A libertarian critiques a conservative's critique of libertarianism - from Tech Central Station (and, if you haven't guessed, TCS is one of my favorite web lounges).
In the anti-libertarian
article published in the March 14 issue of The American
Conservative, Robert Locke wrote: "Libertarians are also naive
about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to
unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of
Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug
use and work on Monday." Gee, where have we heard that
stereotype before? At TCS, Max Borders answers:
In a truly free society, people will be just as able to enter into collective arrangements with people who have also chosen to forego so-called "absolute freedom." Mr. Locke and I can start a Hutterite commune where everybody shares the work and bows hourly to a statue of Edmund Burke as a condition of residing there.... [As for] Mr. Locke's visions of how libertarianism in practice would unleash "sadomasochism" and other caligulan horrors....
Suffice it to say that libertarians know that we are able to exercise self-restraint not because the Great Nanny in Washington threatens us with chastening, but because we belong to communities, families, and relationships in which the values of healthy living are naturally grown orders.
Another
rebuttal runs (to its credit) in the same March 14 issue of The
American Conservative, this time by Daniel McCarthy, who writes
"Sadly, a few conservatives seem to have learned nothing from their
experience at the hands of the Left and are no less quick to
present an ill-informed and malicious caricature of libertarians
than leftists are to give a similarly distorted interpretation of
conservatism." He continues:
There is something rather counterintuitive - or just plain nonsensical - to the belief that bureaucrats and politicians care more about the elderly than families and communities do. The same holds true for the notion that the state upholds the interests of children....
The free market sometimes involves things that conservatives dislike, such as pornography. Playboy may be bad, but one is not forced to subsidize it....
The libertarian rests content to let Utah be Utah and San Francisco be San Francisco.... If the property owners of a neighborhood wanted to establish a certain set of common moral standards, they could do so. Other places could do differently. Libertarianism thus responds to the reality of difference, including profound cultural and religious difference, much better than other political philosophies, which are left trying to smash square pegs into round holes.
And as to that possibility, rest assured, both the
social right and the angry left join together to declare, "It's our
way, or no way!"