Over at Balko’s site, Radley is on vacation, so he has a bunch of guest bloggers holding down the fort. One of the guest bloggers, Peter Moskos, asked for the libertarians who haunt the comments at the Agitator to explain certain positions to him. The community did a pretty good job responding, but one of the other guest bloggers really, IMHO, nailed the core of Libertarian values in two simple words..
Power Corrupts
Go read the posts and discussion, it’s interesting.
…and the absence of power would be what?
According to my studies in philosophy, that would be anarchy.
Libertarians mostly have their hearts in the right places, it seems to me, but sometimes they fail to apply real-world metrics to their Big-L polemics.
Power TENDS to corrupt. Some FORCE must be applied to see that it doesn’t. IF you BALANCE all that properly, you have a happy result: the minimum-sized government using it’s power responsibly.
That should REALLY be the goal, RESPONSIBLE use of power, but I never hear that from the mouths of Big-Ls.
I don’t play at Radley’s place, too many egos there and not enough room for mine, heh, so this will have to be my response to the Ls.
Maybe we could use an abused word one more time: how about MODERATE Libertarianism?
Oh, I think power corrupts is fine. Of course there are always exceptions which prove the rule, but I think that, for the most part, those who seek power are most easily corrupted by it. Still, we can’t have anarchy, so we do need someone in power. The moderate Ls just want to see fewer in power, less concentration of power, and better safeguards against the abuse of power.