I Was a Card-Carrying Libertarian: Confessions of a Black Sheep Republican
When we all start thinking we have the right to behave like idiots and not have to bear the consequences, we lose the mortar that holds the bricks of our society together.
To be fair to libertarians (I am, after all, a liberal in the better, post-{Campbell-Bannerman} sense, so I’m willing to speak for the unfortunate), I’d say that they’d say that they are precisely _for_ people having the right to behave like “idiots” and face the consequences—the only way to tell if they really have been acting like idiots, as opposed to merely acting in a way conservatives find new and weird or threatening or tabou-tabou.
The best conservative counter-argument is that many actions (all? most?) are not really that new, so that it’s wasteful for each generation to learn the consequences of the stupid ones; “No society can get away with its members’ behaving like that; each generation should not have to suffer a lesson already learned.”
A good liberal counter-argument is that too often the consequences are either completely out of proportion to the mistake, are so irreversible as not to be instructive, are near-random in nature (and so have no moral or educational valence), or fall on parties not responsible for the actual decisions (think of the children!).
But in any event, a libertarian argument might be that it’s wrong to pre-judge any behaviour as idiotic, because things change (laws against fornication make less sense post-{the vulcanisation of rubber} and the invention of penicillin) and traditional societies are more interested in maintaining authority than in individual liberty, so they’re more likely to quash the useful and new than to encourage it.
