For The Greater Part True
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Hoyle Hodges
- Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Response for 19 Jan 2011
- For The Greater Part True
Other men’s lives are not yours to dispose of. (Hospers, The Libertarian Manifesto, pg 22) The proper function of government as the author defines Libertarian doctrine is very limited, Libertarians recognize that government has created more misery on its citizens than any other man made invention in our history. The worst most recent examples are Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Hitler out of long line of despots reaching back throughout our history. To prevent the state from degenerating into full use of its legalized coercive powers Libertarians strive to have has little governmental control of its citizens as possible. To do this the doctrine has been built around three central concepts. The right to life, The right to liberty, The right to property. These three ideals make up the Libertarians view of the proper functioning of government as the protection of human rights (Hospers; pg 27) Central to these concepts is that the proper role of government should be limited to protecting people from harm or aggression by others. Boiled down to its core the government has a police function for protection from interior threats and a military function to protect from exterior threats. A core Libertarian belief is that with the government so limited, that free market solutions to other requirements of a civilized society will increase as the burdens and restrictions that are imposed by large state bureaucracies are diminished. While I agree with many Libertarians viewpoints that center around the right to life, and especially around the right to property, it’s the extreme arguments centered over the right to liberty that proves the most troubling for me personally. If the Libertarian logic on liberty is taken all the way down its path you end up with endorsing legalized drugs. Which as a purely political argument centered around individual liberty might sound like it makes sense, but all we really have to do is look at societies where drug use and production is / was legal to see the horrific effect of unlimited individual liberty. China and Opium, Columbia and Cocaine. Extreme politics often makes for strange bedfellows when you have both stereotypical arch conservative libertarians and pot smoking commie hippies on the same side of the argument. My argument against both sides is this; beer is legal, yet you do not see the Cartels producing beer. Nobody is going to voluntarily give up the huge amounts of power and wealth that is associated with producing and distributing drugs regardless of whether it is legal or not. The fact that you do not see drug trafficking organizations manufacturing any legal controlled substance (alcohol, tobacco, medicine) proves the point that unlimited liberty as a theory does not work. It also disproves the flip side of the drug legalization movement espoused by the left that if drugs are legalized the criminals will disappear. Thus there is a larger role for government than is stated in Libertarianism.
