It seems to me that whenever a person makes the decision to "identify" as a "right libertarian" or as a "left libertarian", their loyalty is never to the libertarian part.
I've watched it happen time after time.
As soon as they are forced to make a choice, the "libertarian" gets tossed aside in favor of the "left" or "right" statist or "social" position.
That seems completely backwards to me. Why keep the trash and toss out the treasure?
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Interesting. If you have the time, could you please let me know where I've tossed "libertarian" aside in favor of a "left" statist or "social" position?
ReplyDeleteAs with most posts of this type, this was based on and inspired by observations of lots of people on Twitter. Instead of getting into a pointless tweetfight with them after reading some of those tweets, I wrote my observations here.
DeleteAs far as I can remember (with a possible exception for some "right libertarians" on Twitter screaming for "strong border control" and trying to make libertarian-sounding justifications for it) I haven't called anyone out in person for doing this. Nor will I start now.
I agree that supposed libertarians abandoning libertarianism where it conflicts with something they really, really, really want is an interesting problem.
DeleteFor instance, I know this one guy who fantasizes a magic bubble that makes it okay trespass on (that is, steal the use of) other people's property if the property owners require going disarmed as a condition of that use.
But it's never struck me as a specifically "right" versus "left" kind of thing. More a problem with the difficulty of putting philosophical consistency before personal desire.
I have noticed some people who are so distressed by the society they live within having completely dismissed the right of free association, that they try to use a fabricated extension of property rights to compensate for the loss, rather than defend the right of free association. They even extend this so-called “property” right in a way that justifies the abrogation or denial of other’s basic human birthrights when these individuals are present on their physical real estate rather than simply asserting, as they have every right to do, that they just don’t want them on their legitimately owned space. Curious, that in response to societies violation of an aspect of their right they then compound the error and try to justify an even more reactionary and serious violation of other’s primary and inalienable rights rather than reassert the one society has taken from them. But then this isn’t the first time, nor will it probably be the last, that I see the ‘two wrongs make a right’ attempt at a solution instead of the ‘eliminate the wrong ‘ choice option as this seems sometimes to be the default behavior of the human species.
ReplyDelete"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one." ~ ------ H.L. Mencken