GET YOUR HAPPY ON! - a meliorist worldview

I’ve written it before, and I will never tire of repeating it. Despite what the vast majority of humans believe, guns don’t solve problems; no problem has ever been solved with a gun.

You can shut someone up with a gun… until you turn your back. You can shoot a person preemptively, but that person’s friends will get you. You can shoot a person and all of that person’s friends, but someone else is going to hear about your killing spree and come after you. A cowboy diplomat really can’t even trust his own friends, because he knows that they’re likely to turn on him for a larger stake in the claim. About the only way, cowboy diplomacy works is if you kill everyone in a 500-mile radius, so you don’t have to worry about anyone rustling your cattle. Of course, now they have helicopters and tanks and ICBMs that can travel a lot farther than 500 miles, so the humble cowboy diplomat is screwed unless he kills everyone else but himself. “‘Cause a cow poke just can’t trust nobody no more no how, no sir!”

Aside from the fact that murder of even one person is unconscionably wrong, there is only one other problem with the Final Solution of Cowboy Diplomacy: the cowboy has no one to herd cattle for anymore, except himself. Perhaps, that is the Libertarians true goal: to live in a world without neighbors, to relive Cain’s folly.

One of the best American Westerns is The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. It’s Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne’s first of three pictures together. Jimmy Stewart plays a bookish, pacifistic, yella-bellied lawyer whose mission is to bring law and justice to the frontier. John Wayne’s character is a tough old cowhand who knows how to handle a gun. The two men dislike each other on sight, and the tension between them increases when J.S. steals J.W.’s girl. Oooh! Drama! Anyhow, Wayne’s role diminishes as the film progresses, and Stewart’s liberal integrity receives the accolades of the community as he attracts the attention of Liberty Valance, a really bad hombre. It becomes clear that Liberty has to die if Justice is going to take a permanent hold in the West. Not that it’s very subtle, but the death of Liberty Valance symbolizes the end of the Old West. I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but a question remains.

Who really shot Liberty Vallance? It wasn’t George Bush… I mean, Ron Paul… I mean, Fred Thompson… I mean, John McCain… Sorry, I mean, Jimmy Stewart. (I don’t know what got into me!) It wasn’t John Wayne either. The man who really destroyed the “cowboy way” was Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first and only real cowboy President (and incidentally, a gun enthusiast if there ever was one). Why? Because Teddy understood that the cowboy way had to die, so that the rest of civilization could prosper. He developed conservationism so that a portion of the West that he loved would be preserved, and he bullied anti-trust reform so that monopolies would never have too great of a control on the market. Oh, how we have backslided!

I hate to say it, but we NEED a government. A nation as large and as diverse as ours needs laws and regulations — to protect us from each other and to protect us from ourselves — especially when it comes to controlling the collective and individual economic welfare of each citizen. The only way humanity will ever be able to survive in anarchy or near-anarchy with equality, dignity, and liberty for all human beings is if we evolve into a species of altruists (beings who would die before hurting one another). A Libertarian government is a terrible misnomer, because it would result in the physical slavery of hundreds of millions.

I agree with the fiscally ultra-conservative crowd on very few issues, but I do agree that we need to have a balanced budget amendment added to the Constitution and that we need to get rid of the National Debt. I don’t believe that cutting costs across the board is the only way to go about doing that. We need a compassionate and creative solution to the grand economic crisis that threatens to crash down upon us, but I don’t think we yet have all of the tools to fix that particular problem.

Be good to yourselves, my friends. Don’t give in to the easy way out. It will only ever lead to more trouble.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling really claustrophobic in the city, I would like nothing more than to enjoy the open plains of the Old West. For a bookish “pseudo-intellectual” like myself, Libertarianism seems like such a great idea on paper, because they claim to regard the philosophical pursuits more highly than any other political organization — a government of the mind and of rationale. [sigh]

Libertarianism is a bare essentials approach to government: no executive regulatory office more than what the Libertarians think America needs (the Treasury, the State Department, and the War Department… I mean, Defense Department). Because the Libertarians would have us reduce the government to almost nothing, income taxes would no longer be necessary, and it would be a lot easier to balance the budget and expunge our nation of its multi-trillion dollar debt.

Some pot smokers advocate Libertarianism, because a Libertarian government would decriminalize pot, and no government agency would exist to control the flow of marijuana anyway. War on Drugs? Over. Some anti-Keynesian economists advocate Libertarianism, because it would theoretically allow the purest form of Free Market capitalism that has existed in over a hundred years — a completely unfettered approach to acquisition and divestment. And gun lobbyists LOVE Libertarianism because those living in a nation without federal justice would be forced to fend for themselves — a gun in the hand of every man, woman, and child strong enough to hold a weapon. Maybe that sounds great after a long day of killing animated pixels in Grand Theft Auto, until you realize that we don’t live in the great Old Wild West anymore.

Thankfully, most U.S. cities have regulations against walking around with a holstered pistol, because they realized that giving everyone a gun won’t solve any problems. In fact, no problem can be solved with a gun; there will always be a better solution to any problem. It doesn’t matter the situation. At best, a gun could only delay more problems.

[WARNING: Don’t even try testing me on this one, clever contrarian. I know you think you have a hypothetical desert island scenario where a gun would be necessary, but you’re absolutely wrong. I’ve thought about this argument to endgame and checkmate. Trust me, I’m Big Blue on this one. Guns don’t solve any problems ever.]

Not that I am a big fan of the police or the FBI, but U.S. crime would rise exponentially without a federal law enforcement agency, especially in states that did not have the same resources as other states. Crime would only continue to worsen after honest people realized that there are only two ways to survive and thrive in a Libertarian country: high finance and crime. Crime will seem like the only option to anyone who is not a financial genius, and most financial geniuses will turn to crime for protection anyway. It should be no surprise that Capitalism doesn’t encourage integrity and morality.

Look at the collapsed Eastern Bloc: Russia is a nation dominated by corrupt politicians and incredibly organized criminals. When Yeltsin took over, the most notoriously oppressive regime in the world became the most lenient regime in the world, and the former oppressors (the KGB) became the Russian mafia. Without the FBI, the Secret Service, and the ATF, the criminals would take over (well, they’d gain a greater stranglehold on the populace), and then you’d either be forced to either carry a gun or pay the mafia protection money. As I’ve already stated, guns don’t solve problems, but we live in a nation with a lot of would-be cowboys who suffer from pistol envy; they are Reactionary Neo-Objectivists. Collectively, I think of them as the reincarnation of Howdy Doody — a little ginger-headed, buck-toothed puppet from the Fifties, who wore a cute little cowboy outfit. It’s pretty hard for me to take them seriously, but Cowboy Diplomacy seems to have struck a chord with a large segment of the population, so I feel obligated to illustrate why Cowboy Diplomacy doesn’t and will never work. More on why guns don’t solve problems tomorrow.

Be good to yourselves, my friends. I hope you’ve been able to stay out of the heat wherever you are.