Conservative, Not Liberatian

When Liberty Gets Leprosy: The Libertarian Lure

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Since we are in between elections, and because public feelings are not running high at just this moment, I thought it would be safe to take a moment to discuss the libertarian temptation. And so let us begin by defining terms.

I am a conservative, not a libertarian, but there is quite a bit of overlap. If we are talking about the manufacture and sale of widgets, or of any other lawful product, I am for all intents and purposes a libertarian. When we are talking about basic economics and black ink/red ink problems, libertarians and conservatives are as one. I have elsewhere described myself as a theocratic libertarian. So far so good.

Libertarians, at least the ones not smoking pot, are good at math. You can’t spend what you don’t have, and you shouldn’t spend what you shouldn’t have. If we had a libertarian president, instead of the one we have right now, my reactions to the evening news would be much the same, toggling between jeepers! and yay! There would be much in that scenario to make me happy. Since the great political threat in our time is the overweening state, there are many instances where conservatives can make common cause with libertarians. We can be cobelligerents on a number of issues. All good so far. So where might the problems be?

I have three basic problems with libertarianism as such, and the first two lead to an informed discussion of the third.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Love and Liberty

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The theme we have been developing is that self-government is the ground of all other government. Men and women who cannot govern themselves will in fact be governed by others. The less government they have at home, in the heart, the more government from the outside will necessarily be imposed.

This liberty we are speaking of—at this individual level—is the liberty to do right, which is not the same thing as the liberty to do as you please. But we must be careful here.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The 5 Smooth Stones of Theocratic Libertarianism

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Things in our public life together are gummed up enough that I believe we can openly call for radical reform. Whether we do or not, I think we are going to get the same treatment. We might as well respond with something that might actually help. Whatever the case, we will not be able to trim or pirouette our way out of this mess. As an insightful sailor on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor might have said, as the third wave of Japanese bombers flew over, “The time for nuance is passed.”

A few posts ago I mentioned the five smooth stones of theocratic libertarianism. This was in the context of an illustration using David and Goliath, and as with David, I think most of our problems would probably  be addressed in principle with just the first one.

At any rate, here are the basic features of theocratic libertarianism. Here are my five smooth stones.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The After Deck of the Pirate Ship

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Whenever I write on things like liberty and taxes, it is easy for some to try to stuff me into the wrong box. And upon my making this objection, some might expect me to go on to say that I hate labels. But actually I love labels, which are the precondition of all honest discourse. Con artists hate labels.

But the label should be accurate. I am no anarchist, and I actually am in favor of both liberty and taxes. I’m against parodies of either, and because these parodies are currently dominating the landscape, they are the problem which must be addressed.

The parody of liberty is found in the libertarian image of the fornicating pot smoker – but you can get high and get laid in a 6′ x 8′ prison cell. There is one who defiantly cries out that he wants more liberty – so that he can enslave himself ever more tightly in chains he has forged himself. But no tyrant has ever been successfully resisted by cluster of lotus eaters, however big the cluster might be. Virtuous people cannot be kept as slaves, and an effete and self indulgent people are made for slavery. It is their native habitat.

Towards a Christian Political Philosophy

The Moral Purposes of Law and Government

Feb 11, 2015

Justin Taylor

Several years ago First Things published an essay entitled “Law and Moral Purpose” by Robert P. George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.  I’ve taken a section of this essay and added questions, numbering, and italics, turning it into an “interview” of sorts.

What are the obligations and purposes of law and government?

(1) To protect

• public health
• safety
• morals

(2) to advance

the general welfare—including, preeminently, protecting people’s fundamental rights and basic liberties.

Wouldn’t this require the granting of vast and sweeping powers to public authority?

No; the general welfare—the common good—requires that government be limited.

Uber in New Zealand

Mr Plod and The Free Market

Human interaction in the marketplace is a fascinating study.  At the point of exchange, where a buyer and seller exchange property, all kinds of evil can be present: deceit, fraud, dissembling, theft, passing off, price gouging, refusal to pay--the list goes on.  Given our common propensity to rape and pillage, how could a universal behaviour such as buying and selling ever be kept relatively honest?

The statist answer is--no prize for guessing--the state's rules and regulations, restrictions and permits will keep the market place fair and honest.  The libertarian's answer is a transparent marketplace itself keeps the participants honest.

The libertarian belief in the regulating and moderating power of the marketplace really turns around human prudence and freely available information. Exploiters and bad-faith traders become known and exposed. No-one except fools want to deal with them. Both buyer and seller have a duty of care to themselves.  Market information about participants--good and bad--means that bad traders are driven out; good (that is, ethical) traders become more prosperous.  There are sanctions available in a free market, but they are largely by means of claims in a civil court.  If one "rips off" another, they are liable to civil action where the court may order redress and restitution. 

Between the two poles of statism and libertarianism, the market manages to trundle along.  Every so often there is a paradigm shift which shakes up all the participants in a particular industry.  Right now, one example is the taxi industry versus Uber.  The interplay between the transactors and the marketplace and the authorities is fascinating--and predictable.  Rodney Hide tells us how it is playing out in New Zealand:

Mouldy Tyrannies, Free Spirits

Freedom For Us, Controls for Everyone Else

There are two ways in which a secular society can be organized.  It can be built upon maximising a form of human freedom, or it can enforce one view as absolutely right, imposing it upon all.  The former champions liberty of opinion and freedom of thought, word and deed.  The latter champions order, structure, and the one right way.  The former reflects libertarianism.  The latter reflects an authoritarian dictatorship either by One or the Party.

Unbelief will always pull either one way or the other.  But over time, libertarianism will crumble and tyranny will win out.  Why?  Libertarianism has no authoritative standard by which the limits of liberty can be nailed down. It has no authoritative standard to define what the human being is who is to be free.  Humans in the womb, senile humans, comatise humans don't necessarily qualify.  Sexual perversions performed by sexual perverts do.  Man-boy-"love" must enjoy the protections of liberty.  Libertarianism produces the ruthless discarding of humans from their own race. Libertarianism inflicts a deadly tyranny upon those judged to be "outsiders".

At the same time, libertarianism must foster and allow and even indirectly encourage views which champion authoritarianism, its opposite. Libertarianism is a vacuum which the natural order eventually abhors. Consequently, all secular societies gradually morph into tyrannies of one kind or the other.

Here is an example of  what we speak.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Aluminium Deniers

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

A couple of posts ago, I said that limited government was absolutely dependent upon public virtue. Here’s why.

It all goes back to Burke’s “little platoons.” Raw individualism is not the opposite of the collective. It is what makes the collective possible. The collective likes it. The Hive can handle a pothead bee. The collective cultivates individualism because the collective knows how to take genuine rivals out of commission.

The atomistic individual has no ability to mount a principled and structured stand against the state. Whatever the romantic appeal of “going Galt” might be, to the extent it might work it would have to work in concert with others. And to the extent that it doesn’t work in concert with others, it will not work.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

What Mardi Gras Has for Breakfast

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Monday, March 17, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

This is happening in lots of different areas, so I don’t want to pick on Rand Paul. But for the sake of convenience, let us start with him. He recently called for a “truce” within the Republican Party on “social issues,” but what such a truce would actually amount to is total capitulation on the part of social conservatives.

To agree to a truce on such issues is to acknowledge in some fundamental way that the issue is not what you have been claiming for it all these years. Principled incrementalism would never use the word truce.

Face-saving surrenders do. If abortion is murder, you don’t go halvsies on it. If you had been fighting the Nazi genocide for years, and they suddenly offered you a truce, wherein they agreed to stop killing the Feingolds and so on through the end of the alphabet, and you agreed to such a deal, would this not reveal that you had no earthly clue what position you had actually been advocating?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Rand Paul, National Review, and a View From the Cheap Seats

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Monday, March 10, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

I first subscribed to National Review when I was in high school, which would be somewhere northwards of 42 years ago. I  have been a faithful subscriber since that time, and — disagreements and all — it remains my favorite magainze. They are still genuinely conservative, although it should be said at the outset that they are not conserving quite as much as they used to.

Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, is a skosh more libertarian than I would like, but I like what he has been doing very much. About time somebody did, and all that. There are places where the libertarian streak will lead you astray (e.g. marriage), but there are other places where it supplies a much needed corrective to our putative lords and masters (e.g. metadata).

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Making It Flow to the End

Posted on Sunday, September 8, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog 

In the Syria saga, we are getting a good glimpse of how political decisions are made in a gargantuan democracy, and we are also getting quite a cash payout — worth a great deal to me at any rate — of Ron Paul’s apparently quixotic presidential runs.

Let me state the conclusion first. I am convinced that – despite the blinkered limitations of pure libertarianism when it comes to foreign-policy in the Middle East – the presence of a  significant libertarian mindset in the Republican Party has been beyond helpful in this situation. I think an ideologically pure libertarian foreign policy would be a disaster. But I also think the current endless war policy is a disaster, and I like very much the fact a good portion of our population — for whatever reasons — has gotten kind of surly about it.

Let us be frank.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Gedunk Government 

Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 15 May 2013


So then, it appears as though the president is making a hash of it. The Unaffordable Care Act supplies the corned beef, the hard leftism of his administration would be the little diced potatos that we see everywhere, and this latest scandal triad is the hot grease that makes the whole thing sizzle and pop like that.

Now in this circumstance, every chance he gets, the president will blame Bush for his woes, and will do so in a way that is more risible every day. So let's not do it that way. Let's blame the so-called conservative establishment in the way they need to be blamed for all these federal fiascos. They are to be faulted because they think like short-sighted partisans, and not like the Founders, who thought with an expansive vision -- a vision that included both the greatness of the cultural mandate and a deep suspicion of man's sinfulness. Our modern conservative leaders are like the man driving a local delivery route with his Fritos truck. The Founders were coast-to-coast long haul truckers.

The legal theorist John Rawls once said that the ideal society ought to be crafted with the designer of it not knowing where he was going to be born into it. This is, of course, simply an interesting variation of the Golden Rule.

Libertarian Vacuity

Demons Will Return to the Empty House

What are the building blocks of civilisation?  The libertarian answer is straightforward, if simplistic: civilisation will be built upon free contracts entered into by individuals, once the state is dismantled.  Roll the state back to a minimalist entity and you are left with a free people.  These free people, acting out of self interest, will enter into formal and informal contractual arrangements for their own (and mutual) benefit.

But what if the "free" people were universally enslaved to lusts and self-indulgence?

Some Wars Should Not be Fought

Do-Good Wowsers on the Wane?

A growing number of folk are facing up to the unintended consequences of prohibition.  The consequences include the reckless destruction of lives and subsidizing vast criminal enterprises.   The evils are now much greater than those which attend the drug taking in the first place.  Rich Lowry, writing in the National Review has been looking at the tea leaves and discerns a change in the portents. 

The Left's Social Contract

Do We Have a Deal for You!

The NZ Labour Party appointed a new leader late last year.  The faithful are still trying to work out what's inside their new package.  Blogger Dim Post has been adding his speculations to the mix, in a piece entitled Back to Basics. 

He writes:

I thought Shearer’s interview was a bit insipid – but he did say one thing that gave me a little hope about his ‘Ides of Mars’ speech this week, which was a reference to the Social Contract. Maybe I’m being wildly optimistic here, but it could be pretty smart for Shearer to go back to the very principles of left-wing political philosophy, and simply make the argument that we’re a society of people with obligations towards each other – in contrast to the right-wing view-point in which we are a competitive market-place with no responsibility to each other outside of inter-party transactions.

We think that paragraph sums up the simplistic ideology of the left.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Four/Fifths of the Brimstone

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 06 February 2012

A few days ago, Ron Paul was on Piers Morgan, and demonstrated, in a breath-taking way, a certain muddledness about life. He certainly tried to stay consistent with his libertarianism, which is -- in the world of political trimmers, shifters, and dodgers -- a certain kind of admirable. The problem is that libertarianism, on its own, is a false ideology, and will therefore necessitate self-contradiction. The glory of man will always fail.
I am talking about the pro-life issue, but Paul whiffed a couple others too.

He continues far too ambiguous on the homosexual marriage issue -- as though YWVH would have been fine with the Cities of the Plain had they only had a federal system that allowed for states' rights on the issue, with each city being allowed by the Constitution to make their own decisions. Say that one of them had not legalized sodomy, we might have had one four/fifths of the brimstone. Paul also said that his libertarianism governed his child-rearing -- if he doesn't believe in coercion, then spanking should clearly be out.

On the pro-life thing, he was asked about abortion in the case of rape.

Grand Pooh-bahs and High Priests

Religious Libertarians

We had to hoot with laughter over this one: Peter Cresswell, high-priest of libertarianism, has deigned to declaim libertarian Ron Paul.  The Grand Pooh-bah of the Orthodox Libertarian Church has pronounced that Paul is not an orthodox libertarian.  He is a sectarian libertarian, holding views and opinions that no true believer would dare hold.

Now, to be a true member of the true church of libertarianism you have to bow five times a day towards the last known resting place of Ayn Rand.  [For our readers not familiar with the wonderful attributes of the Goddess, we have posted a couple of times on her holy attributes, here and here.]  Paul does not bow and worship.  Therefore, he is not even an apostate--one who once genuinely believed, but then departed from the true faith.  He is a wolf in sheep's clothing. 

Paul's heretical belief?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Ron Paul, Enemy of Liberty

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, October 31, 2011

Let me say at the outset that I don't know who I will vote for when the primary campaign finally wends its way to Idaho. The field will no doubt be a bit different, and we likely know a good bit more about the candidates, probably a bit more than we wanted to know.

I know which candidates are flat out -- Romney, Huntsman, and Gingrich -- and they are out for character/religious reasons. One of the fundamental qualifications for office in Scripture is that a man must hate covetousness.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Fatherless Under the Fig Tree

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, July 25, 2011 7:12 am

Hard libertarianism and/or anarchy is a function of what might be called civic fatherlessness. Just as the antitheist regards the eternality of the Father as tyrannical on the face of it, so also the hard libertarian regards any civic authority whatever as something to chafe the soul.

Within this paradigm, all political authority is based on coercion, straight up, and since coercion is (obviously) bad, then at best we should regard political authority as a necessary evil, and at worst tyranny to be thrown off. Those who are more eschatologically minded long for the day when the state withers, or blows up, or something, and then every man can sit fatherless under his own fig tree. This view assumes that the only possible justification for civil authority is pragmatic, and when we grow past the need for such pragmatic expedients, then we will no longer have any presidents or kings. We will have grown out of our need for civil fathers, or so the pipe dream goes.

But as I write this, I am in my late fifties, and my father is in his eighties.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Then Leave The Man Alone

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, May 12, 2011

Beware of all isms except for prisms, as the fellow said. This goes double for libertarianism, and I would point you to Denny Burk's applause of Michael Gerson's critique of Ron Paul. Since I have praised Paul in this place before (and will no doubt do so again), I should perhaps offer an explanation of what gives here.

There are different kinds of libertarian approaches. One is when liberty itself has become the standard, and an attempt is made to apply that standard wherever practically or theoretically possible, and sometimes when impossible. This kind of liberty is an abstraction, divorced from any particular Word from God, although it is often assumed that God generally likes liberty. Christians like Ron Paul can mistakenly go for this, and it leads them to sometimes take surprising stands, such as Paul's support for the legalization of prostitution.

But there is another variant of a libertarian approach, one that is consistent with social conservatism, and one that I would like to argue for here. When God, as it were, "leaves us alone" with one another, we should take note of the temptations that Scripture describes under such circumstances. This is a libertarianism that is based on a scriptural understanding of what power and privilege tend to do to the hearts of men.