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Tuesday, March 08, 2005
And Now, Embarrassing Himself For Your Entertainment, It’s Robert Locke!
The following snippets come from an article pointed out to your Curmudgeon by reader and longtime correspondent Koray. Its author, Robert Locke, is the sort of writer who believes himself capable of deducing the entire Universe from a single grain of sand...and seems uninterested in comparing his deductions with reality. Mr. Locke is at his most entertaining when fulminating about libertarianism and libertarian ideas, which, as you will soon see, affect him like fiberglass in one's BVDs.
Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government.
Like any inadequate debater, Locke prefers to deal in calumny rather than in fact. While there is no doubt that some persons who currently style themselves libertarians are ex-socialists, drug users, or sexual eccentrics, to open his essay this way is to throw off all premise of grappling with libertarian ideas on their merits.
There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them...But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.
This is a version of the old Peter Schwartz attack: the writer decides that the privilege of stating a precise definition of a school of thought belongs not to the persons who develop it or espouse it, but to him, who is determined to assail it. Note also the sequence of scathing evaluations, presented before any and all argument.
This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. 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.....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.
More substanceless casting of aspersions, including imputations that are so false as to constitute fraud. There is not one point in common between Marxist and libertarian thought. The first is premised on the conviction that a small group of planners can be wise enough to plan and administer a national economy, while the second is premised on the conviction that no one is wise enough, virtuous enough, or special enough in any other way to plan authoritatively for any self-responsible adult but himself.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life....But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Locke would have you believe that to a libertarian, only freedom matters. This is viciously incorrect. Even the hardest-core natural-rights libertarian will tell you that freedom is an enabling condition for security, prosperity, and sound families; otherwise, he would be hard pressed to justify it.
[Libertarians claim] that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it.....But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it....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.
A strawman, having nothing to do with libertarianism. Libertarianism is silent on what is good and what is not; it merely propounds the thesis that political freedom is the order in which the other goods of life, whatever they may be, are most efficiently obtained and secured. That a politically free man cannot be dissolute is outside all its contentions; by advancing such a foolish notion, Locke implies that libertarians propose to solve every man's problems for him, rather than merely leaving him free to work on them for himself.
Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?
At last, a substantive point! And one on which serious thought is required, and is taking place. But Locke's attitude of superior wisdom makes it unlikely that he's aware of this.
[E]ven if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
And who shall decide what constitutes an acceptable level of vulgarity? Perhaps Mr. Locke has himself in mind. The reason pornography must be tolerated is precisely such an indeterminacy, which, among other things, confers infinite prosecutorial discretion upon the agents of the State.
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
All of these questions are being asked. Some have been answered more than satisfactorily, while others help to point up the limitations on the domain within which one can claim to be an autonomous individual possessed of complete political freedom. But your Curmudgeon must note in passing that the only true test of a society's soundness is whether it survives and flourishes. History is eloquent on this matter: the freer a society is, the better are its chances of perpetuating itself while increasing in power and wealth.
So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.
Mr. Locke seeks to sneak utilitarianism in through a concealed entrance. What does it mean to say that some policy choice is "the right one"? If rights by some definition -- it hardly matters which -- are regarded as inviolable, then they form a constraint upon what the State may and may not do to its subjects. Whenever there are constraints, there are policy choices that lie beyond them -- and there's always some policy wonk ready to abridge those rights to get to the policy he regards as "right." But this makes nonsense of the entire idea of rights; it's the bridgehead of totalitarianism.
Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.
No passage in his essay makes clearer Mr. Locke's utter lack of comprehension of his subject. "America's traditional liberties" are libertarianism, as embodied in the Constitution and the original Bill of Rights. If he were to read the document, he would find that, in substance, it says:
- Here's a short list of things government(s) may do;
- All other powers are reserved;
- No punishment even for violating a duly legislated, Constitutionally sound law may be levied on an individual without the assent of twelve of his peers, who may withhold that assent for any reason or none.
That's the extremest form of libertarianism possible, with the exception of anarcho-capitalism.
Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
Once more, Mr. Locke equates political freedom with other goods-in-themselves and hopes no one will notice. Worse yet, he fails to grapple with the central problem of unbounded government: that given the opportunity, people will readily vote themselves into bondage at the behest of deceivers who spread cupidity and fear among them. ("Freedom: that which you demand for yourself but would deny to others." -- Thomas Szasz) The Constitution and Bill Of Rights were written for this very reason.
Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.
Like religions, all political philosophies regard themselves as correct and others incorrect to the extent of their divergence. More, liberty imposes nothing on others; in point of fact, it denies that privilege to all persons regardless of their merits or station.
The rest of the essay is not worth bothering over; it merely reveals Mr. Locke's ignorance of associated subjects such as economics and fiscal theory. He concludes by snarling, "Conservatives should know better." In fact, the whole conservative movement, which has been actuated since the Goldwater candidacy by a desire for the restoration of lost freedom, knows far better than Mr. Locke. Nor will it cease to move in that direction until it butts up against the "inherent collectivisms": national defense and security, foreign policy, border enforcement, the protection of inherently common facilities and resources, limitations on individuals' capacities for self-regulation due to age or infirmity, and irresolvable clashes of rights such as those generated by abortion. All the other directions -- socialism, oligarchy, bureaucratic authoritarianism, monarchy, and other promotions of the State over the individual -- have been weighed in the balances and found sorely wanting.
Comments
"I know what you said, but that’s not really what you mean. What you really mean is...”
“No, I know what you say you mean, but what you really mean is...”
Posted by Chris Byrne on 03/08/2005 at 08:08 PMWith every passing day, week...congress...it seems less and less likely that either of the two main parties are terribly concerned with freedom. They both love to say the word, but the platform of each would crumble if liberty were realized in this country. Classic liberal philosophy needs a celebrity figure to extol it’s virtues to a populace that is drunk on pop culture.
Posted by on 03/08/2005 at 09:44 PM
