A Personal Failure

My friend Mitch The Killer - check the Glossary of Characters - recently commented on a blog post that this blog has been busy sucking. In a way, I agree. Whereas I once swore regularly, and raged against the dying of the light, and charged foolishly into windmills, now I bore those few people who stop by with tattooing, rationality, and Libertarianism.

Somebody asked me about this obsession with Libertarians. “Why, what’s wrong with you? Why bother with them? They’re a few percent of the population, and they’re never going to win!” These are excellent points.

Once, I went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the gay Meccas on the East Coast, and I remember thinking, “How on Earth can everybody here look so damned similar? These people are gay! They, if anybody, should be tolerant of difference! Where is the difference?!?” And then I walked down to the ocean, which was beautiful, and screamed at the high tide.

So why the newer focus on Libertarians? Because they claim to care about all of the same things that I do - specifically, individual liberty - and yet they propose solutions which will almost certainly reduce the aggregate amount of individual liberty. I cannot possibly square these two realities.

“Move on! Focus on something else! Jesus Christ already, the Libertarians see individual liberty differently than you do, and they’re not going to change that! Come on already.”

But I can’t. Just like I struggle to let go of most things: old breakups, the Mountaineers not stopping Tremaine Mack on the end in the loss to Miami, the lunacy of running John Kerry for president, four-putting the final green in a golf tournament that I won. “How can people be so fucking stupid,” I wonder about everyone, including myself.

Libertarians aren’t so fucking stupid, for whatever that’s worth. It’s just that they don’t seem to give a good god damn about anybody but themselves. That’s fine I guess. No law requires anybody to care about anybody else. But it seems like the right thing to do, and it certainly seems like there are some people who simply can’t take care of themselves. I know that Libertarians have no problem with innocent people being allowed to die - “Hey, nobody has a right to take my money to pay for that old woman’s selfish desire for medical attention!” - but I can’t take the same position myself.

Sometimes, I have this fantasy. There are people in my town who are crazy anti-abortion protestors. They carry around those signs with babies on them in an attempt to shock us into political submission, and they do it on major street corners, because God-for-fucking-bid that I be allowed to drive to work without being confronted with somebody else’s political crusade. I think it would be fun to make a sandwich board that says, “These people oppose contraception.” Nothing for me clarifies better the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement than the morons who believe that contraception is bad. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will lead to fewer abortions than the correct use of contraception. I imagine that my sign board would actually mean something, that people driving by would say, “God, these people are idiots.” I don’t have the time, or the inclination, to actually do such things. So it remains my little dream, a fun little fantasy.

And so it goes that I find myself standing outside of the Libertarian headquarters shaking my fist like an old man telling those damned kids to get off my lawn. It probably doesn’t make for radically interesting reading, but dammit, I’ve got to be me.

Briefly

-I added my friend Nathan’s Natural Law to the old blogroll. He is a LibertarianChristian (ChristianLibertarian?), very effectively seeing government and religion as two very separate things. Good on him. Check out his blog if you’re into that sort of thing.

-I would like this semester to be over…immediately. I’m sick of school.

-Tattooing Convention, this weekend. I’d suggest you come out and see me, but you’re not reading this in the first place, so it isn’t like you’re be making it to the convention. Still, I’ll be at Wild Zero Studio’s set up. I think I just screwed up my punctuation. D’oh!

-In pursuing questioning about the issue of rationality and utility maximization - I’ve been struggling to rectify the notion that people are capable of making irrational decisions, what with my belief that human beings are constantly calculating utility when they make decisions - my friend Andy pointed out that there can be a difference between utility calculation and the rightness of it. In other words, somebody can decide to do something that they believe maximizes their utility (think: pleasure) when in fact, something else would have maximized their utility (still, think: pleasure) more. It doesn’t mean that the human beings weren’t calculating their utility; it just means that they got the wrong answer. However, I think it is fair to say that it is only the person who can decide about the rightness or wrongness of their own utility calculation. I hope I’ve phrased his point correctly.

The problem remains that it is assumed that human beings can act irrationally. This is usually based on a measurement of their actions against their words; as I’ve already stated, I firmly believe that actions mean far more than words, or to put it more popularly, actions speak louder than words. I can tell you, for instance, that I want this semester to be over. I do. But I haven’t quit school (an immediate semester ender) and so, I am forced to acknowledge that, while I want this semester to be over, enduring this semester certainly seems better than doing literally anything else that I am currently capable of. Hence, my belief isn’t that strong.

This is important to note, particularly in regard to Libertarian Economists who do a lot of talking and, quite frankly, very little acting. Unless giving money to Ron Paul counts as acting. It does probably. But the costs paid to donate money are relatively low.