We know Obamacare is bad, according to many, because freedom is good. I think I’m representing the argument as accurately-yet-succinctly as possible. Many of Obamacare’s more strident opponents might object to my caps-lock-free use of the word “freedom,” preferring instead to use the sobriquet “FREEDOM.” I will use the lowercase version, but please understand that my refusal to express my stridency through capitalization does not necessarily reflect a lack of enthusiasm for my subject matter.
Now then, on to the point of today’s screed: libertarianism might be “back,” at least according to Pauline Arrillaga at the Associated Press, who writes that
Something’s going on in America this election year: a renaissance of an ideal as old as the nation itself – that live-and-let-live, get-out-of-my-business, individualism vs. paternalism dogma that is the hallmark of libertarianism.
It’s Saturday, so I’m not going to bother unpacking the various historical amd equitable inaccuracies in that statement. I’d be preaching to the choir, anyway. Where it gets interesting is where she starts talking to actual self-styled libertarians.
She interviewed Mark Skousen, an economist who founded FreedomFest, a conference starting this week in Las Vegas that talks about freedom, presumably with some liberty thrown in for good measure. I’m not saying that Skousen speaks for all libertarians, but he brings up some points that have long bothered me about the whole concept of libertarianism, or at least the way many people express it:
“It is a rebirth,” said Skousen, and a reaction to a feeling shared by many that America has moved too far afield from its founding principles. “This country was established for the very thing that we’re fighting right now: excessive government control of our lives. In today’s world everything is either prohibited or mandated. … You have to have medical insurance. You have to wear a seat belt. … They have to pat you down (at the airport).”
Skousen has a simple analogy for all of this: “If you restrict a teenager, they rebel. I think that’s what people are feeling.”
Perhaps he was speaking off the cuff, and had not had time to put together a better list of examples. Of course, he is also purporting to represent an ideology, so the examples of “excessive governmemt control” he cites are worth noting. Airport pat-downs are pretty obvious. I have yet to hear anyone who doesn’t actually work for the TSA defending the practice, but no one in Washington seems to have the guts to stand up to them. Complaining about that hardly sets this guy apart.
Seat belts: truly, our Founding Fathers fought, bled, and died, so that their descendants two centuries later could hurtle across paved roads in large steel carriages at speeds unknown anywhere else in the animal kingdom with no safety restraints. (This was covered in a song that unfortunately did not make the final selection cut for Schoolhouse Rock.) As an example of excessive government control, this makes Skousen look like a crybaby.
Medical insurance: this is the issue of the day, isn’t it? Never mind that most Americans want affordable health care and agree with the individual provisions of Obamacare. Never mind that we as a nation made a decision that health care should be a for-profit enterprise, meaning that drugs are developed and marketed for their ability to make money for shareholders more than for their ability to improve health. Never mind that ensuring people have basic access to health care is the right damn thing to do. The fact is that people both need and want health care, and they have to pay for it. The only people who would “suffer” under the mandate are the tiny percentage of people who can afford insurance but decide not to purchase it. Presumably because of FREEDOM. I am skeptical that someone who would refuse to buy health insurance under those circumstances, if faced with an illness or injury later on that required health care at a greater cost than they could not afford, would just go gently into that good night. Opposition to the mandate, once you get past all the “slippery slope” rhetoric and word salad about liberty, is really just about being a freeloader. And that brings me to my last observation.
Skousen overtly compares libertarians to angry teenagers who don’t like rules. That is the perfect analogy, actually. He sounds like a sullen teen who is angry that his dad won’t let him borrow the car even though his mom needs the car right then to take his little sister to soccer practice. He wants the car right now, and screw the rest of the family. He’s probably not quite a bad as Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but he’s getting there.
In Skousen’s analogy, the teenager represents the libertarians, and the parents represent the government. There’s another word we can use to describe the parents, and it encompasses everything that libertarians like Skousen are not: grownups.
Photo credit: ‘Veruca Salt, from the film ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ [Fair use], via Virginmedia.com.
