The first of four articles illustrating my issues with certain political viewpoints. by Logical Premise
(statist)
Monday, November 28, 2011
I've been posting on Nolan Chart for a while,but not recently, since I've been extremely busy with work. But the recent spate of news about canidates and the talk of once-ridiculed names now tossing their ossified corpses back in the political ring has gotten me to thinking again.
The main problem, of course, in the election, is that you have only a few real choices. There's Obama, if you like your thinly-veiled socialist elite club , and then there is a spate of so-called "christian" canidates, who are not only completely hypocritical but incoherent on policy or the idea that the country is not supposed to be a Christian version of Iran, no matter how much that galls them. There is the old GOP dependibles, which have no answers, and the semi-neocons, who have new, bad answers.
And of course, gentle readers, there is Ron Paul, but you already guessed who this article was gonna be about anyway, didn't you?
My prediction is that Ron Paul will get more media attention and more votes this year than in previous years, and will still lose. He will lose, because Libertarian thought is fundamentally flawed when it comes to facing the reality that is and always has been America.
Let's get some things out of the way first. I don't throw punches at Libertarians because I'm an ex-IRS collections agent who is now profiting mostly off of government waste, fraud and abuse (actually the cleaning up of such, without fixing any of the actual problems). And I don't throw punches because I dislike Libertarians -- if they were the only ones in the country, the country would probably do amazingly well in some ways, provided things were implemented with intellect.
I throw punches because it's a bad idea, because it's unrealistic, because it will never work, and because the energy , integrity and intellect wasted on trying to bring it to fruition could be spent actually making things better.
Let us begin. My basic problem with the concept is that it rests on a fundamentally bad idea. Freedom and liberty, while certainly good and important, are not the only good and important things in a society, or as values or markers in life. If the failure of Liberals is the stupid idea that society can run on altruism and multicultural assimilation alone, then libertarians fail in thinking you can run a society based on being self-interest and individualism. No extreme works. Security is as important as freedom, as without it, one is conquered or plundered. Family and love have nothing to do with freedom and are often more constraining than laws. Customs and traditions are hardly freedom, they are confining , but are also what defines our nations.
My second problem is that the platform is unrealistic. What happens when society needs to restrict the freedom of the press to prevent spies from learning how to attack us? What if a free society had to resort to the draft in order to remain free from invasion? What if it needed to outlaw the import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution? Pah. There is more to any society than mere "freedom" but that is all they can preach. Oh, they sometimes try to avoid this logical fallacy by reducing all reality to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, embraces everything -- love, religion, etc. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature. Exercise and eating right are good because nature makes them so, not becuase we like going to LA Fitness or Whole Foods. Fair and equal justice is good because it does not allow the innocent to be punished, not because of some moral choice.
You think long enough this way and what's to say the life of a murdering gangbanger is not just as valid, and as worthy a life as that of , say, Ron Paul? Mm?
My third problem is that it will never work, and you are wasting your time. Total and unfettered freedom today would just be a way of putting off problems for another day. Ironically in that it says choice is everything, it actually makes no rael choices. It instead leads to more farked up conundrums. It would have no problem with slavery, oddly enough, if the slave was property prior to the implementation of the law, but ironically has issues with the laws that freed slaves and gave them equal rights to white men. It doesn't like the control of or regulation of economics, but avoids the fact that the most rigidly controlled economies, like Japan and China, are booming, while ones with no government control , like Russia, much of Africa, and parts of South America, are in ruins. And of course, it invalidates itself. Libertarians have been on the ballet for many, many years, but they won very few actual seats or reins of government at any time. They champion choice, but ironically , the people don't ever seem to chose them. There is no libertarian governments, and there never have been. The ugly side of this is that there is a distinct feeling -- and some of the articles on here channel it -- that people are sheep and that a libertarian government should just be installed.
So, wait. You're just a pack of know-it-alls who *think* you are better than everyone else, and while you say "Freedom of choice" you secretly just want to impose your own form of authoritarian and economic stranglehold, invalidating your own premise. And if you do ,what then? You champion ideas like money issued by private banks and local government control , but these ideas have been tried and found wanting. You uphold an economic model that has been predicting economic collapse since the 1880's and has never ONCE been proven correct. You champion unregulated drugs, but refuse to consider that the people who produce such are becoming increasingly violent and political and that legalization will just end up funding violent forigners who, by the way, feel white men stole their lands and future.
It's all very tiring. Ron Paul is a great guy, a very good speaker, and seems to mean what he says. And I certainly agree the country is in a mess, and no, I don't have any magical answers to fix it. What I councel avoiding, however, is the presumption that trying something "new and radical" that's based on ideas never updated since the 18th century will improve society. What I forsee is people becoming frustrated because instead of coming together to make compromises and solve problems, everyone wants things their way and only their way, and the Libertarians are no different.
Demanding absolutes is the first sign of the unbalanced mind. Without compromise, without the ability to adapt what is good from other viewpoints, you have no freedom. And if the libertarians become that way it would be irony writ large.I expect people to disagree with me strongly. I expect to be insulted, to be called "un-American", "communist", blah blah blah.
The bottom line is that for a so-called philosophy that champions freedom as a central credo, it doesn't want to allow the freedom of conflicting or contrarian viewpoints. It can only work if you presume that all other approaches are flawed or evil. And if you only have one choice, well..that is not freedom in any dictionary.
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