In this clip from a recent episode of The Last Word, Ron Paul is heard to say “I think the problem of immorality creates the problem of wanting to use the [birth control] pills.” Lawrence O’Donnell takes RP to town for that, proclaiming that he (RP) is thereby exposing himself (sorry for that) as a “fake libertarian” because RP is, by LOD’s reckoning, saying that sex for purposes other than procreation is immoral.
While I don’t want this to be a debate about RP’s views on contraception or anything else, as far as I know he thinks contraception should be legal, even though his personal morals my preclude its use, but not paid for by the government. That seems wholly compatible with libertarianism to me. How about you?
To my mind, a libertarian, at least in the political sense, could be as moralistic as he or she wants, as long as they don’t think the government should enforce those morals on other people.
I guess the basic question is: Is Libertarianism incompatible with moralism?
No. There’s plenty of other means besides the government to force people to do what you want them to do, and weakening the government makes them much easier to use. Libertarianism is fundamentally anti-freedom; it opposes the government because the government is the main tool the common people have to protect themselves. Under a libertarian regime, if your employer demands that you have yourself sterilized, dress like Mother Hubbard and convert to his particular church, you’ll do so or starve.
Let’s take a recent issue: the Penn State sex abuse scandal.
Outside of Jerry Sandusky, nobody directly sexually abused any children. The scandal was that people like Mike McQueary, Joe Paterno, Tim Curley, and Graham Spanier were aware of what happened and didn’t take action to stop it.
That to me is the problem with Libertarianism. Libertarianism is willing to stand by while bad things are happening on the dubious principle that interfering with a bad thing is somehow worse than the bad thing itself.
Oy. Libertarianism likened to paedophilia? I guess you’re not interested in any serious kind of debate.
I’ve said before that I believe RP to be an atrocious presidential candidate but in this example I think he displays exemplary libertarian principles. So no, libertarianism is not incompatible with moralism.
I guess it had to come to this. The race to the bottom of a political hyperbole has reached its natural conclusion. This one is so “hyper” it needs an elephant sized dosage of Ritalin before regular folks can access it. It’s a mind-f*ck Borghias never dared to dream. It’s so surreal Dali sh!t his pants. Twice.
The bottom line: if you are for Ron Paul you are for child abuse.
If only one of the guys - Mike, Joe Tim or Graham - was a Democrat the Penn State sex abuse could’ve been stopped.
Libertarians, why wont you think of the children!!!
Well, actually, libertarianism isn’t being likened to pedophilia, but to quiet tolerance of pedophilia in order to protect something perceived as being of high value (i.e. Penn’s football program, Joe Paterno’s reputation, etc.), as should be fairly obvious. It is, of course, still a hyperbolic comparison for any reasonable application of libertarianism.
At libertarianism’s nutty extreme, though, where social programs and public education are taboo, we find out if a libertarian would rather cling to his ideals, which hold as axiom that social programs are public education is bad and despite the negative consequences of their abolition.
You know what else annoys me about libertarians? Their inability to understand an analogy.
Okay, let’s talk a real world example. Racism. Are people willing to agree that racism is a bad thing?
Well, there are libertarians who agree that racism is a bad thing (like pedophilia). But they’re willing to stand by while racism happens (like Penn State). Because they figure if a bar owner doesn’t want to serve any black customers or a taxi company doesn’t want any black passengers or an apartment manager doesn’t want any black tenants, then it’s not their place to interfere.
Which I say is wrong. Property owners have rights. But black people have rights too. So I say it’s okay to restrict a property owner’s rights when he is using those rights in promote racism.
Racism is a great wrong. And I want a government that is both capable and willing to do something about it.
Tricky… What if he’s using his private property – a printing press – to produce and publish a racist newsletter? If the government does something about that, it’s censorship, and not a good thing. The general consensus is that racist newsletters are permitted…and that the rest of us heavily criticize them, calling them dumb, and perhaps boycotting the publisher’s business, his advertisers, etc.
The reason a restaurant owner can’t discriminate is that he’s engaged in doing business with the public. He’s taking money for food; commerce. It’s pretty widely agreed that commercial practices aren’t the same as entirely private practices.
So, for instance, if he’s merely holding a birthday party for his kid, then he can discriminate, on the “free association” clause. But when he’s doing business, it takes on a more public character, and the government has more regulatory power.
(No one has to get a business license to throw a birthday party…but to open a restaurant, one is needed. Taxes and fees are charged. The health inspector comes and takes a look at the kitchen. etc.)
So…ya gotta be careful in how you describe these things. None of us wants to censor even racist newsletters, and none of us wants to fine a guy for an all-white birthday party. It’s only when you have a business that excludes black customers that the issue starts to become a public matter.
I don’t even know what that means. I know what Libertarianism is, but I have no idea what “moralism” is.
Anyway, you posted a link to a video of some MSNBC blowhard pontificating on and on on and then giving us snippets of video and we’re supposed to debate that? Sorry, I need more substance before I can weigh in on that matter.
Where do you get that sort of nonsense from? Raping a child is against the law. It would be against the law in Libertaria just as it is against the law in the US. Why would you think Libertarians are OK with letting someone break the law? Do you have some crazy idea that Libertarians are unwilling to report rapists to the legal authorities?
I think somebody once said “You know what else annoys me about libertarians? Their inability to understand an analogy.”
I do not think libertarians are unwilling to report rapists to the legal authorities. It was an analogy.
So let’s get back to racial discrimination - something I actually accused some libertarians of. It’s against the law in the United States. But would it be against the law in Libertaria? There are libertarians who say racial discrimination laws are wrong.
Interesting how I mentioned pedophilia and racial discrimination. And everyone is jumping up and down to deny libertarians are in favor of pedophilia.
I am a “recovering libertarian” and I endorse Little Nemo’s position in this thread.
The following may seem to be a “Modest Proposal” but is actually a serious suggestion. Would “libertarians” please start their own thread, closed to all but hard-core libertarians, and come up with a Doper Libertarian platform?
Start by telling us whether you support Ron Paul or not. Until you do that, we’re just arguing against “strawmen.”
But these are not strawmen of our own devices. In various SDMB forums, we’ve heard from “libertarians” whose concerns are the use of vaccines to sterilize Gentiles, and the need to abolish government-regulation of banknotes. When I mentioned the damage to Thailand’s rice farms as consequence of inadequate governance, I was told that those farmers should have contacted Chicago commodity brokers and hedged against weather events. :smack: The self-appointed “libertarians who actually have a clue” disdain from such debates but later accuse rationalists of inventing strawmen.
Heck, it’s not a problem specific to libertarianism - we could ask the same of a hardcore Marxist who waves away the famines in the USSR in 1932 and China in 1960, asking him if it’s the fault of a bad political theory or of “saboteurs” and “profiteers.”
Clearly balance is the best way to go - mixing individual freedom with reasonable governmental controls - but Paul would discard the latter[sup]*[/sup] and a Marxist would toss the former, and neither is likely to admit to causing the resulting disasters.
[sup]*[/sup] - Or maybe he would; I figure once he has power, he’ll be loath to give it away, even if his philosophy demands it.
Someone also once said “my post is my cite”. Guess how much weight that carries around here.
A bad analogy.
Certain types of racial discrimination are illegal in the US and certain types would be illegal in Libertaria. We’re just talking about where to draw the line. In the US, I can open a private club and refuse to allow anyone of the Nemoid race to join. What I can’t do is open a public facility and do so. In both the US and Libertaria, the government is not allowed to discriminate.
We still don’t know what “moralism” means in this context. If Moralists are those want to impose their morality on others to the restriction of such conduct as they find immoral, then a moralist (who believed contraception is immoral) would not just not subsidize contraception for those on government aid, but would seek to take access to contraception away even from those who could afford it.
There are things that even in Libertopia or Randstan would be considered great moral evils as well as acts of aggression that have to be prevented, not just punished, by the power of the state – murder, fraud, child rape – but then you have to draw the line on when does your appreciation of what’s malum de se, as opposed to evil due to actual harm done, stop being the criterion for policy restricting or punishing it.
This seems to be sort of the converse of the other thread as to how an anarchist society would avoid reverting to a government of differentiated power strata once they were actually running the place. How would Libertopia prevent the de facto coercive imposition of the moral rules of whoever acquires more relative power, upon everyone but the most Roarkian of their fellow citizens.
I’d agree with the OP that in the scenario he quotes it seems like two different matters - one is Paul’s feeling: people need to use a lot of contraception because they are being immoral about their sex lives. Kooky old fart stuff but useful to know before casting a vote. The other is the political part: people may use contraception but it’s not the state’s job to provide for it; pretty standard Libertarian material that would have been unremarkable any other year.
Like others, I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking, or what your definition of “moralism” is, but it sounds like you’re asking whether Libertarians necessarily believe that “anything goes”—that people should be free to do whatever they want with no legal or moral restrictions. And it seems obvious to me that the answer is: no, not necessarily.
