 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a new project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm a research fellow here at the Cato Institute, an editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burris. I'm a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. For this first episode of Free Thoughts, we want to look at politics and community in the relationship between them. Libertarians often get called anti-community, that's an unfair charge, of course, but it's a plausible one if you assume no difference between community and politics, between community and the state. This mistake is in fact a rather common one, and thus results in many bad arguments against libertarianism. So what is community, and what is politics, and can we have one without the other? Trevor, let's maybe start by defining our terms here. These people, I think, have a good sense of what community means, but we can get to that one. But let's start with politics. We talk about politics and we contrast it with community or compare it to community. What do we mean by that? Well, generally we're talking about some method, you know, there's a lot of, whether it's dictatorship or anything like that, but we just can stick, I would say, to modern political philosophy. Some method by which a group of people enact control, it's usually voting over other people in the area. It's not voluntary, that's first of all clear. It's not all voluntary. No, and I think the voluntary is, that's the really important issue here, and that's where we start to really distinguish politics from community. I wrote a post for libertarianism.org this week where I said that politics is basically we start with discourse, with group decision making, so we vote on something and people agree to go along with it or not, and that happens all the time in our daily lives. I mean, you get together with a bunch of friends and say, let's pick a restaurant to go out to, and some people, you know, I want to go for Chinese and everyone else wants to go for Italian, so we decide to go for Italian, but that's not politics. Even though it looks a lot like the stuff that goes on, it looks a lot like voting, the difference is you add and the winners get to back up their position with violence or the threat of violence. Ultimately, violence. You could also, you could go, I guess, a little bit above violence. We might be going, maybe some people would think we're going hyperbolic, violence is part of the equation. We might just want to say that the losers view it as legitimate, that they have to comply with the winners. That's one thing, that's one function of democracy, and a many dispute resolution that if you lose the game, if you lose a dispute, you abide by the results still, and those who don't, most people voluntarily abide by the results of democracy, and if you don't, though, there is a threat of force to back it up. But isn't that sense of needing to abide applies even in the non-political examples of the, say, going out to the restaurant, that if we all say we're going to go to a restaurant tonight at eight and we'll decide when we get together, the losers, so to speak, in that case, still probably feel like they're not going to say, well, then I'm just going to head off on my own and go to that other restaurant I wanted to anyway. Generally speaking, and that would be against social convention, but they don't have to, right? Right, and so I think the have to is where for, I mean, we're taught that we should, and we internalize this notion, but ultimately what sets politics apart from all the other things, even other things where we have a really strong sense that we ought to abide by the decision, is that in the political arena there is this specter of violence out there, that if you don't, if the society decides that everyone's house has to look a certain way and you don't want to paint your house that way and you refuse, you get fined, and if you don't pay the fine, then they'll come and threaten you or garnish your wages or whatever else, and if you still refuse to pay it, then they'll come and try to arrest you, and if you resist arrest, you get violence. Exactly, and that is a very good touchstone for why politics is something very different than community. You don't have that in your going to dinner example or even necessarily in a gated community. A gated community can bring force upon people, but it can't make you live there. You could say that the state can't make you live in the state, but that gets a little bit difficult for something you've been born into and everything around you, all your friends, they all live there. You'd like to stay there, and of course the violence is the crucial thing, and that gets us to the definition of the state that is most often used by libertarians and non-libertarians, which is the holder of the monopoly on violence within a geographic location. Or legitimate violence, because there are lots of people who engage in violence within a state, but the state claims that it's the only one who may legitimately do so, that it's not wrong when it doesn't. It's on mob shakedown operation or something like that. It's a legitimate community-oriented, at least that's the theory method of figuring out the things that we have to decide together, and that's of course the other thing that comes into this in the words of people like Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama pretty recently, where we talk about politics in such a community type of language where we say, you know, Barack Obama said, politics is the one thing we all participate in. I don't know if it was politics, but government is the one thing we all participate in. And then similarly we have Elizabeth Warren saying, you know, you didn't build that, and other people picking up that vein of discussion to talk about how this integrated hole that we live in where we vote and choose all these things through political methods and then use violence ultimately to enforce that against the people who lose that election or decision making, that that is some sort of instantiation of the general community where we depend upon each other. Yeah, the point that Elizabeth Warren is making is this kind of gratitude account of why we ought to obey the state and why we ought to pay taxes, which is that, you know, you weren't kind of born into a vacuum. You were born into this pre-existing society that had a pre-existing amount of stuff, resources, services, all of that, and that because those things were either in some cases provided by the government or supported by the government in some way, and that that government is us. It's, you know, it's us coming together, it's us paying for these things via taxes, that anything that you, any goods you derived from using these things you found in the environment. So the education you got going to the schools, the places you were able to go, driving on the roads, whatever else, to some level you owe everyone else for that. And because the government is everyone else, in this view, you owe the government, and so then you're then obligated to both obey the government, respect its laws, so that it doesn't have to use violence against you, and to continue to pay for these services, to kind of pay it forward. As much as the community demands, I guess, I don't know if Elizabeth Warren would draw an upper line of, for example, progressive taxation, if that was your fee for, you know, becoming a millionaire because you use roads in schools. But aside from that, I think that it's interesting to take the, what I have called, and I know what we have called together, extremification of the conversation. So the counterpoint to, and we're recording this during the government shutdown, so we're hearing a lot of discussions of, you know, anarchists, I'm making scare quotes there, Tea Party people, and then not people who want to keep the government running, and the Tea Party people are against community and against government, this kind of rhetoric. So the counterpoint to the Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, we're all in this together, government is what we do all together, is the idea of the atomistic individual who apparently, or at least in terms of the straw man argument, denies that fact totally and thinks that men are islands. I think that's sort of a caricature we get a lot. Yeah, we get it quite often. It's probably the, that's probably the most common one next to maybe were selfish and greedy and just want to get whatever is ours at the expense of everyone else, although the two are very related in this kind of straw man picture of libertarianism. In fact, that particular charge has shown up quite recently in several attacks against libertarianism published. So there was Peter Corning publishing in Psychology Today, wrote a piece on, I believe, what's the matter with libertarians, or what's the matter with libertarianism, and he said that quote, the more radical versions of libertarianism rely on a terminally deficient model of human nature in society, and he adds, we evolved as intensely interdependent social animals. So keep in mind, this is what he's saying, this is what he's saying is the real model that libertarians reject. So he says that the real model is we evolved as intensely interdependent social animals and our sense of empathy towards others, our sensitivity to reciprocity, our desire for inclusion, and the loyalty to the groups we bond with, the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from cooperative activities, and our concern for having the respect and approval of others all evolved in humankind to temper and constrain our individualistic selfish impulses. So there you've got that. In another one called Libertarians Are the New Communists, and not been published in Bloomberg by Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, they said radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact, cooperation is the height of human evolution. These quotes, when you look at them, they strike me as really interesting. We could have discussions about how much, let's just take the welfare state. There's so many other things we talk about, but the welfare state is always a big one, and we have these people advocating for forced welfare payments, right? And apparently, I would assume not believing that voluntary welfare payments, charity, private charity would do the job. Yeah, because we should be clear what they're not. When they talk about we are libertarians and these radical individualists and selfish and whatever else, they're not saying libertarians are going out there and violating basic rights in order to get what they want. They're not saying, well, libertarians are these, are muggers, and are out there stealing from people. But they might think that about business men or something like that. Sure, but I mean, we're talking like genuine muggers on the street. That's not what they're saying we are. The reason that they are saying these things about us is because we are rejecting certain ways of interacting with and in their minds, helping other people. Exactly. And so the welfare state, if they apparently think people need to be coerced into providing welfare, and we think that people can be pretty good at providing charity by themselves, you have to kind of ask who is actually thinking people are selfish, right? We need to have temper and constrain our individuals like selfish impulses. We are wired to be selfish when, in fact, cooperation is the height of human evolution, but they need to make people through force behave the way that they are saying people are anyway. People are so cooperative, but they're not cooperative enough for us, apparently. Is it possible, though, that their argument is with a certain type of utopian thinking that they see libertarians as engaging in? Because if we replaced all coerced welfare system, welfare programs, with totally voluntary, like private charity. So right now, everyone pays taxes in some form or another, and a portion of each person's taxes goes towards these social welfare programs. And let's assume that it then is just dispersed to people who need it. There aren't these inefficiencies. Yeah, there's no noise in the system. Right, it's just going. Then under this coercion, everyone is participating in providing welfare for the needy. If we went to a strictly voluntary system, many people would continue to give, just as many people right now give to charities. But it is the case that fewer people would give in a voluntary system. Yeah, that would just be an economic calculation. Your marginal person would stop giving. There are people who are really into giving to charity, and there are people who are less into giving to charity. So those people would stop giving. And that's always a question of economics in terms of how much private charity would result, but in terms of it being a question of community and whether or not we're against community, we go back to this question of whether or not these mechanisms that politically choose welfare recipients, politically choose everything from schools, the quality of nature and quality of our schools, the curriculum of our schools, any of these things that we decide about, well, I should put we in quotation marks again, any of these things some people who vote decide about are in fact community, and to deny that is atomistically individualistic. And I think that's interesting just in terms of a broader debate that has been happening in political philosophy for, I would say, a couple centuries now, which is a slow erosion of the private sphere in order to make it public. And that's when they're sort of denying that there's atomistic individuals. They have to say, well, you're not really all on your own. You affect things outside of your private sphere and things outside of your private sphere affect you. One of the things that strikes me about that is feminists have brought this point up a lot. They say that the private sphere, keeping it private, allowing husbands to beat their wives as was possibly the case in some places in the 19th century and allowing different types of pressure to go on inside the home leaks to the outside of the home area and perpetuates the oppression of females in the broader sense. So this idea that there is no such thing as private, right? That all things are ultimately political and the government has jurisdiction over all these areas that are private to your personal life, property, and individual. Let me ask, just stepping back and going back to the violence issue, because we've gone into communion. I want to talk about what these different conceptions of community, what the libertarian view of community actually looks like and how it relates to politics. But the question of violence here, we often, I mean, when we call something violence, there's a sense in which all violence is illegitimate, right? It's not acceptable to engage in violence. Yeah. So is that actually the case? Do we have to, is there a place for violence within politics? Or is it, so I guess, is there a place for politics? That is, I mean, that's the way this should be considered. I'm not an anarchist and I find, I think about where politics should be in a place. And I kind of think about this. Best represented is sort of where are Venn diagrams most overlap. And that's the way I sort of think about it. If you think about everyone's preferences for various things, and where the Venn diagrams most overlap is the place where politics is better suited for decision making. And so some of those that are mentioned, and we believe here, Cato, like strong national defense, for example, has a far more overlapping agreement on where we should be using politics to decide these things. Where we have schooling, for example, and how people should be taught, how children should be taught, also what substances should be prohibited, a ton of how our health care programs should look. You start having just very little overlap, and you can tell that when you start hearing rhetoric that's incredibly vague, like everyone needs to be taken care of in their health care needs, that explains a lot of different opinions about what health care needs are. And so that would be my general very inexact theory of where politics is best suited, is where we agree on more things. But even still, there's going to be some areas where even agreement isn't necessary for or violence or politics to be justified. So if we have a set of basic rights, so a right not to be assaulted and murdered, a right not to have our property stolen, those rights don't depend on agreement. And yet violence is permissible around those rights in the sense that if you violate my rights or you're going to violate one of those rights, or you're coming at me with a knife, I am allowed to engage in violence to defend myself. Yeah, it's not the agreement that makes them makes violence permissible. It's the underlying source of the agreement, I would say. So the desire to not have our stuff stolen is a very, very widely shared desire, but that's not why violence is justified to prevent that. It's not the agreement, it's the fact that having our stuff stolen is a violation of right. That's the core reason. But again, that gets you to what the meaning of like minimal enormity of state, which is what a Hayekian term would be, or just a minimal government that protects life, liberty, property. Those are sort of descriptions of things that have very, very wide agreement on where politics is less pernicious to community in those areas. And this has been discussed in political philosophy for centuries. And in the 20th century, both John Rawls, who is sort of the torch bearer of modern liberalism, and then also Friedrich Hayek, who is a very big fan, we're very big fans of Hayek at Cato, both of them talked about sort of overlapping social consensus and Rawls in terms of the things everyone agrees that are minimally needed. And also Hayek's point about minimal normative normativity for where the state should control, where we can create a community out of politics better than in more specific things. I mean, I'm not saying anything different than right now is like, think of the disagreements that would arise if we tried to vote about decorating our houses. And those disagreements, that's very maximally normative. Those disagreements arise because we have a lot of very different opinions about how to decorate our houses. And they aren't violations of right. And so the Venn diagrams are just scattered and they rarely overlap. And in terms of basic violation of property rights, we have a lot of agreement on. And I think this gets to where our differences are with these quotes that I read earlier, the conception of community and politics that's expressed in those is we see far from saying denying politics or denying the expansiveness of politics or wanting to scale politics back, far from saying that that is somehow corrosive of community. If we shrink the state, it means we're necessarily anti-community. We in fact tend to argue that the more politics you have, the less genuine and effective and well-functioning a community will be. And much of that is for exactly these reasons is that a community, in order for a community to really work, in order for us to feel like a part of it and get a lot out of it, which is enormously important for us. And we need to be part of these social relationships in order to be happy. That there has to be a level of trust and we can't feel threatened by the people around us. And so if we're using politics to decide all of these questions, like how are we going to decorate our house, but also ones that are more important to us. I mean, how you decorate house actually is important to a lot of people, but things like how do we educate our children? What sorts of ways do we address health concerns? How do we religious questions, all these other things? The more that those are determined by the political process. The more it separates us. Yeah, it turns people who would be members of the same community with differences. So you can decorate your house however you want, and I can decorate my house however we want, but we can be really good neighbors still. It starts pushing us in the direction of being enemies. Because if you get your way, it means that I don't get mine. And if what we're arguing about is something that's really important to me and to my sense of purpose and the direction I want my life to take, then you're doing real damage to me. Yeah, and I've described this, I guess it's somewhat of a little bit of a joke, but I have an essay on the Libertarian Social Work site called The Problem of People Liking Different Things. And it is only a problem under certain circumstances. So it's not a problem that someone listening to this likes Mexican mariachi music, and I don't, generally speaking. It is a problem if that is suddenly politicized. And suddenly the fact that the guy likes Mexican mariachi music and me, we can hang out together and be friends. But as soon as I'm starting to try and pose my music taste on him or vice versa, it suddenly is very anti-community. And this is, you can analyze a lot of political theory just to say, that person likes different things, and I think the fact that they like those things is bad. And I want to take control over them, whether it's they like SUVs or they like corporate products or things that destroy the environment, which on some basic level just means that they don't have the same preference for the environment as you do. And so now it's just a question of whose preference for the environment wins out. Although to be fair, there are instances where their lack of preference for the environment could be a legitimate threat. Absolutely. So if they're dumping waste into the groundwater where you get your water, that could be very harmful to you. Yes. And those are difficult questions that we talk about here at Kato All the Time and the best way of solving those. But you need to come up with some story like that. Generally speaking, I mentioned these private spheres a few minutes ago about the erosion of the private sphere and getting into them to say you're causing harm. And you have this question, for example, in environmental regulation, where no, your pollution is leaking outside of your private sphere. We're going to regulate that. But generally speaking, respect in private spheres are very good ways of letting people live together in a community-oriented way, in a good fences, make good neighbors type of way, where we're suddenly all not, you have control over your place and I have control over my place and barring some sort of leakage. That's generally the rule. And now we're not voting on everything under the sun because someone has sort of a just-so story about how your music taste or the cigarette smoke that's leaking outside of your house or whatever is causing all these problems. So I need to come into your private sphere and regulate it. I think what's an important point to make here is that in addition to the argument that we make that the bigger politics gets and what we mean again by bigger politics is more decisions in our lives being made via the political process as opposed to being made by us. And by us does not mean just radically isolated individuals who are totally uninfluenced by anyone and anything around them because all of us are deeply embedded in cultures and communities and families and networks of friends and they influence the decisions we're going to make. And it would be too large and impossible to make decisions that weren't influenced in some way by all of that. But those are still voluntary decisions in the sense that they're not backed up by violence if they're not being coerced upon us. But we argue that that as politics grows it degrades meaningful community. But it's also the case and these are I think it's a subtle distinction but they are distinct that also the smaller politics is if politics is reduced to just the state is reduced to just respecting these rights and protecting these fundamental rights that that will have a huge positive benefit on community. The community will flourish even more than it already is. Yeah and the people will solve things voluntarily. You have the sort of utopia of utopia's idea in Robert Nozick which is within a minimal state you can have a thousand flowers. And a minimal state is one that limits itself to just protecting these basic rights. Yeah and a thousand flowers can bloom about the possibilities of freedom and voluntariness. And that's in different policy areas. Kato here we talk about that in different ways. In the education context we talk about how the thousand flowers that can bloom are a thousand different types of schools that have different ways of educating kids and no one is fighting over their kids education and how they want to educate other people's kids in an interesting way. So the left says kids need to learn global warming and environmentalism. And the right says they need to learn Christian values and God and that creates a lot of strife but they can both have their schools in a minimally normative state in a night watchman state if you want to call it just protecting those basic values. And those communities can be friends in a way that they aren't really friends within the political system. And you can still if you want to live with people who share your values you absolutely can. The people do that now. Yeah I mean that's like cities and towns have a recognizable character that differs from other cities and towns and that's because people like to live with other people who share their values and so they start living together and then that place develops a reputation for having a certain sort of community and so people who are attracted to that community move there and all of that happens without these people you know like Given City has a very strong indie music scene and people who are into indie rock go there but that happens without the community voting and saying in this town 85% of the shows that must be indie rock must be indie rock it just it happens organically and it it allows for a much richer more vibrant culture and it also happens within larger cities you'll have neighborhoods that are very distinct in feel and again that happens without this without politics. Yes the the possibilities of community developing just sort of naturally and then also the ways in which government destroys community I think it seems it seems clear to me now of course I'm biased but it seems clear to me that if you look at the the sort of ways in which government destroys community we've talked about some of them such as voting on education which both destroys the possibility of multiple education systems and makes you probably not like maybe your neighbor with the bit Romney sign if you have an Obama sign as much as you might like them if you weren't fighting over each other's lives but you also have the possibility of you have the actuality of the government destroying community in far more clear ways so we have a drug war for example that has eviscerated inner city black communities in particular but tons of communities around the globe including South America and Latin America that that's a really bad one we have some really you know just just straightforward ideas of literally destroying communities in the sense of imminent domain when they decide to take out an entire neighborhood that is a could be a thriving community but the government decides that some people who are now voting over that decide that it's not they're not behaving in the way that they want them to be behaving so they bulldoze the entire thing that happens a disturbingly large amount of time disturbing a lot and so there's very direct ways that the use of force that the government is prohibited or permitted to do no other entity is allowed to do is destroying communities in an incredibly pernicious and damaging to just the human spirit type of way so you know that's one of my first responses to the atomistic individuals like because I believe that people are allowed to put a substance with their body and if they're not hurting anyone else that means I'm not going to break into their house and put them in a cage because they did that and that is a destructive community at such a fundamental level that it would be hard to imagine an argument to the contrary let me see if I can come up with one okay let me push back by saying okay so a lot of the examples that we have given are of people who have basically different tastes using the state to enforce their tastes if their tastes are in the majority or whatever other way they're able to win in the political process which doesn't necessarily mean being in the majority and often in fact doesn't mean that but it's about forcing your tastes upon others so what kind of music you can listen to some education stuff but you can smoke what you can drink but it seems like the response that could be given to this is that's not really what most of politics is about most of politics is about kind of two broad categories of things when we're doing this large scale kind of social engineering is the first is preventing people from causing harm to others that can't be prevented from just like you know through these voluntary means of just asking them to stop or whatever else are moving away so the really toxic pollution is one example or you know that some people argue that the income inequality that they say results from freeing up markets is another one where it's really destructive to a great many people or in healthcare you know like people are being hurt because we don't have laws that require everyone to have access to healthcare and so we're not this is about tastes like everyone would like to have healthcare and everyone would like to have access to a whole range of things so there's there's that sort of thing where you know this is we're stopping hurt that's what we're doing with politics but the other one is is we're stopping people from hurting themselves so what we're doing is it's not that we're forcing our tastes upon them it's that we're saying look for whatever reason weakness of will on your part poor upbringing lack of access to whatever resource necessary you are doing things that are maybe destructive to others but more importantly destructive to yourself and and so we're going to help you even if by help we mean using violence to stop you so the philosopher John Stuart Mill in his book on liberty he he says basically there's no kind of no paternalistic exception to liberty we can't we can't violate someone's right to liberty in order to help them we can only violate it to stop them from hurting someone else but he has this exception which he calls the bridge it's the bridge exception which is if if someone is walking along a path and we know that the bridge is out right ahead that there's no way they're going to see that in time we're certain that they would not want to plunge off this down bridge if they knew about it then in that case we are permitted to yank them out of the way or do something to stop them and so that that seems like a lot of a lot of the things that are done in the political sphere are often we're set we're told are done for those sorts of reasons so that would be the the soda bands that were recently struck down in in new york where mayor bloomberg wanted to limit the size of sodas that people could buy because they were consuming too much sugar sugar which was harmful to them which was this sort of paternalism in the sense of these people if they knew how damaging the sugar was and if they could somehow overcome the you know the urge to have lots of sugar they would thank us yeah no i think that that's a very good explanation of the the honest position i mean it's very important at first we don't care caricature our opponents and say that they're you know blatantly trying to to rule our lives because they're a bunch of lex luthers who want to who just want to do that because they see it's a good time they have arguments um and so you this is the two idea you scope them out there's the external harm possibility and the internal harm being harmed to yourself interestingly i think that most people agree so if you're actually just in this sort of economic way of which one is worse so which one so we have to compare government solutions to what's happening in the private place so when is government making it worse is is just one of the questions so we have the question of pollution for example causing harm and the interesting question is whether or not uh you know does this give does the harm principle or even the benefit principle give like universal jurisdiction over all things right because like the first question is is our principal that we can draw that says okay well like you know we're not that's too low but if we could show that like everyone got the same haircut would produce a ton of benefits or if everyone listened to the same music would produce a ton of benefits or if everyone started driving a single car and we eliminated all preferences and that would produce a ton of benefits and we could show all that stuff shouldn't we just do it and uh that's sort of like the technocratic argument that we should we should just get the experts to come in and measure you know get some mutile some cost benefit analysis I think that you know there's a lot of reasons not to do that but for the point of this conversation it's because it's first of all it's not done cleanly and it and it so that's the first thing and when politics enters into the realm of regulating everything as a harm or a benefit that's leaking outside of your zone it's not you have politics and politics is dirty and everyone knows that so it doesn't do a perfect job that's one so there are costs to politics that's one example the other reason is because as soon as you start playing that game that is the only game in town and you diminish the possibilities and you diminish community so as soon as you you have no limiting principle on harm and you start saying well let's all politicize everything if you can just show me that's best practices if you can show me that this is this is causing a problem well then now everything is political and I I mean some people might say that's okay but I'm always interested to ask people like when when is it too far when has politics gone too far what do you think people shouldn't vote on because there is just an inherent part of a modern liberal democracy whereas in the popular response to your entire neighborhood getting together and voting on what haircut everyone's gonna have is not well you gotta get an interest group and you gotta get a lobbying together and you gotta get some studies to show why your haircut is preferable to that haircut the proper response is no we do not vote about that stuff and that is why the spheres of private action are so crucial because politics is not good at solving those questions it's not good at addressing them and that's for that so that's for the external harm for the internal harm question again it's hard to come up with a principle that would not let me you know smoke marijuana take heroin but would let me skydive or drink alcohol or drink alcohol and the reason for that is because there is no principle in those as they're formulated right now there's just politics you know the reason that alcohol is legal and marijuana is not is not based in some maximum study that we figured out the total harms and the total cost to individual people let's say we're just we're still keeping this to the individual it's not has anything to do with that and everyone knows that so that goes back to the noise question like politics does not solve these questions in any rational way even if it should we're constantly endangering ourselves and we have different preferences for how much we would like to engage in risk-free activity and how much pleasure we get out of it and you know you can't really aggregate those by voting some people are risk takers some people aren't risk takers and that's part of the thousand flowers blooming of a world that respects individuals as individuals and not as their political power of whatever group they happen to be a part of and that's the thing that always gets me like I don't want to live in a world where the skydivers need a lobby next to the bungee jumpers next to the marijuana smokers next to the big soda lobby I don't want to live in that world and it's always finding me that conservatives will come along and you know criticize Michael Bloomberg for his big soda ban and then turn around and support marijuana prohibition or any other drug prohibition I can't find any principle that would differentiate that except for pure politics and that's not what we want to be playing and it's certainly not community oriented it always when we get charged with being anti-community I confess to often just being baffled by that but when we get told like that we are you know that we reject cooperation as just a entirely like cooperation out the window it's not doesn't exist yeah or that we reject social ties and all of that like I just or even the better one that we are libertarians because we want to you know be parasites on people and suck them dry yeah like it's just they don't I mean it just totally doesn't match my experience it doesn't match my values and beliefs or those are the people I know but I do think that there is there's a a certain sort of rhetoric that gets engaged in a bit by some libertarians that doesn't support this view but if if not quite understood makes this view look a bit more plausible and I think that that's this focus on rights when talking about morality so libertarians libertarianism is a first it's a it's a philosophy of government it's a philosophy of what's the proper role of the state but then there's this distinction that gets made between thick and thin libertarianism so thin libertarianism says all that this is about is what the state is permitted to do and not permitted to do and anything that's not a question so that the state's not permitted to get involved in this that is just something we're not even going to talk about because that's not what this political philosophy is about thick libertarianism says no that the the moral beliefs that you hold that lead you to political libertarianism so belief in you know respect for people and their rights and the value of freedom also ought to make you take or lead you to take views on non-political moral matters and I think such as like private discrimination or something like that for example sure yes yes exactly and so I think that people who see libertarians as anti-community often don't see this distinction and don't see that that the thin libertarianism which is what they often attack is is just about politics and so I think it should be clear that you know we're not we do not deny that morality is bigger than rights you know that respecting rights does not exhaust the range of your moral duties you have all of these moral duties beyond that or you know I tend to take this more Aristotelian approach to morality which says that it's not about like how should I behave but what kind of person should I be and so you have these characteristics like being just and being courageous and being kind and beneficent and all these other things and we should we should embrace those values and and live them out in our lives and so yeah respecting rights is part of that it would be you know the being just would mean respecting rights but there's other thing we should also be kind and we should also be generous and all these other virtues and so we we have to be careful to not make it look like we think that the only guidelines on how we behave towards other people are respecting their basic rights because then that that does end up looking like we don't really care about community yeah and I think that that brings up very fascinating questions so we can say that we think the government should do just a minimal amount of things but that the people have higher responsibilities than the government and of course that's what we do say when we say you know private charity is is a moral responsibility but not one that the government can effectively or should enforce but those questions there there are very difficult questions that arise from that that libertarians debate internally to ourselves and some of them for example they often mentioned Civil Rights Act debate so whether or not government should be and this goes back again to piercing the private sphere right the and a very sort of and I mentioned the feminist thing about the thing that happens in the private sphere is not divorced from the public sphere so the Civil Rights Act based on the theory of getting inside and telling private individuals who they can and can't discriminate against is something that libertarians talk about but it is that is entirely consistent viewpoint to say that I believe that the government should not mandate that stuff but I also believe that people I firmly believe people should not discriminate based on race and gender and sexual orientation that is an entirely consistent viewpoint it's interesting when people take their viewpoints on morality in general I believe that people should do all of these things that I think are good and therefore I believe that government should make people do all these things that I think are good and not see that those have to be the same level of moral obligation and I'm not saying I disagree with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 I think there's a lot of very good arguments for it but we have the discussion which is one of the things that the law of criticism that is that like if we even wonder about and question interfering in private activity we're off the reservation for you know normal political discourse that we even question the Civil Rights Act never ever bringing up the fact that you know the fact that they are okay with you know throwing people in cages for years and years at a time for private drug use is so totally unacceptable that we should attack them for that but aside from that fact you know that happens a lot to happen to Rand Paul here's a single thing that I can show your ideology may not believe and therefore your entire ideology is corrupt that's just a silly way of argument it shows they're not taking us seriously but it is I mean it is a fascinating question for example why the government can come in and prohibit private discrimination in a business but they can't do it in dating you know it may sound absurd but like you know if it's just like some guy's like well I don't date black people he's like well that's okay but you have to hire them I mean and there have been a lot of legal theories that come up with that for how you pierce the private sphere but again going back to it you can you can think that it's totally and completely morally obligatory to to behave in some way but the government doesn't have to make you do it and you can also think that the voluntary method of doing that makes you more moral than only doing it because of the threat of force and that brings us back to where we started which is this distinction between politics and community that when you recognize that politics whatever else it is always has this element of force or the threat of force behind it then you can see how you can be opposed to that but very much be in favor of well functioning communities and so I think this is going to be a common theme on free thoughts is that these issues that one side or both sides or all sides have very strong opinions on and think are very clear are often much more complicated and subtle yeah and another theme is what we're going to ask questions about things that people think maybe you're off the table because they're interesting by themselves yeah but in this case we can say that the simplistic view that libertarians because they believe that the state should be much more limited than it already it then it is right now are opposed to society and community is just it's just an ill-informed and absolutely and that and some of that just comes from the fact that you know we always compare in a way that that other political ideologies don't tend to we say oh here's a problem in the market and I believe in market imperfection and market failure and then we compare it to government failure so one of these things is here are some problems with community yes people can be you know racist and they can do horrible things in community but we have to compare to what government does we always have to compare because we do that we can say well I'm very pro-community I think government is anti-community and that's why I don't think it should be involved in these situations thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find me on twitter at A Ross P that's A R O S S P and you can find me on twitter at T C Burris B U R R U S to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org