Saturday, August 09, 2014

Funny how you can never find a Libertarian when you need one

Regular readers of the Mabinogogiblog (peace be upon them) will know that I spend a lot of time debating with libertarians, chiefly about climate change. Libertarians tend to deny than man-made CO2 can affect the planetary climate.

They arrive at this position through the Fallacy of Consequences, thusly:
1 if climate change is right, libertarians are going to have to use less petrol.
2 libertarians refuse to be told to use less petrol
3 therefore climate science is wrong.

Obvs they dress it up a bit, but that is he essence of their argument.

Your slightly more thoughtful libertarian, like Mark Littlewood, will want to reduce the tax take in the UK down from the present 47% of GDP to 29% of GDP. 

In the course of debate you discover that they hold the State to be inherently Wrong About Everything. The State should stop taxing us and just leave us to get on with our lives in liberty, then everything will be all right.

Now here's the point. Greens think libertarians are wrong about the State being 100% Evil, but we do find that the State behaves stupidly a lot of the time, and its agents often do wrong things. This is what Greens spend a lot of time doing, trying to put the wheels of the State I back onto the track of democracy, equality and sustainability. 

My current obsession is filling out this wiki vipcsa.wikidot.com which is about how agents of the State - MPs, police, the CPS, a social worker and others - have managed  to sexually abuse children who were placed in "care" and to then cover up and block investigation of their very serious crimes, which probably include murder.

You would expect libertarians to be shouting about this from the rooftops, wouldn't you? Given at they are so anti-State. Here we have agents of the State committing crimes and covering up. Perfect example of their thesis of the Evil State.

Yet - nada. Silence from the libertarian corner of the room, apart from a few thumb-sucking noises. It is true that Greens have not been particularly active in this arena, probably because we are a bit preoccupied with the atrocities happening in Gaza, but Caroline Lucas was one of the "Magnificent Seven" MPs who called for an inquiry into child abuse.

So, come on Mark Littlewood, Paul Staines and all you libertarians who are so convinced your philosophy is so right that it overrides science: let's hear your voices raised against the crimes of commission and cover up by agents of the State.

2 comments:

Bradley James Stouffer said...

You need to vote with libertarians for a smaller state then we would not have this over grown bloated problem that just keeps on getting bigger and uglier. Starve the beast. The beast is not on our side.

DocRichard said...

Well, it's a start I suppose. A comment from a Libertarian bot. You are a bot, aren't you, LFFA?