From Nashville, a Libertarian Primer

Roger Abramson's cover story in Nashville Scene (which I belatedly happened upon via The Radical Centrist blog) is as good a primer on libertarian principles as any — except that Abramson is dispassionate about libertarianism. Claiming to be neither a "devil-may-care libertine" nor an "in-your-face moralist," he cautions upfront that "I have no dog in this hunt." Well, good. Non-partisan, clear-eyed arguments work better for me than pre-cut ideologies anyway.

Abramson gets bonus points for starting off his essay with the still-amazing tale of Peter McWilliams. Peter, who unwittingly gave this blog its name, was a writer and a chemo patient who stayed alive thanks to a nausea-suppressing drug (yep: marijuana). He was pushed into an early grave by callous drug warriors who wouldn't allow him to have the very thing that had been saving him. So Peter choked to death on his own vomit, at home in his bathtub. I recently commemorated him here.

Anyway, as for Abramson, he hits a lot of good points. With just a glimmer of sarcasm, he notes that

...[W]e seem to hear more about the Metro Police Department busting up poker games than we do about their tracking down a missing child. The missing child is just one person, and could be anywhere; the enemies of vice are legion, and vice is everywhere.

And he's a lot like yours truly in the sense that

...[M]y life wouldn't change very much if all the things we place in the category of "vice" were banned outright, nor would it affect me much personally if everything were legalized to the hilt.

That's an important thing to say. Because I've made it my life's work to challenge and mock Nanny-Staters, I'm sometimes taken for an incorrigible smoker, or a consumer of pornography, or a pothead, or a whoremonger (wrong on three counts). Shocking as it may be, people who defend 'vice' (however the word is defined) typically don't live lives of festering turpitude. We tend to be solidly in the mainstream. Our limbs aren't disfigured by needle marks; we don't have purple dildos protruding from our pockets; we burn neither flags nor bibles; we love our kids and pay our taxes; and we rarely sport tin-foil hats.

Me, I'm mostly in this fight for the principle of the thing, but also for the same practical reasons that Abramson brings up:

What I'm curious about is whether using government resources to police these sorts of things is really an effective thing to do, or whether it's largely just a way to make so many of us feel good about ourselves at the expense of both the liberty of others, not to mention our pocketbooks.

The answer, of course, is 'the latter.' Whole thing right this way.

Comments

[Adam W.]

I didn't read the whole thing yet, but it seems like a good piece.