ESR wrote an interesting blog post some time ago stating why he is neither a conservative nor a liberal, but then seems to assume that his own libertarian views do not fall for most of the same mistakes.
I am in fact politically quite libertarian, I want governmental power to be as limited as possible, and where needed to be as decentralized as you can get it, with maximum power to individual citizens over their own lives. I like that South Africa has a crucial step in this direction – our highest power is not government at any level, it’s the constitutional court which can and has repeatedly forced government to change policies and laws that were not in line with the constitution. The core power of this court is that party politics don’t play a role here – individuals bring cases when needed, judges measure their merit under the constitution – and if the case holds merit, forces government to rectify the problem.
This is a good thing (there are many bad parts of our setup, but this part is actually really clever) and I applaud it. The reason however why I don’t fit into any of these boxes is because they all, without exception seem to fall for reducto-ad-absurdium, and people seem to assume that you cannot hold contradictory views – on different topics. To me that is a sign of intelectual laziness, different topics have different contexts and should be viewed differently – sometimes the right answer on one social question is exactly the wrong approach on another, so even though these views seem contradictory, they may both be the best logical choice in context.
A point about ESR’s stance is that he seems to think that wanting to limit governmental power, must mean maximising corporate power. This is a typical rightist stance (these days) – take the power from the government, and then give unlimited power to corporations instead. Leftists want to go the other way, take all the power from the market, and give it to the government. And both are equally wrong because both corporations and governments will abuse whatever power they can get. So ESR in his anti-governmental power desire ends up being opposed to government facilities to preserve human dignity and life, he sounds almost republican when he blames poverty on “laziness”.
He doesn’t even seem to see that this is inconsistent with theories he claims to subscribe to. Notably evolution, ESR has written some very thoughtful articles on evolutionary biology… yet this claim of his contradicts the very theory that Darwin cited as the single most important evidence in favor of his theory: that of Maltus.
Maltus’ theory states that the population growth of a species is exponential, but that of it’s foodsource is linear. Darwin’s theory is built on the premise that this creates the pressure that causes competition, leading to survival of the fittest. Of course Maltus’s theory is just a theory (like everything in science) and there are questions about it. However, almost nobody ever questioned it in terms of human populations (which is what Maltus wrote about) the only question is whether this applies to a balanced ecology of other organisms (the reason it’s a question is that in a balanced ecology the food source of every organism is also an organism so it should grow exponentially as well) – but humans are decidedly not a balanced ecology, and nobody doubts that we are growing exponentially, the other assumption Maltus makes is the terminal and incurable stupidity of mankind but since he wrote this theory before we invented birth control we can honestly say that a t the time the possibility of controlling our rate of growth didn’t exist, so he could not have written a theory that considers it.
The thing is though, Maltus’s theory – long before Darwin already led to a number of other social realizations because Maltus’s theory means that poverty is not caused by the punishment of a deity, nor for that matter (mostly) by laziness – it’s caused by a natural law. Too many humans, not enough resources – and unless we reduce the rate at which we make new humans, we will never have a society without rife poverty.
Now reality is that the higher the level of education in a country, the lower the population growth levels become (you don’t need much more than census data to verify that one), so logically – the best way to eradicate poverty is to make more education accessible to more people. Healthcare availability is also inversely proportionate to population growth.
By the ESR version of logic though, it makes more sense to take resources of which there is already far less than we needed, and concentrate them in a tiny minority of people – than to try and create a fair distribution of those resources, with due reward for merrit, that allows everyone at least a fair chance. That way, quality of life increases for all, which in turn reduces population growth (parents living better can send their kids to school, those kids have better jobs and fewer children).
ESR would, however, prefer to see even schools run as corporations – ready to kick you out if you (or rather more acurately but worse your parents) aren’t rich enough.
This is a prime example of the intellectual laziness that I spoke about. It’s true that too much power in government is bad. I agree with ESR that gun control is a bad thing which, if anything, increases the amount of violence in society – but it is quite possible to hold both these views and still believe that hospitals should be free, that your ability to earn money should not determine your access to lifesaving medicine (or, for that matter, a square meal).
In Biblical times, the law stated that a hungry man wandering across a farmland had the right to eat as much of the crops as he could. He could not carry any off, he was not allowed to sell any – it was, after all, the farmers property. But he could take as much as he could eat. He had a legal right not to starve and this wasn’t deemed as theft (the law is spelled out in Deuteronomy). So when did the religious right of all people decide that allowing a hungry person to eat some food is somehow wrong ? The Biblical system took that food from them who had plenty (the farmers) – reducing their profits a bit to subsidize those who had none – but if we today propose a charitable taxation to run a soup kitchen, it’s the very religious right who hold that as their highest truth who oppose us. Such is human greed I guess. This is why I’m not a conservative.
If you give a government too much power, if you let socializm be without limits then you end up with either the USSR or Nazi Germany (remember the zi in NAZI came from socialist). This is why I am not a liberal.
If you don’t restrict what corporations can do, you end up with corporate atrocities (which the world is full off, everywhere) and treating lawsuits as just a (rather small) cost of doing business. This is why I’m not a libertarian.
Instead, I think each issue should be looked at individually. Does it make sense to have free hospitals and education ? Absolutely (and I’ve been treated in some of these socialist medical systems when ill, both in South Africa and abroad and gotten great service). Does it make sense to have poverty alleviation programs ? Absolutely. Does it make sense to let the government restrict who can provide telecomunications services to whom ? Absolutely not.
See – different topics, different context – different answers.
I can tell you this much though. There is no justification whatsoever, anywhere, for why corporations should have human rights. They are not human beings, and should not have the rights human beings have. The people within them should, but the corporation needs only two rights to exist: the right to sign a contract, and the right to pay taxes. Everything else is reserved for people.
