Skip to main content

Michael Shermer's definition of Libertarianism...

... appears, of all places, in HuffPo.

Shermer, the regular skeptical columnist for Scientific American and longtime debunker of intelligent design claims, is always interesting, and his writings have always made me think he had a libertarian streak.

Here he lays out what technically is not so much a definition of libertarianism, but a point-by-point description of what Libertarian government would look like. In the libertarian spectrum Shermer is pretty close to me, which means not radical enough for a lot of my libertarian friends. I would suggest that he is more properly a constitutionalist, but his points are worth examining:

1. The rule of law.
2. Property rights.
3. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.
4. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.
5. Freedom of speech and the press.
6. Freedom of association.
7. Mass education.
8. Protection of civil liberties.
9. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
10. A potent police force for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.
11. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws.
12. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.

These essentials incorporate the moral values embraced by both liberals and conservatives, and as such form the foundation for a bridge between left and right.


Number five (mass education) and Number seven (legislative system for fair and just laws) will be problemmatic to a lot of my friends.

Actually, however, Libertarians don't object to mass education, just a State monopoly on education. And I'm less Libertarian, perhaps, than many of my peers in that I want to drastically reform "public" education in a lot of ways, but I do not advocate abolishing it. I have written on that at length before.

As for that legislature, this is probably the weakest of Shermer's twelve provisions, because "just and fair laws" is so vague as to be a general grant of powers, without even the existing Constitutional restrictions. Shermer, moreover, punts the question of taxation and redistribution of wealth, I suspect because he know that it would not help the case he is making.

Yet, Shermer is describing--or at least hinting at--a system that is less invasive, more protective of property, and possessed of a more limited government than we now have. Which may make something like this a basis for starting discussion with the increasingly disenchanted from both wings of the Demopublican Party.

Comments

The Last Ephor said…
Two things of note, if you read contemporary accounts of McKindley's assassination it reads as if some distant king was killed not the President. He was so far removed from daily life he might as well have been a million miles away. Contrast that with President Obama and the Gates thing.

Second, I think most people agree on the same things in the abstract (i.e. just laws, good infrastructure etc) just not how those things exist in practice.
Bowly said…
That list, to me, reads like a list of what conservatives used to claim to believe in, and why I liked them then.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?