Libertarianism

There's no question: government budgets are, by their very nature, just like that fat guy on the sofa. He knows he shouldn't eat that bag of potato chips, that he should lay off the Snickers and that having cheeseburgers every night is really truly not a good idea. He can feel the flesh jiggle when he walks and he gets embarrassed at the sight of himself--but still he eats. From time to time he puts himself on a diet and loses some weight and tells all his friends about how much weight he's lost. His friends congratulate him and then politely look the other way when the diet just kinda disappears and the weight just kinda reappears. Governments, and their budgets, are exactly like that.

So I am, in principle, sympathetic to the broad aims of the libertarian movement. I can walk down the movement's list of principal aims and check them off one by one. "Government should be smaller?" Yep, it really should. "Government should be less intrusive?" Oh my lordy yes. "Government should not be enslaved to corporate interests?" Yes, yes and yes. "Government should not be in the business of aggressive, imperial war?" Halleleujah!

But then that pesky little question asserts itself: "How exactly do you go about achieving these ends?" And, more importantly, "Just how small a government are we talking, here?"

So I did a little research today (and yes, maybe it's true that a little research is a dangerous thing). The best summary I've yet found of the ideals of the Libertarian Party of America (which is not quite the same thing as libertarianism) is here, in a Wall Street Journal article written by the late Harry Browne when he was running for President in 2000. And there are some serious places where I find myself saying "Whoa, wait a second."

Browne writes, "I want to get the federal government completely out of every area where it's made such a mess--health care, education, law enforcement, welfare, foreign aid, corporate welfare, highway boondoggles, farm subsidies." Farm subsidies and corporate welfare, yes; but if you take the federal government out of law enforcement, does that mean there is no longer an FBI to hunt for missing persons who have been taken across state lines? Does it mean there is no longer a federal grand jury to prosecute multistate crimes like those perpetrated by Enron? Highways may inevitably incite graft and corruption, but isn't it better to have a national highway system than not?

And what's wrong with welfare for people who've fallen on hard times? When I was very young, my mom got sick for a while and we had to accept food stamps. Then she got better and went back to work and didn't have to take the food stamps anymore; but it sure was nice that we didn't starve in the meantime. As Jimmy Stewart says in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it's important that there always be "a little bit of lookin' out for the other fella." I feel the same way about foreign aid: sure it gets abused, but if we can help then we should, and I just don't believe that private charities and free trade would take up all of the slack.

Besides, people really aren't so good at regulating themselves. Remember what I wrote about Miami drivers after the hurricane? When authority disappeared, there was chaos, and it persisted for months. Harry Browne and I, as good citizens, are pretty damn good at understanding and practicing our place in the social contract; but in a population this large, even a small percentage of those who don't give a shit about the social contract can really fuck things up for the rest of us.

It boils down to this, for me: there are certain things that only a nationwide governmental effort can really accomplish. The shining example from our recent history is federal legislation that put in place many of the goals of the civil rights movement, namely the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There's no way Southern states were going to allow such measures to pass on a state-by-state basis. (And I say that as a native who loves the South.) Read almost any page at random from Taylor Branch's superb Parting the Waters for ample evidence of this. Only a concerted federal effort, with law enforcement backing, was going to get the George Wallaces of the world to ever back down.

So I just can't bring myself to actually become a capital-L Libertarian. For grins, I took "The World's Smallest Political Quiz," a ten-question Q&A that then scores you on the Nolan scale of political thought, and I came out as a Centrist--but right on the border between Liberal and Centrist, with a leaning toward Libertarianism. Pretty damn accurate for such a short quiz.