One guy’s thoughts on libertarianism. Pt 2.
Ok, before we get started, I need to ask if anyone in the audience has a forklift or light crane I can borrow? Looking over my outline for this post, I’m having serious trouble keeping my lower jaw held up off the floor and I require some heavy duty mechanical assistance to put an end to the uncontrollable drooling on my carpet that is resulting from it. I’m going to actually defend Rush Limbaugh here, and it’s having the adverse effect of making me lose control of some of my minor muscles…
In my first post on what I believe are the core beliefs of my version of libertarianism, I closed the post with the comment: “Now the next question becomes obvious: What type of government, and how much power should it wield?” Happily, the one comment I received (from WalkeyWalk) on the post also addressed the idea that government poses as much of a problem for a free man as the unruly mob, giving me the perfect lead in to my second bulleted point: The problem of government.
The first thing we need to do is to establish what government is, and why it exists. A simple check of the appropriate Wikipedia entry of “government” provides a reasonably close answer:
A Government is the body within a community, political entity or organization which has the authority to make and enforce rules, laws and regulations.
There we have it! The purpose of “government”, and revealed in its purpose, a clue as to the nature of the beast. We apply the term ‘government’ to the social structure that is responsible for the enforcement of laws, rules, and regulations. Government is the legal and moral wielder of a monopoly of force. The government is a gun. The government is the sword. The government is the sole entity empowered with the ability to force compliance by the revocation of liberties, usually beginning with civil liberties and property rights (jail), but certainly capable of removing your right to life if your transgression proves serious enough, or you resist its will too forcefully.
Think about it: Cops don’t carry guns for the looks. They carry the guns because they’re empowered to kill you. The individual officer may face penalties for the act, but the police force itself isn’t going away and you’re still dead.
Why? Why would a society allow so much power to be held in the hands of a single entity? The answer is simple, there is no choice. It’s a sad fact of life, but the laws of nature and natural selection do still apply to humanity. We aren’t free from the evolutionary process, people. The strong rule the weak. The strong take their survival, they don’t ask for permission from the weak. Life is really brutal, kill or be killed, and it’s only the ease of modern, first world life that allows Americans to forget it.
I make my living, I survive, through the destruction of some other form of life. Life is only made possible by death. I must eat. I must have resources such as wood or hides for shelter and clothing. Nature rewards only those that are the most efficient killers of something else, be it prey or competition. With that fact lingering around in the back of your mind, you realize that without government, without the society which it represents, there would be no human race and we’d still be feeding other species higher up the food chain.
Can you honestly think of even one animal species on Earth that doesn’t have some set pattern of dealing with other members of its species? All dogs know to sniff butts, and to live within a pack. If only for the purposes of mating, every animal on Earth must at meet a member of the opposite sex at least once, and everyone one of them has an instinctual knowledge of a governing system.
We see this in humans by the universal reaction to certain actions by members of all societies. Every society has some form of murder that is illegal. Every human knows that they shouldn’t kill their neighbor. We’re a pack species, just like the rest of the world’s apes. Every society has some law against theft. There are just certain, basic principles that all non-psychopathic people can agree upon, out of the blocks.
Again, keep in mind that this is instinctive at this point, we’ve been a societal creature for so long, had government for so long, that natural selection has meant those that responded best to a governing system thrived and produced more children. From bands of hunter gatherers, we evolved small farming communities. These led to cities, which then scaled up to nations. Today, we have a global economy. It’s not hard to see how nature rewards us. She’s not subtle. Usually it’s life or death and there aren’t a whole lot of hunter gatherers on Earth these days.
Thus, the seeds of government. Remember, in nature, might makes right. As humans come together, individual might ceases to matter. Once you’ve got ten or fifteen people together, one man being the strongest isn’t going to help him if they all attack him at once. In human society, force is numbers of people. The majority is the true source of power in any society, of any form of government. The kings of old had to keep their earls and barons happy, those in turn kept their subjects happy. Many a king has been slain at the hands of his people. A monarchy only exists at the whim of the people. All government exists only at the whim of the people. This is the simple truth behind the line “A government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” A government has no power that the people do not give it.
This is the birth place of freedom.
The idea, over time, has evolved such that the people realize that government does not need complete control. They are, as time moves forward, denying the government more and more control over every minutiae of life, such as that enjoyed by the kings and priests of old. What do we call those realms of existence where the government does not have the legal authority to force you into submission? Freedoms! Liberties!
But not “rights“.
I do not believe in “the inalienable rights” put forth in the Declaration of Independence. I believe in the freedoms and liberties found in the US Constitution. This blows the mind until you really consider what the idea of “rights” really entails. Here is the real definition of ” rights “:
Powers or privileges granted by an agreement or law.
The idea of inalienable rights, as so aptly observed by author Robert A. Heinlein in his book StarShip Troopers, is laughable, with the exception of the “right to the pursuit of happiness”. As he says it: “What right to life does a man drowning in the ocean have?” Extend said example to instead portray a modern fear. What “right to life” does a person dying of a terminal illness have? If a robber points a gun at you and takes your property from you, did you have the “right to property”?
What we have are freedoms, liberties. Essentially, the idea of “freedom” is the ‘permitted exercise of self interest’. You are not free to violate the freedom of another. There are rules to freedom. You must be willing to pay the price for your freedom, to live with its consequences, and at times be willing to fail. You must be willing to allow other men their freedom, and to support their freedom and defend it, even if you don’t agree with it, for your freedom to exist for any appreciable length of time. As in: Pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem.
Every man has the freedom to speak his mind, to say whatever it is he wishes to say. This doesn’t change in countries where some speech is criminal, the man just understands that his freedom to speak may cost him his life or his liberty. Only the acts of submission to another’s will gives them power over you. Slavery is not a primarily economic or physical condition. It’s a mental condition.
Did you see the movie 300? There is a scene in the movie where King Leonidas and King Xerxes are talking about the inevitable outcome of the fight. Xerxes tells Leonidas to kneel and he will be made rich and powerful, to which Leonidas quips something along the lines of: “There is something about kneeling that makes my knees and back hurt”. He refuses to kneel. He understands that this will mean a likely death for himself and his men, but he also realizes that such is often the price for a man who refuses to wear the yoke of bondage. What he realizes, and what his actions speak of, is the truth that a governing body only has as much authority and power as the people it rules allow it to have.
Here’s is an interesting example of what I’m trying to say. On Salon.com, some liberal goes absolutely crazy over a video clip of Rush Limbaugh talking to William “The Shat” Shatner. The piece is written by J.E. Robertson, and the youtube video of the Shatner-Limbaugh interview can be found here:
Limbaugh unbelievably argued that poor people should have no more right to quality healthcare than they have to purchase “a house on the beach”, arguing instead that they should have healthcare equivalent to the “bungalow” they would be able to afford.
For Limbaugh, the right to have one’s health issues treated adequately, is a luxury and nothing more. If one is wealthy, then the luxury is within one’s reach. If not, there’s no moral reason whatsoever for society to provide any means to assist the underprivileged (or, middle class?) in affording quality health treatment.
The interview should once and for all seal Limbaugh’s position as radical, callous and out of step with the 100% of the American population who believe they should have access to care when they need it. Limbaugh’s view allows only for the wealthy to decide whether the poor should live or die.
Sorry to burst your bubble, J.E., but he’s correct. The ultimate cost of a freedom is life itself. What purpose is there in dying for someone else’s “right” to have “free” health care insurance? You willing to take a bullet for it? You willing to shoot those with money who don’t wish to give you health insurance at no cost to you? Kind of makes you a contemptible person, doesn’t it? Defeats the purpose behind the argument for health insurance for everyone, doesn’t it?
When someone tries the same with you, walks up and points a gun (the government) at your head and forces you to give them your money, don’t you immediately call the police and report a crime? Don’t you feel violated? And yet, as long as this person is called “rich” by the media, you applaud and cheer? That’s twisted. If it was your money being taken, I highly doubt you’d call it a “luxury and nothing more.”, but you feel totally free adopting such a flippant attitude with other people’s money.
Grrr… Sorry about that. I always have to retort when I’m faced with “Progressive thought”… It’s a true oxymoron. Back to my topic.
Of course, having everyone run around fighting and dying for their liberties and freedoms defeats the whole purpose of humans coming together in the first place. Thus, government! An organization which was evolved to remove the presence of those who disregarded the freedoms of others. It truly is the nanny (Or jailer, depending on your government) tasked with making us all play nice in the sandbox.
But how do the people and the government come to a mutual understanding of the freedoms they are to have, and what behaviors the government can dictate to you? Historically, we’ve come up with two methods, and two transition periods.
There are only two long term choices of governing style: an oligarchy or a republic. There are three other common systems, but on examination, they all devolve into one of these two. If you remember the idea of a sliding scale of government from my first post in this lengthy explanation, you can slide everything into place easily:
100% ——————— 50% ————————-0%
Kings Oligarchy Democracy Republic Anarchy
A democracy and a system of anarchy aren’t permanent. They are states of transition. In a true democracy, the mob takes the place of the king as supreme ruler, and everyone starts losing rights almost immediately. It dies a quick, painful death (Tytler), and is replaced with a dictator, monarch, or some other armed thug.
The same with anarchy. Power abhors a vacuum. As long as there is a single greedy human, we cannot exist without laws to prevent them from amassing as much power as they can and instituting their own government. Look at the constant fighting in Somalia as proof of this. Bands of war lords battling one another. That is anarchy. Battles for succession always take place.
As we’ve discussed, the kings aren’t really the sole power in a monarchy, and no system of government ever has one ruler. There is always a group of earls, generals, and sundry other “nobility” the king must keep happy.
So all you really have is a choice between rule by a small group of men, or rule by the law (a republic, in latin it reads:res publica, essentially “the public thing” or ‘the law‘).
This is the reason for our Constitution. Our founders believed, and rightly so in my opinion, that it was better to be ruled by the timeless words of a body of laws than the whims of men. Since we must have government, and we desire the government to allow as much freedom as possible, for as long as possible, to the individual, we must make the dictates, the “mission statement” for the government, as long lasting as possible, and as tight as possible.
The power of a contract. Since all power is ultimately invested in the people, the law is the delineation of the powers over which they do not have full, sovereign control.
Men are inconstant, shifty creatures, and what one man may say today, he may not hold to tomorrow, to which anyone who has ever watched a political campaign can surely attest. The will of a man may change within the minute; the words of the law are unchanging. This security is what makes life and trade possible, much like the break wall around a harbor. No harbor has ever been protected by piles of sand, or mountains of feathers, they always seem to be made of long lasting rock. “We the People” are similarly protected by an inviolate law.
And this has lent us the ability to use the greatest tool ever devised by man to increase wealth and the standard of living: capitalism. But that’s certainly a topic for another post. :-)
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I’m enjoying these posts so far. I’m hoping you might keep them going to discuss your libertarian views on issues where an individuals/minorities actions and decisions, while having no immediate negative effect on another’s liberty, do over time accumulate and create serious consequences for people not directly involved in the said action or decision. I’m talking mainly about environmental issues and regulation, but other issues can fall into this category including health care.
I’ll let you speak about environmental regulations at your convenienve, but since you have mentioned health care I will pose my position to you for consideration. I, a libertarian, would support public sourced funding for medical services/insurance pertaining to contagious afflictions because an individual can suffer the consequences of such an affliction through no real fault of their own, even despite efforts to combat the risk. The consequences of contracting something come with consequences that the individual had no alternative options to because he/she lacked sufficient control on the circumstances of contracting the affliction. Thus contagious affliction pose a real threat to individual liberty and the threat is best minimized fairly among all individuals via government (read: public contractual) agency.
I would include purely (or nearly pure) genetic diseases in with contagious bacterial and viral diseases as “contagious afflictions”.