Pro-Individual Does Not Necessarily Mean Liberty

Many libertarians are liking the new government defined marriage situation, sadly. Reason, and possibly Cato, though I am not sure about the last one, and a few others. Libertarians make a big deal about the individual- generally speaking, so do I. Unfortunately, some of my fellow liberty minded people don't see how this is working- the state, using individual rights as pretext, subjugates and interferes with all social sub-units to it.

So, what does this cause in practice? The individual, alone, subject to the whim of the state- or perhaps more specifically, whichever bureaucrat might be in charge on that particular day. Gay marriage leads to gay divorce, and yet another individual's wealth being redistributed by court edict.

There was once, and should be, opacity. Paradoxically, the means of freedom for the individual are the organic relationships of local self-governance. These are boundaries, parameters in which the individual can operate. The modern state uses the fact that these organic relationships can sometimes be oppressive to institute systematic oppression, and the systematic oppression is to destroy all forms of local self-governance, in favor of creating this direct system of interference, with the lowly individual versus the almighty state.

One of the places where you can see the state inertia in this is the proliferation of laws. We are all criminals by default; we can't keep up with the laws they are writing. The Constitution is entirely contradicted in various places in federal and state law. In many cases they write laws they can't even enforce.

They do not intend to enforce them, but on occasion they do intend to 'make an example,' which means spending an inordinate amount of money and time persecuting an individual.

Thus the individual very much needs his family, church, local polity, etc- to be a barrier. The state simply should not be able to enter into the realm of the individual. To effect this change an individual's freedom to discriminate needs to be affirmed. You can see this in various ethnic/religious groups, where local relgious or ethnic affiliations are a stronger determinant of whether you get hired than what you see in mainstream America.

Anti-discrimination laws had a large effect on community solidarity over time. They might as well be designed to stop inter-generational thinking and the creation of coherent instances of local governance. If you can't favor your kids, your co-religionists, even your ethnicity- well, things are going to get bad and you should not blame the next generation for not being good enough. They are just going to respond to the fact that you artificially made them compete against all these random people by shoving you into an old folks home with a bunch of random people. Oh, and not showing up for any of the things you think are important.

But anyway, we are not going to have very much liberty if we continue to fall into the modern state's trap, and continue to define all these individual rights, wherein the state turns around and demands total surveillance. Instead, our natural alliances should be opaque to the state. We wouldn't have to argue about something like a V.A.T. tax, for instance, if the state didn't have entirely too much information in the first place.