Michael Gerson Explains Why Libertarians Should Want to Ban Everything

Washington Post columnist
Michael Gerson
argues that libertarians are objectively pro-government because
they want to legalize marijuana and gambling, which as taxable
industries provide revenue to Leviathan:

Two of the larger social trends of our time—the growth of payday
gambling and the legalization of marijuana—have two things in
common: They are justified as the expansion of personal liberty,
and they serve the interests of an expanding government….

Libertarians are now, paradoxically, providing ideological cover
for irresponsible government. State officials just want the money,
however it is blessed, without requesting it through the normal
democratic process. Rather than building social competence and
capital, politicians increasingly benefit when citizens are
addicted, exploited, impoverished and stoned.

By Gerson’s logic, a true libertarian would want to criminalize
as much commercial activity as possible, the better to starve the
beast. The less there is to tax, the smaller government will be, so
when all peaceful transactions are banned, we will be living in a
libertarian paradise.

Speaking of which, Gerson declares that “libertarian utopias are
always childless,” an old canard that assumes anyone who cares
about children will want adults’ choices limited to those
appropriate for a 10-year-old. If you reject that prohibitionist
agenda, if you believe that adults should be free to indulge in
adult pleasures despite the risk that they might overindulge, you
obviously hate children, and probably puppies too.

Gerson’s alternative to the libertarianism that he faults for
expanding the size of government is an authoritarianism that
depends on government to instill proper moral values in the younger
generation. He regrets that “parents no longer expect much help
from government in reinforcing the cultural and moral norms
necessary to the raising of responsible, successful children.” The
vagueness of Gerson’s rhetoric conceals what that mission means in
practice: kidnapping people at gunpoint and locking them in cages
for providing goods and services that offend Michael
Gerson.