Ever since I knew of what socioeconomic theories were, I have had many different opinions on how our government and the economy should operate. I’ve been raised a Catholic since I was born, and as a Catholic I have a strong sense of social justice and some general idea of how things should be, although these thoughts were never fully formed.
Frankly, my views have pretty much run the gamut: Socialism, Communism, the Democratic Party, essentially anything left of center. As a Catholic, I understood that we should help the poor, to defend civil liberties, and that the economy should be protected as if we were handling a baby. And I researched anything and everything I could about the tenets of Marxist theories and Socialist and Communists governments past and present.
Yes, I even had a Che shirt. “Viva la Revolution!” it said beneath a picture of the man himself, the man so many other high school students have idolized and revered as the person that finally stood up. Little did I realize that everything I learned about Che, and Communism in general, was based around a system of control and abuse, not on revolution and the idea of justice my young mind was familiar with.
I was a sophomore in college here in one of the most liberal states of the Union. I was getting ready to go to my economic geography class, and I was thinking about whether I should wear my Che shirt, since I was feeling a little rebellious. I would choose not to, and so I went to my geography class and listened intently to my professor to see what his vision of government and the role of economics were. So convincing were his ideas and theories, from that day on my view of government had drastically changed to neither left nor right, but libertarian.
“What is libertarianism?” you may ask. It certainly isn’t a term discussed enough by the often left-leaning media bloc that feeds us our information daily. Libertarianism is basically the idea of “free minds and free markets”, which is individual liberty both socially and economically. I’ve always been interested in what makes men free, how we are able to say what we want to without fear of coercion. But Communism believes that there is such a thing as collective liberty, where the “common good” is established by the State and enforced as such. If the “people” (the Communist government) didn’t like what you had to say, you were imprisoned to defend the State. In other words, the State is God.
Libertarianism takes the original ideas of the Founders of this government and of the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment to defend the rights of the individual against the State. To a libertarian, the only role of government is to enforce social contracts and the law, and to defend us from violence and coercion. Laissez-faire capitalism, which is essentially free market capitalism, is defended as the right for the individual to make his own choices on what to buy or sell.
This embracing of capitalism AND individual liberties stuck me as odd, because when we look at the Democratic and Republican parties, they either support freer markets but more conservative restrictions, or less free market but a more liberal social view. It was a new idea that a free market, a small and less invasive government, and a view of the rights of the individual could coexist and thrive so peacefully! Seeing as how the government is taking more and more control over what we can say, eat, believe in, what we buy or sell, the ideas of libertarianism are more important now than ever before.
I encourage everyone to research libertarianism for themselves, and tune in for more articles from me about current issues with a libertarian mindset!
Check out this websites to learn more:
http://www.libertarianism.com/
http://mises.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
About Trevor Jones
Capitalism is at odds with Freedom. Capitalism enslaves the working class. So how can one support Libertarinism and claimt to support the freedom of all?
Capitalism, pure unbridled capitalism, is the free exchange of goods and services in a society. Voluntary labor for money with a value is certainly not slavery, wereas in communist and socialist countries you are forced at the barrel of a gun to work for the ever-ambiguous State, or the “people”.
So in a sense, it’s communism and socialist thought that is at odds with freedom… Stalin and Mao didn’t exactly have the “people” at heart when they butchered 50 million and 70 million people, respectively.
-Trevor
Right on the button Trevor, and to repeat my favorite quote “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
Trevor, as we’ve debated many a time before, I disagree. Your continued ignorance on how Socialism and Communism should be mind boggling to me if you, as you say, were at one time a supporter of these theories. To be honest, I can agree with you that Communism, or Stalinism as it should be called, in practice hasn’t fulfilled any of the desired outcomes, but still, at least you are working for a greater good. For Socialism, which works and is working in all other civilized countries, I don’t see how the freedom of people is in question?
As for this notion of the “free exchange of goods and services in society” and “voluntary labor for money” isn’t true at all. The laborer, the person that makes the object, is subject to a subservient position in which the person that is working above you might not be the “best” or even “better” person than you. For example, if you or I worked in Burger King, we’d kill our manager since we are better than that person. Essentially, the worker has no freedom.
As Engels argued, and for lack of incentive to go find his exact works I’ll paraphrase, that so long as the machine is working, the worker is working. On that logic, the worker is now a servant to both the machine that is used to create the object that only has value since someone made it and the overseer, whether it be a manager or the overall boss. Anyway, this idea that government is too powerful is still a very weak notion, since without a strong central government, the state governments follow the federal government and devolve power to the localities. This is the basis of anarchy, and I think everyone agrees that such an idea doesn’t work.
Really, all you’re advocating, as a Libertarian, is the creation of a Confederacy with the best interest in mind of those people who have and wield power over those without. You cannot have freedom without a powerful central government, and you cannot have life or liberty without someone to prevent oppression. And the main sources of oppression throughout history aren’t federal governments, but the local governments. After all, the English Crown didn’t order the slaying of people in India or Africa, the local governor did, just as an example.