-- THE TROUBLE WITH LIBERTARIANS

Several years ago, I visited a home in Provo, an older pioneer home, which the landlord had divided into 5 apartments. The old house had no steps to get onto the porch; two milk crates had been overturned to serve as steps. The ground floor was home to 15 Hispanic men; the ceiling drooped into the room and dripped brown water. The staircase to the upper level was so narrow that both my shoulders touched the walls as I ascended; it could never have been been built with a building permit. The floor in one apartment was covered in mismatched carpet scraps; it could not be vaccuumed or cleaned. The bedroom in one "apartment" was exactly the size of the bed; there was no room for a door on the bedroom. There were mouse droppings on every surface. The large backyard was used as a dump for material taken from the landlord's other units-- almost 1000 in Provo -- and the garbage pile was nearly as tall as the house, full of wood, windows, broken appliances, etc. The neighbors complained that the dump harbored rats. The landlord replied that the pile was not visible from the street, so the city had no cause to intervene.

Why on earth do I recount this story? Because it demonstrates the trouble with the libertarian mentality-- less government regulation, less government restrictions, less government. I believe that thinking denies the existence of men like the landlord. It is naiive at best, delusional at worst. The rhetoric sounds good, but it has no basis in reality. There ARE wicked people out there, and they can, and DO, take advantage of every opportunity, of every hole in the law. As they get worse-- greedier, craftier, more vocal-- it will be necessary to match their volume. They will force us to have not less government, but probably more government.

We lose our liberty through wickedness, and that wickedness is not necessarily our own.

A book I read recently analyzed the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He had a vision in his mind of how the people should behave -- women in veils, men at prayer, etc. -- and set about to make everyone comply. That his vision had no basis in reality was beside the point. He dreamed it, so be it.

The libertarian arguments are persuasive, they sound so good, but they also have no basis in reality. Good men believe the world to be one way, and want to enact legislation (or repeal legislation, actually) based on that belief. It's a delusion. We must work with the world as it really is, not how we would like it to be.

There are good men who are libertarians. But, unfortunately, bad men also espouse the libertarian party line, in order not to preserve their rights, but to protect their profits. -- mel