Why I’m a libertarian
(I’m only using politics as a jumping off point, I’m not really discussing politics.)
I’m not a libertarian because I think that a libertarian utopia is either achievable, or likely to be a good government if it’s achieved. The United States is never going to become a libertarian ideal, so the relevant question isn’t what the US would be like if we achieved that, but what will trying to achieve that do for the United States.
My answer is that government always tends to grow, so the US having a strong libertarian bent will prune that growth, and strike a very liveable balance. Kind of like how our cells kill themselves off all the time through apoptosis to balance out their growth, and so produce a healthy living organism.
The reason that I think this is my point. The spirit of the times is in favor of government regulation (if you don’t think so, just pay attention to what the public reaction is to the next heinous crime or corporate malfeasance — they are always followed by calls for more law and regulation). Whether this is the case isn’t a point I’m trying to debate, what I’m interested in is the idea of a “spirit of the times” (often called the “zeitgeist” by people who prefer German to English).
In any given society, people generally share certain assumptions — it’s what defines their culture. But that means that there are certain virtues that they’re likely to be especially good at, and certain vices which they’re likely to be especially bad at. It means that some truths will be very plain to them, and some truths will be very hidden. People who worship the state (in a practice sense, like in Meiji Japan, rather than as a pretense, like in Soviet Russia) are often very selfless, but also very cruel to individuals. Being off-balance means that you’ll get something very right, and something very wrong. And societies are always off-balance somehow.
Actually, it’s usually segments of societies. In America, liberals and conservatives tend to make different (not necessarily opposite) sorts of characteristic mistakes. Computer geeks tend to make different characteristic mistakes than artsy people, who make different characteristic mistakes than jocks do. And so on.
It is, therefore, important for a person to figure out what ways they are off-balance, so that they at least know what sort of mistakes that they’re prone to make. The best way to do this is to try to know different people enough to see things from their point of view. If you’re a computer geek and can learn to think like a jock (I’m using the term loosely; for example, a person who’s big interest is rock climbing or distance running), you’ll find some of the things taken for granted contradicted or ignored. But that won’t be very much of a difference. Despite what people like to think in high school, jocks and geeks are actually very similar when considered against the historical range of human experience. It’s good to get to know and sympathise with different people in one’s own culture, but that only gets you so far. You still share all of the prejudices of your culture. So it’s helpful to get to know people from other cultures. But they’re still alive at the same time you are; it’s better still to read people from other time periods. There’s historical reading material available through about 2,500 years ago. It’s very interesting to find out what people took for granted back then.
Why do this? I’m not suggesting that people should start making the mistakes that people in other times and cultures did. But when you figure out how you could make the same mistakes that someone else did, it helps you to see how to avoid the mistakes that you make.
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2 comments
So are you going to vote for Bob Barr ?
He says he’s in it to win.
It’s not clear to me that the spirit of the times is really particularly pro-regulation; the trend from the New Deal onward was to increase government regulation, granted. This seems to have reached a peak during World War II, with the government centrally managing large swaths of the economy to keep the country on war footing, then in the post-war years with the U.S. government rebuilding Europe and working to ensure jobs for all the men who came home from that war. This on the whole seems to have created a general faith in government that was all but universal until the late ’60s/early ’70s. By then, arguably, the regulatory state had reached its apogee, with price controls and rationing and very heavy regulation of all sorts of things. The so-called "Reagan Revolution," as I see it, was a necessary act of destruction upon a regulatory state that had grown excessive and was arguably destroying the economy.
But it’s not clear to me that we have come anywhere near to the level of state interference and control that we had before the 1980s. Nor is at all clear to me that we’re heading back in that direction, although I would agree that having the government reassert some of its (rightful) powers in regulating commerce should only be expected.
Viewed from my perspective, what I see is that only a few decades ago we had a much too powerful state, we destroyed a good bit of that, and are now seeing the process of reconstruction, because deregulation is not always a good thing.
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