Tom Kawczynski - Off the Record

With good reason, libertarianism is seen as a philosophy that centers around individual liberty as the only ethical foundation upon which a society may be built.  The central premise is that unless you have individual choice governing the relationships between people and whatever institutions or arrangements they create, a coercive act such as the use of force must be inserted to compel the acceptance of any unwilling party.  More simply, either force or the threat of force is used to create any other society.

Thanks to this philosophy, doctrinaire libertarians always revert back to individual liberty as the highest aspiration in their political goals and philosophies.  Many believe that if people simply recognized that they have their liberty as a natural right, respecting it both for themselves and others, then we would have a more just society.  I agree with this premise, though I think it unlikely to happen or to be as complete as they think in the absence of one key factor:  prevention of the centralization of power.

The old saw is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  In this imperfect world where we don't have people acting simply for the interests of each individual, ranging from the petty tyrants who seek control through force, or the most kind hearted idealists, seeking to create their vision of utopia, they all share the need to create institutions that can impose their will on others to succeed.  To the extent they have greater legal, financial, moral, or any other authority, especially with respect to the other edifices in a given society, they can achieve this end.

This leads me to my next thought in applying libertarian ideals in a pragmatic way.  While recognizing that individual liberty should be protected to the utmost possibility, said pragmatist can see that without the prevention of centralization of power that the thought of liberty is likely to be subsumed to the power of another agenda.  From this assertion, I begin to draw the conclusion that those who would defend liberty will recognize there are times when that absolute must be compromised in order to prevent such a nexus of power from coming into being.

The founders understood this clearly which is why there are so many levels of division in the American government, between state and federal, between chambers, and between competing interests.  Pluralism is healthy, so long as it is sincere, and no interest (or collection of interests) can gain monopolistic control over the agenda.  This means standing opposed to any state that rules by fiat, against corporations that would use the state to simply advance only their agenda, against labor if it would reappropriate assets, and against anyone seeking compulsion through force without compromise.  It does not mean that any of these interests, inherently, are bad.  But, it means that if the balance between them ever falters, then that is when the subtle slide into authoritarianism begins.

I do not like class arguments as I find them inherently limiting, but people accept these identities and thus validate them.  It makes them relevant for this illustration of how a nation can quickly become authoritarian.  Let me draw up two examples, using government, workers, and business as our actors.  In each case, government serves only to advance the interest of the strongest entity, which ends up being true for financial and political reasons in fact.  If you have a strong relationship between government and workers, you end up with a state where they begin to determine the nature of business, vote for reappropriation of assets, and use the laws to take money from others.  If you have a strong relationship between government and business, tax money is reappropriated in terms of contracts, where government begins to serve as the force for the business interest with little care for either the labor force or end users.    An interesting thing happens when both have a strong relationship with government; when the government is large, what happens is the bureaucracy tries to satisfy the interest of both.   Only when the strong relationship is between labor and industry, in the presence of constrained government, is there balance achieved whereby these extremes can be avoided.

It is why I find myself supporting many arrangements that might limit liberty in an absolute sense, but that I believe bring necessary and appropriate balance.  I would not want any group to dictate our future, so I support both sides and the negotiation between them.  Labor, through unions and other assemblies, serves a good purpose in being a negotiator for the interests of the works against the profit motive of the corporation.  Industry, through taking labor and fashioning it into something productive, should be encouraged to innovate and to compete, but not be able to simply monopolize and dictate.  Government, ideally, should just be there to make sure no one dominates anyone unfairly in the society, as defender of liberty, but also wary of the corruption that come from any single body, group, or entity becoming larger enough to coerce the state into growing into something more.

This was the failing of the past, and it is the fight for the future.  Liberty requires us to recognize those entities that have an interest in using the state to force policy on us, and to make sure they are not only removed, but also that their counterpoint is found and set into balance.  Otherwise, a battle might be won but the war will be lost.  Centralization of power is the greatest single threat to human liberty, and with the advent of new technology, the possibility actually exists to have a state that can dictate more aspects of our lives than ever before.  That is what must be prevented.