{"id":7914,"date":"2009-06-09T11:33:20","date_gmt":"2009-06-09T18:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7914"},"modified":"2012-10-02T10:04:31","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T17:04:31","slug":"from-the-mailbag-if-libertarians-were-housepets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7914","title":{"rendered":"From the mailbag: If Libertarians Were Housepets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s an old cartoon, but I like it, and so I’ll take any excuse to post it. Such as this email I received from “Mark”:<\/p>\n

Just caught your “If Housepets were Libertarians” cartoon<\/p>\n

Boy are you confused about what Libertarians are. It\u2019s not about selfishness, it\u2019s about not being FORCED into charity. What\u2019s more damaging however is the impression you form in the minds of those who take your little drawing at face value. Read a book would you; how about \u201cAtlas Shrugged\u201d or \u201cWealth and Poverty\u201d or \u201c Freedom to Choose\u201d. If you are going to dabble in political thought don\u2019t let yourself be pigeonholed as a complete neophyte.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m really tickled by the idea that if you haven’t read a book by obscure 1970s anti-feminist<\/a> George Gilder, then you’re a complete neophyte.<\/p>\n

I don’t interpret “If Libertarians Were Housepets” as saying that libertarians are selfish (that’s more the theme of this cartoon<\/a>). Rather, it’s saying that Libertarians have dangerously little understanding of how society actually works. As Mark Thoma<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n

Where I part with many libertarians – perhaps due to my background – is in the idea that government is almost always at odds with liberty. In my case, government played a key role in providing me with opportunity – education is one example, without tuition of $100 per semester at a state school, I probably would not have gone to college – but the opportunities government provided me go beyond education (and also see the examples given in the article for women and minorities).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bruce Bartlett argues<\/a>: ((I’ve cut out a sentence in which Bartlett says that blacks no longer have less freedom than whites, generally. One look at who goes to prison in the US is enough to refute that claim.))<\/p>\n

Many government interventions expand freedom. A good example would be the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was opposed by libertarians like Barry Goldwater as an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights. Yet it was obvious that African Americans were suffering tremendously at the hands of state and local governments. If the federal government didn’t step in to redress these crimes, who else would? […]<\/p>\n

One could also argue that the women’s movement led to a tremendous increase in freedom. Libertarians may concede the point, but conservatives almost universally view the women’s movement with deep hostility. They think women are freest when fulfilling their roles as wife and mother. Anything that conflicts with those responsibilities is bad as far as most conservatives are concerned.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But although Libertarians may concede the point, Bartlett points out, in the end they still vote Republican, because they’re entirely focused on economics, and on government as the enemy of liberty. This is problematic because libertarians tend to have an extremely narrow conception of what liberty is: not paying taxes.<\/p>\n

The Cato Institute publishes an annual survey of economic freedom throughout the world, but produces no surveys of what countries have the most political or social freedom or those that have the most libertarian foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, economic freedom tends to be determined primarily by those measures for which quantifiable data are available. Since it is very easy to look up the top marginal income tax rate or taxes as a share of GDP, these measures tend to have overwhelming influence on the ratings. As a result, countries like Denmark, which are very free every way except in terms of taxes, end up being penalized. Conversely, authoritarian states like Singapore don’t suffer for it because they have low taxes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although not all libertarians are well-off white men, nearly every libertarian I’ve met had at least two of those three traits. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that if you’re economically comfortable, white, and male, it’s much easier to imagine that government is the biggest threat to liberty in the world, and to minimize or dismiss how other factors — such as racism, sexism, and the concentration of wealth and poverty — also constrain liberty. For George Gilder — a white man with more money than he could ever spend — perhaps the biggest threat to his freedom is taxation. But most of us aren’t George Gilder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s an old cartoon, but I like it, and so I’ll take any excuse to post it. Such as this email I received from “Mark”: Just caught your “If Housepets were Libertarians” cartoon Boy are you confused about what Libertarians … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-comics","category-economics-and-the-like","category-libertarianism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15891,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7914\/revisions\/15891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}