Community, Big Government, and Libertarianism

On his blog, Jonah Goldberg brings up the issue of libertarianism and community, something which I have written about in an article that will appear March 13th at The Prometheus Institute. In the meantime, I would like to add a few comments here on libertarian communitarianism vs. state communitarianism.

The species Homo sapiens (a.k.a., you) is a social mammal. Big-government supporters love this fact because they think that it is proof that all their welfare state ideas (which are really socialism light) are proven and that libertarianism is thus disproven. This requires that we all agree that government is the true source of all community and that libertarianism is a destroyer of community. Well, I would argue that the opposite is true.

The source of all community is rooted in the family. A tribe is an extended family, and ethics too is based on our extending how we treat our families to others. This is why religions use the language that we use for families – including “family” itself. And this is why we hear proponents of big government beginning now to use this same familiar language. How could we go on if we didn’t hear some Democrat lamenting every child’s plight, as though only government could possibly protect the children? “We must take all your money so the children of the poor won’t suffer any more.” But please don’t pay attention to the fact that almost every person now on welfare works the system so that they can get more money and not have to work at all, or that they use their daycare as a place to dump their children off so they can spend the day with boyfriends, home, or shopping. Hope they’re home or shopping, since the former choice will just get them more children for more money. Should we be surprised that when we pay a person every time they have a child that they keep on having them? And never mind that fact a thousand generations of people worldwide somehow managed to raise children just find without fascism/socialism/communism/welfare statism around to dictate how to do so.

My wife was once a Left-wing Democrat and former social worker. She saw homes of people getting welfare with wide-screen T.V.’s, brand-new cars outside, and far more things than my wife and I now have – and these were people she was trying at the time to get more services and money. She saw almost everyone misusing welfare, and she told me that she thought that maybe ten percent of all the people that she helped were actually needy. Her best friend, another social worker who remains a liberal, said he thought it was more like five percent. And, worse than that, he said that the corruption going on in social work is unbelievable, that no one doing social work could do their job without their falsifying most of the required paperwork. They quit, unable in the end to keep on working in such places that were so corrupt in what they did and who they served, encouraging unethical behaviors in the clients with the very “help” they gave. But what about the children? Well, their children learn that work is something to avoid, that you should have a lot of children (out of wedlock if you can), and that the system can be worked – and all because of liberal guilt. And this is for the children.

Welfare, then, destroys the family – but that is what big-government supporters really want, for if you’re loyal to a family or group, then you will not show all your loyalty to government (at least, not nearly what the big-government worshippers all think you should). It also helps explain the reason why the Left is so against religion – they hate competition, after all.

A libertarian community develops from the ground up. They are self-organizing, self-assembling entities. Social bonds form naturally among the members of such a community. People are able to join into voluntary associations, like families, groups of friends, churches, clubs, etc. Such groups may split or join together -- but that is natural and healthy. Complex systems are made bottom-up in nature, and those complex bonds are maintained at that level. Complexity emerges from simplicity. When something is designed form the top-down, the system is always simple and simplified. A steel i-beam or other object is chemically much simpler than is iron ore. This is fine for the creation of simple objects like cars and buildings, but human societies are complex and are natural products. They cannot be engineered without the elimination of complex bonds -- meaning, social engineering simplifies communities and thus weakens them considerably. Thus, the most natural, most complex communities would be those based on libertarian principles. A libertarian country would have strong local communities with leaders who emerged naturally from that community and, knowing everyone in the community, would have a better idea of what is needed by them and it than someone elsewhere. As a result, higher-order governments (city governments, county governments, and certainly state and federal governments) should have increasingly less power to be natural and efficient. The most natural form of government for a large group of interconnected people would be one that is locally communitarian, and globally libertarian, with many levels of increasing libertarianism in between.

I guess the only people who would not be happy in a country such as this would be the ones who hunger for the kind of power which results from ruling millions and from telling people what to do. I think that we should sacrifice the happiness of this minority for greater happiness. I think that this is something which is more than worth the sacrifice. Besides, these people will not be without some power in the end – there’s always people ready, willing, and desirous to join any cult that comes along. Those people can be ruled off on their compound, far away from all the rest of us who wish to rule ourselves.