Liberty Or Moose Turd Pie

There's a commons of liberty we all draw from, and the way we manage that commons determines the "net liberty" for those of us who graze on it.

"Okay, enough," says some glib fascist, "That's doublespeak." Then he'll go off on a tangent about Orwell and the totalitarian left.

Ron Paul makes a net-liberty calculation when he talks about the Confederacy. The great Russian philosophical novelist Ayn Rand assumes a commons of liberty that would serve all of us best if we let the Hank Reardons and Frisco D'Anconias of the world plunder it. (Didn't it creep you out just a little that Dagny, the novel's eyes, winds up as prize for the top libertarian in the book?)

And we make that calculation when we condemn to the Third Reich's struggle for lebensraum. And a nice new sofa and coffee table.

There's gotta be some accommodation to living in a finite world with other people. I would rather a representative government call the plays, so that I have some say. The libertarian plan has interested parties, with superior ways of organizing to protect those interests, make the call. Or worse, has the planet's new dominant life form, the corporation, ordering my life.