Nietzsche, in I forget which book (probably Genealogy of Morals), noted that moral philosophy is kind of the opposite of other sciences. In moral philosophy, we know beforehand what is “right” and “wrong,” and its goal is not so much to discover new truth as to concoct a framework that helps us understand the system of why things are “right” and “wrong.” We do not “discover” new moral truths.
Nietzsche was living before there were any libertarians.
Libertarism, like other “Enlightenment” philosophies turns the entire system on its head. It creates its own “rational system” that reaches new and absurd ethical conclusions. Like Marxism, liberalism and everything-else-ism, libertarianism is a form of rational pornography that continues to lead us to absurd conclusions because of the intellectual appeal of its reasoning system. The system produces plenty of absurdities, but to lift one’s self out and abandon the pretense is a Herculean task.
Years ago—when I was a libertarian too libertarian to call himself a libertarian—, I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Haidt on his social research on the ethical values that he gave to an audience of libertarians. He flattered the libertarians for their intelligence and logical consistency, and gave them hypothetical ethical scenarios starting from abortion and escalating to rich people buying fetuses in the womb to make brain-dead to later grow into unconscious sex slaves. Many of the libertarians gleefully and proudly consented to the permissibility of even the most absurd of such hypotheticals with smiles and laughter.
The smiles and laughter come not because these people genuinely think they are endorsing some obvious moral good, but because with pride and felt-superiority they know they are endorsing absurdities that nonetheless show their slavish dedication the principle the identify with. This is a badge of dedication no different from leftists who will insist with full pretended certainty that a hairy pervert in a skirt is actually a woman.
Political Nihilism
There’s always a large gap between what a libertarian professes to believe and what he actually does. Here’s an experiment. Go to the closest libertarian and say that you want to ban something. It doesn’t matter what: pornography, heroin, abortion, cigarette ads, prostitution, alcohol, take your pick.
This is, without a doubt the response you will get:
“Woah, dude, you can’t ban pornography! I mean if you ban it, you can’t enforce it and people are just going to do it anyway! Plus who are you to decide for all of us what’s good and bad?”
This straw response holds a distilled Platonic quintessence of every libertarian statement ever, which can be summed up in two assumptions:
- Assumption A
- Banning something, even something indubitably bad is useless because “people are just going to do it anyway.”
- Assumption B
- Making any kind of moral or legal judgment is impossible because of a nihilist argument to absurdity.
“They’re just going to do it anyway!”
This is an “interesting” “argument” because if we foolishly take it seriously, it does indeed utterly annihilate any anti-libertarian arguments you can come up with… but it also equally annuls libertarianism itself.
No libertarian actually believes this. If they did, they would be entirely politically apathetic: They wouldn’t argue that marijuana or other drugs should be legalized, because in this twisted logic, it makes no difference and it is not enforcible.
In real life, every libertarian knows that this is a cynical and mendacious argument because all of their political advocacy is predicated on it not being true.
I haven’t heard libertarians yet saying we should legalize murder or rape since “If you want to do it, you’re going to end up doing it anyway.” This argument is equally applicable here. (Actually I’m revising this article draft to say, I have gotten at least one email saying precisely that murder should be legal since “people are just going to do it anyway.”)
Libertarians are supposed to know about economics. One of the first things economists should acknowledge is that people respond to incentives. There are certain actions that have only negative externalities. A rational state would take means to disincentivize these and they would be successful.
Defending the Indefensible…
Libertarians are in the awkward position of constantly having to argue that things that are entirely destructive and damaging have to be legal for some reason.
Pornography causes nothing but harm. Crystal meth causes nothing but harm. Bath salts cause nothing but harm. Every libertarian knows all of this, but so they can feel politically consistent, they have to defend to death the legality of bath salts or we lose everything.
I can at least give some honorable mention to Murray Rothbard, who after tortured logic eventually determined that the mere creation and ownership of nuclear weapons is inherently bad. So at least we won’t have private nukes in the an-cap paradise… (Although he did famously argue that parents have the right to sell their children.)
This is the issue with the mere Enlightenment idea that reason has to precede patent morality: we can’t just say “This is wrong.” We have to construct this massive and leaky intellectual edifice that provides some consistent rational justification for all moral claims simultaneously, and we better hope that human reason, supposedly created by Darwinian accidents, is up for the job.
Anarcho-tyranny
One of the reasons that this argument can pass under the radar as non-retarded is because Americans are so emotionally abused by their non-government. In America, it is common for many things to be nominally illegal, while at the same time being publicly endorsed and supported by the government.
“Illegal” immigration is nominally “illegal,” but it is effectively never enforced. Tens of millions of people in America have built their lives entirely dependent on the fact that illegal immigration is not really illegal. Oftentimes its non-enforcement is enforced by law and public criticism of it is more likely to lose you a job!
Marijuana is also “illegal” (it remains a federally controlled substance), but government allows it and it is advertised profusely in American pop culture. Democracy is by its nature a dishonest government where there will always be a massive gap between de facto and de jure.
Libertarians will say, “You can’t ban pornography,” or silly things like that forgetting that the government already has done a great job in banning child pornography. The state and its satellites have done an exceptionally clean job of censoring “‘racism’ on the internet” because it is in their twisted motives to do so at all cost. If they were 10% as enthusiastic for regulating pornography, you would never have run into internet pornography in your life.
Other nations that actually desire to regulate drugs or pornography or prostitution or vices do so very, very well. If you don’t think so, go smuggle drugs into China or Singapore. Go ahead. It should be a great market since competition is scarce.
In reality, libertarians, in all their social activism are not advocating to bring hard drugs into China because ultimately they don’t believe that drugs are good or that anyone is improved by them. They are okay with drugs because their ideology leads them to and because they imagine themselves too smart to be dumb enough to use the “freedom” to get addicted to drugs.
China and drugs is an important side note. Remember the Opium wars? Remember when western powers managed to domesticate and drug a significant portion of the Chinese population to make money and increase their influence over them? How is a pro-drug libertarian supposed to land on this conflict? Were the British and French empires fighting for freedom? If “people were just going to use opium anyway,” why did the British and French bother sending men to die to prevent China from enforcing their “unenforceable” laws?
“Who are you do make that decision?”
What about argument 2: “Who are you to decide what we should ban?”
Libertarians talk about these things as if it is some esoteric concept.
In a livestream a bit ago, libertarian coomers went apoplectic when I said matter-of-factly that pornography should be banned. Duh.
Letting the “Free Market” Decide
Now the libertarian has a highly nominalistic concept of “right” and “wrong.” There is a kind of Darwinian intuition behind what these words could be used for.
For example, how do we determine what is a proper way to raise children? What are the proper social norms conducive for the continuity of society? Is it appropriate to take a certain drug or substance?
The libertarian has no answers to these questions from their philosophy alone, but instead thinks they should be left to a kind of “free market” or Darwinian system of experimentation. This “free market” allows society to “freely” experiment with all possibilities, and those that are truly beneficial will persist, while negative things will be discarded.
For example, for a libertarian, drugs should be legal, even drugs that are unambiguously deleterious. The libertarian’s “solution” for these drugs (which some libertarians have no doubt been yelling at the screen since I mentioned it above) is ultimately that there are people who will experiment illogically with dangerous drugs and those who have superior moral senses who can resist them. The Darwinian “free market” allows the impulsive to be maximally harmed as a lesson to us all, while the wise are unscathed and reproduce in having more children and having a greater effect on society’s standards.
(Some libertarians will stray from “Darwinian” terms, but this is an honest appraisal and I totally lack the leftist hatred of anything not dysgenic.)
The important thing is that certain types of errors or short-sightedness are disproportionately punishing. For example, we don’t need a Darwinian free-market solution to nuclear arms, as once a global error is made with them, it’s hard for us to undo the problem.
A society is hard to build and easy to destroy. If you acknowledge this, you realize that this is why promiscuity, drug and the like that cause life-altering deviations from social functionality. When a generation is free to make massive, irreversible errors, they cannot be undone, and even the information of that error is rarely heeded automatically.
A Truly Stateless Society Is a “Reactionary” One.
I’ve heard many libertarians argue just this for the determination of social norms. As a libertarian I did believe it as well… But suppose we have this libertarian paradise: What really does it look like after several generations?
As time goes on, “society” learns more and more about which behaviors are, if we use the term in a utilitarian sense, wrong or bad or evil. Our libertarian society, to continue and improve must take on highly “judgmental” and conservative social norms. At the same time, the enforcement of these social norms is, let’s say, post-rational. A generation might see the harm that something causes, and then teach that to their children and grandchildren who may pass on the information and norm without knowing some deep praxeological justification for why this behavior is bad on a rational level.
We will quickly learn that certain substances and foods are “evil.” But just as well, we can learn just as easily that it is socially harmful for women to dress in a way that reveals their legs and shoulders.
That said, it’s important to remember that the “state” truly is a novel invention. There have been empires throughout history, but they were never comparable to the highly intrusive states of today or mass-monitoring, mass-taxation, mass-management and social engineering. In essence, every society of history was either a total “anarchy” in the sense of a stateless society, or one where a far-off ruler and bureaucracy had largely nothing to do with the daily life of people.
The restrictions on one’s individual life (even if they now are incarnate in laws of the state) have been emergent social norms, in the same way that this line of thinking above (which is very Hayekian). What I mean by this is the that “irrationally” socially conservative old cultures of the world are, in fact, libertarian societies that have just aged a little bit and acquired that social wisdom that any “libertarian” society needs to function.
Most self-described “libertarians” usually do not want to returned to the merely “privately-enforced” hyper-conservatism of the past. The “libertarians” who smoke marijuana, sell other drugs, have family-less and promiscuous lives are really more properly just libertines who have some cursory awareness of libertarian argumentation to rationalize their personal degeneracy.
The Two Types of “Libertarians”
So in truth, “libertarians” are really two very distinct groups who are, in their essence ultimately incompatible.
On one side, the degenerate libertine, but on the other, the “paleo-libertarian/paleo-conservative” who is a little more in the vein of Hoppe. They view the modern [American/Western] state as a force both degenerate and suffocating.
I don’t ultimately think these people should be burdened by association with the first category, but I also think they do too often associate themselves with the libertines just because their argumentative arms are always aimed at “control” and talk about “freedom.” In the mind of modern man, and sometimes in their own, they truly do come off with a goal similar to the revolutionary leftist; this is in fact how Murray Rothbard construed it when saying that right libertarians are the “true leftists.”
But a truly “free” and “stateless” society is actually one where they are very often very many more social expectations (which can be interpreted as constraints) upon individuals.
I think especially Americans living in Anarcho-tyranny have a very sarcastic view of government. One of the reasons that many “libertarians” ceased being libertarians when Trump came around is because Trump finally presented the possibility of an “out” within the political system, even if a long-shot.
Look too at the many libertarians who have fallen in love with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador—he drops a lot of libertarian buzzwords and is a big bitcoiner, but he is most notably seriously and overwhelmingly enforcing crimainal law, but also will often cut corners of “civil rights” to do so.
I don’t mean that in a bad sense—in fact, he is likely doing the best libertarian government possible for his people and is genuinely restoring the freedom of his people to be and act without rampant crime or drugs. Bukele might be one of the most admirable heads of state right now. You can debate about how “libertarian” or not he might be in some autistic sense, but it is better to live in the New El Salvador than the old, for libertarians or “statists.”