So you would be in favor of repealing laws that prohibit murder, rape, kidnapping, and pederasty? Those are all laws founded in morality, LONG before libertarianism was invented. Your statement could easily be rephrased, "I am against murder, rape, kidnapping, and pederasty from a moral perspective, but I don't think government has any place in passing or enforcing laws against them."pbwalker wrote:Morality is great. Forced / Governed morality is not.
This is the problem when people state that you can't legislate morality. Of course you can, and people have been doing it for thousands of years, and generally for the betterment of society and the culture. In fact, there is nothing "immoral" about legislating morality. The ultimate Libertarian expression is utopian in nature, and like all utopian ideals, it fails to account for basic human nature. It assumes that all people will listen to the better angels of their nature. Unfortunately, most don't. When they don't listen to those angels, how can they even have a trial by a jury of their peers when most people don't want to have anything to do with jury duty? You do that by passing laws that constrain the freedoms of The People, forcing them to participate in jury duty. Doesn't that violate the fundamental tenets of Libertarianism......government forcing a citizen to do something they don't want to do? And yet, Amendment 6 to the Constitution guarantees "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence." How can pure Libertarianism reconcile forcing a citizen to participate in government who doesn't want to do it, with the guaranteed right to a speedy and public trial........often for accusations of having violated a law based in morality? None of this would be possible in the ongoing Ayn Rand novel which is the libertarian ideal.
Dagny makes the statement several times in "Atlas Shrugged" that she would willingly kill a person who stood in the way of her business goals. That is fundamentally immoral position. That would be against the law in today's society just as it would have been in late 18th century America, and it certainly isn't something the Founders would have countenanced.
The fact is that society survives because people agree to be restrained by certain moral standards, and then they codify those standards into law so that we can all be on the same page about what is acceptable behavior toward one another, and what isn't. Morality is at the very root of the law. Further, society agrees to hire enforcers of those standards, and to establish punishments—which are in themselves violations of another human being's rights—for violating the commonly accepted standards. You simply cannot divorce morality from law. That dog won't hunt; and whenever societies attempt to divorce morality from the law, society suffers and begins to degrade.
I personally lean toward certain (small "l") libertarian standards in that I want to reduce the size of government and onerous laws and policies which intrude upon and infringe my constitutional rights, but I NEVER want the law to be divorced from morality because that is a recipe for social disaster.