One of the worst things about this war (and the cluster of quasi-libertarian arguments used to justify it) has been the incredible mental toll it has inflicted on libertarianism. Instead of tending our own garden – working to smash, reduce, or at least slow the state that oppresses us – libertarians have typed keyboards to death over fundamental issues even goddamn liberals understand. To wit: Matthew Yglesias:
- [T]he notion that anything even remotely resembling libertarianism could underwrite an effort to conscript huge quantities of resources from the American public and deploy them in an attempt to wholly remake the social and political order in a foreign country is too absurd to merit a rebuttal. … As long as the conversation is supposed to be proceeding on the shared basis of libertarianism, however, one hardly needs to say anything. It’s coercion, it’s planning, it’s every non-libertarian thing under the sun.
Yet I can’t go to a libertarian site without enduring some soporific marathon debate about a no-brainer, i.e., that waging preemptive (read: aggressive) war (read: death and destruction) to impose democracy (fer Chrissakes!) on people who never even posed a threat to us is, uh, wrong. As Gene Healy once wrote,
- I continue to be perplexed by the fact that smarter people than me think that a political philosophy that tells you what to think about mandatory recycling has nothing to offer on the question of when one might morally employ daisy cutters and thermobaric bombs.