Non-Libertarians

As an attempt to be open minded I expose myself to opposing points of view.  One of the blogs I read is Critiques Of Libertarianism.  I rarely agree with what he has to say.  I'm skeptical about how much this is contributing to my open mindedness.  It could be that I am just re-enforcing my opinion that non-libertarian political thought is faulty.

In any case the author posted an entry about Ron Paul.  Apparently one of his supporters recently died, and Ron Paul commented that this was an example of self-reliant people taking risks.  In fact he died leaving $400,000 of unpaid medical bills which the state had to pick up.

The author went on to state that this was an example of how libertarian political philosophy failed to take into consideration that we are all part of a community that includes families, churches and employers.  He might have a point here if libertarians wanted to abolish religion, the family and employment, but since they don't all this is irrelevant.

Libertarianism doesn't depend on whether or not people are self-reliant.  In fact, I don't think it should discredit the political philosophy of a libertarian if he or she takes advantage of social welfare programs that go against that philosophy.  We don't consider it to be hypocritical for socialists to take advantage of employment opportunities at capitalistic businesses.  These social programs are set up to serve everyone regardless of political ideology.  Opposing them doesn't exempt you from the taxes necessary to support those programs.  Libertarians are required to pay the same taxes as everyone else.

Libertarians believe that the country would be better off without those taxes and social programs.  The fact that a libertarian takes advantage of social programs tells us nothing about whether or not that assessment is valid.  This wouldn't even tell us whether or not that libertarian is better off because of the social programs.  The impact of those social programs on taxation and credit markets will have an impact on the libertarian that might be larger than the benefits of the social programs that were there to help the libertarian.

Of course maybe the problem is that I don't care enough about other people.  That's what they author states.  Libertarians don't support the war on drugs.  Maybe they don't care enough to put all those heroine addicts in jail.  I suppose that's the way that we show that we care about other people.  We incarcerate them.

The author calls libertarianism applied autism.  The equivalent tactic would be for a libertarian to call non-libertarianism applied kleptomania.  This goes well beyond polite political discourse.  I don't see how the author thinks that this is going to persuade libertarians to rethink their political position.

It seems that what motivates much of this blogger's work is opposition to "market fundamentalism".  I would argue that our society is not suffering from this.  The idea that our schools should be run entirely by the free market would be dismissed as political extremism, for example.  Can you imagine a Republican opposing school vouchers on the basis that education is a private responsibility and should not be provided by the state?  Just about every president spends more on social programs than his predecessor as a percentage of GDP, even ones that are considered hard-core conservatives.

What we see is indeed ideological entrenchment, but it is exactly opposite from that suggested by the author of the blog.  We might call it progressive fundamentalism.  Any suggestion that the social welfare state ought to be smaller is dismissed as a politically irrelevant, extremist position.  To be fair the Republicans sometimes give lip service to limited government, but they don't deliver.

For this reason I wonder why the author devotes a blog to opposing libertarianism.  It seems that he wants to abolish libertarianism even as a minority position.  Sometimes I suspect that it is not enough for him that libertarianism isn't being implemented and that we are moving away from free markets, that he needs to have libertarian thought eliminated from the face of the earth.  It seems more charitable to assume that he mistakenly believes that libertarianism is being implemented, but the result is much the same.  He is supporting the anti-market ideological entrenchment that we are suffering from.