Category Archives: Libertarianism

Americans like to see themselves as rugged individualists, a nation defined by the idea that people should set their own course through life. Think of Clint Eastwood rendering justice, rule-bound superiors be damned. Think of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

The idea that personal liberty defines America is deeply rooted, and shared across the political spectrum. The lifestyle radicals of the 60s saw themselves as heirs to this American tradition of self-expression; today, it energizes the Tea Party movement, marching to defend individual liberty from the smothering grasp of European-style collectivism.

But are Americans really so uniquely individualistic? Are we, for example, more committed individualists than people in those socialist-looking nations of Europe? The answer appears to be no.

For many years now, researchers worldwide have been conducting surveys to compare the values of people in different countries. And when it comes to questions about how much the respondents value the individual against the collective that is, how much they give priority to individual interest over the demand of groups, or personal conscience over the orders of authority Americans consistently answer in a way that favors the group over the individual. In fact, we are more likely to favor the group than Europeans are.

Surprising as it may sound, Americans are much more likely than Europeans to say that employees should follow a bosss orders even if the boss is wrong; to say that children must love their parents; and to believe that parents have a duty to sacrifice themselves for their children. We are more likely to defer to church leaders and to insist on abiding by the law. Though Americans do score high on a couple of aspects of individualism, especially where it concerns government intervening in the market, in general we are likelier than Europeans to believe that individuals should go along and get along.

American individualism is far more complex than our national myths, or the soap-box rhetoric of right and left, would have it. It is not individualism in the libertarian sense, the idea that the individual comes before any group and that personal freedom comes before any allegiance to authority. Research suggests that Americans do adhere to a particular strain of liberty one that emerged in the New World in which freedom to choose your allegiance is tempered by the expectation that you wont stray from the values of the group you choose. In a political climate where liberty is frequently wielded as a rhetorical weapon but rarely discussed in a more serious way, grasping the limits of our notion of liberty might guide us to building Americas future on a different philosophical foundation.

The image of America as the bastion of libertarianism is a long-established one. Our Founding Fathers stipulated a set of personal rights and freedoms in our key documents that was, by the standards of that day, radical. The quintessentially American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance, extolled the person who does not defer to outside authority or compromise his principles for the sake of any collectivity family, church, party, community, or nation.

This quality in the American character struck observers from overseas, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1830s book, Democracy in America, famously tied the relatively new word individualism to what seemed so refreshingly new about the Americans. Popular culture today reinforces this image by making heroes of men (its almost always men) who put principle above everything else, even if perhaps especially if that makes them loners.

But in modern America, when you look at real issues where individual rights conflict with group interests, Americans dont appear to see things this way at all. Over the last few decades, scholars around the world have collaborated to mount surveys of representative samples of people from different countries. The International Social Survey Programme, or ISSP, and the World Value Surveys, or WVS, are probably the longest-running, most reliable such projects. Starting with just a handful of countries, both now pose the same questions to respondents from dozens of nations.

Their findings suggest that in several major areas, Americans are clearly less individualistic than western Europeans. One topic pits individual conscience against the demands of the state. In 2006, the ISSP asked the question In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law? At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong.

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Sweet land of... conformity?

Why does Libertarianism seem so Radical?
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By: Phillip Taylor

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Why does Libertarianism seem so Radical? - Video

Ben Carson nails libertarianism in one concise statement

By: AFRTALK

Originally posted here:
Ben Carson nails libertarianism in one concise statement - Video

My gripes on libertarianism and Laissez faire

By: warobsessive

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My gripes on libertarianism and Laissez faire - Video

BILL MAHER ON LIBERTARIANISM AND DRUGS
One of the many Larry King interviews with Bill Maher on CNN.

By: nick charles

Original post:
BILL MAHER ON LIBERTARIANISM AND DRUGS - Video

Aaron Swartz in Miami Beach in 2009. He died Jan. 11, 2013 at age 26 in New York City. (Michael Francis McElroy/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON The pushback by some in the Republican Party against the Obama Administrations embattled defense of secrecy and surveillance is well-documented. Tea Party champion Rand Paul, with a strong libertarianism strain, has promised to file a class-action suit aimed at the National Security Administrations massive snooping operations.

Sen. Ted Cruz, another of the movements bannermen, has kept mostly quiet so far on many of the issues that have so riled up Paul and a small band of others.

But on Thursday a very different kind of Republican, Sen. John Cornyn, weighed in on a related issue, raising his own objections to what he called the reckless way in which the Department of Justice under President Obama has wielded its powers against individuals.

It was an interesting move for Cornyn, who as a former Texas Supreme Court justice and attorney general is about as conservative, as law-and-order as any senator in Washington.

He engaged the debate by evoking a name that hasnt been much discussed in Texas political circles, a name I first heard a year ago this Saturday.

I was sitting in funky little coffee shop in San Francisco trying to make sense of a piece of fiction that I had begun. I was on leave, and it was a year for trying new things. Across the table was a young guy in his late 20s looking like he had lost his iPad somewhere or dropped one of the gadgets that seemingly everyone in Northern California carried like ammunition. I asked him how he was. His response: Im just devastated by Aaron Swartzs death. I cant believe it.

Aaron Swartz. I had heard a report of his suicide at age 26 that morning on the way into the city from my home in Palo Alto, and seemingly alone in that tech-juiced city, hadnt recognized the name. Turns out, seemingly everyone I met that day and the next was reeling from the news.

Aaron was the computer wunderkind who as a teenager had emerged as kind of a hacker white knight and thinker that made the computerati take notice. One of his earliest achievements was to help write the code for what became RSS newsfeed software. His close mentors as a teen were MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the, well, the Internet, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. The New Republic would write in a February obituary that Swartz was welcome on any e-mail thread or chat room populated by the worlds leading hackers before he could shave.

But of course all that had seemed like an eternity ago for Swartz in January of last year, when he killed himself. He had been pursued for two years or more by the Department of Justice for the crime of illegally downloading 4 million articles from an academic database and making them available to the public. Trouble was, none of the articles belonged to him. That Friday a year ago was the first day I had heard his name.

See the article here:
John Cornyn again questions feds' pursuit of late hacker-activist Aaron Swartz

One of the main problems with an unremittingly hostile view of government -- held by many associated with the tea party, libertarianism and "constitutionalism" -- is that it obscures and undermines the social contributions of conservative vision.

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WASHINGTON One of the main problems with an unremittingly hostile view of government held by many associated with the tea party, libertarianism and "constitutionalism" is that it obscures and undermines the social contributions of a truly conservative vision of government.

Politics requires a guiding principle of public action. For popular liberalism, it is often the rule of good intentions: If it sounds good, do it. Social problems can be solved by compassionate, efficient regulation and bureaucratic management which is seldom efficient and invites unintended consequences in complex, unmanageable systems (say, the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care). The signal light for government intervention is stuck on green.

For libertarians and their ideological relatives, the guiding principle is the maximization of individual liberty. It is a theory of government consisting mainly of limits and boundaries. The light is almost always red.

Conservatism (as my co-author Peter Wehner and I explain in our recent National Affairs essay, "A Conservative Vision of Government") offers a different principle of public action though a bit more difficult to explain than "go" or "stop." In the traditional conservative view, individual liberty is ennobled and ordered within social institutions families, religious communities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, local governments and nations. The success of individuals is tied to the health of these institutions, which prepare them for the responsible exercise of freedom and the duties of citizenship.

This is a limiting principle: Higher levels of government should show deference to private associations and local institutions. But this is also a guide to appropriate governmental action needed when local and private institutions are enervated or insufficient in scale to achieve the public good.

So conservatism is a governing vision that allows for a yellow light: careful, measured public interventions to encourage the health of civil society. There are no simple rules here. Some communities disproportionately affected by family breakdown, community chaos or damaging economic trends will need more active help. But government should, as the first resort, set the table for private action and private institutions creating a context in which civil society can flourish.

This goal has moral and cultural implications. Government has a necessary (if limited) role in reinforcing the social norms and expectations that make the work of civic institutions both possible and easier. Some forms of liberty say, the freedom to destroy oneself with hard drugs or to exploit other men and women in the sex trade not only degrade human nature but damage and undermine families and communities and ultimately deprive the nation of competent, self-governing citizens. (The principle applies, more mildly, to softer drugs. By what governing theory did the citizens of Colorado surveying the challenges of global economic competition, educational mediocrity and unhealthy lifestyles decide that the answer is the proliferation of stoners?)

Read the rest here:
Michael Gerson: A yellow light for government

This page is about free-market individualism. Some people (especially in Europe and Latin America) use the word libertarianism to refer to "libertarian socialism" (see anarchism)

Libertarianism is an idea in ethics and politics. The word comes from the word "liberty". Simply put, Libertarians believe that people should be able to do whatever they desire as long as their actions do not harm others. As a result, Libertarians want to limit the government's power so people can have as much freedom as possible.

Libertarianism grew out of liberalism as a movement in the 1800s. Many of the beliefs of libertarianism are similar to the beliefs in classical liberalism. It also has roots in anarchism and the Austrian School of economics.

Libertarians oppose slavery, rape, theft, murder, and all other examples of initiated violence.

Libertarians believe that no person can justly own or control the body of another person, what they call "self-ownership" or "individual sovereignty." In simple words, every person has a right to control her or his own body.

In the 19th century, United States libertarians like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Lysander Spooner were all abolitionists. Abolitionists were people who wanted to end slavery right away.

Garrison based his opposition to slavery on the idea of self-ownership. Since you have a natural right to control your own body, no one else has any right to steal that control from you. Garrison and Douglass both called slave masters "man stealers."

If you have a right to control your own body, then no one has a right to start violence (or force) against you.

Some libertarians believe that all violence is unjust. These libertarians are often called "anarcho-pacifists". Robert LeFevre was a libertarian who rejected all violence. However, most libertarians believe that there are some ways violence can be justified.

One thing that justifies violence is self defense. If someone is violent towards you, you have a right to defend yourself with equal force.

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Libertarianism - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fair warning: This is about the Duck Dynasty controversy. Yes, I know. Im sick of it, too.

Still, relying upon my First Amendment right to freedom of speech, I will make a few observations about Phil Robertson, the grizzled Louisiana duck hunter turned reality TV star whose comments about black and gay people recently got him suspended and then unsuspended by A&E. If you find my observations disagreeable you may, relying upon your own First Amendment rights, protest to my employer. Assuming enough of you bring enough pressure, my employer may dump me. Feeling angry and betrayed, I might heres that First Amendment again blast my now-former bosses for defects of character, courage or cognition.

But one thing I could not say at least not credibly is that theyd violated my First Amendment rights. There is nothing in the First Amendment that says a private company cant fire you.

Well return to the First in a second. Right now, let me offer the promised observations about Mr. Robertson: The man really needs to wake up and smell the 21st Century.

His comments, made in an interview with GQ, are almost cartoonish in their stupidity. They sound less like they were made by a backwoods ignoramus than by someone doing a takeoff on a backwoods ignoramus.

For instance, Robertson explains his aversion to homosexuality by discoursing on the comparative merits of the male anus and the vagina. For good measure, he invokes bestiality and the Bible. He also notes how black people were singing and happy when he was young. Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare they were godly, they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

Ahem.

So anyway, A&E was shocked shocked, I say, shocked! to learn that a self-described redneck from the Louisiana woods harbored such illiberal views. It suspended Robertson, thereby igniting a scrum of conservative pols jockeying to express newfound love for the First Amendment.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says he can remember when TV networks still believed in it. Sarah Palin calls free speech an endangered species. Mike Huckabee says, Stand with Phil and support free speech.

Yeah. Because freedom of speech means you can say any asinine thing you want and nobody can call you on it or punish you for it. Right?

Excerpt from:
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Idiocy is not a First Amendment offense

One of the main problems with an unremittingly hostile view of government held by many associated with the tea party, libertarianism and constitutionalism is that it obscures and undermines the social contributions of a truly conservative vision of government.

Politics requires a guiding principle of public action. For popular liberalism, it is often the rule of good intentions: If it sounds good, do it. Social problems can be solved by compassionate, efficient regulation and bureaucratic management which is seldom efficient and invites unintended consequences in complex, unmanageable systems (say, the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care). The signal light for government intervention is stuck on green.

Michael Gerson

Gerson writes about politics, religion, foreign policy and global health and development in a twice-a-week column and on the PostPartisan blog.

Archive

For libertarians and their ideological relatives, the guiding principle is the maximization of individual liberty. It is a theory of government consisting mainly of limits and boundaries. The light is almost always red.

Conservatism (as Peter Wehner and I explain in our recent National Affairs essay, A Conservative Vision of Government) offers a different principle of public action though one a bit more difficult to explain than go or stop. In the traditional conservative view, individual liberty is ennobled and ordered within social institutions families, religious communities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, local governments and nations. The success of individuals is tied to the health of these institutions, which prepare people for the responsible exercise of freedom and the duties of citizenship.

This is a limiting principle: Higher levels of government should show deference to private associations and local institutions. But this is also a guide to appropriate governmental action needed when local and private institutions are enervated or insufficient in scale to achieve the public good.

So conservatism is a governing vision that allows for a yellow light: careful, measured public interventions to encourage the health of civil society. There are no simple rules here. Some communities disproportionately affected by family breakdown, community chaos or damaging economic trends will need more active help. But government should, as the first resort, set the table for private action and private institutions creating a context in which civil society can flourish.

This goal has moral and cultural implications. Government has a necessary (if limited) role in reinforcing the social norms and expectations that make the work of civic institutions both possible and easier. Some forms of liberty say, the freedom to destroy oneself with hard drugs or to exploit other men and women in the sex trade not only degrade human nature but also damage and undermine families and communities and ultimately deprive the nation of competent, self-governing citizens. (The principle applies, more mildly, to softer drugs. By what governing theory did the citizens of Colorado surveying the challenges of global economic competition, educational mediocrity and unhealthy lifestyles decide that the answer is the proliferation of stoners?)

See the rest here:
Gerson: How the tea party undermines conservatism