Peter, Bartlett’s remarks were truly maddening and contorted. He separates libertarians into the unsophisticated rednecks and rubes who are only interested in not paying taxes, and in survivalism and gun culture; and effete, unprincipled, cosmopolitan metro-libertarians who don’t mind paying taxes and who are not very career-oriented.
What a bizarre dichotomy. First, despite some unsavory characteristics of some metro-beltway libertarians, even most of them are in fact against taxes, and many of them are actual gun owners. And it is natural for think-tank and beltway types to be less “career-oriented” than typical professional working people. As for the anti-income-taxers, as noted, many of them are in fact metro-libertarians, but even outside the beltway, many of us are in fact sophisticated, educated, and professionals, and we are very principled and interested not only in tax abolition but in abolition of a depressingly wide array of state policies that violate rights.
This column is so full of bizarre distortions that my first inclination is to attribute it to mendacity, but my guess is it’s really just the result of stupidity, ignorance, … and a certain lack of sophistication.
Bruce Bartlett gets the award for a rather silly column in Forbes:
[M]ost self-described libertarians are primarily motivated by economics. In particular, they don’t like paying taxes. They also tend to have an obsession with gold and a distrust of paper money. As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn’t extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep all the guns they want. Many are survivalists at heart and would be perfectly content to live in complete isolation on a mountain somewhere, neither taking anything from society nor giving anything.
Fortunately, Bartlett later assures his readers, a smaller group — “metro-libertarians,” he calls them — is “cosmopolitan, urbane, articulate and interested in ideas more than just about anything else.” Guess where you find them? At a Washington, DC dinner party, of course, like the one featuring metro-libertarian and liberal bloggers that Bartlett recently attended.
Bartlett’s main substantive point is that libertarians spend too much time on economic issues and not enough on foreign-policy or personal-liberty issues. I’m not sure where Bruce was living the last eight years but I recall quite a few libertarians writing and speaking on foreign-policy concerns. Oh, and by the way, there are a few pressing economic concerns to focus on these days.
11:50 pm on May 29, 2009
