Why we choose to defend liberty

 

Why do libertarians choose to defend liberty? People look at the libertarian defense of free markets and assume we only care about the rich and big business. They think we are naive about national security because we favor peace, not just in Iraq but generally. They think our opposition to the “War on Drugs” comes from an obsession with drugs.

In reality, most people care about more than narrow class or self-interest. The pro-lifers, pro-choicers, environmentalists, conservatives, liberals, and others are motivated by ideology and principle.

Surely, what excited the Ron Paul movement—an unprecedented libertarian grassroots uprising—was ideas: the ideas of liberty.

So why is liberty the idea we choose to defend? It is the right thing to do. Look at the alternative.

 

We favor economic freedom because the state’s attacks on free enterprise lead to stagnation, impoverishment, inflation, and wealth destruction on a horrific scale. The Federal Reserve’s cheap credit and inflation of the money supply have driven prices up. Health care is a mess. The unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare are in the tens of trillions of dollars. From economic freedom comes prosperity, as seen in all former socialist nations moving toward free enterprise. America’s move away from it has been disastrous.

We defend personal liberty for the same reasons.

 

Some say the libertarian position on drugs is utopian, but look at what the drug war has actually created. The United States has the largest prison population on earth. This is supposed to be law enforcement, but these prisons are totalitarian hells of lawlessness. Inmates are raped, beaten, and treated like slaves. Half a million people are behind bars for drugs alone. Conservatives wanted to create a drug-free America. They instead created a police state where the Bill of Rights and the rule of law are dead letters. This police statism has leaked into other areas, leading to police brutality, martial law after Katrina, and such abuses as the mass kidnapping of children from Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas.

 

The principles apply to war, too. Our empire alienates foreign allies, cozies up with despots, destabilizes cultures, promotes conflicts, gets us embroiled in civil wars, destroys our dollar, distorts the economy, and lays claim to our freedom and the unimpeded right to set international policy and interrogate anyone around the world.

The United States had been treating the Middle East like a playground for decades — from the CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader in 1953 to President Jimmy Carter’s support of religious extremists in Afghanistan … from President Ronald Reagan’s support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the 1990s, and the blowback many libertarians warned about happened on Sept. 11, 2001. The resulting war on terror has been exceedingly costly in lives, liberties, and wealth. A million have died in Iraq because of the invasion. Warrantless surveillance, indefinite detentions without habeas corpus, and even torture, have become law in America. These are urgent concerns, emergencies even. Stopping the next war is our great moral duty.

 

Horror stories are not the only thing that inspires libertarians, of course. Where liberty is allowed, humanity has flourished. Throughout history, American idealists set their sights high, envisioning independence from Britain, the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow, alcohol prohibition and an end to the Vietnam War. The classical liberals, revolutionaries, abolitionists, and anti-imperialists were ridiculed as utopians and dreamers, but they won the day, and America benefited immensely as a result.

Indeed, civilization itself depends on the principles of individual liberty. Without the market, there is no economy. Without social tolerance, there is no social peace. Without freedom there is no justice.

Libertarians take positions that horrify detractors on the left and right. We defend some people that others won’t. We take some very unpopular stands.

But we have to. The statists on left and right have had their way, and they have devastated the lives of millions.

 

Libertarianism is not about protecting big business at the expense of the little guy. It is not an obsession with drugs, or a naive view of foreign affairs, or wanting to throw all manner of civility, community, law, and personal discipline out the window. That is not our interest. Quite the reverse.

Ours is a program and philosophy concerned with dismantling state oppression and setting people free. The short-term remedy and the long-term goal are the same thing: Liberty. Everything we care about is on the line.

 

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation, and a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His Website is AnthonyGregory.com.