I was browsing around redstate.com and came upon this: http://www.redstate.com/repair_man_jack/2011/02/09/real-libertarians-understand-consequentialism-paulistinians-dont/
The writer seems to think libertarians do not respect the natural rights of anybody else as long as they can do whatever they want. How would you reply to this?
This inane rambling isn’t worth the effort of a response. Fortunately, refuting his premise is simple enough: there is no conflict between individualism and consequentialism or freedom and consequentialism (at least, when these words are used properly; it’s hard to discern just what he means by these words). Libertarianism is not libertineism, even from the largely ‘cultural’ libertarians. It is not absolute freedom, able to do whatever you want, but freedom circumscribed by rules.
If I’m starting to ramble now, it’s because I just don’t know what this guy thinks he’s saying.
Whew, thanks Michael! I was afraid my reading comprehension skills were deficient because I didn’t come away from that article ascertaining a thesis
It was an atrocious piece of literature. This guy doesn’t even sound like a consequentialist if he’s worried about porn shops (sounds more or less like religious deontology perhaps). Basically I tend to agree with David Friedman; the market is going to determine “morality”, however one defines morality, but in a Rothbardian sense, the Common Law will most likely represent some form of libertarianism (after all, these people have thrown the State into the garbage heap).
As for the porn shop, maybe people won’t shop there because it seems distasteful? It would probably be better to move a little farther away then directly across a high school. There’s a strip joint and a Hooters just down the road from where I go to college and I assume the college-aged market is where you’d want to shoot for. Plus if you were marketing to a high school that is practically run by religious people, think of the boycotts and pickett lines and all the stuff you’d have to deal wtih. It’d be a headache. All of those are peaceful means if the practice is really that offensive to the relevant population.
As for the porn shop, maybe people won’t shop there because it seems distasteful?
Actually, I don’t think so. I mean, most people when not constrained by the law are not such weirdoes about sex. I think this is pure cultural fetishism, no offense conservatives.
It would probably be better to move a little farther away then directly across a high school.
This is just a sort of ridiculous ignorance of how property developers might decide on constructing things. Are you going to build a high school across from a porn shop? Is a high school area a good traffic zone for porno sales?
Also, I really don’t think it’s a big deal for 14yo’s to see pornography.
I agree on all of the above.
It does seem distasteful in a sense, even though I really don’t care much about sexual morality if it’s consentual. I’m pretty sure market forces would dictate that it’s a bad business plan overall. That would be like a libertarian saying, “so what if the population of America is against slavery, what if they voted in a pro-slavery candidate?” It’s just probably not going to happen, so this point has nothing to do with anything.
My comments in bold
America was founded on libertarian principles. This tradition empowered the rise of America. It inspired the creativity and entrepreneurial energy of our people to such an extent that after WWII our culture, economy, military and society bestrode the world like a mighty colossus. Even in modern America, the more libertarian Texas is gaining population at nearly the same rate that the more authoritarian Massachusetts and California hemorrhage tax slaves from their welfare states.
Yet, despite the epic win powered by this libertarian ideology in America, the Libertarian Party has yet to paint the electoral map gold, ban the Fed, legalize Oaxacan ditch weed, or privatize or power down any of the myriad functions that our Federal Government (in my humble opinion) has no business exerting dominion over. In today’s blog, I endeavor to explain to all five or six of my constant readers exactly why Ron Paul (or any other perspective Libertarian Party Presidential candidate) won’t make it anywhere near Mt. Rushmore without a ticket and a means of transportation. They do not get the entire concept of consequentialism.
Where did this come from? We think people are not responsible for their actions? Huh?
Consequentialism involves owning the results of any action you choose to engage in. It sets a necessary, constraining and specific limit to the extent of my freedom as an individual. Most of us, even hard-core Paulistinians, get that as individuals. Some of us don’t, and reside in Cell Block 6 or have long ago assumed room temperature for a variety of reasons. Absolute freedom is as fun, exciting and unworkable as the relationship a lot of people had with the person who took their virginity. It’s a wild ride, but a perspicacious individual figures out that it has to eventually come to an end.
What modern Libertarians don’t seem to grok is that the same holds true for societies.
What does this even mean?
Letting the neighbors do whatever they want is great until David Berkowitz moves in next door and decides he really doesn’t like your cute, little pet dog.
1. I’m not sure what he is saying exactly. David Berkowitz killed all those people in a Libertarian society?
2. This is the Nirvana fallacy. A libertarian society cannot stop a David Berkowitz from prowling around killing people, therefore it is bad.
3. How would Consequentalism have stopped him?
4. Had it been legal for everyone to own guns, he probably would have thought twice.
Morality does have to be legislated.
So that was the problem. There was no law saying you cannot be a mass murderer. If only we had legislated morality back then, all those lives would have been saved.
It may feel liberating to let a woman abort her pregnancy if she wants to, but that’s just because fetuses struggle to express what it feels like to have their head sucked apart by an industrial vacuum cleaner.
This is certainly a deep and sensitive topic. But it has nothing to do with Libertarianism. If we grant that a fetus is a living human being, killing him is murder, be one a libertarian or not. If we say a fetus is not a living human being, then, libertarian or no, things are different.
Senile Grand Parents can get on our nerves as well, it’s easier if they can just drift away one night and not wake up again.
What exactly is he saying here? That libertarians think senile grand parents should be sent away to die, like the African Hottentots did to the weak? What has this to do with libertarians?
Eventually, if we just let people deal with these problems and lay back far enough, Berkowitz just has to be Berkowitz.
What is he saying? Who else is going to deal with these problems? Animals? Berkowitz has to be Berkowitz, he was literally insane and heard voices, but what has that to do with libertarians?
If a fetus isn’t human, why are you?
That question is a signifcant and interesting one, but not relevant to libertarianism.
The sacred value of a human life has been subordinated to an empty life-destroying dogma of unrestrained freedom.
Unrestarined freedom? What? No libertarian says there exists a freedom to harm others. Straw man here.
Letting the markets decide who gets what works well for “Tickle Me Elmo Dolls”. Elasticity of Demand and quadruple-digit credit card bills tends to discipline even the most wayward scatterbrain. My little children may whine about not having one, but neither one would shrivel up and die. If Paris Hilton owns every last one of them, I’m not too unhappy.
Glad we agree on something.
Letting the market demand dictate that Hugh Hefner should put up pornography theatres and prostitution houses across the street from every high school in Madison County, AL, (due to the awesome potential aggregate demand) probably requires a little more careful thought.
Yes it does.
1. Why are there mandatory govt run high schools in the first place?
2. Ethics and morals are not things to be handed over to politicians. It is the job of parents to instill them.
3. The right way to deal with this is to have the kids stay at home until the offensive palces close down. The people working there could be socially osracised. Grocers could refuse to sell them food until they quit.
Societal traditions, values and standards of decency need to hold sway somewhere.
They have to hold sway exactly where people want them to. Not where you want them to, not where the govt violently imposes what it wants.
I can turn off a raunchy Super Bowl Commercial. I can’t stop a sick culture that pipes its filth into the very walls of where my children go to school.
You could if you knew the roots of the problem. If govt did not tax you to pay for its schools and impose all kind sof licensing requirements on schools and teachers, you could afford to send him to a private school that would seek your custom by having those pipes cleaned.
Modern Libertarians seem a bit confused as to why my cute little adolescent can’t just take his porn and his hookers straight-up; like a man.
Straw man. What sick mind is this coming from?
I find myself respecting a lot of the ideas espoused in philosophy of libertarianism. The USA Patriot Act was never my favorite legislation. I often wondered what it would be like to have all these new and exciting investigative tools in the hands of President Hitlery. Janet Napolitano’s definition of potential domestic terrorists offered us just a little appetizer of what the feke-sandwich would taste like if Barack Obama really wanted to serve it to us for lunch with an ironic smile. I could envision him sneering and telling us to be good little USA Patriots as he ordered us off to the reeducation camps.
When it comes to showing care and reluctance to ever give the Federal Government significant power over anything, Ron Paul has a valid point. The Department of Homeland Security should have played a role in a dystopic novel by Sinclair Lewis or George Orwell. The freedoms we give up, to assuage temporary fears, sometimes never get returned back to us again.
That all being explained; there also has to be a counter-test to determine how far individual and societal rights can actually be extended before we’ve given ourselves enough rope to auto-asphyxiate. Late, Great USA Patriot Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. perhaps nailed the proper design for that filter better than anyone alive in America today. “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” (HT:Askville.com)
A very libertarian staement. Don’t steal it.
The hateful and destructive rights that such a standard would strike down are myriad. Free, tax-payer funded abortions, for example, would put many people’s noses out of joint. Even free Planned-Parenthood Funded abortions would run afoul of at least one cute, little nose. Free, guaranteed, government health care for all citizens, via a single-payer system, would certainly require slavery to provide for the guarantee to the extent that the supply of qualified physicians is finite. In essence, placing a limit to the rights and freedoms that an iniquitous governing clique can promise, to a numerical majority of registered voters, may well be the only way the United States of America retains any individual liberties at all.
We seem to be agreeing again, though you don’t understand libertarians enough to know that.
This is where the Libertarian position that we can have individual freedom, athwart all the silly, reactionary barriers of decency, culture and modest restraint, runs into the brick wall of contradiction.
The words have a beautiful oratorical ring to them, but no content. Well, there is content. A straw man and ad hominem attack saying that libertarians are indecent, barbaric, and immodest.
You really can’t have it all without paying for it. Nobody ever makes it into heaven without lying down for a dirt nap first. The freedoms Libertarians tell me I should just be able to take for granted often times, inconvenience, offend, harm or even partially enslave the people around me.
You really don’t get it, do you? What have you read about libertarians? Who is paying you to smear them? Or are you really stupid and doing it for free?
For a brief period of time I thought about being a Libertarian, instead of a Republican. Having to share an organization with too many Lindsey Grahams, Lincoln Chaffees and Arlen Specters can do that to anyone who has morals. However, because of those morals, I could not believe what the modern Libertarians believe. It is because many other Americans, agree with and share at least some of those morals, that President Ron Paul will never amount to anything more than an obnoxious meme on the Internet Tubes. To the extent that Libertarians are libertine, they are also not faithfully libertarian. Fight for freedom as a Republican instead.
Oh, I see. The Republican party is paying you. Fight for freedom as a Republican who is not libertarian? That is like defending your home by leaving all the doors open.
This (^)
This is why Algore invented the ignore button.
