I received a private message from someone close to me who indicated that Ron Paul was the only candidate he thought he might support for President. I have many contacts on the Internet who are strong supporters of Paul, and most of them claim the title “Libertarian”, which arguably is the position Paul represents. I have my concerns. I think Paul is one of the most intelligent people in American politics, and he might well make a good President of these United States; but there are aspects of Libertarianism, at least as it appears in his platform, that I find troublesome. This, then, should not be taken as an attack on Paul, nor on Libertarianism, nor indeed an attack at all, but simply my expression of my concerns about a few issues about which he and other Libertarians seem to be in agreement.
I should preface this by stating that I have always considered myself an independent, and am the son of independents, but that I have also tended to be conservative, seeing at a very early age that it is very hard to go back to what was. Zymurgy’s Law of Evolving Dynamic Systems has proved true in the political and social areas as well: if you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can it is to use a bigger can. The last Democrat I supported at the national level was Carter, and I supported third-party-candidate Anderson in the Carter-Reagan race, but have since supported Republican candidates in national offices almost exclusively, for reasons that will appear later.
Welfare
I am very acutely aware that the welfare system in this country is badly in need of overhaul. Although it cannot be said that the majority of Americans are on public assistance, I have seen indicators that show that that such recipients form the majority of voters in most key voting districts of most heavily populated areas, and thus that politicians who support increasing the amount of money going to those who cannot or do not support themselves have a greater chance of being elected nationally. I have also seen the “entitlement program” mentality first-hand, and I think that calling the kindness of others moderated through government organization “entitlement” is symptomatic of the problem. We have too many grasshoppers (who think the world owes them a living) and not enough ants (who work to provide it).
However, the strict conservative view that all such programs should be eliminated, even in a gradual process, suffers from a flaw it fails to see. We might say that it lacks compassion–a charge that can be raised in relation to most of my objections to Libertarian policy–but I think that it is more problematic than that.
The mistake lies in assuming that most people are generous enough that without government coercion the haves would provide amply for the have-nots. We want to believe this about ourselves, that we are basically generous people. Yet there is an economic reality that mitigates against this. Certainly in times of abundance we freely give from our surplus to meet the needs of those who for whatever reason do not directly benefit from national prosperity. Yet it is in the nature of economics that we have cycles, periodic downturns; and the more we do to delay these, the steeper and more severe they are when they come. During those times of scarcity, we recognize that what we have is barely enough to meet our own perceived needs, and so we give less to meet the needs of others. It is a bit like Tevye’s beggar, asking, “So because you had a bad week I should suffer?” Yet when we have a bad year, the poor suffer the most because those who would give to them are struggling themselves.
There are three other factors that are significant in this.
One is that the higher you are on the economic ladder, the more isolated you are from those on the bottom. It is easy to understand Marie Antoinette’s error, that if the peasants have no bread they should make do by eating cake instead. From the perspective of some, poverty is having only one car and two televisions, and not being able to dine at the Tavern on the Green or vacation in Europe. Those who are close enough to the poor to see the plight of homelessness, of lack of food and clothing, of the cycle that you can’t get a job because you have no car and you can’t get a car because you have no job, don’t have enough to spare to make a difference. Those who might be able to make a difference are too far removed from the problem to see the need as it is.
Second, the Rockefeller story has great merit. For those who do not know, when there was only one Rockefeller, one wealthy magnate controlling that vast fortune, someone approached him and asked if it wouldn’t be better to have a system that distributed wealth more evenly. Rather than object that he had earned his fortune fairly, Rockefeller agreed and said from that moment he was going to begin distributing his wealth evenly with everyone beginning with this man–and promptly gave him a dime. The top fraction of a percent of the wealthy have a lot of money, but it’s not that much if we take it from them and give it to the vast poor, particularly granted that we can only take it all once.
But there is an aspect that has nothing to do with the wealthy; it has to do with the people in the middle. When the economy booms, we all feel secure, and we feel we can afford more. We buy bigger houses, or second cars, or swimming pools. We improve our lives in ways that have maintenance costs which in times of prosperity are easily met. Then when the times of scarcity come, we still have those maintenance costs. We have even less to share with the less fortunate.
Voluntary charity has never been sufficient to eliminate poverty. Those who believe it will are making exactly the same mistake as the communists they most despise. That mistake is in believing in the basic altruism of humans, that all of us will give to relieve the suffering of others even if we have to give until it hurts, and that when times change such that it hurts more we will give more. The reality is that most of us will give whatever pittance will make us feel good about our own altruism, and believe that if everyone else were as generous as we are poverty would be eliminated.
Thus I am persuaded that we cannot eliminate all social welfare programs no matter how poorly they work now, no matter how much they now encourage dependency instead of diligence. We need these programs. We need to fix them, certainly, but we cannot expect individual charity to fill the need.
Military
One of the most touted planks in the Libertarian platform is the idea that we should cut back the military primarily by bringing home the troops. It is noted that we have American military bases all over the world, and we are told that these create bad feeling against us as we prop up governments that are not kind to their people. If we closed all foreign military installations, stopped providing troops around the world, and pared down the military to something just large enough to manage our own defense, we would save a substantial part of the budget and reduce the need for such a large army by no longer making ourselves a target.
Again we have a lack of compassion displayed here. This type of isolationism communicates to the rest of the world that we do not care if they all kill each other as long as they leave us alone. The idea that a Kuwait could be invaded by an Iraq and that’s just too bad for Kuwait because we’ll buy Kuwaiti oil from Iraq after the dust settles is offensive to anyone who claims to care about the lives of people elsewhere in the world. The statement that all that is necessary for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing was made in part about the actions of nations. If America withdraws its military support from allies elsewhere, the world will be the worse for it.
However, the issue goes deeper than merely whether we ought to care about the welfare of other nations. The fact is that we have a self-interest–not whether we can buy Kuwaiti oil at acceptable prices, but whether we have allies in a world with new divisions. The Domino Theory of the 1960s (that communism would overcome all the nations of the world one at a time until the United States stood alone against a worldwide communist dictatorship) was certainly simplistic, but it was not entirely without merit. We are faced by Oriental Communism, Middle-eastern Jihadism, and other groups, each of which is seeking to expand its influence. One of the arguments of that earlier time was that those countries we do not support will get their support from our enemies, and so become our enemies. The fact that many of those little skirmishes were very much about America and Russia funding and supporting opposite sides (one the government and the other the rebels) may seem silly in retrospect, but it was an intelligently long-sighted view in some ways, as power on the world stage is comprised largely of the number of countries that will agree with you.
Are we overextended militarily and financially? Almost certainly we are. It is again an area in which we need to make intelligent decisions to reorganize, to reduce our spending and our levels of commitment, without losing our allies or our international influence. To shut it all down is as foolish as to launch new wars. To think that all terrorism against us is inspired by our military presence abroad and will end when we withdraw is a dubious view of Islamic terrorism. The most devoted do not oppose us because we support Israel, nor because we support moderate governments, but because we allow people who are not Muslims to live under laws that are not Sharia, and we prosper in ways that they do not.
Moral Issues
I have left these to the end, because to me they are the most important, but they are also important for the more personal of reasons. That is, I have definite opinions on the subjects of abortion and homosexual rights, and I have clear and defensible reasons for my opinions which are not the subject of this article, and I understand that there are many who do not share my opinions. The short form is that I am against abortion in most cases and I am against treating homosexuality as if it were normative. On the latter, I believe that the civil rights of homosexuals ought to be defended, to the same degree that I believe that those of alcoholics and those with mental illness ought to be defended, but I do not believe that we should as a society suggest that we consider homosexuality to be other than an aberration. It ought not be criminal, but it ought not be encouraged, either.
What matters is that I support conservative candidates as opposed to liberal ones primarily because of these issues. They are, if you like, my “hot buttons”. As an independent, I recognize that all the political parties, even the fringe groups, represent at least some worthy ideals, some moral values that ought to be defended. Choosing between them is a matter of deciding which of those moral values is most important to me. What I consider the murder of an unimaginable number of preborn children every year is the single most important issue to my mind, and as long as one party continues to support that ongoing slaughter and the other opposes it, I will stand with the opposition.
The Libertarian position, though, is that these “moral” questions are none of my business. If women want to kill their children the government should not be involved unless the children have reached a defined age or state of development that makes them “citizens”. If people who see themselves as homosexual couples want to have the same same legal status as heterosexual couples, the government should not make such a discriminatory distinction. (I do not think the distinction discriminatory, which I explain in In Defense of Marriage, but that again is a separate issue at this point.) Ron Paul is against abortion, but he is more against having the government involved in the matter. That to me is a serious problem, and might cause him to lose my vote. After all, if the position taken on what I regard the most important issue is functionally the same no matter who wins, then I must make my decision based on whatever issues I consider next in importance, and it might be that the termination of social welfare programs seems a worse evil to me than their continuation as they are, and that would mean at least one long-time conservative independent will vote for the Democratic candidate.
What matters, though, isn’t that they will lose my vote, but that they will lose an entire block of voters who hold similar views. Parties in the American political system are coalitions, or they are inconsequential third-party wannabes. The Greens, the Socialists, the Communists, all fail because despite their size every issue is a minority party draw. You win national elections by building platforms to which people with different priorities agree. One of those coalition members in the Republican party is the Religious Right, the people who are there because the Republicans include their opposition to abortion and homosexuality among that for which the party stands. Whether those people will find a home with the Democratic party is doubtful; but they will not continue to support a Republican party that ignores their concerns in favor of a hands-off-moral-issues viewpoint. And the Republicans cannot win without them. They won’t lose all of them immediately. Some will stay on the basis that at least some of the party’s other positions are better than the opposition. But these issues will not die, and the Republican party might if it thinks for a moment that any one of its coalesced groups is the true definition of its policies.
That ultimately is the problem of having the Republican party put forward a purely Libertarian candidate like Paul: it fails to recognize the coalition, and so risks breaking it. I would not necessarily vote against Paul; I think again that he may be the most intelligent candidate in the field. Yet if he fails to recognize the importance of embracing the values of others in the Republican coalition, he will either remain a fringe candidate or turn the Republicans into a fringe party.
That is why I am not a Libertarian.
