by Nathan Schlueter
The contemporary Tea Party Movement, like its revolutionary ancestor, looks to principles for guidance. Yet an old but active fault line runs just beneath the surface of the movement that has the potential to cause a fatal rupture. Tea Partiers simultaneously promote both a conservatism based upon the principles of the American founding and a libertarianism based on individualism, but the two are ultimately incompatible.
Libertarians are good at explaining why the market works and why government fails, and they have made important policy initiatives in areas such as school choice. On the other hand, they actively oppose laws prohibiting obscenity, protecting unborn children, promoting marriage, limiting immigration, and securing American citizens against terrorists. These positions flow from core principles that have more in common with modern liberalism than with the American founding, and which threaten to erode our constitutional order even further.
The attraction of libertarianism is also its main defect: it offers neat solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, reality is far more complex than libertarians acknowledge.
Only conservatism offers principles adequate to that reality. Consider ten claims libertarians often make:
1. “The Founders of the American political order were libertarian.”
2. “Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them.”
3. “Only individuals exist, therefore there is no such thing as a ‘common good.’”
4. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
5. “Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery.”
6. Virtue cannot be coerced, therefore government should not legislate morality.
7. Government should not interfere in the free market.
8. The only alternative to libertarianism is totalitarianism.
9. Libertarianism is based upon a realistic understanding of human nature.
10. “Freedom works.”
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Read more here: www.theimaginativeconservative.org
1. “The Founders of the American political order were libertarian.”
2. “Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them.”
3. “Only individuals exist, therefore there is no such thing as a ‘common good.’”
4. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
5. “Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery.”
6. Virtue cannot be coerced, therefore government should not legislate morality.
7. Government should not interfere in the free market.
8. The only alternative to libertarianism is totalitarianism.
9. Libertarianism is based upon a realistic understanding of human nature.
10. “Freedom works.”
..........
Read more here: www.theimaginativeconservative.org
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