Now that I have offered a rather rough handling of Libertarianism, I want to address my ‘Conservative” friends.  But first, I want to make sure my Conservative and Libertarian friends both understand something.  I do not attack the Democrat Party directly because I consider that Party and everyone in it – leadership and membership alike – to be a lost cause.  Democrats are hopelessly tied to the American Progressive agenda and, because of this, they are irrational.  They cannot be reached with reason.  This is not true about those calling themselves Libertarian and Conservative.  The majority of you have not yet renounced the use of reason, but you are caught up in the grips of faction (as Madison defined it).  In other words, you are fighting harder for your team than for your goal.  My goal is not for a Party or even this nation.  My goal is the preservation of individual rights and liberty.  So, when I address Conservatives and Libertarians, it is in the hope that I can get you to stop worrying about your team (i.e. Party or even political label) and start worrying about the objective.

“Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”

–Benjamin Franklin

I am often criticized about worrying too much over the definition of words.  Well, there’s a reason for my concern.  Language is a form of logic, and if you do not know the words, you cannot reason properly and will open yourself to making mistakes in what you believe and why.  This is why the Progressives always seem to be obsessed with matters of language: it’s because they know they can use it to form, shape and direct public opinion.  It’s called propaganda, but it doesn’t work so well when the audience is properly educated.  And that is why we should all be concerned with mastering the language.  Unfortunately, mastering the language is only a part of the equation.  We also need to know and understand history.

The term “Conservative has a definition, and I have explained it before:

Political Labels: The History of “Conservative/Conservatism”

But the definition of “Conservative” is not the subject of this post.  The purpose of this post is to show that those who call themselves “Conservative” do not hold the same political ideology as the founding fathers because they have incorporated far too much of the Progressive philosophy into their own thinking.  There are several points we could focus on, but for the sake of brevity, we will look at just two.

The first is the Conservative tendency to embrace the police State in the name of law and order.  The Patriot Act is a perfect example of this.  Our founders would have violently objected to the Patriot Act.  It is completely unconstitutional, and yet, at the time the bill was being debated, Conservatives could be found defending the bill.  They were even going so far as to question the patriotism of anyone who objected to the law.  But look what has happened: those who objected have been vindicated, but now we are stuck not only with the Patriot Act, but also the TSA and DHS – and all in the name of law and order.  This is not a founding ideal of this nation, but an authoritarian State is most certainly a main plank in the Progressive ideal.

Next, we have the Conservatives’ embrace of corporation.  Franklin and Jefferson both wrote that those who object to the public control of property that exists only because of a public act should not partake in that sort of property.  In short, if you do not want the government to be able to have some say over your business, do not incorporate it.

Now, I have not found where any of the founders expounded on this point past the words I have read from Jefferson and Franklin asserting a public right to control publically created entities (i.e. Corporations), but I suspect the reasoning is rooted in the founders’ understanding of Natural Law.  You see, the corporation as we know it is – by its very nature – ‘collectivist.’  It is an artificial construction created by a legislative act of the entire people and, in theory, it is owned by many (i.e. stock holders).  However, in practice, the corporation as it exists today is little more than a vehicle by which the responsibility for the operation of the corporation is shifted from those corporate officers in charge of running it to the corporation, itself.  You see, we have given ‘personhood’ to something that is not real, and along with that ‘personhood,’ we have granted corporations rights as a person.  This is why corporations are usually fined but no one goes to jail.  And this is entirely at odds with Natural Law – but it is perfectly in line with the Progressive Ideal.

We could also go into the Conservative position on tariffs and free trade, on foreign military involvement and immigration.  The positions of the majority of those who consider themselves to be part of the modern American Conservative movement are quite different in these areas than that of our founding fathers.   Sadly, however, they are close to those of the Progressive movement, and this is because the Progressive movement got its start from within the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has co-opted those who consider themselves to be “Conservatives.”  In truth, this is all a big word/ideals game designed to keep people fighting over Party and ideology rather than focusing on principle and common grounds for obtaining common goals based on those principles.  And the people who have kept us chasing our tails for decades now depend on the Right being as ignorant as the rest of the population.  It’s just that they have to be much more sophisticated in their approach where the Right is concerned.  The few real thinkers on the Left already buy into the Progressive agenda, so there is little need to fool them, but the majority of those who think for themselves tend to reject the Progressive agenda because it leads to tyranny.  So the people in control of our government and social institutions have to be trickier in directing the voters on the Right.  But make no mistake about it; they still use the same basic techniques against us; they just do it in a much more sophisticated manner.  All I am trying to do is help you see this by showing you that you do not believe what you think you believe in the hopes that this will get you to step back and look a little closer at the rest of what you think is real.  If you do that, I think you might just find you have swallowed the founders’ red pill.

OK, if you have been reading my work for any length of time, you have probably run across at least one of my posts objecting to the Libertarian ideal.  Now, I am under no delusions here; I know that I have little chance of getting a dedicated Libertarian to change their world view.  I don’t write to or for those people; I write against the Libertarian ideal for the benefit of those who I might still be able to convince.  It is not that I think there is anything inherently evil about the people who adhere to the principles of Libertarianism.  Quite the contrary: I believe many of them are sincerely seeking to live their lives freely and in peace with others.  It’s just that I see a flaw in the foundation of Libertarianism.  The whole ideology is based on a fallacious assumption which is, in reality, is the same self-deception at the heart of original sin.  I’m just trying to help others see and understand that this self-deception undermines the rest of the philosophical foundation upon which the Libertarian ideal is built.

Liberty depends on morality.  I doubt I will find many ‘disciplined’ Libertarians who will disagree with this assertion.  For a person to be self-governing there must be some idea as to what is right and what is wrong.  It is this ideal of right and wrong that then allows the individual to be self-governing.  So long as the individual controls his/her own actions according to this ideal, the individual has little use or need of government because they encounter little or no conflict with other individuals.  And, when they do, they can usually resolve that conflict between themselves.  In fact, it was the self-governing Christian that built this nation.  The principles and ideals written into our Declaration of Independence can trace a direct lineage to the example set by the self-governing Christian, as evidenced in the model of the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlements in Colonial America (among others).  In fact, our foundering fathers said exactly this.  So, one of the fundamental principles of liberty is that there must be a sense of morality at the center of any self-governing societies.

Again, I doubt I will find any ‘disciplined’ Libertarian who will offer too much of an objection to my argument so far.  So far as most of the Libertarians I have known have been concerned, so long as you do not harm anyone else in the exercise of your rights and liberty, they would argue that you should not be restrained in those rights and liberty.  In short: if you’re not hurting anyone, you should be left alone – especially by the government.  And, in this sense, the Libertarian might even believe their idea of self-governing is the same as that of the Christian, just without the religious aspects.  But there is the fallacy in the fundamental assumption of the Libertarian ideal.  There can be no morality without ‘religion’ (where ‘religion’ is understood to mean a general belief in a Creator connected to the assumption of judgment by the Creator for our actions in this life).  In this sense, the self-governing Christian is very different from that of the self-governing Libertarian.

The Libertarian would claim that, since religion is a ‘private’ matter, he/she should be free from any outside religious influences – even to the point of Atheism.  In essence, the Libertarian will claim that the Natural Right of conscience imparts a right to not believe in God.  On the surface, this seems reasonable, but there is an inherent fallacy in this assertion.  If the Libertarian ideal is predicated on the individual’s right to be his or her own governor, then the individual asserting the Libertarian ideal is claiming to be his/her own governor.  In other words, the Libertarian claims to be the ruler of himself or herself.  And by logical extension, this then means the Libertarian must decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong, as well as what constitutes ‘harm.’  But deciding what is right and what is wrong and what constitutes harm is the work of the Creator, not the creation. For, if the individual claims the right to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong, is this not a claim to be God?  It must be, as moral law cannot be established by man; it must be established by the Creator.  This is what Voltaire was getting at when he penned words to the effect of:

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.”

The self-governing Christian does not create his or her own idea of right and wrong because the Christian does not claim to be their own Lord.  The self-governing Christian is governed by God, and therefore, by God’s law.  This is what creates an objective standard by which other self-governing Christians can determine what the right action in a given situation is.  This is not to say that every self-governing Christian will always make the correct decision, nor that they will even all agree as to what God’s law demands.  What it means is that there is a known ideal that is known to all and which can be examined and debated so that a common understanding can be reached.  However, under the Libertarian ideal, there can be as many standards as there are Libertarians.  By definition, this also means there can be no fixed ideal for – according to the Libertarian ideal — so long as no one ‘harms’ anyone else, no one can claim the authority to tell another what is right and what is wrong.  The consequence of this is that I can decide certain people are not people.  Thus, I am free to do what I will to them as – again, by definition – I cannot harm a ‘person’ if they are not people and no one else has the authority to tell me my definition of ‘person’ and ‘harm’ is any better than theirs.  Now, before you object to this, do some research: you’ll find several leading ‘ethicists’ have already made the case that parents should be allowed to kill their children up to the age of three because ‘they are not human yet.’  In fact, ‘science’ has been used to justify Eugenics in America, the Holocaust in Germany and abortion, and in every case, the justification rests on the re-defining of who is and is not ‘human.’  So, this is not an absurd example; it has already happened!

Here is an illustration of the Libertarian problem:

Suppose one man kills an eats another man and when the police arrest him and he goes to trial, he says he has done nothing wrong because the other man wanted to be killed and eaten.  Suppose the man on trial says he even ran an ad explaining what he wanted to do and the man he killed and ate answered that add?  What is the Libertarian to do in this case?  According to the Libertarian ideal, no one was harmed because neither party was forced to do anything against their will.  Both acted voluntarily.  Now, again, before you think this example is absurd, do a little research.  The cannibal’s name was Armin Meiwes.

Now, the Christian answer to the same problem:

After WW II, when the Allies were getting ready to hold the Nuremberg Trials, the Charter of the Tribunal encountered a problem.  They could not try many of the Germans charged with war crimes because they were claiming they were merely following orders and, under the laws of the governing bodies over them at the time, what they did was ‘legal.’  The problem is that – at their heart – all laws represent what a society considers to be right and wrong, so the Allies had to find another standard by which to charge and try the German war criminals.  In the end, the Allies claimed a ‘transcended’ standard; they claimed the “the law beyond the law.”  German war criminals were tried according to the law of God, the God of the Bible. (John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis, MN: Dimension Books/Bethany Fellowship, 1975), 24-25)

To end this post, I would refer you to:

Judges 17:6

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

⁶ In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.

So long as God is your King and you conduct yourself according to your best understanding of His law, there is nothing wrong with doing what is right in your own eyes:

Judges 8:23

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

²³ But Gideon said to them, “I will not rule over you, nor shall my son rule over you; the Lord shall rule over you.”

But this is not what the Libertarian ideal says.  In fact, the very foundation of Libertarian philosophy is based in the ‘right’ to reject any and all notion of God.  Therefore, the Libertarian model puts the individual in God’s seat, and that is original sin – and the reason why the Libertarian model does not work.  It violates Natural Law; the very law by which individual rights and liberty are claimed.