Thus begins a three-part series on politics and in particular my political inclinations. It was originally going to be one post, but that one post wound up being about as long as the tax code.

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By political disposition, I am a libertarian.

I started out as an American liberal of the highest rank--the kind of tax-and-spend philosophy that regards the government as a sort of monetary-driven panacea, and is willing to concede to it certain rights and liberties in exchange for the services that, it is held, only the government can provide effectively.

The terminus of this particular train of thought leads one to socialism, and I considered myself a Marxist socialist for a while. That philosophy has a certain amount of appeal: the saying itself, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is actually quite beautiful, in its own way. Of course there is the slight problem that socialism doesn't work--but it's easy enough to overlook that, and I did.

At some point, though, I realised that there is only one point at which all of us are equal. We're not all equally smart, equally strong, equally attractive, what have you. But we are all granted equal freedom of choice, at birth. In this particular sense Marx and Engels were highly wrong: our true worth is not labour but choice. Choice--freedom--is the currency we spend to purchase the things we desire in life.

As valuable as my muscles and neurons themselves is the cession of liberty that I give to my employer. I choose to give him a certain period of time, every day, in which I subordinate my will to his. In return, he gives me money I can spend on things that the choices of others have made available to me. Mothers sacrifice their liberty for children; children sacrifice their liberty for the protection and nurturing of their parents.

So too with the state. We choose to give up our freedoms to purchase from them--roads, schools, a military. This at its core is the social contract we've signed. Libertarians are more conservative in how they spend their freedom, and I came to believe that I had given up too much to the government for too little in return. Certainly, there is value in structure--but it occurred to me that the best government is one that operates as a watchmaker does: assembling the gears and setting them to function, but then getting out of the way unless something is in need of repair.

Then, too, one realises that much of the government is dedicated not to serving its constituency but to serving the government itself (as though the government were some faceless monolith, which it obviously is not), or to external entities that, themselves, seek to restrict the freedom of others. Much moral law falls under this category--sodomy statutes, for instance.

Most people are unconcerned. Most people are willing to let the government take away their freedoms, spy on them, spirit them away to prison now and again--if they are left mostly alone, and allowed to be happy. Gracchus, quoting a different movie in Scott's sword-and-sandal epic Gladiator, puts it this way: "Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar."

At this point the government becomes not a clockmaker but a nanny, which (as a more intensive occupation) requires yet more government, in a kind of delicious circle. Of course, people are (or can be) dangerous. Not dangerous like a serial killer or a bank robber--those are localised, if ugly, points of danger. I mean dangerous like Falun Gong is to China or the Bolsheviks were to Nicholas. I mean dangerous like the Paris Commune. Do you hear the people sing? The government does. This is why it quiets them. And again, most people put up with it.

Thusly do we get manifestly stupid concepts. Like:

"When they were writing the Second Amendment, I don't think the Founding Fathers meant to say that everyone should be able to have assault rifles." Don't be retarded. Of course they did. That, in case you're not capable of reading between the lines, is the entire point. The Founding Fathers, being wealthy landowners, also didn't give two shits about hunting, which is why the idea that "you don't need an AK-47 to shoot deer hurr hurr" is equally stupid.

They had, however, just fought a war against an oppressive, militarily-superior state with the weapons they had on hand. The notion that the Founding Fathers would have intentionally disempowered the citizenry of their ability to resist the government, should it again become oppressive, is ridiculous on its face. We have reached a point at which people are so content with their government that they seem to have forgotten the lessons of Valley Forge.

Or:

"If you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't have anything to worry about." This is more insidious, but it's just as bad--worse, in fact. I do have things to hide--lots of things. Things like who I talk to, and what I like doing, and what food I buy and what I wear. Things like who my romantic partners are. Things like what operating system I use, what languages I speak, what hobbies I follow.

The only practical reason for the government to know these is to restrict my liberties in some fashion. Beyond pure moralising, the most common rationalisation for this is security--the notion that we live in a dangerous world, and (this is something like the most common phrasing) "if we can do something, it behoves us too".

Oh, bullshit. Let me let my readers in on a little secret: the world is not really a dangerous place. You're not going to get shot, and you're certainly not going to get killed by a terrorist. The idea that "not letting another 9/11 happen" justifies the restriction of our civil liberties is laughable on its face. In 2001, 2.4 million Americans died. The deaths incurred on September 11 represent a blip. For comparison sake, that year somewhere around seven hundred thousand people died from heart attacks, and 550,000 died from cancer. If you were shown a graph of American mortality rates, you wouldn't be able to tell that the attacks had happened at all (indeed, the death rate increase from 2000-2001 is the same as that from 1999-2000, and much less than the increase from 2001 to 2002).

We'll ignore the things that everybody knows--that in 2001 motor vehicle accidents killed forty thousand more people than Muslim terrorists, for instance, or that the American diet will kill so many of us as to make bin Laden look like Bono. That year, just as many people died of intestinal parasites. You know where else that kills people? The Oregon fucking Trail on an Apple II. In 2001, malnutrition killed more Americans than hijacked airplanes did. You want to be scandalised? In America, the richest country in the world, 3500 people starved to death. There's your scandal.

"Well, then why aren't you doing anything to stop it?" you ask. Because I don't really care: in the grand scheme of things, 3500 dead people is peanuts, as will my own death be when it occurs. But then, I'm not the one trying to cow people into passing domestic wiretapping laws with the spectre of a threat that, in its most fatal year, killed fewer people than ulcers, am I?

-Alex