A Plea to Libertarians

I speak to you as a fellow Libertarian.

It is the natural instinct of the Libertarian to announce that he has the greatest features of "both sides." From the fascist Republicans he takes the economic freedom, and from the socialist Democrats he takes the social freedom. The result is a kind of man who hates the government and wants nothing to do with the IRS, social security, the military, nor food stamps.

The first problem with this is that the Republicans and Democrats don't actually sponsor either of what has just been suggested. Not in actuality. You can find fringe-members of each party, be it Ron Paul or the Democrat-equivalent, but the party itself, and the units they elect, are much closer to one another than they are to either of the ideals expressed. Economic and social freedom - freedom - is lost to the two-party system.

The second problem is much more complex, and regards how one defines "freedom." Freedom is a buzzword that most are inclined to support, but it doesn't so easily stand behind a single platform in the face of the interpretations of many people. Right-libertarians, like myself, are captialists. That means property establishment, and that means guns and borders. That means: cross that line and you're dead. Not exactly "free." But freedom is denied to man in its perfect form, so saith these types. The right-libertarians posit that a world without property is less free than a world with it, because property establishes a space in which you may act freely, where propertylessness produces only chaos. A world where every man has his own land is a world that utilizes that land the best, and also where people can freely pursue their own interests, so saith we. But that's a very different statement than "social freedom," or "economic freedom," the latter of which simply means adhering to the exclusive ownership rights of property.

I have been, at one point in my life, drawn away from right-libertarianism for this the property issue. It is hard to support property based largely on its inequitable distribution and exclusive nature. My plea is that libertarians come back to the old ways of natural rights, and forget the argument of establishing property on the basis of consequentialist jabber.

Natural rights are hard things to support. How could it be that what matters more than the outcome is... anything? Don't the ends justify the means? - it is what we're looking at after all, what we're considering. To these I say, yes - I hold no contention. There is no problem with pursuing the best ends, but we must acknowledge that these ends can only be pursued in the first place, insofar as those ends are good, by establishing property rights. Whatever value a man has and wishes to pursue, whatever good value - be it peace, love, friendship - these values are lost automatically in a world ravaged by conflict. Conflict-avoidance is a goal that comes temporally prior to the pursuing of ends, thereby establishing it as an a priori ethic. Property rights are the means by which conflict is avoided. It is initially appropriated by homesteading - the act of utilizing virgin resources - because the goal of land, for man, is to be utilized, and once utilized there is no sense in the removal of that title for the sake of another. Moreover, such 'first come, first served' with regard to the unutilized world is natural - it is what any man would expect, and so establishes itself as a Schelling point - a thing that man will respect on the basis of a mutually-agreeable point in the vast land of unagreeable ones.

To establish libertarianism on this basis is an inherently more powerful argument. It side-steps the values debated by the consequentialists by imposing a natural law that supersedes them. Its support necessitates the libertarian code and its many extensions, where the consequentialist would have to painstakingly enumerate. None of this is to say that a consequentialist argument doesn't serve the libertarian well - indeed, supporting the use of property rights as a means of conflict-avoidance would need to also suggest that values could and would be pursued in a state of peace, and in this avenue such arguments are welcome. But to stand on these alone is to lose a powerful advantage.