Opponents of libertarianism often make its adherents sound deadly dangerous. They speak as if, at any minute, libertarians might seize absolute power, changing life as we know it in cataclysmic ways and at supersonic speed. Dire warnings are issued of the apocalypto-world, Mad Max society we would create. The poor would starve in the streets, children would wither from lack of nurture, rabid dogs would tear us to bits, people would be perpetually naked and stoned and copulating in public and nobody would even care. Where the hell does this stuff come from?
It comes equally from the statist left and the statist right, from everyone who buys into the notion that if government doesn’t do absolutely everything, absolutely nothing will get done. The fact that for the vast majority of human history, government didn’t do most of the things it does right now is entirely forgotten.
Some libertarians contribute to this by talking as if we could, or should, make dramatic transformations simultaneously and in the blink of an eye. But of course, any change we influenced could only happen gradually. And once implemented, every step would also need to succeed very rapidly, or it would be even more rapidly reversed.
The fact that for the vast majority of human history, government didn’t do most of the things it does right now is entirely forgotten.
If a full libertarian agenda were enacted all at once, we would be in trouble. Our society has become so corrupted, degraded, and infantilized that we probably wouldn’t be able to deal with it. We have, indeed, come to depend on government to do everything for us except think. And government wantsto do that for us, too. But in order for a nation with limited government and a reliance on personal responsibility to survive, people must once again be willing to do for themselves all that countless generations did far better than government ever could.
The process wouldn’t be like that of children growing up. It would be like that of adults who, having suffered debilitating brain injuries, must be rehabilitated to full functionality. The difference is that we have suffered injuries not so much to our brains as to our spirits.
It isn’t the nature of libertarians to rule over everybody and everything. If we did that, we would no longer be libertarians. The most we really can do is exert an influence. If that influence is great, it will open a wider space for experimentation, to verify what works and what doesn’t. The best ideas, once proven, don’t need to be forced.
Most libertarians actually know that our agenda could never be enacted all at once, nor do we all agree about what the agenda should be. I wish we did a better job of assuring people that we can’t flip a switch, wave a wand, or cast spells with a wiggle of our nose, like Samantha on Bewitched. A libertarian transformation of society could indeed be enacted only over a long period of time. People opposed to it would have to fight it, be won over, and — perhaps hardest of all — get used to it.
Government does everything it can to discourage us from taking care of one another.
Behind the fear of a libertarian nose-wiggle is the notion that if government doesn’t force people to do good things, they simply won’t do them; that when they’re not being bullied by thugs with a license to kill, human beings are incapable of responsible behavior. According to this view, we are toddlers who will need Mommy, Daddy, Nanny, and Teacher all our lives.
I beg to differ. We are perfectly capable of cooperating peaceably with one another, engaging in trade, and caring for those who need our help. Government of some sort will always be necessary to protect us from force and fraud, but when it attempts to do anything beyond that it inevitably becomes a nuisance, and generally something worse than a nuisance. Then it does more harm than good. Though we’re always being told that government makes us virtuous, what it actually does is degrade us morally. Its constant warnings of our irresponsibility, infantilism, and decadence become self-fulfilling prophecies. Government does everything it can to discourage us from taking care of one another. It breaks us of the habit of spending on behalf of our families and communities by taking our money and spending it for us — often on things we don’t want. It tells us, again and again and again, that we can’t take care of ourselves or each other, that we’re too stupid to know what’s best and that we can’t run our own lives until we begin to believe what it says.
Increasingly, however, instead of helping us to do good things for each other, government is actually keeping us from doing them. Thus municipalities levy fines against churches for feeding the homeless, or for taking them in, to save them from freezing. Law-abiding citizens are now prohibited, in many areas, from defending themselves or their families against violent criminals. The police themselves are rapidly becoming militarized, devoting nearly as much time to preying upon the innocent as they do to protecting them.
It is no longer possible for statists to conceal the emptiness of their claim to be keeping us safer or making us better. In fact, they barely bother trying to hide their intent to control us. In pushing their authority, they are in-our-faces brazen.
The people who actually do the work in this country are merely expected to foot the bill. We have little, if any, say over how the money bled from us is spent. Yet nothing gets my “progressive” friends more apoplectic than my claim that we should be the ones to determine where our money goes. They splutter that it should be spent on behalf of “social justice.” As if that’s what’s happening now.
The common, working American is presumed to be too selfish to use his or her money to help care for those less fortunate. As in imperial Rome, the state has been deified. It is credited with powers of divine benevolence and entrusted with the duties of upholding every worthy cause and providing for our every need.
Big government is expensive. It will inevitably belong to those who can afford to buy or bribe it. This stark reality, which should be obvious even to simpletons, somehow eludes the statist Left.
People built and sustained communities for thousands of years before government decided it had to do that for us. Systematically, the leviathan state has destroyed community. It wants to plan how we live, where we live, and with whom we live. But true community is the nexus between the individual and the larger society, and to function in ways that contribute to human happiness, it must equitably serve the needs of both. That which crushes the individual for the supposed sake of society — micro-managing people so they’ll be good little cogs in the social machine — really serves neither.
Those in other countries who pose a danger to us are often protected and enabled by our own government. Most of the weaponry with which they attack us was manufactured by us. If protecting our own people ever became a greater priority than milking money from us to fund our enemies, the great majority of those who pose a genuine menace to us would be disarmed. If we had more control over how our money is spent, we would certainly spend it on ourselves — and each other — instead of on them.
I suspect that what the powers-that-be actually fear is that we might use our time, talent, and treasure for our own good, and for that of our fellow human beings. That would explain the millions of dollars they’re pumping into the corporate media to warn us how dangerous and irresponsible we are. A hell of a lot of capital is being invested in telling us to trust our self-proclaimed (and handsomely-funded) betters, instead of trusting ourselves and each other.
Big government is expensive. It will inevitably belong to those who can afford to buy or bribe it.
If we truly got the chance, once again, to work together unimpeded by government restraint, we could put to constructive use all that progressivism genuinely has to teach us. Would some use their freedom to do things of which others disapprove, and that would, perhaps, even be self-destructive? Of course they would. But those who did so would lack the government-backed brawn to force themselves on all the rest of us, or to dump the consequences of their irresponsibility on us.
The nervous nellies can relax. Libertarians have great confidence that our way is the best way. And we have reason to hope that someday, even many of the most dogged skeptics will come to realize it, too.
Those opposed to our ideas seem very much afraid that our influence could succeed. They don’t dare to even let us think so. But a world in which statist control freaks don’t rule over everyone else would be an apocalypse only for them.
