Musings on Libertarianism

I am not a libertarian, though I understand the draw of the ideology. In simple terms, libertarians believe that government and freedom exist in a strictly inverse proportion to each other. Here is a link to their web site. It's a nice, easy philosophy to embrace, I think. "Keep the government out of my life, and my life becomes freer."

I tend to believe it's not so simple.

Thomas Hobbes was the British philosopher who popularized the term "True Nature." You can read about it in detail here. In this state, all people have complete freedom. They can do whatever they want, as can you. Kill? Rape? Earn? Farm? Whatever. You can do all of it, so long as you can actually do it. Clearly, I couldn't bench press 300# in true nature any more than I can in present reality. There are just no laws to limit my "freedom" to rob, rape, and kill.

Of course, nobody else's "freedoms" are limited in this way either. As a natural result, I spend a disproportionate amount of my time protecting what I've built from other, taking certain "liberties" with my property. Thus, I can't go to work because someone might forcefully take over my house. I can't stockpile food because someone may very well show up to take it. My family? Well, perhaps someone else with superior fighting skills decides he should be the patriarch of my family.

In sum, by giving up my "freedom" to forcefully take from others, I in turn gain the "freedom" of knowing that others aren't allowed to forcefully take from me. Seen in that light, additional government actually INCREASES freedom. Such is a dispositive argument to libertarianism and is the reason I can't get on board with the simplicity of the ideology.