Libertarians Are Community-Friendly

Opinion Editorial by Tibor Machan - Nov 22, 2004

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Whenever I speak up for liberty, there’s bound to be someone who accuses me of favoring the individual over the community, and rights over responsibility and obligations. But it isn’t so at all.

Champions of individual liberty often believe even more firmly than their critics in doing the right thing, including acting generously, compassionately, and helpfully — in the spirit of community. What they insist upon, however, is that all such responsibilities and obligations be carried out from personal conviction, not from fear of going to jail or being fined.

Just think of it: Is it not far more decent if people do the right thing because they want to do it, choose to do it, rather than if they are coerced to do it by others, including governments? What meaning does a good deed have if it is done because someone fears punishment for not doing it? What is the moral merit of helping someone if support has been derived from taxes and “transferred” to the needy? Sure, the needy got the goods, but not because they were willingly given, which takes away all the ethical value of the “giving.” There’s no compassion where there is coercion.

What libertarians insist upon is that good deeds are done voluntarily. And when it comes to good deeds that benefit one’s community, no less must be true. In fact, a decent human community isn’t like an ant or termite colony, where all the critters are being “public-spirited” as a matter of their biological hard-wiring. That is why they don’t deserve any moral praise.

Neither do higher animals that fend for each other — it’s all instinctual, even the most complex variety of such behavior. Human beings tend, of course, to ascribe human capacities and motives to animals; even some of the most educated researchers of the great apes make the mistake of anthropomorphizing the animals they study. “Dominance,” “assistance,” “sorrow,” and other concepts are often applied when their very existence lacks a true foundation — a moral nature.

The sort of community that is suitable to human beings doesn’t require automatic cooperation, from instinct or obedience, but from good will, sound judgment, and discrimination. Loyalty to a Nazi or communist community is a bad thing, even though it contributes in a fashion — the community to which the contribution is made is a vicious one that is counterproductive, and ill-suited to human habitation and flourishing.

Those who champion liberty need not apologize and be on the defensive when communitarians and others level their frequent charges against them for not being community-minded. That is a little bit like accusing a refugee from a concentration camp of not caring for his fellows, not exercising responsibilities toward the community, and for being disloyal! (I know a bit about this, personally. When those like me managed to escape from tyrannies, now and then people would accuse us of not being loyal, of not remaining to sacrifice ourselves.)

The plain fact is that human beings require a certain kind of community, one that makes their thriving possible, and since they are free moral agents, they require a community wherein individual rights — the guarding principles of liberty — are respected and protected. To the extent that a country’s structure is comprised of this kind of community, it is right and just. But once it departs from it significantly, that country isn’t worth much.

Individualists and libertarians are, in fact, the most honorable champions of community life because they insist on the building and maintenance of proper communities, not slipshod ones where there is little care for what human beings require in order to flourish.

Of course, the world is full of the false gurus of communitarianism or, perhaps better labeled, tribalism. Ethnic solidarity and the like are peddled as high moral virtues — but they aren’t at all. Being loyal to the Mafia is no virtue, however much the Dons insist upon it. The same goes for countries that treat the population as a resource for the leaders’ pursuit of their “worthy” goals. Those aren’t human communities at all — rather, they are near-prisons.