[Ed. Note: While TFL has a letter section, we received the following comment on the essay The League of Free Nations: A South Park Solution to the UN Dilemma by Gary Jason that merits posting as a feature.]
I take it as obvious, as do millions of my fellow classical liberals, that the UN is a fatally flawed organization. (By “classical liberals” I mean those who advocate free markets and open democracies, which include all libertarians and a great many conservatives, and exclude modern “liberals,” not to mention socialists of every stripe.)
Comments:
So as a modern liberal I cannot be a classical liberal? By who’s authority? Is that a government rule and regulation somewhere? By who’s definition?
What if I am a liberal who thinks government welfare is always the worst case solution to any social problem? What am I then? What if I have trouble taking on faith the phrase, “God will take care of it” and “the market will take care of it”? When pressed, libertarians/Classical liberals are full of principle, short on solutions and pragmatic vision. Case in point is water law and other “collective resources”. In fact, if I may, its is the failure of libertarians/classical liberals to paint a positive vision, create a long visionary narrative, that makes their work all “stick, stick, stick, with no carrots and honey for the masses”. And that is SAD because my “progressive” friends are a LONG on visionary narrative with lots of carrots and honey for the masses….. indeed, that is what truly moves people.
Furthermore, what are modern liberals like my public school teaching parents, who see the teachers union as an obstacle to them privately negotiating a teacher’s contract with the school district of their choice? They want the right of the unfortunate amoung us to have a minimal social system there, down below the charity system (opposite of what we have today) to be 100% no one dies. Until libertarian/Classical Liberals can paint a social system that WILL NOT have human beings falling through the “cracks” of the Charitable system down below, then every decent caring person in the world will opt for a “compulsive social welfare system” that will “make sure” that won’t happen. I am rare modern liberal in that I doubt anything will be needed below the charitable system, “to sure it up so no one falls below”, but its just a hunch, and so it is with libertarian/classical liberals. Furthermore, sociobiology and anthropology tells us that in no human society has government NOT been held to such a standard.
What kind of liberal am I if I support full free trade and the civil rights of gays to adopt children, get married, and enjoy all the other civil rights that other members of this American society enjoy? What kind of modern liberal am I that find the works of the ACLU, the Green environmental movement, all just wonderful as long as it does not seek out government welfarist solutions? What kind of liberal is that? Not your kind? What is wrong with me that I enjoy porn, find the female naked body a work of art, love to see two women get it on, and thus find gay sex not disturbing at all? Does classical liberal/libertarian have anything to do with that? I submit it does, by association, a willing association of sexually challenged puritans. Perhaps I am the kind of liberal who votes for New Mexico ’s Governor Richardson, or Mike Gravel or Denis Kucinich. How is it that you can hang with a conservative who like Huckabee or Brownback or Tancrado, but can’t hang with a liberal who likes these three democrats for President? What I am saying is perhaps there is MORE in the name or label that meets the eye? I suggest it is so. What if I am the kind of Union loving liberal that sees the income tax as the culprit for chasing all the good union jobs out of this country, and so, would like to see corporate income tax abolished? Am I not your friend? Or am I still just a “modern liberal” or socialist or whatever name/box you wish to place me into? Most liberals hate this label box game, and they do so out of a strong desire to look at each issue on its own merits. What that makes them in the end, is secondary.
Sorry Gary, not all people fit into your neat little definitions and boxes and its unacceptable to write them out in your first sentence. Who are you trying to convince anyway? Those who agree with you already? That is not using the art of political persuasion, that is art of cultural identification. I must say that you should try to create LARGE grey areas, not boxes, because there is no freedom for people to move about inside a box. That box circumvents the mind, limits solutions and limits one’s friends and makes social life harder for us all.
May I suggest that where people come from politically, comes from first who they like to hang with in their pre-teen and early teen years, then later comes the label and only then comes the ideas behind the label. Sure, for ideologues it’s the other way around, but look how few ideologues there are. I suggest these people something like gays people, in that they get it all backwards. That does not mean it is wrong or bad for society that young ideologues consider ideas FIRST and everything else second or third, no. But I will share with you one clever libertarian essay ---I once read in Liberty ---it looked at liberals and conservatives from a “Freudian point of view”. In sum, Liberals, at a pre-teen age, get all hung up on envy of money and other money issues. Conservative pre-teens, on the other hand, get hung up on sexual desire and other sexual issues. It’s funny because it is more true than not. Now what then Gary for the over 40 mature men and woman who have grown wiser over their money or sexual hang ups? Where is the grey political area for them? Not in your box?
For me, I prefer the company of liberals culturally--perhaps that is a result of being a “make-out artist” in the eight grade with a few girls in the baseball field dugout. Who knows. Even though I am 46, totally down with the free market ---and do believe there is a collective wisdom within it that solves social ills--Adam Smith’s invisible hand idea as the best thing for everyone, I confess that I still cannot watch Paris Hilton without getting all worked up over her. Or how about her sidekick Ms. Ritchee, ---a Mexican adoptee, lucky to say the least, and not doing a dam thing for orphans everywhere, really tees me off. But so be it, those are my “modern” liberal instincts. Conservatives could care less about what she is NOT doing with her money, just all upset about what she is not wearing under her dress and what example THAT gives off.
The narrow minded sexually repressed culture of conservatives (that libertarians have hung their collective hats) has made libertarians as people very hard to stomach. This combined with their computer programmer late prepubescent nerdy-ness, like Beavus and Butthead really, combines to place them out of the cool culture and into the stuffed religious shirts of “modern” conservatism. This is not a complaint of libertarian/classical liberal principles or beliefs, …it’s a complaint about them culturally…..as not my kind of people. But like 40 something liberals and conservatives who rise above their money envy and sexual puritism, libertarian/classical liberals do not have to remain friends with their only friend who gives them a call now and then. They can buy a new shirt, get some stylish pants and be cool with the rest of us modern liberals.
Still don’t see it in cultural terms? Case in point, where are the interracial libertarian or classical liberal couples? Hell, where are the single women? There is nothing about libertarian/classical liberal theories that are so obtuse that anyone with a decent high school education can’t understand. It’s cultural. Perhaps this is why Gary REALLY why excludes modern liberals and socialists. It’s cultural, not his kind of people. He wants them in a cultural box. Socialists who moved over to libertarian viewpoints are rare, not because socialists are stupid unconcerned people, but because each side is guilty of making a sharp box line. Cross it, and we don’t talk. I know plenty of Conservative-libertarians who love Bush and the Iraq war and support the draft, yet they don’t loose the precious inclusion into Gary ’s box. Again, its cultural. Why can’t liberal-libertarians who hate Bush, the Iraq war, and the draft be included? Look in the mirror at two iconic individuals--Ralph Nader and Dinesh D'Souza …….. and ask yourself, why should I favor either of these two more than the other? They should both be welcome to my party---yet only Dinesh D’Souza gets invited to “Freedom Fest”. Nader is for Freedom, though you disagree with his means. D’Souza is for Freedom, though Ron Paul and most libertarians disagree with his means. Yes, its all cultural. Its time to stop with the boxes.
Give me a 1000 loving caring modern liberals who are altruistically trying to do good by society, and I will talk into the night in a pleasant meaningful and caring way…. And perhaps when I am done, I am sure to have all of them as friends and perhaps quite a few as seeing just how raising the minimum wage is a bad thing to do if one is concerned for the poor---which we liberals are. But as I said it is all a cultural thing in which self identity plays a big part. I would rather have as my intellectual friends a liberal who believes in yes government dole, yes to a flat 15% sales tax, no income tax, yes to a 50% estate tax, no to minimum wage, yes to unions, no to Bush’s Iraq war and no military draft, no US military bases outside the USA, and not have a problem with gay marriage, a threesome, a polygamist marriage, porno on the internet and hotel rooms, and openly legal prostitution. Instead, if one is to find company with these conservative - libertarians, it won’t be with someone who has an interracial marriage & an openly bisexual “non exclusive” lover, runs medical marijuana website, has a gay daughter & adopted boys, a union membership, and a healthy fear of corporations and corporate power over our lives. Why? Again, it’s a cultural thing.
So my point is that Classical Liberals and Libertarians have done themselves a GREAT harm (Much like the Greens have done) by making --consciously or not-- a cultural GROUP identification. There is no reason for it.
On a continuum of political beliefs, if some or many of libertarian Classical Liberal beliefs can be accepted by Conservatives, then there is no reason why modern liberals cannot accept some or many of those beliefs too. What prevents it is 100% cultural which inspire opening sentences like the one above.
What is very WEIRD is that Libertarians, a creature born of the Left, should be found sleeping around these sexually uptight and disgusting conservatives who care more about the fact that their daughter saw Brittney Spears shaved vagina, than not seeing Brittney Spears wonderful charity work---if she indeed has done any beyond what’s tax-inspired/compulsory. A real modern liberal is emotionally upset not about the shaved vagina (gee its nice and clean), but totally bothered by the fact that she DOES so little when there is so much SHE COULD DO---given her wealth and fame. This is the reason liberals still love Princess Diana and Angela Jollie, its what they have done.
Libertarians and Classical Liberals would do well --- in my opinion -- in finding new friends with modern liberals and if that means libertarians must become cool, laid back, and cool with the idea of government helping out as the “last resort”, then so be it. Take it as a personal challenge to derive and spell out a possible foreseeable market solution to social problems. Make it a personal challenge to “Paint the vision, make the sweet as honey narrative” that expands upon the “BLOWBACK” that may possibly result from following Classically liberal/libertarian principles. Its time to jump cultural ships, and get yourself away from the uptight neo-Nazi extremists Conservative authoritarian types. …… And the first way to become friends with someone is not to rule them out in the first sentence! The book How to Win Friends and Influence People should be a must read for Gary Jason and others with his restrictive mindset.
Treg Loyden
Tempe AZ