Category: Libertarianism

Value-Free Government?

Libertarians sometimes speak as if government could and ought to be value-free.  But value-free government is as impossible as value-free education.

Education cannot be value-free for the simple reason that all education, assuming it is not confused with indoctrination, presupposes that knowledge is a value and ignorance a disvalue.  If knowledge is a value then so is the pursuit of truth.  And if the pursuit of truth is a value, then the habits of mind and character the cultivation of which are conducive to the pursuit of truth are values as well.  Among these are truthfulness and intellectual honesty.  But truthfulness and intellectual honesty cannot be brought to bear in the quest for truth without diligence and self-control and respect for those who know better.  We could continue with this reflection but we have gone far enough to see that the notion of value-free education is nonsense.

Equally nonsensical is the notion of value-free government.  One would not be much of a libertarian if one did not hold liberty to be a value and (material) equality to be, if not a disvalue, then at least subordinate in the axiological hierarchy to liberty.  So libertarians have at least one value, liberty.  They advocate a government that allows its richest expression.  Anarchists, conservatives, liberals, fascists — they too have their characteristic values which they hope to promote when and if they gain power.

What I have said suffices to show that the notion of value-free government is nonsense.  The question is not whether values but which values.

Libertarians and Drug Legalization

Libertarians often argue that drug legalization would not lead to increased drug use.  I find that preposterous, and you should too.  There are at least three groups of people who are dissuaded from drug use by its being illegal.

1. There are those who respect the law because it is the law.  'It's against the law' carries weight with them; it has 'dissuasive force.'  For these people the mere fact that X is illegal suffices for them to refrain from doing X.  It doesn't matter for the purposes of my argument how many of these people there are or whether they are justified in respecting the law just because it is the law.  The point is that there are such people and that the mere illegality of doing X supplies a motive for their not doing X. 

Now suppose the legal prohibition on doing X is removed.  Will every one in this first class begin doing X?  Of course not.  The point is that some will.  So it should already be clear to anyone with common sense and no ideological axe to grind that drug legalization will lead to increased use.

2. There are those who may or may not respect the law because it is the law, but fear the consequences of getting caught breaking it.  These people don't like rude encounters with cops, jail time, fines, loss of reputation, etc.  Among these people are libertarians who favor legalization and have no respect for current drug laws but obey the current laws out of fear of the consequences of breaking them.

3. There are also those who are quite confident that they can avoid the consequences of breaking the drug laws, but fear the consequences of contact with drug dealers. They fear being cheated out of their money, being given diluted or poisoned product, etc.

Now take the logical sum, or union, of the three classes just menioned.  The membership of that union is significant. Legalize drugs and some of those people will begin using drugs.  And of those who begin, some will end up abusing them, becoming addicted, etc.

Therefore, it is utterly preposterous to claim as libertarians typically do that drug legalization will not lead to increased use.  So why do people like Ron Paul  make this claim?  It is hard to figure.  Why say something stupid that makes your case weaker than it is?  Is it just knee-jerk oppositionalism? (I can't find my  old post on knee-jerk oppositionalism, but I'll keep looking.) 

Why did Paul say, "How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would."?  That's just a dumbass thing to say.  Paul is assuming that whether one does X or not has nothing to do with whether X is legally permissible or legally impermissible.  He is assuming that people who use drugs will use them no matter the law says, and that people who do not use drugs will refrain from using them no matter what the law says.  That is a bit of silliness which lies beneath refutation.  So again I ask:  why do libertarians maintain extremist stupidities when there are intelligent  things they can say?

After all, libertarians do have a case.  So my advice to them would be to concede the obvious — that legalization will result in greater use — and then argue that the benefits of legalization outweigh the costs.  They will then come across, not as fanatical deniers of the obvious, but as reasonable people who understand the complexity of the issue.

As for Ron Paul, I'm afraid he has already blown his 2012 chances with his remarks on heroin.  It's too bad.  The country needs to move in the libertarian direction after decades and decades of socialist drift.  But the American people do not cotton to fanatics and the doctrinaire. 

Krauthammer’s Situational Libertarianism

I have argued more than once that toleration has limits.  See, for example, The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant and other entries in the Toleration category.  I am pleased to see that the astute Charles Krauthammer has argued  something similar. He calls his position "situational libertarianism":  

     Liberties should be as unlimited as possible — unless and until
     there arises a real threat to the open society. Neo-Nazis are
     pathetic losers. Why curtail civil liberties to stop them? But when
     a real threat — such as jihadism — arises, a liberal democratic
     society must deploy every resource, including the repressive powers
     of the state, to deter and defeat those who would abolish liberal
     democracy.

     Civil libertarians go crazy when you make this argument. Beware the
     slippery slope, they warn. You start with a snoop in a library, and
     you end up with Big Brother in your living room.

     The problem with this argument is that it is refuted by American
     history. There is no slippery slope, only a shifting line between
     liberty and security that responds to existential threats.

Krauthammer mentions Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and FDR's internment of Japanese during World War II, and points out that after the crises were resolved, liberties were restored.

It is worth noting that there is no logical necessity that one slide down any slippery slope. One can always dig in one's heels. Slippery slope arguments are one and all invalid. But there is more to argument than deduction, and so the topic is a large and hairy one. See Eugene Volokh, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.

Conservatives Versus Libertarians on Immigration

Victor Reppert thinks that a conservative case can be made against immigration restriction but cites a libertarian article in support of his contention.  But as I see it, it is important to distinguish carefully between conservative and libertarian positions on this and other issues, despite several important points of agreement.  Pace Reppert, no conservative who understands his position can support open borders or tolerate the elision of the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.  There are no conservative arguments for open borders.  But let's turn now to the article in question.  Here are some excerpts:

. . . the false dichotomy between civil and economic liberties. Both incorrectly bifurcated forms of freedom are rooted in the same set of property rights, first and foremost in one’s own person and, by extension, in the tangible property one acquires justly through homesteading, gifts and honest market transactions. If Big Brother tries to comprehensively regulate immigration, he can smash economic freedom of association. And if the state has the power to oversee our economic lives, our personal freedom will always suffer in the process.

This is the type of excessive rhetoric that libertarians are known for.  Immigration laws obviously limit economic freedom of association, but to write that they "smash" it is to suggest that the limitation is some pure power move on the part of "Big Brother" without reason or justification.  But there are a number of solid reasons for border control none of which is  so much as mentioned in the article.  I sketch some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.  And what exactly is wrong with the distinction between civil and economic liberties?  The word 'civil' derives from the Latin civis, civis, citizen and civitas, civitatis, state, citizenship.  So I hope I will be forgiven for asking how a person could have civil liberties apart from his membership in some state or other, and how a person who has civil liberties in a state of which he is a citizen can have any civil liberties in a state of which he is not a citizen.  As an American citizen I have the civil right to the presumption of innocence.  But I don't have that right when I head south of the border.  I can see how economic liberties are grounded in the universal right to life, a right that does not derive from membership in any polis, civitas, Staat, state.  But civil rights and liberties are state-specific.  The right to vote is a civil right, but Mexicans don't have the right to vote in American elections any more than Americans have the right to vote in Mexican elections.  There is no universal right to vote wherever one happens to be.

This also is a good time to question the entire idea of the national government trying to “seal the borders,” pick winners and losers among immigrants, decide who gets all the welfare benefits of being a legal immigrant and who is not even allowed into our golden door. Invariably, when the federal government imposes its way on immigration, we get some immigrants who come in with legal sanction and quickly become dependents of the U.S. government—whereas illegals are probably not net beneficiaries of the welfare state, legal immigrants might very well be.

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly wrongheaded.  Since the USA is a welfare state and under ObamaCare about to become even more of one, it is obviously suicidal  for purely fiscal reasons alone to open the borders.  Who would not want to come to this great prosperous nation of ours?  Do I really need to spell this out?  Only if the libertarians got  their way and succeeded in shrinking the government down to 'night watchman' functions (the Lockean triad: protection of life, liberty, and property), would this fiscal objection to open borders be removed.   But obviously this shrink-down is not going to happen.  Given that the USA is a welfare state and will remain one  — the only real question being how much of one — it is all the more necessary to control entry into the country.

Since conservatives often say our rights come not from the government but from God and the nature of man, it is not for the government to decide whether someone should have the right to live here or not—it is up to individuals and communities, which obviously are able to sustain a fair number of illegals.

This is very shoddy reasoning.  Conservatives maintain that there are certain natural unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness (which is not the right to be or be made happy).  These natural rights are not granted by governments but secured by legitimate governments.  They are rights that one has irrespective of one's being a citizen of a state. But it does not follow that every right that one has one one has irrespective of citizenship.  My right to vote is not a right to vote anywhere.  When I lived in Germany, Austria, and Turkey, I did not have the right to vote in those countries, nor should I have had that right.  Just as I don't have the right to vote anywhere, I don't have the right to live anywhere or travel anywhere.  When I lived in Turkey I could not stand on my natural right to live in Turkey: there is no such right.  I had to apply for a visa and be granted permission to live there for a stated period of time after I had paid a fee for the privilege.  Now you might not want to call living in Turkey a 'privilege,' but it is surely not a natural right that everyone has just in virtue of being a human being.

The author says that communities have a right to decide who shall live in them.  But a community is a political entity, a state writ small, and what goes for states writ small goes for states writ large.

. . . constitutionalists in particular should question the very notion that the feds have legal authority to crack down on the border, since immigration is not an Article I, Section 8 authority of Congress. Conservatives especially should follow Reagan’s example and embrace immigration amnesty.

This is just false.  "Congress shall have the power to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization . . . ." (Article I, Section 8)  As for Reagan's example, is this guy suggesting that conservatives should follow Reagan's example even in matters on which he acted foolishly or not like a conservative?  Come on!  Amnesty for those illegals already here and established may well be unavoidable.  But this is separate form the question whether the border should be sealed to keep out additional illegal aliens.