Philosophy Discussion Forums

Libertarians, objectivists and some conservatives all make the same error. They see federal government as an organ of corruption and oppression, and nobody else as such.

In fact there are many organs of corruption and oppression that aren't the federal government. Violent husbands. Oppressive religions. Suffocating communities. Corrupt networks in law and medicine. In Western countries, these exercise far greater levels of corruption and oppression than does the federal government.

In Western countries, the governments are elected, official, and made accountable to the public. The same is not the case for these other entities. This results in them having an unchecked potential for brutal, corrupt and oppressive practices. And while the libertarians are out there hunting for corruption potentials in the federal government, real corruption sprouts up under their noses and puts them in its service.

You may ask my friend Celeste, an MD who had three of her relatives murdered in American medical health system. Corrupt doctors enlisted corrupt coroners and corrupt lawyers to bury the evidence and draw away from her any lawyer that she would hire. Or you may ask any number of women who escaped serious domestic violence in the American South, only to see the courts award their children to the perpetrators. Or you may ask someone I know who tried to escape from Jehovah's Witnesses, only to see his family commit him indefinitely in a mental hospital and manipulate him to become hateful and abusive to his loving and generous girlfriend.

Biden did not do this. Corrupt local entities did.

What is more worthy of authority: An entity that is official, accountable, checked and balanced, or entities that are unofficial, unaccountable, unbalanced and unchecked? There is no official check on the power of communities and religions. There is no official check on the power of corrupt entities in law and medicine. There is no official check on the power of Jehovah's Witnesses. The problem gets no attention at all from the libertarians, as they spend all their time and energy scrutinizing the federal government. And thile they are out there spouting New World Order conspiracy theories and claiming “statism” or “socialism,” real corruption and real oppression grows up in their hometowns. The entities that are responsible for this corruption, then, ridiculously, direct the energies of the libertarians toward fighting those in the government who seek to fight this corruption under the false – and ridiculous – claim that in doing so they are protecting values and freedom.

Values and freedom that they violate to a far greater extent than does the federal government; and which violations, with the energies of the scrutinizers spent on the federal government, goes unnoticed and unchecked.

That an entity is unofficial does not make it any less capable of corruption and oppression than the official entities. Indeed, being unofficial, it is un-scrutinized; which gives it an unlimited potential for corruption and oppression. This is the case with the doctors who murdered Celeste's relatives; this is the case with the community courts that award children to child rapists and batterers; this is the case with Jehovah's Witnesses; this is the case with many others.

A person truly interested in defending liberty and integrity will do so from all entities that infringe on these things, whether they be official or unofficial. A true libertarian will be just as willing to take on private corruption and oppression as to take on public corruption and oppression. Once they do, they will have earned their title as defenders of freedom. And until they do, they are cowards and hypocrites who attack an entity that is easy to attack while doing nothing to fight real wrongs.

We know that there are attractive-but wrong types of thinking. They include:

- black&white thinking, in which the State (or religion, or family, or anything else) is painted as either inherently good (with perhaps a few failings hardly worth talking about), or as wholly bad (with perhaps a few minimally good features that pale into insignificance next to the evil).

- conspiracy thinking, in which some all-powerful entity is responsible for all the bad stuff.

We know that both are false.

In any political theory worth its salt, the State has a legitimate role, and can fail us by omission as well as by overreach.

You give examples in which locally-powerful people do bad things and get away with it because the local courts are corrupt. This is not uncommon in local democracy, where judges and other local officials are beholden to influential members of the political party (formal or informal) that elected them.

Such abuse of power can be curbed in two ways - by giving individuals more legal rights against the State , and by giving central government more oversight of local government.