Joe Carter's post on "Libertarian Paternalism," inadvertantly hits on something that is very missing among many libertarians, namely a recognition that while certain decisions may be not dangerous legally, they are not morally valid choices. Libertarians often fail to recognize the distinction between personally condemning someone's choices and condemning them with the force of law.

Some libertarians fail to recognize that it is immoral for a parent to be a substance abuser because they have an inherenty duty to their children. Any criticism of the "individual sovereignty" of the parent to use drugs becomes a moralistic rant, even if no one may be actually proposing outlawing that behavior. They bristle at the very notion that a parent should be coerced by social pressure to give up liberty over their own body for the benefit of their children. The problem is that not all choices carry the same consequences and any durable philosophy must take social cost into consideration.

There should be no doubt that drug use, pornography use, alcohol use and all other consumption of vice carry a potential for moral corrosion in their users. Libertarians must find a way to simultaneously recognize that substance abuse can have a devastating moral consequence on other people, sometimes in ways that can all but ruin their lives, while advocating for a sensible, responsibility-based legalization program. And that's where a lot of it breaks down. Liberty cannot exist in a society where neither the government, nor private groups are able to or will to enforce personal responsibility.

If libertarians, and those ideologically aligned to them, are going to succeed in reforming the government, then the only choice will be to pass laws which force personal responsibility while decreasing the scope of government and law in people's lives. This is non-negotiable because this country has been stripped in the past few generations of many of the important checks and balances that used to provide a "defendable, sustainable liberty." The chaos that would be created without weaning society off of the government would be enough to permanently discredit our goals. In many respects, the United States is no readier culturally to accept a return to a classical liberal state than Iraq is to accept the system of government being imposed upon it.

The most effective way to ween the public off of the welfare-warfare state would be a policy of systematically cutting back on the tax and spend powers, coupled with a general push to rejuvenate civil liberties across the board in every area touched by the government. The government should go back to the approach of trusting the law-abiding parties and scale back its law enforcement to the basics: violent crimes against people and property crimes. We must have this baseline in place first before more radical experimentation such as the elimination of the marriage licensing laws, war on drugs, pornography and other issues can be resolved in a satisfactory manner.

Lastly, it is also worth noting that libertarians must be realistic and accept a "good enough" government; a point where they can be content with making no more progress. This is what will finally separate liberty-minded people from the utopian statists. There are some legitimate concerns that the socialists have had, and we ought to hear them out, though we disagree with their methods and most of their conclusions. Our goal should be to create a liberty-based society that is based on principle, but not ideology. The line there is very simple. It's time to stop when the social costs become so drastic that it is increasingly apparent that the idea is good on paper, but not feasible given the culture we are working with. There is always a future, but we cannot afford to delude ourselves anymore into thinking that it won't take just as long to de-socialize our country as it took the Fabian Socialists to socialize it.