{"id":17404,"date":"2012-10-21T11:22:06","date_gmt":"2012-10-21T16:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17404"},"modified":"2012-10-21T11:28:29","modified_gmt":"2012-10-21T16:28:29","slug":"nick-gillespie-a-libertarian-appreciation-for-the-late-george-mcgovern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/21\/nick-gillespie-a-libertarian-appreciation-for-the-late-george-mcgovern\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Gillespie: A libertarian appreciation for the late George McGovern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>George McGovern will, unfortunately, be best known to most people as the poor beggar who lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon in a blowout. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2012-10-21\/george-mcgovern-s-legacy-as-a-libertarian-hero.html\" target=\"_blank\">Nick Gillespie<\/a> says there was much more to McGovern than just being on the wrong side of an electoral landslide:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>McGovern\u2019s early criticism of the Vietnam War (he first spoke against it as a newly elected Democratic senator from South Dakota in 1963) was out of step with a bipartisan Cold War consensus that smothered serious debate for too long.<\/p>\n<p>Yet when you take a longer view of his career &mdash; especially after he got bounced from the Senate in 1980 during the Republican landslide he helped create &mdash; what emerges is a rare public figure whose policy positions shifted to an increasingly libertarian stance in response to a world that\u2019s far more complicated than most politicians can ever allow. <\/p>\n<p>Born in 1922 and raised during the Depression, McGovern eventually earned a doctorate in American history before becoming a politician. But it was as a private citizen he became an expert in the law of unintended consequences, which elected officials ignore routinely. He came to recognize that attempts to control the economic and lifestyle choices of Americans aren\u2019t only destructive to cherished national ideals, but ineffective as well. That legacy is more relevant now than ever. <\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>In a 1997 <em>New York Times<\/em> op-ed article, he emphasized that simply because some people abuse freedom of choice is no reason to reduce it. \u201cDespite the death of my daughter,\u201d he argued, \u201cI still appreciate the differences between use and abuse.\u201d He rightly worried that lifestyle freedom, like economic freedom, was everywhere under attack: \u201cNew attempts to regulate behavior are coming from both the right and the left, depending only on the cause. But there are those of us who don\u2019t want the tyranny of the majority (or the outspoken minority) to stop us from leading our lives in ways that have little impact on others.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>McGovern believed that attempts to impose single-value standards were profoundly un-American and \u201cthat we cannot allow the micromanaging of each other\u2019s lives.\u201d But as governments at various levels expand their control of everything from health-care to mortgages to the consumption of soda pop and so much more, that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>George McGovern will, unfortunately, be best known to most people as the poor beggar who lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon in a blowout. Nick Gillespie says there was much more to McGovern than just being on the wrong side of an electoral landslide: McGovern\u2019s early criticism of the Vietnam War (he first spoke [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53,13],"tags":[263,322,293,661,515,585],"class_list":["post-17404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-usa","tag-1970s","tag-nannystate","tag-obituary","tag-regulation","tag-richardnixon","tag-vietnam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4wI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17404"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17408,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17404\/revisions\/17408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}