Tonight I read an article by a great friend of Kirk's on his blog at investinginvacantland.com. The article, entitled "In Praise of Selfishness," reminds us Americans of the powerful case for capitalism and a limited government. As a citizen with strongly conservative economic views, I really appreciated his voice and wisdom behind his article.
His article got my own ideas stirred up on the topic, so I'm going to try to make some sense of them here (as I partially did in my
lengthy comment on his blog which is currently awaiting moderation).
On my trip to New York City with Mindy and Bonnie back and April, we were discussing politics and we had come to talk about Libertarianism and it's most visible proponent, John Stossel. I remember saying that the problem with Libertarians is that we are all giant assholes. I'm not quite sure what it is, but this particular belief set attracts a certain personality of individuals who tend to be very self-assured. Not only do we almost always know what is unequivocally true, we have no qualms in sharing it with you. We also usually can be seen by some as heartless because we often have a quite matter-of-fact attitude towards the hardships, losses, and failures of others.
Now I by no means was apologizing for who I am, but I was acknowledging that our cause is difficult to evangelize because while many (usually most) Americans agree with our points on a cognitive level, and will say so, they are easily turned-off by our delivery of that message as they are likely to see us as arrogant, selfish, bossy, and unfriendly. This is a horrible shame, and a terrible detriment getting any of the policies that I believe will maximize our quality of life. So, in keeping with the personality traits that I addressed above, I wanted to enumerate the biggest issues that we
must avoid to further our cause.
- The single biggest problem crime (which I am ironically committing with this sentence) is our use of untamed generalities. One thing that contributes to our perception of being heartless, is that we often pretend that more homogeneous than it really is. We might say, for example, that welfare programs create a culture of dependency and cripples our society. Of course, we are discussing principle and will usually not defend our stance when applied to every case - unemployment insurance, pre-natal care for underprivileged women, and medicare come immediately to mind. The problem is that this gives us an air of insensitivity and makes it seem like the policies we espouse aren't useful in the real world because we discuss a weird, general imaginary world.
- A related sin, which is shared by many groups, especially fundamentalists is the tendency to pretend that the world is black and white. We pose questions and answers in a binary format. Either it is on or it's off. It is or it isn't. It's right or it's wrong. For some reason, fundamentalists feel very comfortable in such a framework and actually seek it for it's seeming simplicity. For example, one might say or imply that freedom should not be traded for security. We say freedoms should not be traded, but what we mean is much more delicate. We are sharing our bias as if it were a commandment. This can really distract people because it can set us up to seem hypocritical. We say that we support deregulation but maybe I support trade embargos and my friend supports minimum wage. Most of us are real people who understand that problems are not cookie cutter so neither can the solutions be, but we tend not to project this.
- The last issue I will cover here is that we frequently downplay the pain and hurt that is a necessary byproduct of our views. We would love to talk about the efficiency provided by an unencumbered job market, but we would rather ignore the pool of unemployment that drives it. We would love to talk about allowing a monster car industry giant to fail as just wages for its own sin, without talking about the enormous price paid by the individuals who have no culpability in that failure but depend on that giant all the same. It is not fair to talk about the benefits of freedom without realistically and honestly addressing the pain that it invariably causes. Full transparency of both benefits and costs is the only way that we can differentiate ourselves from the herd.
