[482] in libertarians
This is Big Time Press folks...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Thu Dec 8 18:12:00 1994
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 1994 18:08:21 EST
From: Vernon Imrich <vimrich@MIT.EDU>
------- Forwarded Message
From: "Eric J. Rittberg" <71562.120@compuserve.com>
To: Bob Reinhardt <RLC-News@tomahawk.welch.jhu.edu>
Subject: Editorial on GOP Libertarians in Washington Post
The following Editorial appeared in the WASHINGTON POST on December 6,
1994:
Libertarian Lure
by E.J. Dionne, Jr.
The role of the religious right in the Republican Party has commanded
so much attention that it is now obscuring an even more momentous
development within the GOP: the rise of libertarians as a key party
constituency and the centrality of libertarian ideals to many of the
party's new leaders.
The new crop of Republican is more opposed to government and has more
faith in the unregulated market than even the most conservative members of
the older Republican generation. If you want to know how much the
pendulum has swung, consider this: In the recent contest over who would be
the Senate Republican whip, Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a solid
conservative with no love for liberals, was considered the "moderate" when
compared with the victor, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi.
Libertarianism is a philosophy of radically limited government.
While there is a range of opinion among those who call themselves
libertarian, libertarians basically believe that the only legitimate
functions of government are to protect citizens from force and fraud and
to enforce contracts. If they had their way, libertarians would get the
government out of everything else, including education, the postal system,
Social Security, medical care, environmental regulation, farming - and
that's just for starters.
In foreign policy, libertarians are resolutely noninterventionist -
"isolationist," if you prefer - and that pushed them out of the
pro-military, anticommunist mainstream of the Republican Party during the
Cold War. Now, many Republicans are attracted to the libertarians'
foreign policy vision, involving a mimimum of American activism abroad.
The basic impulse of the libertarian was captured by Murray Rothbard,
an economist and longtime libertarian activist. "If you wish to know how
libertarians regard the State and any of it acts," he wrote, "Simply think
of the State as a criminal band and all of the libertarian attitudes will
logically fall into place."
One leading neo-libertarian Republican is Rep. Dick Armey, elected
yesterday as House majority leader. One of his intellectual heroes is
Ludvig von Mises, a libertarian economist who believed that "perfect
capitalism" is a system that was "never and nowhere completely tried or
achieved" becuase most capitalist countries accepted a significant role
for government. Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts is one of the party's
most outspoken defenders of libertarianism, while Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas
leans toward libertarianism on many issues.
One measure of libertarianism's rise is the growing role of the
Washington-based Cato Institute as a generator of ideas that find their
way into Reupblican legislative proposals and rhetoric. Cato, always an
interesting place but once marginal to Republican politics, is now
approaching the older conservative think tanks - notably the American
Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation - in influence.
The emergence of the libertarian Republicans is the story of one of
those quiet intellectual revolutions that can have enormouse politicalo
impact. Libertarianism is attractive, especially to intellectuals,
because of its rigor and consistency. Armey, for example, dislikes almost
all government programs equally, which is why he allied himself with
northeaster liberals to fight farm subsidies. In electoral terms it is
attractive to those well-off professionals who have nothing in common with
the religious right but would just like to be left alone. And its moral
code - that everyone should be responsible for himself or herself and
expect no help from the state, ever - has a certain clarity and finality.
The libertarians have also replaced the Marxists as the world's
leading Utopia builders. That's because they can claim that their vision
of a world with almost no government has never been tried. Tearing down
the state, they insist, will work wonders.
The libertarian Republicans may thus pose a far greater political and
intellectual challenge to Democrats than either traditional conservatives
or the religious right. But libertarianism's seductiveness needs to be
confronted, because like all Utopians, the libertarians ignore some measy
realities.
For example, the libertarian notion that all individuals are entirely
responsible for themselves is morally appealing as an ethic for each
adult. But people don't enter the world as adults. They arrive as
dependent infants, and in cases where families (or singlee parents) find
themselves without resources - whether through their own fault or not -
the infants involved may suffer in ways that make it difficult for them
ever to become responsible adults. That's why the initial impulse behind
the welfare state grew from a desire to help orphans, poor children and
mothers. The current welfare state may be broken, but sweeping it away
won't make the problems it's trying to solve disappear.
Similarly, the market does many things well, but its workings did not
lead automatically to a clean environment, which is why environmental
regulations exist; or to full employment, which is why unemployment
compensation exists; or to universal education, which is why public
schools exist; or to decent pensions, which is why Social Security exists.
These are the sorts of basic arguments that the current
anti-government mood will call forth in the coming months. The
libertarians do us all a favor by forcing this kind of ground zero debate
and by pushing supporters of active government toward less intrusive and
less bureaucratic uses of state power. But the rest of us will do the
libertarians a favor by preventing them from enacting their utopia.
Because is the libertarians ever get all that they want, the result will
almost certainly discredit their faith that something called "perfect
capitalism" either can or should exist.
------- End of Forwarded Message
[Someone, hopefully in the Washington area, or from CATO institute
should send a letter to the Editor debunking the "utopianism"
strawman. One of the most common libertarian quotes is "utopia is
not an option." -Vernon]
