The Blog Wars, Part IV

Okay. Adam brought his 20th century political hero into the mix, so I’m going to introduce mine. Harry Truman once said, “It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince them, confuse them. It’s an old political trick. But this time it won’t work.”

Nice try, Adam.

In his last post (a response to my response to his original post—nice to see they’re working us interns real hard over here at All America PAC), Adam basically made it seem as though us libertarian types hate helping people. It was an admirable effort at confusing the issue, to be sure, but I’m not going to let that one slide, so I’m going to respond briefly before, y’know, actually doing my real job.

I think that any time you give a government a task that could be completed by someone or something else, you need to justify it. Thus far, big government liberals have utterly failed to convince me as to why the federal government should be performing tasks like providing drug counseling or deciding one single nationwide criteria for what constitutes a “successful education.” I believe that these are tasks that are performed much more effectively on a local level, and so far, liberals, Adam included, have yet to make an effective argument as to why these are tasks that can only be performed by the federal government.

I think that helping those that are less fortunate is important. In fact, I believe that each and every person on this planet has an obligation to help their fellow human beings.

I just don’t think the government should be telling them how to do that.

I think that most people have an innate sense of right and wrong. And I think that given the opportunity, the vast majority of Americans will rise to the opportunity to help those in need.

But it is quite simply not a government’s job to do that. That is not what a government is. A government doesn’t exist to enforce moral behavior; it exists solely to keep order and provide services that can only be achieved through collective action, like trash collection.

Our founding fathers never intended for government to become the giant machine that it is today. That is why they initially wrote a ban on income taxes into the Constitution. This is a rule that is of course long gone, but the issue still stands. Hobbes argued that government was an issue not of moral good, but of self-interest—that is, citizens cede certain rights to the governments in exchange for physical protection. Nowhere in that argument does helping the less fortunate come into play. It is simply not the domain of government. The social contract between a citizen and his government is not one of morality, it is one of pragmatism. Government does not exist to serve as an equalizer; not all people are necessarily equally deserving of reward in their lives. It’s why communism failed; governments have no place controlling the distribution of income amongst their citizens. In my view, if you earn your money, you should get to keep as much of it as humanly possible, taxing only what is necessary to keep anarchy at bay. Taxes should only be imposed as an absolute last resort, and laws passed only when a problem of order, security, or equality cannot be solved any other way.