June 04, 2006
Libertarian "Principles" vs Reality
It came to my attention that I was being quoted in a discussion about libertarian principles on Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog a few weeks ago. As their thread is closed, I figured to make a response here.
That'd be my archived US Senate campaign website from 2004 that SR is quoting above. I was the Libertarian Party of Indiana candidate running against Evan Bayh.
You may decide that you don't think I'm really "libertarian." You can define or re-define the terms to suit yourself. I was handing out Clark for president literature in 1980 when I was 17, before I had ever met any self-described libertarians. I hopefully have grown and matured in my understanding, but I don't think my basic principles and ideals have changed.
I become less and less interested in the labels with time, though. To my early influences of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, I've picked up on Robert Anton Wilson, particularly his emphasis on the idea that "The map is not the territory" or alternately stated that "The menu is not the meal."
In short, I'm trying to understand as best I can the best, most appropriate thing to do in reality. You're a fool if you just blindly plug in ANY abstract ideological principle as the unquestionable basis for how you would propose to run the country without regard to reality on the ground.
But I never agreed to some quasi-pacifism as the basis of foreign policy in the first place. We've got way too many troops in way too many places for our own good, but there is a real world with people trying to kill us. Further, they're gaming us by blurring the lines between civilians and combatants, between state sponsorship, and carefully looking the other way. What do we do?
There's certainly a lot of legitimate room for debate on the best route. I reluctantly supported going into Iraq, and still think we did the right thing.
That's debatable wisdom, but what's the better alternative to aggressively whacking our enemies in their lairs? The standard boilerplate that if we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone absolutely is not true on the ground as regards Islamic radicals. You're kidding yourself if you think that will dissuade them.
I hate that this will sometimes involve innocent women and children getting killed, but I hate that a lot less than a bunch of OUR people being killed because we're too squeamish to do what has to be done to protect our people. If simply hiding amongst civilians will prevent us from killing our enemies, then we're screwed. We've beaten ourselves.
In the real world, we can make calm, rational judgements about the best measured response to the threats we face. On the other hand, we can bury our heads in the sand until we get hit with another 9/11 (or bigger) and the animal emotions run away and our people and government are past the point of caring about the fine points of civilian casualties at all.
What do you neo-pacifist "libertarians" propose to actually do about Iran, for example? Do we deal with these bad guys in an appropriately brutal manner NOW, or wait till they've got goddam nuclear weapons, claiming some form of "non-interventionist" principles? I'm not real keen on war in Iran, but I'd much rather violate your idea of "principles" than see these crazed mullahs with nuclear weapons. Apply whatever ideological labels to that you wish.
But then some of y'all are not dealing much with reality to start with. I too would LOVE to get by without any government. The government is best which governs least, and the government that governs least is the government that governs not at all. Hey, I've got Lysander Spooner's No Treason posted on my website in its entirety.
This brings us to the delightful quote from the Riggenbach piece in the original post here including, "people who claimed to favor individual liberty but said they believed that a limited State was the best means of attaining that goal." Thus implicitly stated, if you accept ANY government at all, you don't REALLY believe in freedom.
That is so beautiful, and principled and completely stupidly disengaged from reality. You want to talk that kind of foolishness in your little ideological echo chambers, that's great. It won't cut a bit of ice with Bin Laden, however.
If folks with that kind of dumb pie-in-the-libertarian-sky thinking hold sway, we'll be smacked in the head with reality even harder than we already have been.
Maybe when we get to be like the Starchild in 2001, we will have somehow evolved past our current animal states and live in governmentless perfection. If fishes had wishes, I'd go out to the pond and make it so.
But in, you know, REALITY, we're not going to be able to get by without government anytime soon. To borrow a Robert Heinlein analogy, we're stuck with the unfortunate and dirty necessity of some level of government much as we're stuck with the dirty necessity of having bowels and going to the bathroom.
Now, do you want to sit around thinking up ways to explain how Al Barger is a dirty no good fake libertarian "neo-conservative" so-and-so, or do you want to think about effective ways to deal with REALITY?
posted by Al at 6/04/2006 04:45:00 PM
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