I’m not sure exactly what set me off, but over the past few years I’ve come to a crossroads in my political philosophy. Or maybe I just realized that what I thought was a philosophy was really just a grab-bag of issue positions. But suffice it to say that I’ve been seriously disappointed with the Republican party’s performance over the past several years. Given that the GOP had until recently held all three branches of government, I had expected them to advance what I considered basic conservative values of limited government and fiscal restraint.
Instead, what we got was increased spending across the board, resulting in a federal budget of 2.7 trillion dollars (a sum far beyond any human being’s capacity to comprehend), and a Congress that believes its paramount concerns are steroid use in baseball and raising taxes on cigars to $10 a stick. When you’ve got an allegedly conservative president that says, “When someone hurts, government has to move,” you know you’re in trouble.
So what’s a frustrated Reagan Republican to do? Well, if you’re like me, you immerse yourself in libertarian theory. Apparently, there’s a pretty standard syllabus that most libertarians fall into, which includes John Locke, Ayn Rand, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and others. That’s basically what I’ve been doing non-stop for the past two years. I have to admit that there’s a lot to like, but I do wonder how far I can run with it.
On the one hand, libertarianism seems closer to my own personal definition of “conservative.” I remember discussing politics with one of my liberal friends in Colorado and saying that in my view, “Conservatism just means that you want the government to work the way the government was designed to work.” I never really thought of modern conservative social issues as my reason for being a Republican. I always considered myself as a small-government conservative instead. Yet there was something that bothered me about the Republicans that I just couldn’t put my finger on. After reading David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer, I realized what it was – to many Republicans, “limited government” just means “tax cuts.”
Don’t get me wrong, I love tax cuts – the deeper the cut, the better. Anything that lets me keep more of my money is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned – it’s hard enough to make ends meet as it is. And besides, a tax cut just means that Washington has that much less to spend (directly, at least) on wasteful, inefficient, and unconstitutional programs.
In my view, however, limited government means just that – the idea that the government is limited in what is allowed to do. To get an idea of just how far the train has gotten off the track, just read The Federalist Papers. In each chapter, the founders refute the critics of the proposed Constitution. Most of the criticisms involved how the federal government would be able to exceed its bounds and become tyrannical. The founders’ response was basically, “Don’t worry, we’ve got that covered – the checks and balances we’ve put in are bullet-proof, so that’ll never happen.” And just about every conceivable tyrannical act that the critics of the Constitution could imagine then is part of our everyday lives now.
An even greater problem is that government involvement has become so ubiquitous in our daily lives that I’m afraid that we’re not even aware of it anymore – but there’s no question that the founders would regard today’s level of government meddling as nothing short of tyrannical. This is one of the things that attracted me to libertarianism. It proposes limited government in the true sense of the term.
On the other hand, I’m still wrestling with a few things, such as the minarchy/anarchy debate and the pragmatic issues of propagating libertarian ideas. Libertarians are an odd mix of self-confidence and pessimism, which in my opinion makes for some interesting discussions. But more on those issues later…
