general, we are really saying that we are restricting freedom to no purpose. Further, we must acknowledge that we are restricting freedom on behalf of no victim.

Conservatism no less than libertarianism should have a default bias against restriction of freedom.

It is the presence or absence of a victim which should divide a libertarian not from a conservative but from a statist. One need only mention the issue of abortion to illustrate the application of this principle.

As one who lives in Germany, I can testify that the alternative of legalization and regulation to the hypocritical laws and the hypocritical enforcement of laws concerning prostitution in America is a far better option. When conservatives succeed in eliminating the oldest profession (or is it the second oldest profession?) by prohibiting it, we can revisit the issue.

The presence or absence of a victim does not mean the drug user or the prostitute or the John, it means a third-party who is damaged. If a child is damaged by pornography there is a justification for restricting the freedom to publish it, at least to publish it to children. Meanwhile, we still must dig knowledge that is despicable as pornography is, it is still a matter of freedom. I am not persuaded by an herd of sociologists who might have compiled data which shows that pornography is harmful to third parties. I do not propose to sacrifice the First Amendment the dubious pseudo "science" of sociology.

We prohibit drunk driving but we are reluctant to criminalize alcoholism, in fact, we recognize it as a disease and provide for treatment through insurance and otherwise. But we do prohibit driving while drunk because of the demonstrable risk to innocent third party victim. Similarly, we should consider punishing the act, such as driving under the influence of drugs, and not the condition when it comes to drug use, prostitution etc.

As a conservative, I prefer society to choose my personal safety on the streets from being mugged by an addict to finance a drug habit made unnecessarily expensive by the war on drugs over the illusory protection of the drug addict himself. We deprive him of his freedom to use drugs, but we also drive him onto the streets to mug me. All we have done is institutionalize harm to the wrong and innocent victim.

When conservatism goes off the rails and finds its positions abandoned by the public and itself disappointed at the polls, it is usually because it sacrifices a freedom, precious to some if not to conservatives, while often inadvertently creating other innocent victims. This is a loser in logic and a loser at the polls.

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