... with a side order of “why I’m not a Republican”
Anyone coming here from my Facebook page knows that under politics, I call myself a “libertarian-leaning Democrat”. While I think most Democrats will understand what I mean by that, I'm pretty well convinced that most Libertarians won't. I suspect that Libertarians will conclude that libertarian-leaning and Democrat are mutually exclusive terms. Why?
Because Libertarians are fundamentalists. They are fundamentalists in the same way that communists are fundamentalists: you are either with them or you are against them. When have you ever heard a libertarian, when discussing politics, say “probably…” or “maybe…”? Me, I'm a happy-medium kinda guy. I'm not wholly with anybody, nor wholly against anybody. And I say “probably”, “maybe” and “In my opinion…” a lot. I mean, yes, I've staked out my little patch of political turf and am prepared to defend it against all comers, but, and this is the salient point — everyone sees through a glass, darkly. No one sees the world as it really is, including myself. Everybody has certain built-in biases. Including Libertarians.
There is much to like in libertarianism. Who wants the Government telling them what to do? No one I know. I mean, I can think of so many government agencies that I think are redundant at best and evil at worst. Who amongst us has any use for the DEA? I mean, really! And how about the ATF? C'mon, can't the FBI do what they do? Probably better? Their jurisdictions overlap as it is. Like the DEA and most newer agencies in the Federal government, we have Republicans to thank for this. Despite the conventional wisdom that the Democrats are the party of Big Government, almost every new government agency in my lifetime has been created by and for a Republican Administration. Homeland Security? Ditto. They are redundant. Isn't Homeland Security what the Defense Department is supposed to do? I guess the Defense Department is too busy abroad spreading "Americanism" to be bothered with defending the Homeland.
Then there are the little impingements on our civil liberties. Except they don't feel so little when you are on the receiving end. “Voluntary” searches of your vehicle? Voluntary? When you are stopped by the police or Border Patrol or whomever, you are under duress. They ask if they can search your car, so you say “okay”, because it's the devil that you know versus the one you don't. Because you are afraid of what will happen if you say “no”. What part of the Fourth Amendment do the police and the courts not understand?
So, you're thinking okay, you sound like a good Libertarian. So why are you a Democrat? And its this: Taxes. Regulation & taxes, actually. Laissez-Faire.
Nobody likes paying taxes. Nobody wants the Government, whether it be Federal, state or local to take their money and use it for god-knows-what. However, (and I actually have several “howevers”), what's the alternative? How do you run a country, a modern “state” without taxes? You can't! Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of modern Germany was an anti-tax kind of fellow and attempted to run the German state on the revenue from tariffs alone. It didn't work. Why on earth would you think that if it didn’t work a hundred years ago in Germany, that it would work here and now?
Tax resistance comes from all parts of the political spectrum. This in and of itself doesn’t make you special; it doesn’t even make you interesting! It is interesting to note that Karl Marx of all people once said “Refusal to pay taxes is the primary duty of the citizen.” Of course, like Bismarck, he eventually changed his mind. But still... And pro-tax advocacy comes from all parts of the political spectrum as well. Adam Smith, the Scotsman who is the father of classical economics, he of “the invisible hand of the market”, supported the idea of a progressive income tax.
I often hear that the income tax is unconstitutional. It's not. The Constitution was amended to make it constitutional! Interestingly enough, once again, we have the Republicans to blame. The first income tax in the United States was proposed by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, to pay for the Civil War. The 16th Amendment was proposed by another Republican, President William Howard Taft. 42 of the then-48 states ratified it. It's totally legal. Just as legal as the 13th Amendment ending slavery, or for that matter, just as legal as the Bill of Rights! And it wasn’t exactly rammed down our throats. It was created by our duly elected representatives like all the other amendments. If you read the words of our Founding Fathers, most of them weren’t crazy about the prospect of direct democracy. This is the way they wanted laws to be made. As a matter of fact, if you know any American history at all, you know that the process of electing our representatives, while still leaving much to be desired, has become more democratic (with a small ‘d’) over the past 222 years, not less so.
Another thing that you hear from fiscal conservatives of every stripe is that the American Revolution was a “tax revolt”. Not so. At least, not entirely. The American Revolution was a war of independence, a war for the right to self-determination. “The shot heard ‘round the world” on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775 had nothing whatsoever to do with taxes. Also too, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Boston Tea Party was only one small part of a much larger ongoing dispute between the Colonies, specifically Massachusetts, the Crown and The British East India Company, and actually dealt with the issue of tariffs, not taxes in the modern sense of the word. The Stamp Act of 1764/65 was a much more serious affair, but the colonists were angrier that Parliament could lay taxes on the colonies without their consent. The colonial legislatures had been creating their own tax bills but you don’t hear a heck of a lot of caterwauling about that, do you?
Anyway, this is all academic, as the most egregious of taxes according to Libertarians, the Income Tax, rates have been trending downward, at least for the “proletariat”, since 1980 and are at their lowest rates in 50 years!
Thought experiment: Let's just say that we succeed in abolishing the income tax, then what? Do we replace it with some other kind of Federal tax? Or do we tell the fifty states, "You're on your own from now on" and the United States can become like Europe: fifty little countries that share a common currency and help defend each other? And do we go back to a early-19th-century level of services? Because this is what the Libertarians seem to want. Dirt roads; home-schooled kids; wooden ballot boxes; poorhouses; defending your family and property yourself. If you own land and a business, you'll do okay. If not, well, I guess you are SOL.
Then there's the regulation issue. The Libertarian Party platform calls for the abolishment of regulations impinging on the free flow of good & services as well as regulations that interfere with your real property rights. Let me take the second instance first.
The Forest Service (Republicans again!) was created at the beginning of the 20th Century precisely because private landowners, timber companies in particular, were NOT managing their resources well at all. A much more recent example of irresponsible land stewardship would be the practice of "mountaintop removal" coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky.
About business regulation, be it safety, or environmental concerns or workers' rights or what have you, where do you get the idea that businesses will self-regulate? Like Enron did? Or Goldman Sachs? I suppose this brings us back to the "invisible hand" thing again. Libertarians assume that businesses won't misbehave, because if they do, people won't buy their goods or services. Really? How many of you out there like Wal-Mart? McDonald's? Bank of America? BP? Microsoft? Eli Lilly? But you keep buying from them because they are so big, so ubiquitous, that you can scarcely avoid it. Often, they are the only game in town! This suggests to me that perhaps we need more government regulation, not less. As a matter of fact, the crash of September and October 2008 came about primarily because of inadequate regulation but secondarily because of an initial reluctance to interfere in the market. Think Hank Paulsen for a moment.
All of the social experiments in extreme de-regulation that have been tried in other countries have failed and have been at least partially reversed. Argentina. Chile. Bolivia. Poland and Russia after the Fall. Much like the attempts at going taxless. Yes, there are countries in this world that don’t have income taxes. I think, out of approximately 200 countries, there are about a dozen that don’t have income taxes. They tend to be small and affluent. Many are monarchies. Most of them rely on larger powers for their protection. I believe that the most affluent industrial democracies, the G20, all have some form of “welfare state” as it is commonly understood. Even using a yardstick much more acceptable to fiscal conservatives, the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, you will find only one country in the top 20 that has no income tax, and it is an oil-rich monarchy that depends on another power (the US) to protect it. To me, monarchies, no matter how benevolent, don’t meet the minimum standards for libertarianism. So, as you can see, there isn’t a country in world, at least a prominent powerful one, that has successfully applied libertarian principles.
So although I am a civil libertarian I am not an economic libertarian. For one thing, I don’t believe that everything can & should be done by the private sector. Education, for instance. The Space Program was and is a government venture. The Interstate Highway System; The National Park System; The National Forest System; The Transcontinental Railway; The Erie Canal…
Libertarians seem to believe that if most of the rules that govern a civilized society were rescinded, that we would have a pure meritocracy, that the cream would rise to the top and everyone would get what is coming to them. What I foresee is a return to feudalism, where “he who has the gold makes the rules”.
Of course, I could be wrong, but no one has yet presented me with any evidence that suggests that I am. All I hear is rhetoric and clever fictions.
I am reminded of many quotes of Bertrand Russell, but this one is particularly apropos:
“The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.”
