Pournelle on the Tea Party
19th September 2010
Bastiat said long ago that you can have a society in which the few plunder the many (which is eventually what all societies become), the many plunder the few (which is unstable but obviously popular), everybody plunders everybody (which is what we have developed from the Old Republic), and nobody plunders anybody. The latter was what he favored, and is in theory the goal of the Libertarians, but it is a difficult state to achieve. In part because that’s because we don’t really agree on plunder, and we don’t really agree on what services government ought to provide. I thought of an example of that while on my walk this morning: a young mother was getting her small child into the car. The amount of equipment it takes legally to transport a small child is astonishing. All my children grew up in an era in which seat belts were an option available on a new car for a price, and car seats didn’t exist at all. They survived. Is it freedom or irresponsibility to allow parents to drive children without a federally approved car seat? Is enforcing that restriction a legitimate act of government? I suspect there would be wide disagreement on this even among the Tea Party people.