Torn between Conservatism and Libertarianism?

in #libertarian7 years ago (edited)

chopper.jpg

For the purpose of this article I'll define the terms Conservative and Libertarian as follows:

Conservative - Somebody with an ingrained sense of skepticism towards government. A Constitutionalist, who understands the concepts of liberty and the principles that USA was founded upon. They believe government should be limited, but that it's also a necessary evil. I'm not referring to the more modern Neo-Cons or war-mongering, big military, christian fundamentalist, hillbilly idiots.

Libertarian - An Anarchist or Free Market Capitalist. Somebody who understands that government is inherently evil and that Democracy ultimately boils down to two wolves and sheep deciding whats for lunch! Libertarians believe the use of force is ALWAYS wrong. They realize that even the constitution, while good for a short time, still made exceptions for using force and that the ring of power (government) will always be captured by the malevolent.

They both know that too much government is bad!



This may be debatable, I understand, as it depends on your definitions. Libertarians have long understood that the system of Democracy is such that it will always result in massive Socialism. Conservatives know that big government is bad, however they may not completely understand the futility of their beloved constitution. The reason being is that the party which can promise the most free stuff to the most special interest groups, will become the most popular. The party or candidate that seeks to reign in this debauchery will be demonized as uncompassionate, out of touch, racist, etc. The more pro-socialist party can also use immigration to their advantage and rig the game in their favor by changing a countries demographic makeup. Immigrants statistically will vote for the left (i.e. big government, welfare). Immigrants vote for more immigration, so the party which even hints at slowing down immigration, is slowly killing itself. This isn't hard to understand, it's just numbers. Once a certain threshold of welfare, social programs and government loving hipsters has been reached, then it’s almost a certainty that anyone in opposition (i.e anyone not extremely liberal), will never again see their values recognized politically. This where the idea of two wolves and a sheep becomes very apparent. When the Wolves outnumber the Sheep, they may still act civilized, but the through the ritual known as voting, they will vote to eat the Sheep every time!


The argument I hear from small government Conservatives or the Alt-Right is that not ALL people believe in the values of liberty and so therefore we can’t have complete liberty or zero government. To have complete liberty you must have a population, that in general, believes in those values. If you don’t have enough people who value liberty, then the ones who do not will simply form a collective and impose their will on the Libertarians by force.


The Libertarians would maintain that it’s unfair and unprincipled to be non-discriminatory against their collective aggressors and that to treat them ALL as malevolent is wrong. Therefore, because the aggressors have no qualms about herding all Libertarians into enslavement to their collective values, the Libertarians are doomed.

What does this mean?



On the surface it seems like there needs to be a way to effectively impose the values of liberty on others. How do you MAKE people want liberty? Isn’t that the same thing as asking how do you make people moral? Well we could simply not let them into the country I suppose. Maybe have rigorous values testing on all potential immigrants and mandatory freedom tests on the general population every 5 years. What happens when a citizen fails, do we throw them in jail or expel them? To force liberty is to simultaneously deny it, is it not? I hope I don’t need to point out how silly it seems to force your ideas on anyone, especially the ideas of consent and the non-initiation of violence! Yet, we absolutely want people to favor liberty and I wish I could say that in general, most people do, but I seriously have my doubts about that nowadays.

Have we simply lost our way?



I would argue that while I believe most people are kind hearted and compassionate, it seems they’re also morally or principally bankrupt or at least extremely confused. The reason most people don’t give a damn about liberty, is because they don’t actually have a clue what it is. Why don’t they know what it is? Because they’ve never experienced it. They grew up living under a government that coddled them and they actually believe that taxation and government are virtuous, or at minimum, absolutely necessary. To most people the government is a magic cornucopia of free shit!

We've outsourced virtue to the state...



So the same small government that was supposedly necessary in the beginning is now the government that guarantees nobody needs, wants, likes or even knows liberty actually is. By claiming something which is inherently evil (i.e. government and coercive taxation) as something that is necessary, we’ve sown the seeds for our own total enslavement via “equality and fairness” by completely replacing morality with immorality. In other words, constitutions and governments cannot be substitutes for legitimate morality and the understanding of liberty, consent and private property. You can have a constituational republic, sure, but when those being governed by it forget why it was necessary in the first place, you’ll simply end up with a population who doesn’t recognize their own enslavement and continually wrestles to steer that power in their favor, which is what we’ve had for generations.


How do we ensure that everyone abides by these values and behaves morally? Do you invoke government (coercive taxation) on people for just a very minimal set of “necessary” items? Courts and military for example. If that’s the solution and you set up your constituational republic, then how do you ensure that it’s protected in perpetuity without resulting in the outcome I just described? By essentially guaranteeing liberty through a minimal government, aren’t you simultaneously robbing the people of their ability to think critically? Attempting to guarantee liberty through any system is creating a dependancy in the sense that it’s promoting intellecutual laziness and the denying of consquences in the same way that guaranteeing somebody an income will promote laziness and entitlement.

... and created a system where everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else, while under the illusion that it's virtuous!



So what happens when you take away someones free stuff? It seems like an evil trick to play in my opinion. You’ve essentially created useless, dependent idiots who can’t fend for themselves economically and now you’re going to cut them off? It’s like being thrown to the wolves!


Ending government is exactly the same. If we end government tomorrow, we’d essentially be killing people. Many people are so dependent, that they are not only useless economically speaking, but they are also absolutely morally reliant on government as well! To them, morality is not something that comes from within or perhaps from nature. Instead they believe that it comes from their God, the government and in it’s absence they would be behave like the most spoiled, ungrateful children. Many already do behave that way because they’re so conflicted living in this semi-free market, Western world.

Recognizing and breaking the cycle



I’ve come to the conclusion that although we can’t end the government tomorrow, just as we can’t cut off an addict overnight, we must still recognize that we’re still enabling the addiction to evil. We absolutely must get rid of government eventually! I believe Conservatives are wrong in principle and that to advocate for small government in perpetuity (while not also striving towards ending it permanently) is to be an enabler of immorality and dependency. In fact, Libertarians have reality on their side in the sense that what was once the smallest government has resulted in what is now the biggest, most powerful government EVER. I believe that Libertarians are also wrong though if they believe they can simply adhere to their principles and allow things like unrestricted immigration happen within the existing paradigm.


While the gun remains in the room, unfortunately we must continue to use it in our favor, else it will inevitably be used against us. We're caught in a sick game, but at least we recognize the nature of it. We need others to recognize it as well before we can end it.


In the end there needs to be a massive moral awakening. The values on which the USA was founded must be widely disseminated and constantly reminded. Once that happens on a global level and everyone ceases to recognize government authority, then nobody will want a government. When nobody wants a government, then governments will simply disappear. How do we achieve a mass moral awakening, while still being stuck in the existing paradigm? My hope is that through the Internet more people will learn philosophy, while at the same time decentralized technologies like Bitcoin will peacefully strip government of it’s reasons to exist. With more more free markets and less government interference, people will behave more ethically out of necessity! You can't hold a child in your arms, coddle it excessively, then put it down and expect it to walk perfectly. It will be very rough as people learn to become truly moral individuals.


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Great read. I think the place to start is by properly defining property rights and recognize that freedom is a natural right that supercedes any form of government, large or small.

There’s no such things as “natural rights” nor “inalienable rights”. The only reality that exists is the one of natural outcomes and economics. And each of us interact within that natural system. One of those natural outcomes is political-economics, which is up to now a power vacuum.

Society/civilization is naturally a tragedy-of-the-commons power vacuum.

I’m working on decentralized ledger technology because it may be the only way to ameliorate said natural power vacuum.

Libertarians believe the use of force is ALWAYS wrong.

I would say that initiating the use of force is always wrong. Using force to defend yourself is well within the NAP.

Good to meet you, @heavyd!

You are correct! I may edit that to be more accurate. Thanks. :)

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The dilemma you describe of the inability to have liberty without forcing liberty—which as you point out is ironically the antithesis of liberty—exists because of the collective’s capability to use more force than the individual. Max Weber’s canonical definition of government is: a monopoly on the use of force.

What you’re essentially pointing out is that liberty is not possible because leeches game the political economics and subject the society to their leeching. And any conservative group that claims to offer a better (e.g. “more righteous or meritorious”) order is still depending on collectivized force and thus is a power vacuum that ultimately is captured by leeches. Both the Libertards and Conservatzars are hypocrites.

Thus my current goal with my decentralized ledger R&D is to ameliorate the power of the centralized collective.

The more resources we put technologically out-of-the-reach of leeches, the more impotent leeching becomes.

Leeching destroys society not because society can’t produce enough for most people to be lazy, but because leeching (aka socialism aka Marxism) enable/force totalitarianism wherein the most powerful who captures the power vacuum must also be the most corrupt (in order to retain power) and megadeath all those leeches in the end. Leeching is a cyclical, repeating self-destructive cancer on civilization that periodically razes civilization to the ground in a 600 year Dark Age.

Again I view my decentralized ledger technology work very seriously, because we are entering (at least in the West) the totalitarian end-game phase of socialism.

P.S. Lol on the helicopter.

P.S.S. CoinCube @ BCT had made some countervailing points about the importance of preventing group defection else groupwise capital can be destroyed. He presented a biological model for how important mutations can be lost if mutation is too rapid (too decentralized with unbounded defection from the dominant mutations statue quo). My more recent thoughts on this matter is that a decentralized ledger is about enabling coordination (synchronization) thus it supplants the top-down coordination that was formerly required. So the capital that is “destroyed” no longer is needed, i.e. it lost its value. Freeman Dyson’s point about cultural evolution being far more relevant than genetic evolution (see my other comment below for a link), tells me that enabling more peering coordination of culture is exponentially more valuable to society than preventing defection from a top-down governance model which has always been a rollercoaster tragedy-of-the-commons.

Nicely put! What are your thoughts about the morality necessary to sustain liberty? Do think technology alone, which minimizes the need for government and cripples it's ability to control, will be enough or do you think people need a moral awakening?

I sort of think that natural selection has been artificially subverted and that social programs are basically the subsidization of stupidity. Once these government distortions are removed, people will naturally become more moral out of necessity and through facing the negative consequences. The stupid genes will be eliminated from the gene pool resulting in more intelligent and more moral individuals.

I am still concerned with how fast it will happen. Socialists seem to be hell bent on destroying the West with mass third world immigration and it's happening quickly. This is why I truly wonder if all out war may be necessary to preserve Liberty in the meantime, hence my comment about helicopters.

I have not studied any science about whether natural selection would filter out predisposition to leeching. I presume nature will anneal to the resources available even if they’re a self-destructive power vacuum. Genetic evolution moves far too slowly anyway for that to make any sense. Although afair Freeman Dyson (when he obliterated Richard Dawkins) argued that cultural/technological change is a form of evolution which evolves much faster.

In any case, I agree we are entering a very dangerous potentially megadeath totalitarian juncture. We also have a Maunder Minimum coming and the changes to the climate and widespread natural disasters (e.g. drought/flooding) could potentially disrupt civilization. Technology may rescue us.

I ponder if MA reads my writings or if some who read my writings email MA. He often seems to write a blog that seems to be inspired by something I recently wrote about. Here is another recent example one day after I wrote the above comment pointing out that:

What you’re essentially pointing out is that liberty is not possible because leeches game the political economics and subject the society to their leeching. And any conservative group that claims to offer a better (e.g. “more righteous or meritorious”) order is still depending on collectivized force and thus is a power vacuum that ultimately is captured by leeches. Both the Libertards and Conservatzars are hypocrites.

P.S. Marxism seems to be so pervasive.

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