From last April's edition of Liberty, Michael Acree's essay Who's Your Daddy? Authority, Asceticism, and the Spread of Liberty.
Not that I agre with everything, but many interesting observations are contained therein, including:
Start with the most famously transparent case of psychological motivation for political beliefs: the obsessive campaign of conservatives against pornography, which elicits a knowing smile from everyone else. [...] Look today at the amount of coverage given by WorldNetDaily, to pick on just one popular publication, to sex scandals, child prostitution, and other titillating topics. Without their diligent reporting, many pedophiles might never have considered the opportunities in contemporary Afghanistan. Leftist intellectuals smugly infer suppressed desires from this righteous crusade, but their own positions may be vulnerable to a similar analysis.Consider the odd resistance of left-liberals to lowering even their own taxes. The very idea is as offensive to them as relaxing laws against prostitution is to conservatives. That doesn't mean they are indifferent to money, but it is important to them to appear indifferent to money. [...] But the insistent denial of concern for wealth, we may suspect, betrays an underlying obsession.
And:
Lakoff generously subtitles his book "What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't." He is referring to conservatives' "knowledge" that government is inherently about morality. Perhaps it is, for better or worse; but I would say the more relevant thing conservatives know that liberals don't is that government is inherently disciplinary. I wish Lakoff had been less modest and had acknowledged what liberals know that conservatives don't: that legislating morality doesn't work. Enforcing public morality — nurturance by compulsion — doesn't work any better than enforcing private morality. It furthermore ceases to be experienced as nurturant either by recipients, who come to take it for granted as an impersonal entitlement, or by donors, who come to resent it as a demand. If Lakoff understood what both liberals and conservatives know, he would have cut the ground entirely from under both.
There's much more. Recommended reading for those who don't understand the appeal of libertarianism, or lack thereof.
Posted by Walter at January 31, 2006 11:18 AM