Skip to main content

You won't believe why "Libertarians on the Left are troubling, too"

At least according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune.

It's because we're also Darwinian, like those Libertarians on the right.

How do they know we're Darwinian?

Because we support marriage equality.

I'm not kidding.

That's the only reason they cite:

This is social Darwinism of just the sort depicted by Steve Young -- destructive outcomes for the poor, inflicted by ruthless commercial forces in an unregulated environment. It is enabled by libertarianism on the cultural left.
The left very properly advocates government regulation to promote a clean environment, workplace safety and many other social goods. But when sex comes into issue, the left takes exactly the opposite position. It fiercely resists regulation, insists on laissez-faire, and ignores the human cost.
Redefining marriage (the latest left-libertarian project) only would compound our social crisis. Disassociating marriage from biological fatherhood increases the tendency of fathers not to marry. The more that we elevate choice and individual desire as trump values, the more we compromise the welfare of children.
Go figure, as my brother is fond of saying.

OK, if that's the definition of Social Darwinism, put me down for it.


Comments

tom said…
perhaps if John D. Hagen Jr could pull his head out of his ass long enough to look around, and maybe study some history, he would realize that aside from Victorian era England and the U.S. during the middle third of the 20th century, "Uncommitted, recreational sex" has been a norm throughout pretty much the entire history of western culture.

and far from being the latest fad, equal rights for gays has been a plank in the Libertarian platform since the party was founded 40 years ago.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

Soda tax debate reveals fundamental progressive assertions about your lack of individual rights and the "responsiblities" of the State

I thought it would be at least amusing to use the Delawareliberal comments as sub-headings regarding each category of what is wrong with the proposed tax on sodas and juice drinks. But there are so many different little strands of each comment that it would be impossible to pull them all out. So, instead, I'm going to let you read them in more or less the order they appeared, and note the assumptions. pandora: I’m perfectly okay with taxing sodas and juice drinks. Mainly because they’re total crap, and one of the main reasons our country’s children are overweight. They are also dirt cheap. Assumptions here: (1) Because "I" am perfectly okay with a new tax it should be imposed on everybody; (2) it is the government's responsibility to keep children from being obese; (3) the cheapness of the product to be taxed justifies charging people more for it. John Manifold: Soda fattens your kids [and you and your husband], shortens their lives, costs more than water [a...