What I mean is that it always makes me sad to see how readily we’re accepting the leftist framing of every societal problem. The frame is always thus: Problem X exists, Governmental Solution Y exists, and no other solution besides GSY exists. The assumption we’re always allowing to be smuggled into these conversations is that the only tool capable of addressing broad social issues is government.

The voluntary association of a free people with free-standing cultural institutions used to be one of our greatest American traditions. Foremost of course is our association with formal religious institutions, but we also have community organizations like the Knights of Columbus or the Rotary Club or the lowly neighborhood association. There are tens of thousands of fragmented cultural institutions occupying niche work in niche causes, but what is lacking on the right-libertarian side is the consciousness that we really can build a culture of freedom through millions of individual choices to voluntarily associate with groups that intentionally cross-pollinate with one another.

The left, on the other hand, gets this instinctively, to the extent that it has become part of their DNA. Take the Open Source Civilization movement for example. Despite the fact that it is currently floundering because of Jakubowski’s managerial issues, the fact remains that thousands of people have caught sight of an over-arching vision of a culture not currently in existence, and they are now applying the vision to areas of technology, ecology, law, the concept of community, and on the list goes. Or witness the continuity between lefty community organizations, academia, the foundations, the NGO’s, the media–basically every non-governmental cultural institution, all banging the same drum all the live-long day, supporting and feeding off one another.

Virtually all of leftist philosophy is anti-human. I believe that to my very core because I see it in the solutions they propose. But in this one respect, they have tapped into a profound insight regarding human nature. Of course they use it against us, but that doesn’t negate the truthfulness of the insight.

For most people, a vision of some broad contours within which to work is always going to be more compelling than a vision of nothing but a blank canvas and the prospect of formulating it all yourself. Right-libertarians offer the latter, without any significant effort to nurture the non-governmental institutions that give people the broad contours of the wider culture. Government will always care about those contours, whether libertarians care or not.

So we are simply going to have to show up in that space. Otherwise, the only contours being offered will continue to be those envisioned by the perpetual work of Government Justifying More Government.

Very astute regarding local government. While it’s true that local government tends towards more liberty in that we each have more of a say in what happens there, that’s not necessarily the case. Anyone who’s ever come across a corrupt small town cop knows this to be so.

We assume that local control facilitates greater liberty, and that’s usually the case, but not always.

Hence, an eternal conflict and unresolvable conflict. If a small town arrests somebody passing through and jails him for five months and confiscates their vehicle without a trial, a larger government (state of federal) needs to step in and do something about it. However, the more often larger governments do so, the more prominent said governments and the less control communities have over their own lives.

Washington should not be our primary guarantor of liberty, but something needs to hold localities in check when they abuse their power. At the same time, if Washington gets too vigilant in its protection of liberty (and its definition of it), our communities are destroyed.

The closest thing to a solution we’ve got is a society with a strong moral foundation. The more individuals and localities preserve individual liberty, the less we’ll need Washington to come in and solve our problems for us.

“3) On another note, I find it odd how often conservatives and libertarians both assume that local government equals more freedom.”

I view local gov’t more as an opportunity to be able to influence the control of my life. In theory I should be able to effect change more with a government closer to me.

I call it out as theory since I live in the Chicago Metro area, so between Illinois and Chicago, it’s obvious theory doesn’t always translate into practice.

I once worked with NOW to host a workshop on rape at a time when some changes in state laws were being debated. Things discussed were how police should collect evidence and how ER personnel could better handle victims. It was the first time these topics had been discussed in a public forum in the area. But then, some of the younger, more activist types started talking about setting up a volunteer hotline for victims. I was amazed. In our area there was a very low incidence of rape, and the idea of having people man phones 24/7 seemed stupid. I thought that it was more than enough to raise the topic among the people who would already deal with victims and they would then do their jobs with a bit more awareness.

Now, years later I see how senior citizen aid groups have pushed for a new and very expensive center, where essentially old people can go to play cards. Using and perhaps tweaking existing resources isn’t fancy enough. Governments have to get involved, and if state funding for projects is offered, then you will get more spending and less local control. Everyone who is paid with govt money has the potential to become a professional advocate and to diminish the strengths of people who have been providers of help. My hometown still has lots of volunteers, lots of churches that get involved, and a newspaper that writes about and praises these people, so the area hasn’t lost all its strength yet. I keep my fingers crossed.

People are still homogenous about what virtue is. Even the staunchest liberal/Progressive that by chance found himself hitch hiking on a dark road, would hope a devout Christian be the one to stop and pick him up.

But something else is going on that seemingly short circuits people’s common sense about what virtue and goodness even is. And what that dynamic is, is the immense peer pressure campaign coming out of media and academia, that seeks to make judgement and discrimination of others and their behavior to be the biggest social taboo of them all.

An excellent defense of the libertarian position.

I would add some caveats though.

1) Much of the age of “small government” in America – roughly from the founding to the early 20th Century – was a period in which government was more of a register of local sentiments and standards, and not a vessel for social change or experimentation.

Conservatives and libertarians both express admiration for the idea of states as “laboratories of democracy,” but, whatever else it might be, this was not a founding ideal – it was a position articulated by progressives, most notably Louis Brandeis, as a way to empower enlightened elites over against the people whose delegates they used to be.

Even if there were occasional expressions used by the founders suggesting such a notion, they were not in fact suggesting such a notion – the idea that a state government would “experiment” with pornography legalization or gay marriage was absurd. That would not be an experiment; that would be an abomination.

Point is, the people were pretty homogeneous across state lines in terms of their basic notions of what the universe was like and what constituted virtuous behavior within it, denominational differences in Christian belief notwithstanding. It wasn’t that these things were not expressed in law – they definitely were, in ways we now find appalling (sodomy laws, blasphemy laws, establishments of religion, censorship laws, and on and on and on) – but rather that not many people felt particularly sour about this, because they all tried to behave accordingly anyway.

This was an era, as I like to put it, of a “common law” understanding of government (the thrust of the common law being to issue judgments according to the standard of a sensible man in the community). What eventually emerged was a totally different understanding, which might be called “administrative.”

Consequently, I think the issue is more one of the respective benefits and drawbacks of the common law and administrative understandings, rather than one of leaving social issues to social sanction vs. using government to promote them.

That is not, in short, an argument for libertarianism in the strict sense – anarcho-captialism – but rather for something like subsidiarity or localism. There never was a period in which social sanction was the dominant conduit of virtue; indeed, the basic belief was that anything worthy of being severely socially sanctioned was worthy of being legally sanctioned – just not be the federal government.

I think conservatives kind of downplay just how authoritarian the conception of state (small s) power was throughout most of American history.

2) Thus, the problem is not so much that setting up the “deliberate sense of the community” in law removes the incentive to sanction immoral behavior socially, but rather that increasing diversity combined with the importation of highly activist conceptions of government by the progressives led to a shattering of the consensus which had formerly allowed for harmony between social sanction and legal sanction.

In effect, one by one, on each of these moral questions, the deliberate sense of the community broke apart into several different deliberate senses.

Exacerbated by the progressives, who took every opportunity to stoke the fires in order to bolster their standing as the Ones With The Solution To The Problem, state (small s) power was proclaimed to be a chaotic mess where a gaggle of petty tyrannies “raced to the bottom” and ignored the cries of the marginalized. They legislated, they ruled, they conquered.

3) On another note, I find it odd how often conservatives and libertarians both assume that local government equals more freedom. Unless local government means one block in a neighborhood (and maybe not even then), this is pretty counterintuitive.

As communities get smaller, they get more like-minded and thus more tribalistic, which means more confirmation bias, less skepticism, and more boldness is putting moral and “social” issues into the purview of the ruling element. This is universal. We see it in the Amish, in the different groups represented by identity politics, in tribal societies throughout history, and of course in American history.

Whether or not this is a desirable increase in liberty is one thing; whether it is a situation in which virtue is sustained solely by social pressure and private activity is another. The latter it is not.

Personally, I think localism is preferable not on libertarian grounds, but on grounds of checks and balances. Intermediate powers between the people and the central government are essential to a free republic – not, note well, a libertarian republic – and that is my concern, which I also believe was the concern of the Founders. The friction and resistance between the intermediaries horizontally, and between them and the central government vertically, draws energy and attention away from the people, and it becomes harder to set up How Best To Tyrannize them as the central question of government. It also helps ensure that we are tyrannized (speaking loosely) in a way we like or are at least comfortable with.

And I do believe that the closer to home a decision is, the more seriously virtue will be taken, simply because matters are closer to pure concerns of self-interest. But that doesn’t mean the elevation of the local sense of the virtues to enshrinement in the ruling element won’t occur. It will. Arguably it should. But at any rate, it will.

He and I are contemporaries. I have always been of a conservative bent. I suspect that he realized he was also when he was castigated for going electric (at Woodstock?). How some ever I have always been an ardent fan. I now waste/spend my time plating Eve Online and listening to a playlist that includes Dylan, Elvis, Patsy and a bunch of classical pieces. Life is good.

This is the impression libertarians leave more than the actuality. So often they’re emphasizing how something should be legal that they forget to mention that they also believe it’s wrong.

But believing it’s wrong itsn’t enough–it also has to be discouraged, actively, albeit through non-governmental means. Libertarians need to reassure the socons that they’re essentially on the same side by promoting moral behavior in the ways they deem legitimate.

Libertarians often agree with social conservatives in the type of society they’d like to have, they just disagree with how to go about it.

One of the reasons my social conservatism has made me into a libertarian (republitarian) is that I think that when we outsource something to the government, it makes us less vigilant about it. In Europe, where they have a stronger social safety net, people don’t give very much to charity. Likewise, if people count on the government to enforce their morality, as superior as that morality may be, they won’t do as well by their kids and communities.

We left it up the government to protect us from pornography, and then when the courts legalized it, the socons were powerless against it. Had they not outsourced that to the state for so long, perhaps they might have done a better job at getting people to voluntarily abstain from it.

Also, it’s important to remember that any institution strong enough to promote your morality is strong enough to promote its opposite. Public schools used to teach our kids Christian valies. It kept teaching values, but it dropped the Christian part and became hostile to it. Today, public education is one of the most anti-religious institutions we have.

“So it seems to me that libertarians need to spend less time talking about their rights and more time talking about responsibilities. If the latter are devalued, the former will be taken away. I would like to hear them say, Sure, you can smoke a joint, but when you do, you are funding a dealer who will be at the schoolyard tomorrow.”

I totally agree with the first two sentences, but disagree with where you take it. The only reason your joint funds the dealer who will be at the schoolyard is that you can’t buy the joint in a store (which is also why it funds gangs and terrorism).

And the same argument can be used against gun manufacturers and breweries.

Many on the right seek control over our lives but in different areas. Left or right both seek to control power and maintain their status as the gatekeepers. The difference is each side has palette with 100 shades of gray. Leftits are perfectly content to murder to achiever their agenda. Rightist have a good slower appoarch.

Libertarians want the least controls in the hands of DC, a bit more control at the state level, and more control at the locale level. We want common sense laws (from all levels of government) that are few & simple to understand, and that address issues that put recognizable and easily agreed upon limits on individual liberty. We want direct, simple laws that oversee what happens in the market place.

That’s my take.