Yet.
I suspect the same argument could have been made to argue against the possibility of freeing the slaves before the first state freed their slaves. Or allowing women to vote before the first state allowed women to vote. Or allowing gays to marry before the first state to allow gays to marry. Or to decriminalize marijuana before the first state decriminalized marijuana. Or allow school vouchers before the first state allowed school vouchers. And so on. Every great step forward necessarily happened for the first time at some time and place. Why not now? Why not here? Arguments against great things not happening yet have historically always been bad arguments.
The answer to why freedom does not exist in the world has always been, “Because those in power are using force to prevent it.” It was true when the Spartans hunted the Helots. It was true when the Catholic Inquisition burned heretics. It was true when the colonial New England government hanged Quakers. It was true when governments in the American South forced streetcar companies to segregate their streetcars. It was true when F.D.R. interred Japanese-Americans in camps. It is true today when ISIS flings gay men off of tall buildings. The state, which is the nexus of the use of force in society, opposes freedom. If some desired freedom does not exist at any given time, you usually do not to look further than the state to see why. Push back the state and you will find freedom revealed in its place.
Arguments that “most of the world” is doing something is even worse. Wasn’t much of the world in the grips of fascism in 1935? Or communist dictatorship in 1965? Those were the trends. But the glory was to those who went against the times and in favor of liberty.
There will always people who argue against freedom, who say more freedom is going to far, who argue that people don’t even really want freedom. What freedom do you want to deny today? What freedom do you want to argue is not wanted?
Woody Allen once said something like, “Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at once.” Libertarianism is not a revolutionary ideology. It does not call for the overthrow of the current system overnight. It has and will continue to slowly unfold, over time. We all know, from our history books, how this unfolding of liberty started, from the time the man-god-king Hammurabi first put his laws down in stone, to when King John submitted at Runnymede that he was bound to the law as well, to when freedom of conscience was allowed, and the virtues of limited government were recognized, when the power of free markets and civil society were discovered, when the universality of rights was recognized and dictatorships overcome and failed ideologies crumbled.
Do we really think the story of liberty ends now? That this is as far as it goes? That from here on, the trend reverses?
When the last vestige of government force drops we’ll hardly notice it happened. It will be that natural. We’ll look back at the past with bemused expressions and wonder how it was that we once stood by while governments executed people for practicing the “wrong” religion, forced slaves to labor in plantations, stole large portions of workers’ wages to fund giant war machines and locked up over a million people for non-violent offenses. The present will look then as the Salem Witch Trials look to us today. And we’ll shake our heads at the foolishness of those who made illogical arguments that just because something has not yet been done, that it cannot or ought not to be done.
Read other related questions on Quora:
- Do libertarians care if the country's illiteracy rate skyrockets?
- Is Taiwan an example of a libertarian country?
- Should libertarian people have our own country?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2fbp6ew
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