"...you and I could perhaps agree..."

A friend and I were exchanging emails and after a short paragraph she added this closing statement:

Don't get me wrong...on most political compass tests I am liberal/libertarian. So, you and I could perhaps agree on libertarianism with regard to social issues. ;-)

This statement sort of twisted in my mind for a while because it bothered me. This one bothered me because it contradicted my world view. But the contradiction was subtle. When faced with such a statement I wrestle with it and examine it from every angle I can until one of three things happens:

• I get distracted by something else
• I accept the statement as correct and adjust my world view
• I figure out what bothers me and reject it
  

In this case the last item is what happened.

People often produce such statements in the course of a light exchange, as was ours, without following them to their logical ends. But when talking about philosophy one cannot afford to be loose because it is at the extremes that the boundaries are located, not in the middle. So the measure of any such statement is always found at the logical ends, and thus I shall take this statement to see where it goes.

The statement holds a contradiction, but it's a slippery one until you examine it. The key phrase comes at the very end "...with regard to social issues." The problem here is that my friend has attempted to divorce financial issues from social ones. I'm fairly sure she does not even realize the contradiction herself.

Freedom is always a social issue no matter what the topic. To understand you must first understand the concept of freedom. One person alone in the universe has total freedom for that person could never infringe upon someone else. That person also has no social aspects for social requires multiple people. When you introduce another person into the universe, now the potential for one to infringe upon the other exists.

If you could imagine a single person, alone in the universe, you would easily grasp that whatever he choose to do with his life is his business alone, and what he choose to make with his efforts would be his property. By his creative thought and efforts the person has brought into being things which did not exist before, and having done so at the expense of his own life has the highest claim to the creations. In short, he owns his life, and he owns the fruits of his labor, called his property.

Upon adding another person to the universe you would not change the essence of the first person. The first person would still own his own life, and his own creations. The second person, being a person, would also own his own life and creations. From this we perceive that people are, by their very nature, the owners of their own lives and property.

Adding a third person does not change the essence of the first two, and as a person he too shares their essence. Indeed, adding arbitrarily more people to the universe does nothing to alter the essential fact of freedom being the right to own ones life and ones property.

The fundamental flaw in her statement is that she attempts to disconnect ownership of life and ownership of property. But by doing this she divides freedom, and by doing that she introduces bondage. For wherever freedom is infringed upon by another, bondage exists. And this is her message to me, and I suspect to the world.

People understand bodily bondage easily, for being physically bound is hard to ignore. Being the victim of property crimes is more abstract, but no less damaging.

The statement she expresses, if taken to its logical end can be better stated as "You are free of body, but slaves of property".

And in this, we cannot agree. Libertarianism rejects bondage, oppression, slavery and tyranny in all its forms, and liberals do not.

I doubt my friend meant her statement as a precise example of liberal philosophy, but in fact this is what she managed to produce. The danger in such statements, and indeed why it bothered me in the first place, is that it sounds reasonable, when in fact it denies reason by containing such a contradiction. Statements like these accidentally confuse the discussion, and in the minds of those less interested to undertake a study such as mine could mislead them into the unfortunate position of supporting them.