Libertarian Child

Individual freedom has been the topic of debate among philosophers, politicians and economists for as long as civilization has existed. One thing should be easy to reach agreement on however, and that is that individual freedom is completely and totally dependent on the larger social structure we're born into.

Therefore there's no such thing as absolute freedom, there never has been and there never will be. No one is born as an individual, and the first larger social structure we're born into is the family. Parents are a newborn's mini government; they guide, protect, educate and, if necessary, punish the child. And all of that's done with the aim to give that child the best possible start when time comes to leave that mini-society. It must be said that this is a quite modern phenomenon; when we were tribal hunter gatherers, the rearing of children was the responsibility of all the adults and elders of the tribe. The tribe itself was completely communist and egalitarian, and food was gathered by the productive members for everyone, children and elders included.

Our tribes have grown somewhat since then; we're now cities and nations. However, that doesn't change a thing when it comes to the collective responsibilities we all share to raise our children and to protect and take care of each other. This is not an individual choice, but one we make together, at least I hope we do, through whatever democracy we have left in the oligarchy capitalists have wrought for themselves and the rest of us. I really hope we can all agree on this simple principle. I hope we can all agree that we're not absolutely free to make the choice to not be part of a society that holds on to the rule of caring for one another and protecting one another from harm. That we take up the collective responsibility to educate our children because we all realize that they will some day have to take care of us. There are some ancient ideas and realities that will never change because they are essential to our humanity, no matter how many iPhones we invent or how many satellites we shoot into space...

Well... You saw this coming; some of us don't agree with that at all. Some of us are stuck in some childish fantasy of absolute individual freedom. And individual greatness, let's not forget that. I'm talking of course about the modern day libertarians, the anarcho-capitalists who believe that government has one task only, which is to protect them and their personal property from harm. For them there's no such thing as a "social contract", only contracts between individuals, no matter how great the power imbalance between those individuals. They feel wronged when they have to pay taxes to pay for healthcare or the education of the less fortunate members of society. They don't even believe in "less fortunate" or "fortunate", because they've wholly bought into the fantasy of meritocracy. If you can't pay for healthcare or your children's education, that's on you and you alone. This is, in my personal opinion, a gross, selfish and fundamentally misguided ideology. Gross and selfish because they literally have no empathy for society's less fortunate. They don't admit that of course, and they'll go on about charity and your personal ability to help those losers if that's your personal choice. But even if they mean well, the outcome of this individualist fairy-tale, if put into practice, would be devoid empathy.

Yaron Brook, libertarian and current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute, is a shining example of someone who advocates for this brutal and inhuman ideology. He recently debated Sam Seder from The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder, and he displayed perfectly how utterly selfish and inhumane he really is. When I hear him describe his vision for society, I feel bad for him, because he probably wouldn't even survive in that society. If you want, you can listen to the entire debate here; it starts at the 1:09:45 mark. For those of you who don't have 50 minutes to spare, watch the below linked video with commentary from The Rational National; that one's only 10 minutes.

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