Why always so patronizing? (libertarianism is authoritarian)
Michael, we’ve talked about this, haven’t we?A necessity is not a human right. I know that’s hard to hear given the fact that so many people are living in poverty and need food, shelter, water, and other welfare goods that they don’t have the means to obtain. But, they’re still not human rights; if they were, then why don’t we have the government provide everybody with everything that they feel the need to have? The list would keep expanding, would it not? These needs have to be provided us by other individuals. We can’t just force them to give these things away for free; and we can’t force our neighbors to pay for things that they don’t want, need, or will ever use. It’s coercion. I don’t appreciate being accused of not believing in the right to life, Mike. :/ Please don’t compare libertarianism to the policies of a man who allowed for torture and aggressive wars.
This is outright crap. C-R-A-P. We do have economic goods and shared goods. We do differentiate. To claim the things we consider shared goods should be exchanged in the free market as economic goods is paradigmatic. Libertarians deny this. Libertarians want to claim that in nature shared goods and services don’t exist. In other words, to differentiate fucks with the natural order of things. The claim is reactionary. That would be in reaction to the way things already are in society, in nature—in reaction to the way we already separate out from the free market certain goods and services we have historically considered are most likely more or less due to all humans because they are humans.
We should always remember that the goal of capitalist libertarianism is to impose a moral order that insists liberty defines freedom as human being free from others. It’s an ideological interpellation that composes individuals as private citizens who have no relation to other citizens (other than economic/market relations) despite their common humanity. This form of libertarianism eradicates social being, in fact, eradicates social being using a social contract. Libertarians are always on about harmful regulation, but what they intend to impose upon social being is a highly regulated society that enables a capitalist order to cultivate a free market.
Libertarians define the free market as the result of the natural spontaneous order that further liberates us when we exchange goods and services between friends and strangers. This definition is not something found in nature. The definition was not derived after contemplative observation in nature. It’s found in rhetoric. Get off your high horse with your “necessity is not a human right” rhetoric long enough to engage in discourse about ideas that are entirely human constructions. Necessity is not a human right is a claim that, by design, ignores the possibility for the existence of shared goods. It’s not that the claim recognizes a fact that such goods and services don’t exist. It’s a claim that insists they don’t exist. In other words, it’s an authoritarian power structure that seeks to impose a constructed social order. And we’ve seen that capitalist societies are willing to use even their militaries to impose this authority. The claim ignores shared goods and services because it assumes quite a bit about the unexamined social and legal construction of the difference between private and public that Austrian and libertarian theory takes for granted. And it takes this for granted because much of the ground for both theories is purely reactionary in that it was constructed as a capitalist morality contra socialism.
You may wish to ignore this, but many of us don’t. The only way for all of us to be able to discuss these things is to resist relying on strictly ideological constructions for talking about social and rhetorical spaces. Michael was attempting to do that, and you decided to impose a moral order on his discourse. It’s very authoritarian of you.
All that follows is a plea for your position. In other words, a confession that all libertarians want is that everyone accept that highly-constructed paradigm for seeing and thinking about everyday life as the primary way to see and think.
I tend not to berate the impoverished for taking out welfare checks if they absolutely need it to live, but please don’t argue that this is a moral system. Don’t demand higher taxes; we have to live with the system, but we should also be scaling back the state. We should not be calling for more government assistance and programs just because we’ve all kind of benefitted from it somewhat. There are better alternatives.
It’s so typical of libertarians to not see their pleas as demands. The other is always demanding and the other is often poor and oppressed. Libertarianism is absolutely a plea to morality and a claim that the concept of shared goods and services are immoral and unjust. Capitalist libertarianism is necessarily authoritarian in that it must impose a capitalist moral order. It’s like a fucking religion—its aggression is always righteous and mostly unexamined.
(Source: huberthumphreydeathrally, via daisysnotebook-deactivated20120)
