In my home town you could not cut woman’s hair in a barber shop or cut men’s hair in a hair salon. You could drink beer on Sunday, but you couldn’t drink whiskey. And several movies were banned, such as Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. because it was about swingers.

Funny thing was, there were actual swinger groups in the town.

You saw only one part of what I wrote and jumped on that, but segregation was only part and parcel with the whole mindset of that era, Conformity.

Perhaps I sound like a leftist to you because you are kind of living in the past. What I mean by that is that some of the openness and freedoms we have now were indeed championed first by people of the left many years ago. Of course, being leftists, they never knew when to stop, so cultural freedom became vulgarity, free speech became hate speech, and equal rights became quotas.

That does NOT invalidate the freedoms they originally fought for.

i would say that the effects i am discussing are pretty darn direct – e.g., easy divorce laws promote divorce which hurts children and the parents (in most cases).

or allowing the pornographic market to grow almost unchecked promotes quick physical satisfaction at the expense of fidelity and sacrifice for others (again undermining the family).

there is a reason why divorce skyrocketed after so many legal impediments to bad behavior were overthrown in the 60′s and 70′s.

you hesitate to bring back those impediments, but it’s not clear that marriage can survive very well without them (or, if it can survive, it can’t regain its health).

but you see my points, as you have said, and so i will leave it there without going on garrulously.

Legilsation based on subjective and indirect effects on “society” are dangerous and wrong, I believe.

We can go out and tell people about the problems with these things. We can advocate — strongly — for doing the right thing, even from a position of authority. But we have to stop at force.

Overall, I think we agree that the main thing is for Government to have a damned good reason to regulate. I don’t think pornography, or most other PERSONAL restrictions, meet that burden.

I understand your argument, but it doesn’t matter. I think government restrictions on what you’re allowed to do on your own time, in your own home, are dangerous, and not something we should EVER advocate, even if we agree with their premis.

Now my propensity is that the burden of proof is on government to exercise its power of coercion, which is why I am a conservative rather than a collectivist.

However, to simply let everyone do their own thing without dealing with the conflicts that arise between individuals – and groups of individuals is simply using “freedom” as an amulet just as much as collectivists use “justice” or “equality”.

Our individual actions do have consequences on others more often than we might admit. Whether that means that government needs to intervene depends on the extent of the conflict and the ability of those involved to resolve their differences outside of governmental structures.

And when the government does intervene, I further take the position that it should be at the lowest level as possible, where the government is closest to the players and structually most flexible in its approach.

And the other issue is that of scale. One family pioneering into the Amazon rain forest is not a governmental issue. Send tens of thousands of families into that same area, and the sum of the individual actions will start having major effects on others outside the area, even though individually each family is not doing much to harm others.

A family pig farm can generally coexist with its neighbors without much disruptioin. Turn that into an industrial hog farm, and now the neighbors are seriously impacted.

When the government should step in is a matter for analysis and discussion. But to close one’s eyes and say freedom means no government doesn’t prevent infringements.

So yes, things can get messy, and we often face slippery slopes. And more often than not, given how people like to exercise power over others, there are plenty of steaming piles to step in.

But the antidote is humility – and a willingness to emply the collective wisdom of groups (such as market mechanims) rather than arrogant legislators and bureaucrats and interventionist theorists – since unintended consequences are ever lurking.

So in practice, I will tend towards limiting governmental coercion – but not by closing my eye to pretend that individual actions do not infringe on other individual’s boundaries through too-superficial analysis of consequences.

rather, a free society, whose political system is based mainly on securing individual rights, has very limited tools at its disposal for lending support to its most essential social institutions. it is for this reason all the more important that such small steps be taken to give such support, especially because the failure of our social institutions would be catastrophic (including for our individual rights). and, indeed, we have already gone a good distance down the road toward the failure of these institutions.

nonsense.

i’m not trying to save the soul of the viewer. i am trying to prevent the numerous and concrete bad consequences that will befall the rest of us.

we already do this in many, many ways (e.g., heavily regulating peep shows and adult book stores, which regulation can often be an effective ban).

and pornography is just a striking example. there are myriad others. another example is public decency laws (we have to cover ourselves in public – minimally, anyway – and avoid repeatedly using foul language in the presence of others). most localities also keep obscenity out of public buildings.

a deeper example is the (now mostly defunct) state laws making divorce difficult (i.e., being consenting adults was not enough).

i’m sure we could all think of numerous other instances.

But if by regulation you mean just flat out denying the right to open such a business, even if it is discreet and never allows minors in. Then I would strongly disagree.

When? in the 1950′s? Well no, we were not really such a free country back then, there were restrictive laws everywhere, blue laws, laws against various businesses, laws against certain races. Written and unwritten rules against unpopular political beliefs. And in general a pervasive attitude of government control of people and especially of business.

No, we were not really a very free nation then. And I doubt that many conservatives would really like to go back to the kind of nation we had from the end of WW2 to about 1968.

What you’re talking about IS banning an action, but that’s based on the idea that is the tertiary cause of another undesireable action (an action, divorce, which is also NOT illegal).

So you’re talking banning porn because it CREATES an attitude or mentality which COULD LEAD to the perfeclty legal action of divorce.

In short, banning it because it is bad for you.

How about just trying freedom? If you don’t like pornography, or gambling, or drinking, or smoking, or anything else, Then preach against it, abjure against it, do not partake, but don’t think that it is your right to keep other adults from it.

I would think that there would be ample evidence by now of the counter productiveness of such prohibitions.

i will have to support regulation, however, if a fellow decides to open a peep show on main street in my town.

even now, in our very immodest times, we still constrain the viewing of pornography in many ways without banning it outright. why is that?

and when pornography was banned, was america a more free or less free country?

and, jumping one big step further, when extra-marital relations were the subject of prosecutions (in the 18th and 19th centuries), was america a more free or less free country?

i would argue in both cases that we were actually more free, because engaging in the viewing of pornography or in extra-marital relations compromises other freedoms and other crucial social institutions (in particular, marriage).

i agree with you that the government should, in general, favor personal liberty and be modest and careful in its policy aims. but we may disagree about what constitutes modest and careful.

As for labels, I suppose I call myself a conservative libertarian or a libertarian conservative. I cannot go the route of the kooks in the Libertarian party because they are really little better than anarchists, and have a totally unrealistic view of the need for foreign defense.

good for both of us

anyway, i don’t want to replace big-government liberalism with big-government conservatism. i’m one of those old-fashioned guys who actually believes in limited national government and federalism. coolidge is one of my favorite presidents, and i still think that reagan gets too much of a free pass for not actually making the national government shrink instead of just grow more slowly.

so there’s a lot of road we can travel together before you and i have to part ways.

For those acting in good faith, the question of when behavior ceases being purely personal and affects other people is a central dispute in political philosophies.

In my years of reading these debates, I find that libertarians tend to define the boundaries of “purely personal” too expansively and ignore consequent social effects. icbm’s comments about pornography are one example as to societal consequences of pornography that are usually ignored or so heavily discounted that they get dismissed without serious consideration.

Libertarians also tend to discount the societal effects when large numbers of people engage in a particular behavior that may be relatively innocuous when only a few engage in that behavior, looking only at one individual case. Sort of like the tragedy of the commons.

Collectivists, on the other hand, don’t recognize any boundary between public and private and thus claim public control over all personal behaviors (which translates to those with the power to control get to do the controlling). We see the consequence – totalitarian states.

Conservatives, then, are in the uncomfortable middle of trying to resolve the conflicts between these two set of boundary lines, trying to determine at what point society can step in to restrict individual behavior because of the effects of that behavior injure society – or more controversially, when mulitple people engaging in that behavior have delerious effects that small numbers do not – while preserving individual rights and freedoms.

The longer I live, and the more I see, the more I am convinced that only by giving up our desire to control others can we have true freedom. Big government, powerful government, it is a temptation to be used for your own ideology. The Bush administration is a good morality tale there.

Only by denouncing unnecessary government at all levels, and holding fast to just the few legitimate concerns of government can we offer a true alternative to the madness that has become the twenty first century.