Posted on 11/16/2009 1:55:31 PM PST by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
(Excerpt) Read more at amconmag.com ...
I'd be interested to see if any of our libertarians can address it with more than just throwing the contents of their diapers at me.
Wow.
With such an insulting lead-in, how could they resist?
Seriously.
Your statement is not one that invites debate.
Sorry if it sounds that way, but it's meant to head off the inevitable dreck that appears whenever a criticism of libertarianism is posted. In other words, I'm hoping that libertarians will be able to do more than call me a "Commie," a "fascist," or a "statist." I'm rather expecting them to be able to come up with something better than the old "you're just afraid of liberty!" canard that seems to be the extent of the analytical capabilities of many on here.
I left the Libertaian Party for this reason: they started selling and passing out t-shirts that claimed they were “Pro-choice on everything”. Yes this included killing the pre-born. One thing I will not abide is killing innocent and people completely unable to defend themselves. Sorry charlie you can’t defend evil.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It's a shame, too, because on like 85% of things, libertarians are right on the money, and I actually (despite the lead-in that SJSAMPLE didn't like) want very badly to like libertarianism and work with it as a means of heading off and rolling back the march of socialism under the Obamunists.
That and the incident with the EP-3 that was forced down byt the Chinese. They decided to blame us for keeping an eye on a potential enemy despite the fact that our aircraft was in international waters.
The (Big L) Libertarians are too screwy to take seriously.
I'd be interested to see if any of our libertarians can address it with more than just throwing the contents of their diapers at me.
If you want a thoughtful reply from libertarians, try not being such a jerk.
Odd choice of simile.
At least toward the end of the Victorian period, the wives of tycoons, while without a vote, were about as free legally as their husbands. They were constrained largely by societal conventions and pressures, which would presumably operate about as efficiently in a purely libertarian society.
For a better analogy, how about a present-day Saudi princess? Rolling in money, but likely to get her head chopped off if she is caught with the wrong guy.
You should have known by the example of their Supreme Goddess Ayn Rand that they’re serious, bombastic and humourless.
Was that the Libertarian Party or political libertarians that happened to also be pro-choice?
I was under the impression that question of whether or not a fetus is or is not a person was outside the Libertarian Party's scope.
When considering man as economic man this has obvious and enormous implications - the ethics of redistribution between classes are entirely different from the ones centered around the notion that it is individuals who are being dispossessed in favor of other individuals. This isn't a subtle distinction, it's a diametrical opposition of philosophies. There may be a hundred different valid grounds on which to criticize libertarianism but in my opinion this isn't one of them. YMMV.
Excellent article. Thanks for posting.
I left the Libertaian Party for this reason: they started selling and passing out t-shirts that claimed they were “Pro-choice on everything”. Yes this included killing the pre-born. One thing I will not abide is killing innocent and people completely unable to defend themselves. Sorry charlie you can’t defend evil.
1.4 Abortion
Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.
LP platform
...not exactly how you portrayed it.
Here's the author's actual statement of the similarities and differences between Marxism and libertarianism.
Feel free to poke holes in what he actually said.
If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
Libertarians simply have the means and the ends mixed up.
Liberty is the means to the ultimate good, with is Goodness itself, which cannot be attained without the liberty to choose.
Libertarians stop at the means and lose sight of the end. To them to the liberty to choose becomes its own good. They miss the fact that the liberty to choose is ultimately pointless if the choice is made for something other than goodness.
Libertarians are right that people must have the freedom to choose, but some choices are simply wrong and people should be told that they should refrain from making them.
Actually, that is exactly the pro-choice position. It's nobody else's business if you decide to kill your baby.
And I wonder if you actually paid attention to what I wrote - the comparison between libertarianism and Marxism cannot find valid grounds in economics. Philosophically I have no problem with the comparisons. Economically it simply doesn’t work.
I left the Libertaian Party for this reason: they started selling and passing out t-shirts that claimed they were “Pro-choice on everything”. Yes this included killing the pre-born. One thing I will not abide is killing innocent and people completely unable to defend themselves. Sorry charlie you can’t defend evil.
...but according to the LP platform, govt has no say in the matter. That is not the same as “defending evil”, is it?
It seems to me that, in this case and for this subject, when one commits thoughts or opinions to print, they are, essentially, set in concrete....So any further discussion exchanges become a tree-huggers nightmare (or,in our case, a bandwidth-huggers nightmare)
However, I really miss FR of the 90's when the old crap hit the fan almost nightly on this subject....{:-) Powerful thinkers on both sides of the issue...No admins...Few trolls...
Of course old codgers like me always think things were better "in the good olde days"....For instance, I think I had a lot more freedom & liberty in the "good olde days"./sarc
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