Fight, Fight Libertarians and Conservatives Fight!
Don't Mess with DanielWell, I'm going to have to collect all the links to relevant posts in this blog throw down between myself and the libertarians when it actually starts to wind down. But for now:
Though it is now in the references to my original post on the matter - I would like to draw special attention to Daniel Larison's thoughts on Will Wilkinson's body slamming of me yesterday. That's the word that Joanna of Fey Accompli used.
Nothing is more entertaining than having a confirmed non-conservative tell a confirmed conservative what conservatism is and is not. It is as silly as my entering into the fray about who is and is not a "real" libertarian or what constitutes "real" libertarianism, as if I would care anyway. But note the condescension here, which goes beyond telling someone what his own political philosophy "really" is: Michael is "toying with" these ideas, as if no serious person could actually hold them, and these ideas are "poisonous" (and, as we saw above, "repugnant and dangerous" to boot!), which means that no decent person could hold them. Nice. - Daniel Larison
Daniel brings heavy artillery in the battle of ideas. He has more thoroughly stated objections to the libertarian position on economics (often assumed to be the only one) - here and over here.
In them, he doesn't merely propose the question about the social costs of the free market - but positively answers that the free market as conceived today is deleterious to good social order.
In an earlier discussion between libertarians and conservatives (specifically, a Lew Rockwell contributor and the folks at the Rockford Institute). Daniel said the following:
We know perfectly well that "material advancement" results from this system (at least for a while)--that is, if I may be so bold, precisely one of the things wrong with it. It assumes that endless material advancement is good in itself and that it has no serious, negative consequences for human life. There has always been a fundamental choice, which is ultimately as simple as the choice between indulgence and restraint, and blithely pretending that it doesn't exist is a rather intellectually dishonest dodge of the issue.
We can "have it all" only in the sense that we can purchase things both old and new and maintain the fiction that we have nothing to lose but material deprivation, poor medicine and slow transportation. The cost of such "progress" is considerable, and it begins with the destruction of humane and well-ordered life. Simply put, man does not thrive, cultivate virtue or attain excellence in the modern city. He may possess a great many things, grow fat and live a life of ease, but the crucial point is that all of those things are regarded by the actual adherents of the eternal verities of our tradition as forms of vice, ruin and degradation. The "success" that libertarians and modernists of all kinds repeatedly point to for vindication is, I believe, exactly what the gentlemen at Chronicles find so objectionable. - Daniel Larison
No equivocating there. I think these two paragraphs are enough to send a libertarian shrieking.
But for my own interest - I wonder why libertarians generally get more excited about rather minor restraints on capitalism by people who believe in private property - than they do about wars and all sorts of unjust aggression by the state. Maybe they just feel it is their field. Their reaction is just like that of the most zealous stem cell scientists when challenged about the ethics of what they are doing. Ethics, you say? This is Progress you amateurs. That's with a capital P. You can't judge our results. And trust me, we get results. It's science!
Michael Brendan Dougherty
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Response: More on "Morality and Markets"It is encouraging when my writing is compared to heavy artillery, even when it is by a friend whose "position" that "artillery" was supporting. At the very least, that means that my words are having some impact and have (we... -
Response: "On Cultural Libertarianism"
Reader Comments (67)
Good stuff on economics and culture. I have arrived at the considered opinion that the reason libertarians react with such spluttering fury is that even the suggestion that capitalism should be fettered in some respects is received as a personal threat. In their economism, in their belief that accquisition is the end of life, libertarians do have a theory of the good. And just as it would be ludicrous to suggest to a Christian that he check out some new smut, it is, on, libertarian assumptions, ludicrous to suggest that the pursuit of mammon be limited. In each case, the suggestion is one that would derail the believer in his pursuit of the good.
You're proposing denying them their form of salvation, and that's why their monitors are flecked with spittle.
Okay Max, who or what should be regarded as the fundamental political datum if not the individual?
Any way you look at it, the end of democracy is near. Call it the "Judgment of God" if you like, or simply the fact that a self-ruling decadent people will naturally descend into anarchy and someone will have to take over. Just pray that God has mercy and sends us a Franco instead of an Ayatollah Khomeini to punish us. I can't bear losing my home and ancestral lands to the Islamic infidel.
Unintelligible. It never, in the end, develops beyond the assertion of wish.
Privilege? From whence does this ‘privilege. devolve? You might as well attempt to claim that walking down the street is a privilege. Liberty is by nature natural to man because it is by nature a virtue. As St. Robert Belarmine points out. The authority of the state devolves from the individual elements which constitute the state and are prior to the state. The state is not prior to man because final cause rests in each individual. With the state’s final cause being according to those men which constitute the state. Thus self-rule is by nature prior to kingly rule since the king exists for the good of his subjects as instrumental cause to the final cause.
Or to put it more simply. Your argument is ass backward..
There is a difference between speaking of the responsibilities of statesmen on the one hand and the right of the people to defy said statesmen on the other. Granted, the state exists to preserve a society, and society so that individual humans can survive. There have been good kings and there have been evil kings. That does not mean that individual humans have an objective "right" to control the society or state. Indeed, our current government suggests that we are not doing such a bang-up job at all.
Moreover, Christ came and died with us in mind, yet we must still seek salvation on His terms.
However, my strongest objection against viewing liberty as a natural "right" is that it is too vague and broad-sweeping. Liberty to do what? Watch porn? No one has any "right" to do anything immoral. Convert to Islam? Such a false and wicked religion, in the words of Pius XII, "has no right to exist, to multiply or be spread." Another Pope said something to the effect of, "About the rights of man, the people have heard enough; it is time that we speak of the obligations of man and the rights of God."
The liberty to walk down the street is indeed a privilege, not an absolute right. It is by the grace of God that one exists at all. A man in jail for larceny can't well walk down that street, nor should he be able to.
Finally, Maximos' debunking of the notion of natural rights is one of the most astute (and short!) critiques of libertarianism around. Keep it up.
Sorry Max and Nich,
Your philosophy here falls down when you start talking about society. The term is meaningless until we get a definition. After all, all those atoms who are selfishly acting for their own benefit, when confronted by you to stop, would ask, why in this great earthly realm, you, Max and Nich have the right to confront them, what are you going to say? I suspect you'll come up with something from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "Because the Lady of the Lake gave me the Sword Excalibur."
Have you even looked at the Lew Rockwell site? The rockwellian libertarians certainly care about 'restraints on capitalism' but are much more rabid about the wars and unjust aggression by the state. Specifically the slogan of opposing the 'welfare warfare state' is quite common.
Perhaps the proper response of society in such confrontations would be that there will be no reason-giving, because it is fruitless, vain, and masturbatory to attempt to reason with the deranged. And someone who runs about asking, "Who gave you the right?"; or blurts something to the effect of, "You can't make me!" is, at the least, psychologically stunted, having never advanced beyond, oh, the age of 14. Society needs no more reason to tell someone not to, say, take five wives, or sire bastards, than a father has need of reasons to tell his children to be home by 9 PM.
I defer to your superior logic and when society demands my son in conscription, I shall cheerfully give him because "society" undefined as it is demands the sacrifice and I do not want to appear childish in the eyes of either you or Nich er sorry the ever mature Don Moses.
Of course, Michael has looked at the Rockwell site, as have we all. No one doubts their opposition to the war and the "warfare state" in general, nor do we doubt the general commitment of people at Cato to opposing it. Also, the overwhelmingly libertarian slant of Antiwar is hard to miss.
What Michael was getting at was the level of outrage that minor critiques of capitalism (which is all that he made) incite in many libertarians. This is outrage that typically exceeds that even of their contempt for "red-state fascism," which is considerable, especially I think because it comes from the very people whom they have come to expect to be allies on questions of war, the scope of government, etc.
Thus Michael's "Ross Douthat may have a good point about growth harming morals" essay was met with what sure seemed like howling invective. What is also striking is the complete lack of proportion. On the one hand, the GOP administration starts a useless war and kills tens of thousands and are duly called many bad things by many libertarians (though not by all, I would remind you), and on the other a paleo makes a modest suggestion that capitalism has some negative side effects on the moral health of communities and he is labeled with precisely the same names. Why? Because, it seems to me, libertarians generally view everyone not themselves as incipient "statists" in one form or another just waiting to strike. They attack all of them with the same fervour and indignation, no matter how different the targets are.