You know, the “hey, A Christmas Carol is total crap because Scrooge is actually the hero” argument is quite possibly the bottom of the barrel as far as libertarian thought goes: taking Dickens’ classic story about the essential emptiness of living only for profit and greed and completely missing the goddamned point isn’t something that should surprise me when it shows up on Mises.org (unofficial motto: “Sure, The State Paid For All the Stuff That Made This Website Possible, But That Doesn’t Mean We Wouldn’t Have Created A Massive International Information Network By Ourselves If We’d Been Given The Chance”) written by a bell curver, and yet it does.
Consider this part.
More notorious even than his miserly ways are Scrooge’s cynical words. “Are there no prisons,” he jibes when solicited for charity, “and the Union workhouses?”
Terrible, right? Lacking in compassion?
Not necessarily. As Scrooge observes, he supports those institutions with his taxes. Already forced to help those who can’t or won’t help themselves, it is not unreasonable for him to balk at volunteering additional funds for their extra comfort.
What Levin does here is conveniently forget to include the response to Scrooge’s question:
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
What this serves as is an indictment of Levin’s entire philosophy. The role of social welfare is traditionally condemned in libertarian circles: better that social welfare be provided by private agencies, say they, as it is in the best interests of all concerned to prevent desperation and abject poverty as much as possible. Well, Scrooge is given a chance to contribute towards the social welfare and he says “go screw.” Apparently, in Scrooge’s eyes, the welfare policies enacted by Victorian-era England (which is, I dunno, a socialist utopian paradise all of a sudden) deny the need for private charity even when clearly insufficient, and give the lie to the theory of private social welfare systems so beloved by the right.
It goes downhill from there. Really. It’s kind of sad.
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Holy crap that was awful.
I like how in the end he just kind of makes up a new idealized Scrooge to replace the actual character in the book.
“He wasn’t unhappy at all even! He enjoyed being a cynical miserly bastard with no friends at all! He enjoyed having no hobbies! We should all be like Scrooge!”
You’re not really surprised that the whole “Philanthropy shouldn’t be legislated” attitude really means “Poor people should hurry up and die,” are you?
I’m a little scared to comment on a Libertarian subject again, but I do want to point out that most Libertarians are not this ridiculous. The problem with Libertarianism, as with most minority political factions, is that the hard-core extremists tend to be the most active. (There may be some of that in the more mainstream political groups as well.)
I think most Libertarian-types are very supportive of charity and philanthropy.
Supposedly, according to some surveys, Libertarians and Conservatives actually give more time and money to charity than Liberal-types do. (On average, obviously. I’m sure you can find many counter-examples.) Also, lower-class people give more of their income than rich people (although rich people may give more in absolute terms), and religious people give more than non-religious people. (I’m not religious, by the way.)
Sorry, I giggled all the way through this essay. I can’t help laughing at such insane interpretations.
The best part must be the defense of debtor’s prisons.
Read the user-generated tags.
The only reason the tag cloud shows an anti-libertarian bias is because you need to demonstrate basic math ability to get past the spam filter.
And so timely! One need only look back eleven years to find something dumb written on a libertarian website.
Given that Dickens’ family was basically ruined when his father was sent to debtor’s prison, I don’t imagine he’d be too enamoured of the article!
Good heavens, survey results showing conservatives are more charitable than liberals! Sounds mighty fishy indeed, eh?
I’m always distressed by the tendency to treat these terms as though they had something to do with “natural” distinctions. If you asked me if my father was liberal or conservative, I’m not sure what I could tell you about it. I guess he’s a mix of both?
If we even accept that using the terminology is valid for a majority of people, that is. As a matter of fact I know LOTS of people who vote Liberal who aren’t what I’d call “liberals”, i.e. in their life outside the polling place they’d have little reason to self-identify that way. Ditto for Conservative voters.
The States is so messed-up about this stuff, I say it with love but it’s just so crazy down there.
It is quite a strain to be polite to things like that survey, I have to say. Being polite to Mary isn’t a strain at all, but being polite to things other people have said, that Mary is merely relating here for our benefit…
Mary, you wouldn’t take it personally if I went all apeshit on that survey thing, would you? You don’t seem like you’re trying to use your evident niceness and reasonableness to shelter anybody else’s claims, so I hope you wouldn’t construe an attack on somebody else’s claims as an attack on you yourself…nobody wants to shoot the messenger…
That guy was a PROFESSOR.
Of Philosophy, I know, but still.
My favorite bit was when he commented on the fact that Scrooge’s former employer would throw a big Christmas party for his workers, saying that either he must have either paid his workers less overall or passed the cost on to his customers.
The idea that an employer might actually want to use a tiny fraction of their own profits to throw a party at work being utterly alien to him of course.
Wait, this is serious? I thought this was someone taking the piss out of libertarians. Is there a libertarian corollary for Pope’s Law?
An ex-girlfriend of mine was on Law Review in the biggest and oldest historically black university in the state. There was a guy who kept trying to submit an article on why the Constitution and free market should allow people to contract away their freedom into indentured servitude. He just couldn’t understand why his proposal was repeatedly rejected.
And so timely! One need only look back eleven years to find something dumb written about ^A Christmas Carol on a libertarian website.
Corrected and resubmitted.
Libertarians are terrible when it comes to domestic issues, but in terms of foreign issues (bombing brown people) they are awesome.
My church took up a fundraiser because it was expanding the building. We needed $10 million for the renovations. I come from a very rich neighborhood, and there was something of a “giving” war in which people were dumping six-figure donations into the collection plate.
This was in Tom DeLay’s district.
The church was built with money to spare. All told, we raised over $10 million in less than six months. To build a church. So all us good little Catholics could praise Jesus in a more opulent setting.
This was considered “charity”.
Any time I read about how “conservatives give more to charities than liberals” I always have to roll my eyes. If this was a fundraiser for a park in downtown Houston, or higher property taxes to pay for the local grade schools, or money designated to develop light rail or clean energy, we would have had a full blown Tea Party style revolt.
But the rich people’s church wanted to build a bigger richer church to praise Jesus in, and suddenly we’re all a bunch of magnanimous philanthropists. :-p
No they aren’t. Libertarians are all for nuking Guam if it cows the population into lowering trade barriers. Or backing Pinochet because someone’s gotta kill Che Guevara. Or smart bombing Saddam Hussien.
These are all well within any practicing Libertarian doctrine.
They just don’t like having to pay the upkeep on military bases.
There was a deconstruction of the whole “conservatives give more than liberals” thing in a conservative journal, of all places, a while back. It found that the difference between money donated between people who identified as one of the two groups was negligible (conservatives were a little ahead, but within the margin of error) but BOTH groups gave more than moderates, which is what was skewing the numbers somehow (there was some fairly complex statistical analysis going on here that I didn’t totally understand).
There was also the fact that religious donations were counted as “conservative” for the purposes of the poll, which strikes me as unreasonable.
But even if it was flatly true that conservatives gave more to charity than liberals, I’m not really seeing a condemnation of the latter. It’s like saying liberals donate more to gay rights and pro-choice groups than conservatives. Well, yeah, duh? It’s kind of a big part of their political philosophy? Conservatives, or libertarians at least, make a big thing out of private donations, whereas the left is supposed to be more concerned with their taxes going to support social programs. I’d bet liberals pay more taxes, on the whole (I know that “blue states” tend to pay more in taxes) so…doesn’t it all balance out?
Oh, and I’m glad Mary’s still posting. It’s cool to have these discussions. I hope you don’t take it badly when we disagree, Mary, it’s just a discussion.
I can’t comment on the other statistics, since I haven’t seen them, but I can tell you that this “religious people give more than non-religious” surveys are bogus. It was all heavily biased, especially in regards to what institutions counted as charity. Really, all those surveys showed is that non-religious people don’t fund missionary work and the like. Who’d have thunk?
I for one am waiting with baited breath for his interpretation of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
There exist two realities all Libertarians have to ignore to think that their bullshit can work in society:
1. Civilized society is NOT a given. Society is not a god-generated concept. It is a tool established by how much people are willing to co-exist with each other. Its laws and its common morality are based on that willingness to co-exist and to say that libertarians tend to take this fact for granted is a grand understatement.
We follow societies laws because they benefit ALL of us equally, but Libertarians tend to think that this parasitic economic behavior lends itself not only to respect but reason enough to maintain our social co-existence.
Let me make this absolutely clear. WE DO NOT HAVE TO ABIDE TO PARASITIC BEHAVIOR SIMPLY TO CO-EXIST. If libertarians think they can establish our worth in economics, how much do you think they’ll be worth to those that arise against them?
2. Two words: Business License. Doing business in the USA is not a right, it is a government granted privilege and like any licensed privilege (ie hunting, driving, fishing, health care), if it is abused, it is not only the government’s right but its obligation to step in and regulate or revoke that privilege.
Socialism isn’t a threat. Its a reality. Get over it.
BATED. As in “abated”. Not “baited”. Nobody is waiting for anything with the gentle scent of leeches, worms and minnows on their breath.
Grr.
I’ve got that flavor mouthwash, actually.
“Let the private sector handle charity” is just a more sleazy way to say “screw the poor, they don’t deserve anything”.
Which means he gets his paychecks from the State of New York. I wonder what Scrooge would say about taxpayer-funded public universities?
@ DJA “Let them die, then, and decrease the surplus population” would be the pre-haunting quote needed here I believe.
he forgot about how when Scrooge said that they should die and decrease the surplus population he was actually showing a highly developed environmental sense and concern for such traditionally liberal problem areas as overpopulation.
I’m confused I allways thought of Libertarians as a term for the left wing anarchist types, does it have a diferent meaning in america?
When it comes to social concerns, Libertarians are liberal, because they think people should be allowed to do their own thing. When it comes to fiscal matters, they are conservative, because they believe that businesses should be allowed to do their own thing.
But thats just a small branch of right winged libertarians, I thought that the term Libertarian has a greater association with the left wing, at least historically. Its sad to learn that right wingers have co-opted the meaning of the word.
@Bacon
Blame scifi authors.