Recovering libertarian
Sep. 24th, 2016 07:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supergeeIn the 70s I was a libertarian (or perhaps just a fellow traveler; they never gave me a card to carry). The reason I’m not anymore is that we won. When I joined, people were going to jail for using the f-word in books or onstage; abortion and nonstandard but consensual sex were illegal almost everywhere; marijuana was legally indistinguishable from heroin; the state could arbitrarily refuse marriage to couples just because they both had the same sort of bits; the cops were in the men's rooms peeping or entrapping; etc.
OK, so there’s still work to be done. Total drug decriminalization is still in the future, as is minding our own business in Asia, but what we’re mostly left with is the bad parts. Privatizing the prisons was sort of a reductio ad absurdum of the horrors government was protecting us from, but our unlibertarian government is doing it and it’s at least as bad as was imagined. In the not entirely dissimilar area of schooling, private enterprise turns out to be even worse than the state, and the First World is right that medical care has to be socialized. In general, the Market is no better as a deity that will run everything right than the Dialectic or the violent prepuce collector who is supposed to have dictated all those rules in Leviticus.
Also in the Seventies, most of us had a good laugh when Secretary of the Interior James Watt said that his post didn’t require long-term policies because Armageddon would take care of all that. Gary Johnson has a longer-range secular approach: Wait for the Sun to swallow us.
Thanx to Charles P. Pierce.
OK, so there’s still work to be done. Total drug decriminalization is still in the future, as is minding our own business in Asia, but what we’re mostly left with is the bad parts. Privatizing the prisons was sort of a reductio ad absurdum of the horrors government was protecting us from, but our unlibertarian government is doing it and it’s at least as bad as was imagined. In the not entirely dissimilar area of schooling, private enterprise turns out to be even worse than the state, and the First World is right that medical care has to be socialized. In general, the Market is no better as a deity that will run everything right than the Dialectic or the violent prepuce collector who is supposed to have dictated all those rules in Leviticus.
Also in the Seventies, most of us had a good laugh when Secretary of the Interior James Watt said that his post didn’t require long-term policies because Armageddon would take care of all that. Gary Johnson has a longer-range secular approach: Wait for the Sun to swallow us.
Thanx to Charles P. Pierce.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-24 05:48 pm (UTC)Mostly, though, it was watching the antics of the American executive class. I've concluded that large corporations are far too powerful, and combinations of workers, customers, and affected neighbours are ineffective at restraining them, when acting in those capacities. The best chance of reducing the bad effects of those corporations seems to be having those affected acting as citizens, enacting laws to reduce the worst of the bad effects. (It doesn't seem to be a very good chance. Just better than unions, or boycotts, or lawsuits from people affected by pollution and other "externalities" of business-as-usual.)
The really odd thing, though, was that I never noticed myself changing. As a resident alien, I have no ability to vote, so I've resolutely avoided paying attention to politics. But somehow, without quite noticing, I woke up and found out that if I'd had a vote, I'd have been supporting Bernie Sanders.