From a Recovering Libertarian

I used to be a libertarian, so I can tell you what the shortcoming of the philosophy is with the authority of first hand experience:

The libertarian assumes that a civilization can and will maintain its moral character without using any laws to enforce, without using any tax money to fund the teaching and transmission of, the cult and culture on which that moral character is based.

In short, the Libertarians expects all men, including those raised in a libertarian moral wilderness as one might see in Las Vegas, or some place where all vices are legal, to maintain the Puritan work ethic, Christian notions of charity and honesty, and pagan notions of honor, without any laws encouraging the family, without any public monuments praising war heroes, without the use of force or taxes to protect or promote the shared culture making Libertarianism possible.

Also, the libertarian assumes an atomized the society of free and independent individuals unbound one to another aside from voluntary bonds. No account is taken of wives and children, the sick, the poor, the lame, the mad, or the dying.

For example, many a libertarian, during the debates about homosexual so called marriage, offered that the state should bow out of the realm of family law altogether, and neither recognize marriage nor enforce laws against adultery or incest, fornication or sodomy.

When asked what to do, for example, with a fortune in gold accumulated by Hank Rearden when dies intestate, and his ex-wife Lillian, his useless brother Philip, and his pregnant lover Dagny Taggart all appear at his coffin side, demanding ownership,  and each flies to a (presumably) all-volunteer arbitration service to enjoin the others from making off with the shining blue bars of expensive Rearden Metal, but without recourse to any principles of family law or any recognition of marriage or paternity or family bonds, the libertarian principle of radical individualism provides no answer.

Doing away with government recognition of marriage means doing away with family law, trusts and estates, adoption, or laws against child abandonment. It is absurd.

All that happens, in effect, when such an absurdity is attempted, is that the law treats all acts of copulation on a case by case basis either marriage or as rape, and paternity is established by genetic tests alone, regardless of intent or consent.

Libertarianism reminds me of Deism. It is an attempt to reduce to a simple and elegant rational but purely natural system supporting the Christian ideals while removing the Christianity.

In this case, the ideal sought is to found a society recognizing the Imago Dei, the image of God in Man. The ideal holds it to be self evident that all men are created with equal natural rights endowed by their Creator.

But the Libertarian, in order to allow free indulgence in the vices our Creator has forbidden, silences all talk of the creator.

In effect, the Libertarian is trying to uphold the ideal of God given rights to liberty and property, but without the God.

There is also merely a dismissal of any problem involving the public good. In a commonwealth without a draft, the army must be all volunteer, but without God, the culture cannot hold up as ideal any ideal other than enlightened self interest.

And enlightened self interest cannot encourage the type of patriotic self sacrifice needed to attract young men to volunteer for the pain, toil, wounds, tears, and death found in the nasty mud of the battlefield.

Without cultural bonds based on something stronger, deeper, and more mystical than enlightened self interest, there is no reason, for example for citizens living in the presumably borderless libertarian utopia, when the Western districts are being invaded by savage Anemolians, for young men from the Eastern district to volunteer for the all volunteer militia.

And, as to why anyone in the voluntary social compact of the libertarian utopia should pitch in to the annual charity drive to fund their militia is an open question. There is a free rider problem if the tax is not coerced.

Also, any problem involving concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, such as a polluter who gets a hundred dollars worth of good out of some unclean practice, but only harms a thousand people with one dollar’s worth of harm, is not going to be hauled off to the private and voluntary arbitration service for a lawsuit of nuisance or a tort of negligence. It is not worth the trouble of the victim acting in isolation to seek redress.

A faithful libertarian, to be sure, would answer that the drawbacks of his commonwealth are real, but that these are a small price to pay when compared to the very real and hideous drawbacks and dangers to the public weal and individual liberty posed by more authoritarian commonwealths.

And, as a child of the God-forsaking Twentieth Century, the century that invented genocide as a tool of state policy, and abortion as a constitutional right, I cannot scoff at the wary judgment of the faithful libertarian in so saying.

I may disagree, but the disagreement will be respectful.