I came across this comment about me a little bit ago, and it started me thinking:
Next you’ll be telling me she’s not really a libertarian.
This made me go look up “libertarian”, as I wasn’t sure that the world presently meant by the term what I think I mean by it. (For me, the word instantly brought up an image of Thomas Jefferson, along with accompanying images of Monticello, and of the vegetables and various European soft fruits that TJ imported to the US for his garden to experiment with and get commerce started in them.)
The Wikipedia entry has all kinds of too-damn-fascinating crossreferences hooked into it…including a link to the page on paleolibertarianism, which I had never heard of before and which immediately conjured up images of some kind of Free the Dinosaurs movement. (I’m sorry, but these weird sideways associational flashes happen to me constantly, all day, every day. In the psychiatric community they would often be categorized as either “looseness of association” or “flight of ideas”, depending on how fast they happened and how logical the connection of the secondary material to the primary material that seemed to be associated with it. But for this writer, at least, they’re an invaluable tool of the trade.)
Anyway, I read through the article, thought a bit, and found that the following phrases pretty much described my attitude toward what seem to be the primary issues in question:
(1) I prefer just enough government to protect me from having other political entities fall on my neighborhood with fire and sword.
(2) I prefer a government that does not behave in such a way as to cause other political entities to want to fall on my neighborhood with fire and sword.
(3) I prefer a government that does not fall on other political entities with fire and sword unless they (a) are falling on mine with fire and sword or (b) can clearly be shown to be in the process of doing so.
(4) Anybody falls on my neighborhood with fire and sword, they’re going to find that they’ve got my sword to deal with. (And a lot of Peter’s.) And I know exactly where to insert that sword to best advantage. (This being one of the things that having been a nurse is good for.)
(5) (That’s enough formulating for one day. Ed.)
Do those make me a libertarian? Then guilty as charged, I guess. But there were a lot of things on the shopping list of necessary opinions and traits that I wouldn’t necessarily hold with. (From the Wikipedia entry, and this essay, the term “minarchist” would seem to be a closer match to what goes on inside my head. And even in the description of that term, there would be things I’d have to argue with, or would reject.)
So probably the simplest way to find out whether I’m a libertarian or not would be to name me Queen of the World, and see what I did. If I really am a libertarian, I’ll abdicate, right? Q.E.D.
Then again, I might just keep the title for a few years to see how it worked out. And as regarded everything else in the definition, like any other good psychiatric nurse or responsible sf/fantasy writer, I would have to handle each issue that came up on a case-by-case basis. This being the case, when I am Queen of the World, I foresee a lot of long days spent in the adjudicating chair, sorting out all the messy details like free trade (suddenly I hear Jed Bartlett’s voice saying, “Unless a war breaks out, I’ll be spending the rest of my day talking about bananas…”) and the minimum wage (needs raising just about everywhere, if you ask me. And if you made me Queen of the World, then you did).
But generally, I would suggest that you really don’t want to see me being Queen of the World, as even my considerable patience does have limits, and when events take me past those, my management style will most closely approach that of Mrs. Oscar Gordon (“This problem will clear up if you take that man — you, what’s your name? with the goatee? — take him out and shoot him. Do it now.”), though without either (a) the accumulated wisdom of the Egg of the Phoenix or (b) the PMS. …I do, however, promise in advance to boost funding to every sensible space program, as it strikes me as a good way to give the fire-and-sword types something to occupy their time. And of course I get to decide what’s “sensible.” What good would being the Queen of the World be otherwise?…
…But no…I’m sure the world will work better if I stay right where I am and continue to exercise benevolent tyranny over the houseplants and the cats. And attempt to exercise it over the computers. (Hah.) And vote.
(…Though the thought of running for the European Parliament [obviously, as an independent] has occasionally crossed my mind. Wow, just think, the opportunity to eat out in Brussels every night…
Naaaaaaaahhh. I need to lose ten pounds, and with Le Cirio just around the corner and Den Dijver just down the road, it’d never happen.
(snort) Back to work. I’ve got worlds where I’m queen already, and they’re calling.
4 comments
This is somewhere I don’t usually go, myself. Not in print, anyway. I’ll try to keep this short.
I, too, have considered running for office (and starting my own political party, too). As a Canadian, I’ve been “disappointed” (that’s politician speak for made mad as hell) by the fumbling, incompetence and corruption of our elected and non-elected officials.
I can agree with the libertarian viewpoint, but only to a point. Neither my nor your lifestyles would be possible without all the infrastructure created largely by “interventionist” government – unless we were members of the monied class. To me, being a libertarian would be fine, so long as everyone were. I think the classic example of how this utopian concept might work out would be “Voyage From Yesteryear” by James P. Hogan, which is one of my favourite books. Hogan by the way, is another expatriate author living in Ireland – only he is expatriate from England by way of New England, Florida and Nevada.
But the problem is that turning a whole country to libertarianism won’t work. There will always be someone who will want to upset the applecart just so that they can gratify their own ego by telling someone else to pick up the apples. If Ireland or Canada or the United States became libertarian, then each would be at the mercy of whomever has the most swords. Since a sword is fairly cheap, it’s conceivable that everyone would have a sword…but what do you do when the other side has tanks? It’s unlikely that individuals could afford a tank, and unlikely that someone would be able to get enough individuals to cough up some money to buy a tank. The same applies to ICBMs.
Depressing as it might sound, libertarianism – taken to its logical extreme – won’t work in the real world. The built in assumption is that market forces and normal human nature can regulate the behaviours of individuals, companies and nations so that peace and prosperity will reign without those pesky elected bozos ruining everything. But to some extent we have seen something approcahing kind of environment in the past – typically in opening of the North American west or post-contact pre-colonial Africa – where low population density and difficulty of communication over great distances resulted in near autonomy for certain places. And in many places some strong man ended up in a position of despotism and tyranny when the power is political, monopoly and price fixing when the power is economic, and societal stratification when the power is social. It’s hardwired into our genes, from million of years of primate evolution – to compete for mates, status, “wealth”, and the ability to enforce one’s will on weaker individuals. At the risk of sounding like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, that’s the how we evolved, and there will always be those who cannot rise above their evolutionary background.
That being said, I find the libertarian viewpoint valuable – certainly in their opposition to government intervention they find and expose many of the myths our governments try to perpetrate on us. I was a sometimes visitor to the blog of Harry Browne, one time US Presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party (www.HarryBrowne.org), and his commentaries on George W. Bush, Iraq, etc., were very illuminating (especially as they were always fully substantiated by reference to source material). Pity that he’s passed away.
Anyway, please forgive the length of this comment. There are a lot of issues that I don’t have answers to, and probably don’t have real, definitive, utopian answers. I wrestle with them once in a while, too, and I’m starting to come around to the conclusion that a good chunk of humanity’s problems would be solved if we could just get everyone to agree that there are no ideal solutions. No black and white “this will fix everything” measures. If we as a race could accept the uncertainty that we will never have all the answers, it would probably be a huge step forward for the race, and a huge step backward for the psychiatric industry. Take care, and keep writing.
Sigh…
Is it all right if I snicker at the Wikipedia article? Pretty please?
Why? Well, what would “minarchism” (a very recent coinage) have meant in England in 1,000 CE? What would it have meant to Jefferson and Washington, both slave-owning estate holders? In Baghdad at its historic height? If modern US libertarianism is as universally valid as its advocates believe why is it that it seems to have no application outside the present day USA, and only limited application there, where it’s largely used to rationalize yet more power for the wealthy? The questions raised by the people who wrote that article are good ones. But their answers are from Right-Wing Politics 101 and they just keep repeating them, rather than learning more.
Government changes as the nature of power changes: government in tribal societies is different from government under agrarian feudalism which is different from government under industrial capitalism which will be different from government under information somethingism (it doesn’t have a name yet). And modern US libertarianism just doesn’t acknowlege this at all; it’s just…not there.
Thomas Hobbes argued that all human beings were born evil, and therefore were only capable of creating evil things. To combat this, and to keep all the evil people in the world from killng eachother, Hobbes proposed that there needed to be a large organization that towered over everything and held things together. Hence government. Gobernment is supposed to set down laws and maintain order in society so that people don’t rip themselves apart. But the argument arises that how could naturally evil humans create a pure government. The government itself would eventually become corrupt with power and greed, a la Lord Acton’s famous “absolute power corrupts absolutely” quote. So what is the solution, if there is one? Ah, rhetorical questions. Life can be so easily explained by them.
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