'Monitor' statists endorse slavery

'Monitor' statists endorse slavery

by Jason Sorens • 10/07/03

Letter to the editor 'Free from Reality" was an excellent title for your Oct. 6 editorial on the Free State Project, for my close analysis of it failed to yield a single statement bearing any relationship to reality.

"Abolishing Social Security would lead to the isolation, suffering, and premature death of many elderly people. . . . The plight of the aged before and during the Depression years is party of history." The Monitor apparently believes that before Social Security, the elderly were isolated, suffering, and dying in droves. You need to brush up on your history - or at the very least talk to some people who actually lived through the Depression. Americans were poorer then, of course, simply because it was an earlier stage of economic development, but family and communal ties were tight then, and people really didn't starve in the streets. "If anything, families today are less - not more - willing and able than families before Social Security to care for aging parents and grandparents." Exactly! And what has caused this cultural shift? It couldn't be that people no longer take responsibility for each other because they think it's "the government's job." Right? "Philosophically, Libertarians would be prone to support slavery and reject government intervention to prevent it." This is the most egregious falsehood of them all. The libertarian movement was founded in the twin movements for free trade and free men in the 19th century, boasting such forebears as William Lloyd Garrison, William Wilberforce and Frederick Douglass. Slavery is the very antithesis of the philosophy of the Free State Project. It is the statists of the Monitor who endorse a system of slavery, a system in which all are enslaved to distant, centralized, bureaucratic, monopolistic structures of government. As for the claim that "the promised Libertarian invasion will yield little change," it is apparently belied by the histrionics of your newspaper. JASON P. SORENS New Haven, Conn.

(The writer is president of the Free State Project.)

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