— Mom, when I grow up, I’m going to be a libertarian!
— Sweetie, you can only pick one or another!
As a libertarian, I fully admit that this ideology is pretty idealistic. And it’s not even the “who will build the lighthouses and pay for fireworks” stuff — those questions are solvable. The real question libertarianism struggles with is: what do we call the structure that society voluntarily entrusts with weapons and the right to use force? Because division of labor applies there too 😏
Still, let’s assume that being an idealist is fine, as long as we stay within the realm of ideas and ethical reasoning. And this is where I get genuinely horrified when I look at how people argue — thankfully, mostly strangers on the internet. Sometimes it feels like people completely merge the ideas of legality and morality. They outsource the most valuable thing they have — their conscience — to the state.
And as a result, we get things like this:
- A male teacher sleeping with a student from another school who is 16 — legal in Russia, illegal in most U.S. states.
- A female teacher sleeping with her own student who is 16 — in Russia that’s just a disciplinary issue.
- An 18-year-old sleeping with a 15-year-old — illegal in Russia, illegal in all U.S. states, legal in Germany and Hungary.
Oh, those libertarian Mikhails, always talking about the same topic!
Another topic:
- A student picks up a stash containing a gram of weed and shares it with a friend — congratulations, that’s distribution, illegal in Russia.
- The Sackler family aggressively promotes OxyContin in the U.S. market. Americans get hooked on painkillers en masse, the country slides into an opioid epidemic — almost entirely legal.
One more example:
- A man from Mariupol travels to Donetsk in 2015, separatists catch him and kill him. Illegal.
- A man crosses the border between South and North Korea at night, guards spot him, tell him to stop, he doesn’t — they kill him. Legal.
I’m deliberately not stating my own ethical judgment here — because I think it’s important that after reading these examples you ask yourself: in which of these cases do I consider the harm “necessary”? It’s genuinely fine if the answer is “in all of them.” Or “in none of them.” Or “in some specific ones.” But what seems crucial to me — both for society and for your own identity — is the ability to draw a personal boundary that’s based on your ideas of good and evil, not on the status quo or the current laws.
If everyone did that, then as a libertarian I’d feel far more comfortable living in modern states — knowing that laws are continuously evaluated by people for their ethical substance rather than accepted with the silent consent of the majority.