Re: Information sheet thingie
Seth David Schoen (schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU)
18 Dec 1997 10:51:46 GMT
(Sorry, another long political rant in the middle here...)
Kevin Dempsey Peterson writes:
>"government does more harm than good" - you're right, this isn't
>totally agreed upon. I don't want to try to do complicated moral
>arguments, since all I want is something so that people will get an
>idea of what libertarianism is, and where to get more information.
>How about "the costs of government far outway the benefits, in terms
outweigh. (Sorry.)
>of lost freedom and economic harm"?
Deont doesn't like weighing anything; we tend to say that the cost of
lost freedom is infinite and such. So it's only in a somewhat narrow
sense that something infinite can be said to "outweigh" something finite.
(In other words, policy is not supposed to be an engineering kind of
judgment, and it would be good to avoid the traditional impression that
government is like engineering with people rather than materials.)
However, it is a more satisfactory wording to me because it doesn't suggest
that the _only_ point is that "Government Doesn't Work" (as Harry Browne
would have it on almost every issue). For me, it's "Government Doesn't
Work As Well As You Thought, And More Importantly, It Didn't Ask You First".
But this wording is far preferable from my point of view than the other.
>The "drastically less government" works too. I'll have to take a look at
>that section.
Cool. I think that's an LP thing. "Drastic" is a good word to show that
libertarians aren't moderate, while admitting that they might not be able
to do everything they hope to at once.
I think I _have_ heard the word "drastic" in several LP documents and
speeches.
>More issues - yes, more issues are a good idea. I can't think of
>anything to say about religious freedom, though. I hate the right on
>this issue, don't know the left's position, and since I totally
>dispise churches, it'd probably be better if someone else wrote that
>part.
The LP caters to religious people more than I'd like, but it is mostly
neutral. As many on the right have been appropriate by religious
conservatives (or maybe the other way around, as most people think),
religion and theocratic politics are something the left especially
despises.
The libertarians are friendlier to atheists' desires for "freedom from
religion" than the Republicans are. They're also pretty serious about
generic religious freedom issues when they impact the government, but
perhaps the best selling point is that they basically _don't_ think
religion is an issue, and they're willing to say so.
Most Democrats are reluctant to distance themselves from religion, even
when they're better friends to separation of Church and State than the
Republicans are; they tend to rely on stirring up religious _feeling_,
even if they might not use it as a source of social policy. (Look at how
many religious events Clinton has participated in while President, and
how much he uses religion in his speeches, and look at how many moderate
leftists are associated with liberal churches or other religious groups.)
Somehow I don't think Harry Browne would say "Thank you, and God bless
America" in his inaugural address.
>"shoot you if you smoke pot" - yeah, stupid phrasing. I still haven't
>thought of a good way to explain the idea that I personally don't have
>the right to do what government does, therefore government doesn't
>either. I'd like a good visual example. Maybe I'll think of
>something.
It's hard to get a "physical" example on a lot of this stuff, unfortunately.
In fact, reading some of the anti-libertarian FAQs on the web (like Mike
Huben) I see that this issue (the uniqueness of government sovereignty)
is a major critique point against libertarians. In particular, almost nobody
else accepts the view that government doesn't deserve special rights. (They
argue about what those special rights _are_, but they say they're there;
social contract and all.)
They therefore complain that the "shoot you if you do X" arguments are
misleading because they're just an enforcement of a law like other laws
libertarians do want enforced. (Of course, not all libertarians are as
"tough on crime" as the LP; I'd love to chat with people about that sometime,
because it seems like an interesting and contentious issue.) But they
continue by saying that, for example, if you do something a libertarian
doesn't like, the libertarian _will_ ask people with guns to come and
prevent that person from doing that thing.
So the problem becomes that of showing the morally significant difference
between victimless crimes and nonvictimless crimes. Huben et al. claim
that tax resistance, for example, is a nonvictimless crime because it
violates the social contract. So there's really a much deeper argument
implicit in any of these things, which makes them tricky.
Nonetheless, in everyday life, many people forget that public policy is
enforced on people who may be unwilling, and efforts to dramatize this may
make people less favorably inclined toward government than they once were.
The best examples of this may be public policies which are now seen to have
been misguided, problematic, or discriminatory. If government power to
create any public policy (the LP's "social goals" in the statement you
sign) is removed, then they can't do anything bad. Yes, they can't do
anything good, either, but they can't do anything bad.
And that, in fact, is one of my main reasons for being a libertarian: I
don't think it's vital to ensure that good things are done, but I think it's
vital to ensure that bad things are not done. (That's why I believe only
in negative rights and not in positive rights anymore.) Very isolated and
limited examples of this principle exist in the more theoretical aspects
of American law. My best example is the old maxim that "it's better to let
a hundred guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man".
I think this is well-applied to public policy -- it's better to pass up the
opportunity to enact a hundred beneficial and fair public policies in order
to avoid enacting.
Similarly, in Brandeis's wonderful dissent (a dissent, of course, not a
majority opinion!) in Olmstead v. U.S. (277 U.S. 438):
The court's aid is denied only when he who seeks it has
violated the law in connection with the very transaction as to which
he seeks legal redress. Then aid is denied despite the defendant's
wrong. It is denied in order to maintain respect for law; in order to
promote confidence in the administration of justice; in order to
preserve the judicial process from contamination. The rule is one, not
of action, but of inaction. ...
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials
shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to
the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will
be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our
government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for
ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious.
If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it
invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To
declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end
justifies the means-to declare that the government may commit crimes
in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal-would bring
terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court
should resolutely set its face.
Brandeis warns us that the ends don't justify the means, asks that crimes
should go unpunished so that government may follow abstract moral principles,
and at the same time asks that the government be held to the same standards
to which it seeks to hold individuals. (This is the same dissent in which
Brandeis called privacy "the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive
of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men"!)
Anyway, Brandeis had here the same terror that the government should possibly
do anything wrong in its desire to do good (here, to enforce Prohibition);
I think the example combines these points very strongly.
The "omnipresent teacher" quotation is actually precisely what I believe
about government in my occasional non-anarchist phases. If there is to
be a government and laws, they should follow closely exactly what Brandeis
describes here.
>More books - Bergland and Browne are the most common recommendations
>for "I know nothing about Libertarianism, and I want to know about
>it." If there's a book that more closely matches the moral rather
>than economic arguments against government thatpeople in the club seem
>to like better, I'l love to hear of it.
I had some ideas, but I forgot them. I'll look again.
>BLU - how about "There is a more discussion oriented group, the
>Berkeley Libertarian Union (BLU), that can be reached through Jennie
>dal Busco, minerva@uclink4"? Or, I'll just ask Jennie for a short
>description of the group (since I've only been to two meetings)
Cool.
--
Seth David Schoen L&S '01 (undeclared) / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo
custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque
infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus. -- Cicero, in Catilinam I