This article was emailed to me but I wasn’t able to find a source for it. I do like the way it articulates the arguments against all de-regulation.
People like Ron and Rand Paul would have you believe that all government is bad but there is a place for some regulation.
Why I am not a libertarian
Not only is no man an island, but no man is self-made. I’m going to tell you why I am almost, but not quite, a libertarian.
First, capitalism, unless moderated by Christian virtue or government, is just as brutal and cruel as communism.
I know that’s hard for baby boomers to believe. After all, they grew up in the incredibly prosperous post-World War II United States. Most have never experienced really hard times. Most have not bothered to read much history or literature. Many were content to believe the fairy tales woven by Ayn Rand and her cohorts.
- Try digging coal for a few pennies a ton in an unsafe mine where you are forced to buy your own tools.
- Try imagining a disabling injury and, instead of receiving workers’ compensation or disability insurance, your broken body is just tossed off the company property.
That’s capitalism.
- Try a six- or seven-day work week with 12-hour days, a pittance for wages, in a hellish and unhealthy environment and absolutely no benefits.
That’s capitalism.
You can still see pure capitalism in places such as Calcutta or Mogadishu. Capitalism is great if you’re the capitalist, just as communism is great if you’re the commissar or the party bigwig.
I wonder how many Americans would be willing to cut and sew a pair of finished blue jeans for 75 cents in a sweltering, bug-infested building. How many pair do you think you would have to cut and sew in order to feed your family?
Those $30 to $50 pair of jeans we wear were made by what amounts to slave labor in Central America or Asia.
I’ve never been a union member and don’t intend to be one, but I can at least appreciate the struggle that union men undertook to improve the lives of working men and women. I guarantee you that without the “threat” of unionization, most working men and women would see a quite different face on their employers.
And that may not be too far off. Under phony free-trade deals, unions are being broken and pressured by the movement of and the threat to move factories overseas. Anybody who expects real compassion from a corporation would mistake Hannibal Lecter for a vegetarian. Unfortunately, the union leadership is so infected with socialists that they would rather pursue their ideological goals than look out for their members.
So, although I strongly believe in the maximum possible freedom, I also believe in community and in responsibility to that community. Not only is no man an island, but no man is self-made. Some people are just good at forgetting all the people who helped them get where they are.
If you aspire to total freedom and want to be entirely self-made, then go to a deserted island and live entirely off your own labor. If you survive, you can claim to be a self-sufficient person.
But don’t live in a community with all its protections and benefits, don’t go to public schools, ride on public roads, enjoy the benefits of publicly provided clean water and sanitary sewers and proclaim yourself an individual who owes nobody anything. That’s just bravo sierra, and you know it.
Freedom is not a virtue per se. It can mean the freedom of the strong to bully and enslave the weak. It can mean the freedom to exploit the poor, to despoil the land and the water, to turn your back on the oppressed, the sick, the dying.
That’s why, instead of a libertarian, I fall in with those old-fashioned conservatives who believe in ordered liberty, strict observances of the Constitution and a mind-our-own-business foreign policy. Don’t confuse me with the neo-conservatives who like big government and imperialism as long as they run it. Most of those guys are just ex-Troskyites, anyway. And don’t confuse me with chamber-of -commerce conservatives who say that anything good for big business is good for the country. That’s horse manure.
At the same time, I’m definitely not a socialist. An ex-socialist, John Dos Passos, has remarked that the world was becoming a museum of socialist failures. And so it is.
The idea of a mean, something-short-of-pure, unregulated capitalism and pure, over-regulated socialism is what we should strive for.
Captain Chaos's Blog 
I think you are mistaking libertarianism with atomism. It is a reasonable mistake to make, although in all my time reading libertarian authors I can never recall any claiming to support atomism. As a libertarian, I enjoy living in a community, not only for economic reasons but for personal fulfillment as well.
To be sure, libertarians are methodologically and politically individualists in the sense that we believe that an individual’s life is not subservient to the collective or exists to serve the well-being of the collective. We very much support cooperation and collaboration, just not state-imposed pseudo cooperation.
You might also be interested to learn how mutual aid and fraternal societies provided affordable health insurance before corporate insurance cartels and the medical profession broke them up.
Like you said, I think we share a lot of the same goals — a safe and prosperous community. I think that by respecting the principle of individual autonomy we can strengthen community bonds.
I can see why you may think I’m confusing libertarianism with atomism but you may have missed my point. If you live in a community, the assumption is there are some community resources that must be managed and from which you will most likely receive some benefit (roads, etc.). So, in any community, the issue isn’t whether there is government but rather how much government. And, since no one individual is presumed to be in total control, there will probably be differing opinions as to how much government there should be and what it should be in charge of.
It is this delicate balance that I was trying to highlight. As long as there is some government, you can’t have total freedom.
I liked your link about mutual aid fraternal societies.
I think you are right that there in all likelihood will always be forms of collectively owned property. The author of that essay about mutual aid also makes a libertarian case for public property as well.
I would agree that in no society ought people be free to murder, to rape or to torture. When libertarians like myself speak of freedom, we generally mean the independent exercise of one’s judgement. In practice, that means the absence of aggressive force. By and large, what distinguishes libertarians and non-libertarians is how they distinguish between aggressive and retaliatory force. To many supporters of the state, someone who refuses to pay income taxes is committing aggression, stealing from the government. What needs to be resolved between libertarians and non-libertarians is how rights, specifically property rights, come into existence.
Also, I think part of the difference between supporters of a state and libertarian anarchists like myself make is just definitional. In this context, I understand what you mean by “government,” an institution of rules and procedures to resolve disputes and provide needed public services, where in other cases “government” means an individually nonconsensual and territorially monopolistic political organization that coercively claims a monopoly on sanctioning the legitimate use of force. I don’t think they necessarily have to be one in the same.
Maybe I’m just a little too cynical but I don’t agree that individuals free to act based on the “independent exercise” of their own judgement will always make the best choices. There are too many examples where profit motives had a greater weight than prudent action. And unless you invoke a very broad definition of property rights, there are other things such as racial discrimination, anti-gay policies, etc. that also require a level of government intervention.
I agree. Neither do I think that people are perfectly wise. That is why I support decentralizing political authority to the greatest extent possible, which encourages personal responsibility and accountability to others. Libertarians, as far as I know, only maintain that people have the right to pursue their interests (so long as the rights of others to pursue theirs are also respected).
I would actually turn the question around on those who support government control of consensual exchange. Who regulates the regulators? It cannot be voters, since it is not in the average voter’s own interest to become informed of the candidates and issues on the ballot. It is also not in the average voter’s interest to research which bills and regulations are currently under discussion after the election. As David Friedman said, “In the political system, market failure is the norm. If you think of the political system as a marketplace, we cannot expect individual rationality to produce group-rational results.”
I think it is unfortunate when government policies promote the interest of big business, but I believe it is a predictable occurrence when economic affairs are controlled to the extent that governments have to the power to make or break businesses in the first place.
As a libertarian, I support an equality of authority, meaning I necessarily oppose collectivist hierarchies (including racism, sexism, classism, able-ism and all the rest), which are used to evaluate people based on some group standard and not their own merits.
I support peaceful retaliation (such as boycotts, protests, confrontation, and social ostracism) against bigots. Those grassroots actions are what led to the earliest and most substantial victories in overturning Jim Crow laws. I do not think we need to receive any government’s permission to overturn discrimination, particularly when those governments have been so instrumental in enforcing it.
Anyhow, I do not mean to take up any more of your time. Thanks for the discussion.