The Libertarians are more-or-less correct on many of their beliefs regarding interpretations of the Bill of Rights, particularly the dangerous precedents that are being set by the Courts at every level because of the "War on Terror." They are also generally correct about the hypocrisy and waste of funds that mark our forty-year long "War on Drugs," and other consensual crimes. However, Plessy v. Ferguson, The Mann Act, The Harrison Drug Act, and The Smith Act with the resulting Palmer Raids, all took place before FDR, The New Deal, and the Warren Court. What they look to as a Golden Age of "less government," was in reality a brutal age where governors would call out the militia at the drop of a hat for any sort of protest against owners of railroads, mines, and factories.
My suggestion to every libertarian is to read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980), and discover why the left has some of the positions that it does. We have adopted limited collectivism not out of any deep seated belief in Marxism or any other foreign ideology, but rather out of self-defense against the collective power of corporations, syndicates, and monopolies formed by the richest One Percent against the rest of us. A single individual cannot stand against a corporation which can hire its own army of enforcers, backed up by the police and the state militia.
Our country was formed when a collective of revolutionaries rose against the collective power of the British East India Company's trade monopoly, backed by the might of the Crown of Great Britain. It was a collective of outstanding individuals, perhaps unequalled in the history of the World, but it was still a collective. Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hancock, and the rest could have done nothing individually; united, they formed an indomitable combination that started the greatest experiment in political history.
The most important duty of the individual is to insure the honest performance of the members of their government. They must make certain that undue influence by one segment of the nation is not exercised against another. They must also be certain that no segment of the citizenry is unduly oppressed by another due to race, creed, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual preference, age, disability, poverty, or other reason that might present itself. Perfect fairness is impossible; but the effort must be made to be as fair as our human imperfection allows.
The more closely that we achieve that level of fairness in our individual lives, the less we will need active enforcement of fairness by our government. And the more every individual can join in a collective sigh of relief.
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