How, after all, did the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries become the state-obsessed liberalism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How did the once-venerable word liberalism become perverted in the first place? Precisely because of thickism. Sure, twentieth-century liberals said, we favor liberty, but since mere negative liberty – that is, restrictions on the state – doesn’t appear to yield a sufficiently egalitarian result, we need more than that. In addition to restrictions on some state activity, we need the expansion of other forms of state activity. An interesting point. But actually, you dont need to have any particularly thick commitments to become hardline statists. All you have to do is accept the state as an acceptable means to an end, compounded with a willingness to violate rights to pursue it. And even asking the state to pursue the standard end of thin libertarianism—non-aggression—is all you need for the creation of courts, armies, and police. And once you have these things, you can have wars and border controls, which many libertarians defend—not in the name of thick principles, but in the name of thin principles. The totalitarian potential within libertarianism flows from the willingness to have the state enforce the NAP. The original sin of liberalism was in its statism, not in its thickism. Various liberals and libertarians signed on to the Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War and the War on Terror—always in the name of defending rights and only defending rights. At that point, all the social justice and welfare equivocation in the world are responsible for rounding error in the degree of statism inflicting America. (Not to mention the fact that many of the classical liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries werent particularly good on war or slavery.)
Posted on: Thu, 01 May 2014 15:00:56 +0000
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