What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. I don't know exactly how we got here, and I don't think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we'll get more, but I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe.But libertarianism is nothing like atheism. We have no evidence one way or another about whether there is a god. We have a very large amount of evidence about what it is like to live in various kinds of societies. To be a libertarian is not a sort of non-choice about politics, a confession of ignorance. It is a choice to do and not do certain things. If you ask me, it is more like being a Mormon: it is choosing to join a sect with a very particular outlook on life.
And I don't think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don't even know what's best for me. Take my uncertainty about what's best for me and multiply that by every combination of the over 300 million people in the United States and I have no idea what the government should do.
. . . .I'm scared to death of being in debt. I was a street juggler and carny trash -- I couldn't get my debt limit raised, I couldn't even get a debt limit -- my only choice was to live within my means. That's all I understand from my experience, and that's not much.
It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.
The word missing from Jillette's politics is "we." He does not seem to recognize that people absolutely must live in societies, and therefore must have some means of taking collective action, making rules of behavior, and imposing sanctions on violators. Human life is not possible without the basics of what we call government. There is no meaningful sense in which human life is possible alone.
He wants evidence? Here's mine: name a really nice place to live that doesn't have a powerful government. You can't. Nobody can. Modern nations are in many ways vastly better places to live, for most people, than anything that came before, and they all have powerful governments. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Like most libertarians, Jillette is all caught up in the notion that taxation is coercion, which it is, and therefore that it is immoral, which it is not. I do not believe that freedom is the highest good, and it is certainly not the only good. I wish to live in a society that allows me a large amount of freedom, but I also wish security, public transportation, safe food, and a few million other things that only governments can provide. I willingly sacrifice some of my freedom to get those things. Taxation is not the government forcing people to give up their wealth. It is something all of us decide to do together. And that money you think is "yours" is not; it was created, not by you, but by the large economy and society of which you are a part. It is only by participating in that society that you can achieve any benefit from your labor, and you must therefore -- and reasonably so, it seems to me -- abide by the rules of that society.
I don't know how to help everyone, either, and I am quite certain that some government programs make some people worse off. (Imprisonment for drug use, to take one example.) But nothing is perfect, and we don't need perfect knowledge to see that life in some countries is better than in others. Jillette waxes eloquent on the subject of charity, but this is an experiment we have been running for a few thousand years, and we know that people will not be charitable enough to do the things that governments can do. Several contemporary governments have come very close to eliminating poverty, for example, which I think is a great thing.
For some reason libertarians hate the notion that they could be forced to help someone else. They want to stand on their own, and to help others or watch them starve as they see fit. But this is a dangerous fantasy, born from the habit of thinking that the unit of humanity is the individual person. As I like to say, the technical term for a person living alone is "leopard food." We are social animals, and we can only survive by working together. Once you accept that, you can shed this whole false discourse about freedom vs. coercion and ask the real question: what social arrangements allow people to flourish most fully? To me the evidence is very clear that the answer to this question involves a strong government.
2 comments:
I would add that, IMHO, the point of government programs to help people is precisely that they are not charity. We have decided as a society that we have certain obligations to one another, and that those who need certain forms of help have a right, as members of our society, to that help. We have decided, for example, that mothers with dependent children deserve financial assistance, regardless of the ability of the market to provide the mother with a job. Formally--and the formal is important--we do this, not out of pity, but because we are collectively obliged one to another, and because any of us might end up in her position, because of the vagaries of the market, and of life. She can accept this without shame because it is her right, and because she is not an object of pity.
Of course, "we" have decided these things because in the 1930s and the 1960s there were clear voting majorities in favor of these things.
Very true.
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