I came to a libertarian ideology quite early in life and have never abandoned it. I am opposed to the initiation of violence. I think governments are always and everywhere in danger of reverting to the status of gangs. I believe that taxation is essentially theft and should not happen without the kind of clear moral justification that would excuse a theft. I believe in virtually unrestricted liberty of speech and the press; I believe property is a sacred foundation of society.
None of which really helps me answer questions about nation-states. As I’ve gotten older and immersed myself more deeply in the study of history — while watching libertarian principles become steadily more respectable — I’ve begun to realize that the issues you can resolve by simple appeal to a libertarian ideology are the low-hanging fruit of the political universe. Libertarianism helps you see that things like dairy supply management or Internet content policing are shocking absurdities. But does it settle issues like abortion, or immigration, or tort reform or voting criteria?
Not on its own. It dictates that human lives should not be taken without due process, but it doesn’t tell you whether murderers ought to be hanged. It insists that persons should be allowed to organize for collective aims, but does not say that a legal system must have limited-liability corporations. It says private individuals should be allowed to use whatever money they want — but not what kind of money is really best.
[…]
Libertarians have an instinctive horror of larger states: what we call libertarianism sprouted in Cold War-era fears of a worldwide superstate, which we now call “paranoid” in retrospect only because we forget how popular the idea was. The world is, in general, better off with more states. Ideally there will always be refuges from authority, and more states mean more potential laboratories for libertarian success and functioning non-state institutions. (One thinks of the increasing number of European towns without traffic signals, all of whom had to fight the general prejudice in favour of laws and rules we have never tried to do without.)
But there is a level of state size below which libertarian principles cannot be practised. A state must have the means of collective self-defence, whatever principles it is founded upon, and total anarchy is not a stable equilibrium. This is the point at which the concept of the nation comes into the argument. But nations are all more or less fictions. The problem, in Scotland or Quebec or Catalonia or Tamil Nadu, is that a) they are fictions people believe in strongly and b) often they believe equally strongly in irreconcilable fictions.
Colby Cosh, “The Strange Fiction of Hadrian’s wall”, Maclean’s, 2014-09-27.
December 3, 2015
QotD: A thumbnail sketch of libertarianism
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