Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As much as I strive to consume news from a huge variety of sources, so as to get the clearest picture of what’s actually going on, I do, of course, have a series of long-held philosophical positions, general opinions and the like. And, like everyone else, I do occasionally find it gratifying to find something that confirms my positions or opinions. It’s even better when I find one single article that confirms several at once.
I’ve long held that American academia has degenerated into a joke; the higher caliber the degree, the more indoctrination the person holding it got on the way to getting it and the less useful knowledge they actually have. I’ve also long held that theistic statists are inherently unintelligent people.
So, then, imagine my glee when I was directed to a story by Jeremy Sherman, a Ph.D holder who writes for AlterNet and had one extremely silly recent utterance picked up by Salon-dot-com.
The headline wonderfully foreshadows the idiocy to follow.
“Libertarians Need to Choose: More Freedom or Less Government? You Can’t Have Both. Time to End the Charade”
After recovering from the mini-stroke the headline gave me, I plowed on. Then I immediately double-checked that this wasn’t satire. Somehow, it’s not.
“I’m glad to pay my tax dollars for government services that enable me to be left alone to live the life I want without other people spoiling my party or me spoiling theirs. Libertarians think more freedom results from less government. That’s BS. Government is the only organization that can enforce freedom.” reads the first ‘graph of the most moronic thing I’ve ever read.
There has never been a more comprehensive inversion of reality uttered in just three sentences of English language. If one is being forced to pay taxes, they are not being left alone. No one in any country that has a government is living the life they want, unless their job title is “Sultan” or the like. And, if government’s monopoly on violence is the only thing preventing you from spoiling someone else’s party, you’re a sociopath, period. The existence of the state is the negation of freedom. Freedom is the natural state of human beings, it cannot be “enforced” any more than happiness can.
“Yes, enforce it. People who think freedom thrives with less government can’t or don’t want to understand. Freedom to do what you want requires efficient, powerful government with its eyes always on the prize; keeping anyone’s freedom from getting so out of hand it eats into other people’s freedom.”
See, that’s where you’re wrong, kiddo. What I want to do is live peacefully on a pot farm, irrigated with rain water I capture on my own property while tinkering around in my shed with custom developed firearms of greater than .50 caliber; that’s what blows my hair back. Yet, because of government enforcing all my “freedoms,” I can’t do any of those things legally. I guess such prohibition would be an example of keeping my freedom from getting “out of hand.” Never mind there’s no harm to anyone else from me engaging in any of the aforementioned activities.
And yes, I’m going to end up quoting and then destroying every ‘graph this highly-educated imbecile wrote. Next:
“Government isn’t the problem; it’s the solution. We don’t have government that is too strong, but too weak. We have government that is inefficient at enforcing freedom because it has been crippled by powerful people and corporations vying for more than their fair share of freedom.”
To be able to form that phrase in one’s head “…fair share of freedom” requires a complete and through misunderstanding of what freedom even is. Every human being on Earth is born with all of its freedoms it can ever claim fully intact. What happens then is they come to live under the control of a government that oppresses them to some degree or another. Every human owns their own body outright. They then have the right to do with it whatever they please. Every government on Earth restricts that basic human right to some extent or another. Furthermore, “powerful people and corporations” don’t “cripple” government; government cripples everyone. Corporations vie for government favor, so that government’s vast power may be brought to bear against their competitors – the way big tobacco used the FDA to cripple the vaping industry, for example. This can only happen when government is too powerful, further proving that, in fact, government is the problem and therefore cannot be part of the solution.
“No really. Don’t tread on me. Give me liberty or give me death, and for liberty I need government providing checks and balances like a capable kindergarten teacher who wants all the children to muck about safely, wildly and freely. Government at its best is an efficient front in the people’s liberation movement.”
Hell knows I love using analogies to explain things; like my doomed effort to compare raising the minimum wage to redefining a mile as 2,000 feet so F-250 Super Duty duallies fall into the “economy car” fuel efficiency class. Here, the good doctor’s analogy needs some help, namely, “capable” would have to be replaced with “violently psychotic” and the words “…with an Uzi” would need to come after “kindergarten teacher.” There has never existed a government committed to liberating people; namely because what people typically need liberating from is government itself. Also, there has never been a government that did anything efficiently, other than occasionally exterminating a good percentage of the people it governs.
“As is minding your own business whenever possible. Leave people alone to do what they want with their short precious lives. Don’t go sticking your oar in for sport or hobby. When someone is acting unconventionally but isn’t encroaching unfairly on anyone, either ignore them or cheer them on.”
That ‘graph represents the closest thing to a coherent thought the doctor managed during the entire piece. Clearly lost on him, however, is that government doesn’t actually facilitate any of those behaviors, and in fact impedes them whenever possible. Sherman seems to have forgotten that is the government that defines what is “unconventional” and decides to what extent, if any, it will be tolerated. Apparently, using a plant that humans have used for so long as to have developed a symbiotic relationship with it is just too “unconventional” and we need the government’s monopoly on violence to run this kindergarten effectively by locking those people up in cages.
“Don’t be a prude pretending you’re against government as cover for really just wanting your tastes and values to rule. That’s like chasing the security guards off the dance floor in your crusade for freedom and then taking up the whole thing to spin wildly while all the other dancers bunch up on the fringe.”
The first sentence of that graph would almost be good advice for the average Salon-dot-com reader, if it wasn’t backward. People who oppose government don’t do so because they want their tastes and values to rule; rather obviously as they’re advocating against the existence of that entity which would enforce their tastes and values. No, such would be people who embrace government in hopes of using its monopoly on violence to force everyone to do their version of the Cha-Cha Slide over and over; to riff on the idiotic analogy making up the last half of the paragraph.
“You want more personal freedom like I do? Good. For us to get it, we both have to accept checks and balances. And we have to figure out how to make our government enforce everyone’s personal freedom and not just our own,” thus Sherman mercifully brings his diatribe to a close.
No, don’t worry. That last paragraph objectively makes exactly no sense, it’s not just you. Notice how he never quite gets around to explaining just how government “enforces freedom?” Yeah, good reason for that. The one thing that makes government unique among all human institutions is that it has a monopoly on the legal initiation of violence. As such, it can no more be the guarantor of individual liberty than can a fox guard a henhouse.
I’m not sure what the purpose of this piece’s existence is. Can a Ph.D holder really be this powerfully unintelligent? Does he actually believe this drivel? Or, is he just providing soothing lies to the theistic statists who are already inclined to hold such beliefs, cognitive dissonance be damned? Either way, the real tragedy here is that people will read this, and they will believe it and they will be intellectually stunted for it.
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