Libertarians can be annoying, with our constant bellyaching about privacy and taxes, our obsession with the First Amendment and our fearmongering about jackbooted thugs.
But in light of how the past year has unfolded, consider cutting your friendly neighborhood libertarian some slack. After all, we did try to warn you.
On immigration, speech and trade, Americans are living in a libertarian’s nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the last few months. The ownership of TikTok, Intel and U.S. Steel have all become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account.
These stories represent a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism.
Libertarians have argued that the only way to prevent such abuses is to reduce the power of the federal government itself — abolishing unaccountable federal agencies, scaling back the administrative state, cutting spending — and to restore the balance of powers by reining in the executive. This path has generally been treated as hopelessly naïve at best, and morally suspect at worst.
Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it. Libertarian voices have gradually gone quiet in the halls of the capital — bullied into silence, primaried out or resigning in despair.
Yet it has never been more obvious that the grab-and-grow approach to power is a destructive and self-defeating way to conduct politics.
Read the rest here.
Honestly, I was somewhat surprised (pleasantly) to see something like this on the op-ed page of the NY Times.
(Note: I just noticed that I accidentally linked the wrong page. The link has been updated. Grrr.)
6 comments:
I am a libertarian at heart, but a weakness of the Libertarian position is that they don't understand that the streets need to be paved. If you want to have vigorous commerce, then it is necessary build & maintain canals, railroads, highways etc.
OT, but:
Democrats - we do need voter ID.
Republicans - allowing law enforcement to wear masks is un-American.
I have long considered myself a constitutional conservative and pragmatic libertarian. But libertarianism is all over the place depending on who is writing the definition. With apologies to Will Rogers... "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a libertarian."
Points where I tend to disagree with conventional libertarianism... I'm pro-life. Abortion violates one of the cardinal precepts of libertarianism. "Don't hurt other people or try to take their stuff." I think the isolationism common among libertarians is naive to the point of being dangerous. Liberty does not exist in a vacuum and it is constantly under threat. The idea that if we ignore the rest of the world, they will ignore us and leave us alone is too stupid for words. Liberty is never owned. It's being rented, the rent is variable, and its always due. Sometimes it can be damned expensive. Freedom is not free.
Libertarianism is about minimal government, not necessarily no government. And on the whole idea of roads being paved, even in a stateless society, you would still have them. The question the libertarian asks is "Why does the STATE have to do that job?"
More about ICE misbehavior - has everyone completely forgotten what happened at Kent State?
Better said. I, too, am a constitutional conservative. To me libertarianism is not so much about you get to do whatever you want, it is more about the freedoms available when one takes personal responsibility seriously.
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