The Case Against Libertarianism

It's fun poking at them with sharp sticks for their stance on illegal drugs that looks suspiciously like most of them just like to smoke dope. And the conspicuous lack of a firm moral code has always troubled me, because there is some behavior, independent of its immediate harm to others, that simply does not belong in a civilized society. One of the biggest irritants in the Libertarian fixation on being relevant is its fetish for running candidates who are sometimes quite destructive to the very ideas of personal responsibility and freedom and liberty. Run your ass off...yippee...we live in a free country, but don't spoil the election for the Republican!

But for me, the most significant argument by far against Libertarianism and the suggestion that we should take them seriously is their stubborn insistence on open borders without insisting on the dismantling of the welfare state first! Are they really so rigid and stupid and ignorant of reality that they cannot see that open borders will destroy America so quickly that even if by some miracle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were to wither away some time after our borders were flung open to the hordes of STEM graduates and budding entrepreneurs and earnest teenagers just itching at a chance to go to Harvard, the welfare state would come roaring back bigger than ever, and American Exceptionalism (and, probably, America) would be no more?

Yeah...that's rhetorical. I think we all know the answer.

posted by CBD at 05:46 PM

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