Social issues: May 2010 Archives

For many years I took the position that a society was best served by a government that allowed anything and a culture that encouraged the right thing. Only this, I thought, would produce the right incentive to do the right thing.

Rand Paul attempts to bring this approach, condemning racism while saying it's not his place to ban a business from practicing it. It is intellectually defensible.

The rub is that we all know that, if we let people do things we don't want them to do, they'll probably do them no matter how much we cry. That's why so many conservative evangelicals, who claim in theory to want small, non-meddling government, in practice are on crusades to ban abortion pills, gay marriage and so on. They know that they'll never control the culture enough to squelch such behaviors -- and even if they did, those behaviors would go on anyway.

Cigarette smoking is on the decline in California, but not because of the social pressure, but because the various bans and the pressure together affected behavior. It might be coercive, but it kinda works.

Yet in the South, a century and a half of forced freedom for the black man still hasn't resulted in the vast majority of white people becoming color blind. Imagine how bad they'd be, then, if government hadn't meddled.

That's the problem with libertarian ideals. A democratic citizenry steps back and lets its social groups and institutions do what they want -- and eventually the democratic citizenry has to get involved.

That's when those social groups and institutions start claiming that the democratic citizenry is a fascist or totalitarian state. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it....?