| | Thank you for this beautifully reasoned argument that libertarians ought to mistrust the Left's pleadings on behalf of "civil liberties".
I never trust anything the Left proclaims, because they subordinate everything to their pursuit of power. They tell lies to achieve their goals, and they do so consciously, routinely, and without qualms or hesitation. They lie about global warming, AIDS, environmental hazards, history, and economics. They routinely engage in election fraud when they think they can get away with it. They tried to steal the election from George Bush in 2000, and when they failed turned around and accused Bush of stealing the election from them!
As Professor Machan points out, the notion that the Left is sympathetic to individual liberty collapses when one considers their strident unreasoning zeal in pursuit of collectivist goals such as environmentalism. For example, noxious weeds, which are difficult to kill and spread rapidly, are naturally cultivated on public lands--particularly National Forests, but also large tracts controlled by the Bureau of Land Management--that surround the headwaters of the rivers that flow down through the plains. The public lands empire serves as an excellent breeding ground for knap weed and leafy spurge, because no one has the incentive or can afford the cost to control these weeds over millions of acres of unowned and rugged terrain. The rivers that flow from these regions then carry the seeds of these noxious weeds downstream through the privately owned plains, where property owners struggle to eradicate them. Landowners are compelled by law to use ineffective herbicides near the muddy river, because the Greens claim to be paranoid about poisoning an occassional carp or sucker fish.
About a year ago, I was spraying herbicides on noxious weeds on the banks of the Missouri River, using 24D, a relatively ineffective but legal herbicide. I glanced upstream and saw two canoes about 150 years away, each with two or three passengers. They looked like peas in a pod, each wearing the fashionable green-brown slouch felt hats so favored by environmentalists. I noticed they were sitting quietly, motionless in their canoes, watching me spray as though they were witnessing the commission of some grave atrocity against Nature. I wanted to ignore them, because I knew by their dress and the fact that they had time to float the river that they were Greens. However, I decided I had better be friendly, because I worried that if I rudely ignored them they'd make troubles for me with the weed control cops. So I waved.
Each floater raised his paddle over his head in a stiff-armed acknowlegement--a sort of militant Green Salute. Maybe I was slightly paranoid, but the gesture didn't seem relaxed and friendly. So I called out across the river: "Nice day for a float!". They didn't answer. They knew what I knew: I was unfriendly to their values, as they were to mine.
|
|
