The Libertarian Problem

I think I have voted for one or two Libertarian candidates in the past and will probably vote for more of them again in the future.  At the federal level at least, their aversion to government intervention is more in line with my own  beliefs that the federal government has far exceeded it's Constitutional authority.   But that's more a symptom of the total failure, corruption, and dysfunction of the two-party system than it is agreement with libertarian principles.  

I am not a philosophical libertarian.   I'd like to begin to explain why here, because I think a lot of activists are not comfortable with the philosophy but can't put their finger on why.  To be sure, not all of them have a legitimate reason for their discomfort.    There are people walking around right now who believe they are "conservative" and label themselves as such, but whose actual beliefs are much closer to fascism.   That is, they believe that individual rights should take a back seat to national security and even national greatness- often defined in militaristic terms.

Such folks prefer a strong central government which makes uniform rules for everyone, as opposed to classical limited-government conservatism which has a healthy skepticism of the ability of governments in distant capitols to make our lives "better" if only we cede them more money and control.    I understand why fascio-conservatives are uncomfortable with libertarian ideas, but I consider the real reasons for their objections to be roughly as objectionable as any problem I might have with a libertarian approach.

With that said, let me begin to explain why I am not a libertarian by noting that of the three libertarian pillars, the only one I agree with is the Rule of Law.     The other two pillars are non-aggression and Self-Ownership.  Today I would like to talk about Self-Ownership.   Here is the definition from Wikkipedia:

Self-ownership (or sovereignty of the individual, individual sovereignty or individual autonomy) is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to havebodily integrity, and be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to G. Cohen, the concept of self-ownership is that "each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply."

Who could argue with that?  Lot's of decent people, once you apply that absolute to some sticky situations.  An example might be whether a man who got a woman pregnant had any obligation to pay child support.   Insisting someone share the bill for national defense, or anything else with "free rider" issues, might be another example.   

The great Scottish writer George McDonald,  who wrote both Children's books and works on Natural Law, once said "The first principle of Hell is 'I am my own.'"    Understand I am not saying that the state owns us, or that we own each other.    My position is that God owns us, and though He has placed us in this world and granted us much freedom to become who we want to be, we are and will be accountable to Him for the use we have made of our freedom.

If you think about it, it's really hard to make the case that we "own ourselves."  We did not create ourselves.  We did not determine when or where we entered this world, and we do not get to decide whether or not we get to stay in this world.   Others did many things to us and for us- some with our permission, some without, which permitted us to reach adulthood.   Each day a thousand things we cannot control in the heavens and on earth are necessary to sustain our lives.  Nor can we stop the ravages of time in our own persons.  Though we might live 100 years, still our destiny is a slow fade in this life as we begin our journey to the next.   We can dye our hair, but we cannot really turn even one hair of our head white or black.     Self-ownership does not seem a rational position.

A much better case for "self-ownership" can be made in any eternal afterlife that might exist.    There it might be argued that our place of entry is determined by our own choices, that the being we have become is the result of our own choices.   So while we may have had no hand in our own creation in this life, we would in the next.   And the condition would be, unlike this world, permanent.   What McDonald called "the First Principle of Hell" makes sense as a reality in Hell.   In this life, if God exists, we can only be as children in the womb, preparing for the next life but no more "sovereign" in this one than children yet unborn.

The concept of personal sovereignty, in the absolute sense Libertarians present it, implies individuals get to determine their own morality (except for the few absolutes they attempt to impose such as the conditions under which force might be used).   Again, measured against the vast scale of the cosmos, the enormity of time which has passed in all ages, and the value of wisdom which has endured for generations before us, the idea that the four pounds of grey matter in our skulls can be the final arbiter of right and wrong, even for ourselves, seems ridiculous.  

We can try and discern right from wrong, and a worthy life will spend time doing so, but the idea that each generation, and even moreso each person, gets to re-write morality from a blank slate seems ridiculous.    Any one of us is only a tiny part of the natural world.   We remain in it only an infinitesimal portion of the total time it has existed.  The idea that we can construct our own personal morality, to apply only to us, displays what seems to me an almost psychotic misinterpretation of our place in the universe.

It seems to me the balanced approach, rejecting the extremes of both fascism and libertarianism, would be one in which government power was dispersed.   Instead of fighting over who gets to hold the single gun that is pointed at the rest of us from sea to shining sea, the central government would get no gun for enforcing moral imperatives.

States and localities would, retaining their right to sanction moral behavior such as mandating child support.  But let them be careful how they use such power!  For in such an arrangement states who go too far (that is, impose rules for moral behavior outside the underlying moral reality of the universe or beyond the scope of government compulsion) are bound to lose productive citizens to states which do not.  States and localities who did not go far enough would too. And in each case government would look more like what the citizens who live there would want government to look like,. Decentralizing power would make the government subject to the marketplace,