It’s very frustrating to see prominent activists among several nominally pro-liberty/pro-choice political movements loudly advocate for increased government interference in other areas of life. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed it recently within a particular movement by individuals who I’d had thought would’ve known better. The specific interventions that they support are being sold by legislators as an urgently necessary protection of “the people” against “Big Business”. But every single authoritarian measure is sold as a means to keep us safe, be it war, surveillance, taxes, spending, et cetera. Authoritarianism is never packaged honestly. If it were it would be easy to spot. The danger lies in the ability of the powerful to sell authoritarianism as humanitarianism.
It’s easy to fall for authoritarian measures when they are sold as a means to protect the little guy, as harmless humanitarian interventions. But legislative intrusions into freedom, no matter how heart-felt the initial sentiment, eventually are universally destructive to the liberty and choice of the very people it was designed to protect.
We have a natural, evolved capacity within us to worship something, be it a god, a government, some leader, cargo planes, et cetera. We still see various wild-eyed cults arise from time to time, even in the modern age. I’m sure that in distant prehistory, this capacity saved our species from extinction on numerous occasions. But this instinct that we’ve carried with us is destructive to the liberty that has produced everything around us that we regard as civilization. It’s too easy to give in to this primitive instinct to support authoritarian measures, but we need to understand that it is de-civilizing, a reliance or an advocacy of legislative coercion, no matter how ostensibly benign, is a reversion away from the forces that sustain liberty and allow civilization to continue to evolve into something better.
The particular piece of legislation that triggered this blog post was a legislative measure to enforce “free speech” on social media. It has, ironically, been celebrated by a large number of activists of a cause that I have thrown my support behind. But it would be a massive encroachment on the liberty of business to behave how they saw fit, to do business with whom they chose, et cetera. Enforcing “free speech” on business would increase the amount of legislative coercion in an area that is already overloaded with regulation and prohibition. And every act of government that increases this amount of coercive power over business universally helps the powerful, not the powerless. Fiercely protecting the liberty of all is the only possible safeguard of the liberty of the powerless.
