British politicians are turning me into a libertarian

Listen, I don’t want to be a libertarian. I’d be offended enough to be called a liberal.

There are the vibes if nothing else. I’m sure a lot of libertarians are solid, decent folk. But it feels like there is a real and profound danger that a little Rothbard is a gateway drug to being the sort of person who thinks fire regulations breach the Non-Aggression Principle and has interesting thoughts about the age of consent.

Besides, it feels like a very self-regarding worldview. Libertarians are free to argue that laws and institutions are bad because they live in relatively safe and prosperous societies that have been moulded by laws and institutions — not to mention the communities around themselves. It feels a bit like announcing that you are a self-reliant individual while living in your parent’s house.

Actually, in the past — when I had more “trad” pretensions — you could find me musing on how “individualism” was a curse of the modern age, and how the state should be promoting “the good life” (I was far less clear on how it should do that specifically).

I don’t entirely retract this. But I have become more liberal in recent years — due to realising that I have an unclear sense of “the good life” and due to seeing that politicians have no sense of it whatsoever.

Nor do they tend to have a sense of how to get there. The pandemic was a big eye-opener here. Politicians imposed and maintained devastatingly restrictive legislation without a clear sense of what they were accomplishing — and, indeed, beyond the point where it should have been obvious that they had had diminishing returns.

Now, every time a British politician opens their mouths to offer an opinion on what British people should and shouldn’t be allowed to do I can feel myself becoming just a bit more libertarian. “No!” I scream. “I don’t want to be a libertarian!” But then David Davis MP will claim that young adults shouldn’t be allowed to have passengers in their cars and I can see the spectre of Murray Rothbard grinning down at me.

Never mind that this idea would surely mean more cars on the road. Never mind that Britain already has one of the lowest traffic-related death rates in the world. Never mind that the oldest drivers are almost as dangerous as the youngest drivers. Never mind that the tragic recent deaths which have prompted renewed calls for legislation occurred when a young driver was speeding and intoxicated and might well have ignored this legislation anyway. 

Nope. Something bad has happened so we need a ban.

British politicians cannot offer economic growth or institutional effectiveness. But my God they can ban things

Prohibiting young drivers from carrying passengers will “cost next to nothing”, Davis says. Actually, it will cost them their freedom. I don’t drive, so when I was a young man I was often fortunate enough to get lifts with friends who did. Being denied that option would have been a substantial cost. Isn’t this the same David Davis MP who ran a by-election campaign specifically to protest against the erosion of civil liberties? Wasn’t his slogan “David Davis for Freedom”? Ah, but that was in defence of detained terror suspects. These are just young people we’re talking about.

This is a lone example, but there are a lot of others. British politicians cannot offer economic growth or institutional effectiveness. But my God they can ban things. They can ban cigarettes, and vapes, and plastic stemmed cotton buds (a menace for the environment, to be fair, though largely because absolute morons flush them down the toilet). 

They can’t stop terrorism but they can talk pointlessly about the need to ban anonymous posting on the internet. They can’t keep criminals off the streets but they can make it a crime to pray silently near abortion clinics. It’s not just the consequences of the bans that are offensive (indeed, living abroad I don’t feel those consequences). It’s the gross presumptuousness — as well as the pretensions of actually governing. Blatant antisocial behaviour is ignored if not enabled while private individual choices are constrained.

Martyn’s Law is an absolutely classic case of the British state’s simultaneous weakness and overbearingness. Salman Abedi should never have been in Britain and certainly shouldn’t have been allowed to travel to and from Libya. After the jihadi had killed 21 people in the Manchester Arena bombing, though, the British state imposed troublesome and largely pointless regulations on public premises.

Petty prohibitionism feels especially obnoxious when young people are in the cross hairs. Young people bore the brunt of the pandemic era, being confined to their bedrooms over a virus that posed little threat to most of them, and then emerging to find an economy that was even more depleted than it had been. For politicians to obsess over petty ways to restrict their freedoms — in the blissful knowledge that most of them can’t or won’t vote — seems disgraceful.

It’s all very well for post-liberals to talk abstractly about the good life, but when the people who will be imposing the legislation that might shape that “good life” are confused souls like David Davis or frigid automatons like Keir Starmer, the concept struggles to withstand insitutional realities even on its own terms. I don’t want to sound too “populist” but you could throw a tennis ball out of a British window and it would bounce off the heads of five people with a better sense of the good life than the average MP.

No, I’m not going to become a libertarian. I believe in border controls, and public healthcare, and banning cousin marriage. But the next time a British politician acts as if they know better about your choices than you do, I suspect I’ll be yanked further into liberal territory. 

Don’t blame me. Blame them.