The Adolescent Libertarian Mind

Spoke with a Libertarian on a plane.  A nice and solid guy. Everything he said would make sense if you replaced the complexity of history with sound bites.  And dismissed contrary evidence as opinion instead of asking for all the facts.  Ultimately it is an immature politics, one that allows its teenage-minded proponents to relieve their discomfort with complex modern life by pointing fingers at unreasonable rules without asking a thing of themselves when it comes to picking up their own room.  They honestly believe first of all that they live completely and totally honorably and secondly that everybody else would too if government got out of the "nanny" business and just left them alone.

Do you notice that none of them point to the far past, the past that put government in the so-called nanny business in the first place, as an example of how well non-interference works?  Shall we go back to the time of Dickens?  The city sky black with coal dust 365 days a year, children dying from hunger and want?  Shall we go back to the time of Upton Sinclair, with rats and rotting meat ground in your hot dogs, and workers who lose a limb on the job being SOL without income or recompense?  Shall our state leave business alone in making money and only use taxes for a strong police and military, like the mill and mining towns of the thirties where the might of the law was corrupted by the wealthy to bully the poor and prop up the rich?  I am sure that 90% of the despoilers and bullies saw themselves as good, solid citizens, as caring moral souls, but without external institutions to prevent abuses, their understanding skewed to allow a good opinion of themselves even as they treated others abominably.

Government regulation was born in response to abuses.  It strikes me as idiotic to believe that by removing the restrictions of regulation, that the abuses would not return.  If a regulation obstructs or damages honorable dealings, then by all means modify it to manage the situation.  Do not toss the baby with the bath water.

I live in a big city, Los Angeles.  I have neighbors who would toss their trash to the curb and be done if it were allowed.  Once a few did it, soon everyone would and our streets would run with sewage.  I have neighbors who would keep farm animals if allowed, and the stench would be something I could not get away from, living in close quarters and not on acreage with fields between us.  I have other neighbors who would start to party at dusk and carry on with music and drunken laughter till dawn if there were no curbs put on their volume. There are old cars on my street that only move once a week for street cleaning days but which would be allowed to die and rust in place if they didn't have to be kept at least in nominally running condition.

When I walk out my front door, I am thankful for the order. I am sure there is corruption and waste in government and I think we should fight it at every turn.  But to dismantle government because we do not like the limitations it places on us ignores the history of those limitations and our own immature resentment of the social equivalent of parental "house rules."