The Exigent Duality
Of Two Minds - 12:49 CST, 2/25/19 (Sniper)
I have two takes about this.

The first take is that I agree with him wholeheartedly: when it comes to "rights", conservatives and liberals are only different in the sense that they "feel" authoritarian about different things-- whereas the libertarian, despite having personal values of his own, understands that with an institution with powers as crazy and unwise as a monopoly on force, some kind of clear principle is required as to what governs that institution's behavior. To my knowledge, and I've spent over a decade on this issue, no one has yet presented a viable, consistent alternative to the libertarian's "delegation of self-defense". Which of course rules out taxation, which in turn means voluntaryism-- hence, "anarcho capitalism". It's one hundred percent water-tight as models go.

This doesn't mean that people can't form communities with other people who share their values: freedom of association is a natural right. Rather, it just means that they can't codify those values into gun-point enforced laws, especially when they won't let people who don't share their values secede from said community. Just ask the South in the build-up to the American Civil War, or the Catalans in this very decade, how secession went for them. And that secession has to be permitted down to the individual level: chaining one man into slavery is wrong, whether that singular wrong is then multiplied by one, ten, a million, or so on.

And there is no question: "Do as we say or we'll shoot you"-- and you're not allowed to leave either-- is slavery. Both conservatives and liberals support this model: every two years they "vote" so that they can take turns beating each other over the heads for supremacy in a never-ending spiral path towards ever-increasing autocracy. Historically, the government has grown equally when either side is in power, because neither side has the libertarian's all-important limiting principle.

The second take though is that for their lack of principles, in the moment there is a sub-movement within conservatism which is interested in pulling for a "night watchman"-style, Ayn Rand-like minarchism. If we somehow actually achieved that kind of situation, where one could do as he pleased as long as he didn't harm anyone, and the only trade-off was a tiny annual or per-transaction tithe just to fund the two or three things the government still did, it would be so close to ideal that, for me at least, other things would then be much more important expenditures of my energy. I have my doubts that it would stay that way absent pure liberterianism-- the Constitution's "minarchism" has already failed once, for Jefferson's sake!-- but we could cross that bridge once we got there if it became necessary; "eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty", and all that.

Beyond that, a friend once told me a joke: there are a million branches of Protestant denominations, who all endlessly bicker with each other over singular Bible verses-- yet when the Soviets took over, those same Protestants all got to share the same jail cells. Put into the current American political context, many of today's conservatives are pulling in the same direction as are libertarians: why not unite against the common enemy versus quibbling about academics, in a world where we're a million miles from any kind of minimalistic model, and trending in the wrong direction to boot?