Loving liberty

Mark Thompson:

Goldberg’s assumption is that the animating principle of libertarianism is “anti-statism,” defined roughly as a belief that smaller government is always and everywhere better government and that larger government is always and everywhere worse government. He is, to be sure, likely correct that libertarian affiliation with the political Right is the reason movement conservatives consider “anti-statism” to be a core principle of movement conservatism. But he is wrong in assuming that anti-statism and libertarianism are coextensive.

Writing in an altogether different context, Wirkman Virkkala makes some magnificent use of (very politically incorrect-to-offensive) snark that helps explain why Goldberg’s assumption shows the difference between conservatism and libertarianism:

From what I can tell, conservatives at their best are Size Queens: They dislike “Big Government.” They want “smaller government.” Actual liberty? Where people are truly free to choose? Nope. That scares them. There is always some issue, like drugs, or religion, that throw them for a loop.

Individualist liberals and libertarians love liberty. Conservatives want smaller government. There is a difference.

Unfortunately, to accomodate the coalition with the Right, libertarians largely dropped their emphasis on liberty and individualism (which is completely incompatible with many elements of the modern coalition of the Right), settling instead for an emphasis on small government (which is less a principle than a hypothetical means of achieving any number of ends that were - and often still are - compatible with the other elements of the coalition of the Right). And so you wind up with self-described libertarians emphasizing things like states’ rights when it comes to government-sponsored discrimination (since ending that discrimination would entail the growth of federal authority) while largely ignoring the effects that state-level government discrimination has on individual liberty. Or you wind up with libertarians arguing vociferously against various slightly government-growing policies that either are intended to or would have the effect of ameliorating the effects of government intrusions of personal liberty (e.g., needle exchange programs, guest worker visas).