There’s always tension between freedom and fairness. We want less government regulation, but not when it means firms can hire cheap child labor. We want a free market, but not so bankers can deceive investors. Libertarianism, in promoting freedom above all else, pretends the tension doesn’t exist.
Case in point: A house in Obion County, Tennessee, burned to the ground in September because the owner had not paid the annual $75 fee for opt-in fire protection. As the fire raged, the house owner told the dispatcher that he would pay the cost of putting out the fire. The fire department still refused to come. The house burned down, with four pets inside. Libertarians point out that this is how opt-in services—as opposed to taxpayer-funded public services—works. If you don’t pay, you don’t get coverage. The firefighters can’t make exceptions without creating moral hazard. This makes sense in theory. In practice, not so much. The firefighters showed up to protect a neighboring property. The homeowner offered to pay not just the cost of the fire protection but the full cost of the spray. A court would have enforced that contract. But because the firefighters stuck to a rigid principle of opt-in services, a house was destroyed. Will this serve as a cautionary tale next time a rural resident of Obion County is deciding whether to buy fire insurance? No doubt. But will someone else inevitably not learn his lesson and make the same mistake? No doubt.
And that’s just the government side. Consider the social side of Libertopia. It’s no coincidence that most libertarians discover the philosophy as teenagers. At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.
The Trouble with Liberty
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Bream writes a long essay that is a fairly accurate description of the libertarian movement. But he is a statist at heart, so he must defend the outlandishness of today's government excess because it comports with "reality" while libertarianism is merely a fantasy. I call this the utopia/Somalia argument.
The problem with this argument is that it is not a real argument. You might as well point out that no government exists in Antarctica, and they don't have a McDonald's or a Walmart down there. There are no people down there except a few shivering in remote outposts studying climate and other shit.
Somalia is better off today than it was under dictatorship. It is an anarchy, and out of this anarchy will spring some new dictator at some point. Or maybe not. So far, Somalia has resisted all efforts by the US and the UN to establish a central government. There has to be something good in that.
All libertarians agree that statism is bad and inimical to human freedom and flourishing. Despite the many stripes of libertarians from anarchists to Objectivists, they both take a dim view of the tomfuckery of the Democrats and Republicans in Washington. The arguments Bream makes are within the libertarian movement itself. In the case of Somalia, the argument is between minarchy and anarchy. I can flip Bream's argument around and claim that he supports a military dictatorship in Somalia. I can also toss North Korea in his face as well. I doubt he would champion that level of tyranny. It all comes down to determining where the line is drawn. Libertarians draw the line much further away from the statists.
The fundamental argument is between limited and unlimited government. Statists believe in unlimited government. They are the utopians because they believe they have the answer to all problems and have a blindness in acknowledging the problems they create with their solutions. Medicare is great! Of course, funding it is a problem. But you wouldn't want to turn out old people, would ya? Libertarians hate grandma, so you should support Medicare. Later on, those same statists will be pulling the plug on grandma to plug the deficit in that program. There is no such thing as unlimited compassion.
Bream also throws it the latest fave argument from the statists--the firefighters who let a homeowner's home burn to the ground because he had not paid his $75 fee for fire protection. I hate to say this, but I think the firefighters were in the right. Under the statist scenario, the homeowner would pay the $75 at the point of a gun or been put under some other system of compulsion, taxation, subsidy, etc. The irony is that you never hear these fuckers weep and complain when someone's home is stolen and auctioned off because they couldn't pay their property taxes. That gets swept under the rug because Bream is a statist fucktard who wants to ream your asshole with his gigantic government dick. Yes, in Libertopia, the firefighters will let your house burn if you don't pay the fee. But it will always be your house even if you choose to gamble. The result is that people pay their fees, or they become extra cautious about fire hazards around the home. I'm sorry, but I find this much more preferrable to the current system of pay or become homeless.
And that is the statist trick in a nutshell. Because of the possibility of a thousand imaginary disasters under freedom, statism is to be preferred even if you have a thousand real disasters as a consequence. Here it is applied to marijuana legalization:
Yes, marijuana is illegal and ends up with a lot of people in jail for a nonviolent offense and helps create a black market. But if marijuana was legal, pot crazed marijuana smokers will rape your family members, assassinate political leaders, suffer intense brain damage, and unleash a slow marching army of zombies on us right before the rise of the antichrist on his throne of power.
Yes, this is absurd, but it was just such absurd reasoning that got marijuana outlawed in the first place. If the cure is worse than the disease, then you eschew the cure. The statist argument is that we are champions of the disease. Outlawing foodstamps means libertarians favor hunger. Outlawing TSA groping means libertarians favor terrorism. On and on, it goes. I have heard it for years, and Bream offers nothing new or relevant in the way of argument.
Ultimately, this article is a puff piece to tell people about libertarianism who don't know jackshit about it. What people do get is an intuitive feeling that the statists with their warmongering, their lying, their bailouts, and whatnot are not the answer. This is Bream's pathetic attempt to say, "There's nothing to see here. Move along." But there is something to see here. As government fails, the truth will emerge. This is why we have this libertarian moment. The bills of statism are now coming due, and people are pissed. VERY PISSED.
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NOTES
1. IS SOMALIA A LIBERTARIAN PARADISE?
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