Libertarianism and Equalism.

I regard myself as a libertarian and anarcho capitalist, but I see all these Libertarians who want the the government to import unlimited numbers of underclass people from Mexico to live on welfare and vote democrat.  They worry about the government intruding into people’s lives by not allowing gays to marry, and are entirely unworried about the government intruding into people’s lives to desecrate the sacrament of marriage, by forcing everyone to recognize gay marriage, despite the fact that those few gays that get married frequently do it to épater les bourgeois by having sex in public in a great big pile.

Forcing everyone to refer to homosexuals as “gay” did not result in the good feelings and good associations of the word “gay” being associated with homosexuals, but instead made “gay” into a curse word of startling potency.   The theme song of the Flintstones, and the second verse of “Deck the halls” disappeared.   Forcing people to call gays “married” following group sex on the church altar is apt to have similar effect on the word “marriage”.  If ever we revive the old fashioned marriage contract, we will likely need a new word for it.

Gay marriage follows from equalism.  If women are equal to men, then interchangeable, in which case why not interchange them?  If you reject gay marriage, logically you have to reject egalitarian marriage, reject legal equality between men and woman in matters related to sex and reproduction – indeed in any area where the obvious differences are extreme.   If women’s suffrage, then gay marriage follows.  If gay marriage is unacceptable to you, women’s suffrage should be unacceptable also.  If, on the other hand, you believe that women should have the right to vote, you really should believe in gay marriage, and try to contain your gag reflex when the bridegrooms and their best men have sex on the altar in a great big pile.  After all, if men and women are equal, then gay marriages cannot be different, even though they quite obviously are different.

And similarly, if all men are equal, on what basis can we justify not allowing all men to vote in US elections and collect US welfare?

To deduce standard libertarianism, we proceed from the obviously reasonable assumptions that microeconomics, economics in one lesson, is right, and coercion is wrong – and the “obviously reasonable” assumption that all men should be equal before the law.

Or equivalently we can deduce it from the principle that negative sum interactions should be suppressed, since if an interaction is positive sum, there is room to make a deal whereby both parties will agree to it, positive and negative sum interactions being identified by microeconomics – and the “obviously reasonable” assumption that all men should be equal before the law.

Or equivalently we can deduce it from the principle that predations and parasitism should be suppressed, with predation and parasitism being defined relative to standard microeconomics – and the “obviously reasonable” assumption that all men should be equal before the law.

But no one believes that children should be equal before the law, so libertarians wind up making a variety of vague, incoherent, and unprincipled exceptions for children.

And though everyone pretends to believe that women should be equal, no one in their guts believes that a reproductive age female should be responsible for the consequences of her actions, which has the implication that no one in their guts believes that a reproductive age female should make her own decisions for herself.  When a woman is in trouble as a result of her own decisions, no one, left or right, feels she should be responsible for the consequences of her own decisions.  They feel for her like a child, as for example the character of Fantine in Les Misérables.  In the song “I dreamed a dream”, Fantine refers to herself as a child, even though she is starting to hit the wall, implying that it was cruel to allow her to make her own decisions for herself, as indeed it was.  If Fantine pulls your heartstrings, you don’t really believe that women should be emancipated.   If you allow women to run around loose, you will feel a highly unlibertarian urge to childsafe the world to protect Fantine from herself.

And so libertarians wind up making a variety of vague, incoherent, and unprincipled exceptions for marriage, reproduction, and sex.

Further, there are many adult males who simply cannot look after themselves, who wind up living on welfare and crime, and people want laws to deal with them, laws that give police alarmingly great authority and privilege police to use alarming amounts of violence.

The intent is always that the laws will be applied selectively, that in practice they will be applied only to bums, winos, and minorities.

It is often said that guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.  Similarly, drugs do not addict people.  There are however some people, quite a lot of people, who should be permitted neither guns nor drugs.

Trayvon Martin was not forced burgle or mug by drugs.  But since he was spending a fair bit of money on drugs, and had no job, we should conclude he was burgling or mugging.  So Trayvon Martin intoxicated should have been treated very differently from someone intoxicated who had means to pay his own way.

But in practice these laws always get turned around, because applying such laws to bums and such is more work and more dangerous, and because the ruling party needs the votes of its underclass mascots, so in practice these laws wind up being selectively applied only to employed white males, the opposite of the original intention that they be applied only to the poor and black.  We get anarcho tyranny, as illustrated in the Tony Martin burglary case.

In a rural area in England a team of burglars went forth most days, for years on end, robbing, assaulting people in their homes, committing vandalism, starting fires, day after day, year after year, committing hundreds, probably thousands, of burglaries.  Police did nothing – well not quite nothing.  The burglars went through the revolving door of the justice system numerous times without ever being removed from circulation.  Tony Martin shot one of these habitual repeat burglars, and the entire resources of the state were applied to destroy him, to dig up any dirt that could be thrown in his general direction in order to prejudice the jury.

Similarly, in California, a mestizo can drive a car without a license or third party insurance, and not get in trouble even if demonstrably incompetent to drive a car.  Libertarians are strangely unable to acknowledge or mention this striking lack of equality before the law.  Unemployed Mestizos are equal before the law to employed white males, yet somehow, strangely, employed white males are not equal to unemployed mestizos

Committed to supporting equality before the law for people that are demonstrably unequal, libertarians are strangely struck silent by the phenomenon of unidirectional equality.

The no parasitism rule assumes a world of independent adults, thus is fundamentally incompatible with the equality of all men, for a great many able bodied men, the undeserving poor, are unable or unwilling to support themselves, thus must necessarily be parasites.

If only independent adults count, thus a world in which only heads of households count.  Dependents do not count because they, like Fantine, should make decisions under the supervision of the head of household, or with his consent.  Parasites don’t count because non parasites have a common interest in eradicating them like vermin.

It thus presupposes something mighty close to patriarchy, in that without welfare, heads of households are apt to be overwhelmingly male, and that we deal with able bodied indigents, the undeserving poor, in a manner that is mighty close to chattel slavery and, chattel slavery not being very economic these days, genocide.

The first principle of libertarianism has radically reactionary implications fundamentally incompatible with the second principle, equality before the law.   If we are going to ship all bums off to the gulag, we are not treating them as equals.

But, approved libertarians, academic libertarians, libertarians organized as a political faction, are anti patriarchy and take a “utilitarian” approach to welfare. (“Utilitarian” in scare quotes because there are no real utilitarians.  It is always a rationalization for an unspeakably horrifying position.)

The no parasitism rule leads not to orthodox official progressive libertarianism, but to profoundly reactionary libertarianism.

We have a pile of intrusive and unreasonable laws that theoretically apply to everyone, that were intended to apply only to blacks and poor people.  In practice, in some upper crust areas, areas where successful progressives hang out, they are applied to blacks and poor people. In most places in California, it is the other way around.  These laws are applied only to employed white males  Libertarians seem curiously tongue tied about both forms of inequality.

If you believe that all men are equal, you cannot really believe in the non coercion rule, because some men need a great deal of coercion, you cannot really believe in the no negative sum interaction rule, for the same reason, nor the no parasitism rule, for some men are naturally parasites.

I suggest a different principle, one that England was pretty good approximation to from Charles the Second to George the fourth:  That all property owning self supporting heads of households should be equal before the law, that people unable to support themselves should have substantially less legal power and freedom, and that able bodied people unable or unwilling to support themselves, the undeserving poor, should be subject to quite severe coercion, should be kept under supervision and compelled to good behavior on pain of imminent and immediate physical punishment – the old English workhouse.

Libertarian rules are rules for interaction between people for whom violence, physical coercion, is inappropriate:  In other words, rules for gentlemen.  There are a lot of people for whom physical violence, or the imminent threat thereof, is unavoidably necessary.  So a libertarian society has to divide the world into people that are gentlemen, and people that are not.  The more people it fits into the gentleman category, the more libertarian it is, but some people, quite a lot of people, are not going to fit.

This principle, that property owning self supporting heads of households should be equal before the law, is workable because heads of households don’t have much conflict of interest with other heads of households, assuming that they all believe in microeconomics.  That all men are equal before the law is not workable, as is revealed by libertarian paralysis and hypocrisy at all the numerous various unprincipled exceptions to this rule.

I don’t view that part of libertarianism that proposes equality before the law as inherent, but as a blemish that has to be removed, a legacy of libertarianism’s alliance with progressivism, an alliance that progressives abandoned in the nineteenth century, but which jilted and abandoned libertarians have for one hundred and thirty years vainly and pitifully hoped to renew.

A self supporting head of household should be equal before the law to another self supporting head of household. There should be equality before the law between households, but equality before the law within households means the state thrusting itself into households as big daddy, infantilizing adults – resulting in actually existent family law, which intended to apply libertarianism at gunpoint to wives and children to protect them from sexist patriarchal oppression – but fails to protect them from statist oppression.

Much unlibertarian law is intended to deal with people that are not self supporting, but instead gets applied to everyone.  For example if someone is unemployed, homeless, has no rental deposit, and is stoned, then the fact that he is stoned under those circumstances shows he needs to be coerced and supervised by his betters.  If he is not going to be coerced, compelled, beaten if necessary, and it frequently is necessary, he winds up above the law, while the guy who works and pays his taxes winds up underneath the law.  If someone is stoned, but holds down his job and pays his rent, then it is intrusive to meddle in his recreations.  His home should be his castle so long as he pays his rent, while the man who gets high in public because he cannot make his rent needs a thumping, for if someone has no visible means of support, his invisible means of support are parasitic or predatory.  Libertarianism means you get rid of such people.  They should neither be allowed to vote redistribution, nor be allowed to do redistribution themselves.

Equality before the law is only workable if people are well separated (separate households), and if people are not too grossly unequal.   You cannot apply it to someone who cannot afford his own household, because of lack of separation, and, frequently, because of lack of competence and future orientation. Libertarians keep trying to differentiate themselves from the right by advocating further moves left, for example gay marriage

This is corrupt behavior, betraying their allies in an entirely unsuccessful effort to suck up to their enemies.  Equalism is necessarily unlibertarian, because some people are not equal, and those people wind up preying on productive people, and have to be restrained, frequently by crude and primitive means, by grossly coercive means.   It is frequently the case that nothing less than a good thrashing will stop them, and usually the case that nothing less than the imminent threat of a good thrashing will stop them.

Prohibit such crude physical violence against inferior people, the prisons get flooded.  Revolving door justice, as for the burglars that terrorized the area where Tony Martin lived, necessarily follows.  Some people are restrained by concern for their job, good name, and relationships with their fellows.  Such people should never be subject to physical violence.  Some people are not, and should be subject to frequent physical violence.  This is inequality before the law, and quite severe inequality at that.  If you apply a no violence policy for everyone, then those who fit the profile that violence will likely be necessary, wind up being above the law, while the white male with a job winds up beneath the law.   As in California,  you get one way equality.