Over at the Conspiracy, Randy Barnett w
rites:
Even if, as many Libertarians believe, governments themselves inherently violate rights, it does not follow (as some Libertarians appear to assume) that everything such an unjust institution does is a rights violation. Consider mail delivery. The post office may be an unjust monopoly (and unconstitutional to boot), but the letter carrier who coincidentally is walking up my driveway as I type this) is not violating my rights by delivering my mail. Likewise, even if the government of the United States is an unjust institution, this does not make everything (or anything) done by the U.S. Army a rights violation. ... One of the biggest errors made by Libertarian anarchists is assuming that because an institution is an unjust monopoly (because it confiscates its income by force and puts its competitors out of business by force), this makes everything such institutions do also unjust. The latter proposition simply does not follow from the former.Do people really believe this crap? The post office is an "unjust monopoly"? [Assuming a requirement of universal service, core postal services probably constitute a public good, at least for most of our history. (See post below.)] The government as a whole is "unjust"? Please. I doubt whether Barnett believes such nonsense, but his post implies that some people do. Unfathomable. Here then we find the essential difference between sensible conservatism and the lunacy of libertarian anarchy. I plan to do more on this over the weekend. Suffice it for now to direct you to an oldie but goodie:
Let me simply quote [Russell] Kirk on this one: "[I]n any tolerable society, order is the first need. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is reasonably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract Liberty. Conservatives, knowing the 'liberty inheres in some sensible object', are aware that freedom may be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the Constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable "liberty" at the expense of order the libertarians imperil the very freedom that they praise."
Their view of the state as the great oppressor, particularly their view of government as the state as the enemy. While conservatives often share the libertarian's concern over bloated and inefficient government, libertarians take this view too far. They often seem to join with Marx in seeking the withering away of the state. Conservatives realize that government is necessary for an ordered liberty. Again Kirk: "Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection."More to follow. But I cannot resist closing with this cheap shot from the pen of Father Richard John Neuhaus: "libertarianism remains in the largest part a thought experiment for college sophomores of all ages."
