Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Are Libertarians Naive on Evil?

The Left is mostly secular and even the religious Left is secular in substance. This goes a long way to explaining their profound naivety when it comes to evil. For example, the rage of the Palestinians can't be because of an irrational hatred of Jews but because of economic hardship, or lack of rights, or whatever.

Now I'm a fan of Ron Paul's domestic policies, like ending the Federal Reserve, deficit reduction, etc. But I wonder if they have a myopic over emphasis on freedom and economics and could the same disease - naivety towards evil - infect libertarians?

Like Greenwald, Paul doesn’t hold Palestinian terrorists accountable for initiating and perpetuating the violence; he only paints a picture of American and Israeli collusion to oppress Palestinians in what Paul calls the “Gaza tragedy.”

Of the most recent Middle East conflagration, Paul writes in his op-ed that “it feels like 2009 all over again, which is the last time this kind of violence broke out in Gaza.” Note the convenient passivity of that phrasing, “violence broke out,” which enables Paul to avoid placing responsibility where it belongs. That violence wasn’t a nonhuman natural phenomenon like a thunderstorm; it didn’t just spontaneously “break out.” That violence, like the more recent one, was the result of relentless rocket attacks and terrorist activity by Palestinians, which necessitated a too-patient Israel to move in and put a stop to it. But that doesn’t fit Paul’s anti-Israel narrative.

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