By Kung Fu Zu and Brad Nelson, Jul. 6, 2014, Americanthinker.com

While looking up a particular quote recently, I came upon the article "Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries" whiich Russell Kirk wrote in 1981. The timing of this piece is interesting, as it came out after Ronald Reagan had been in office for less than one year. No doubt, there were discussions similar to those we are having today as to the relationship between Conservatives and Libertarians.

To start his piece Kirk asks what conservatives and libertarians have in common. Kirk concedes –

These two bodies of opinion share a detestation of collectivism. They set their faces against the totalist state and the heavy hand of bureaucracy.

This is true and good as far as it goes. However, in the next paragraph Kirk writes:

What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever have. To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire.

Those who believe modern conservatives and libertarians are merely different schools of conservative thought are likely to be stunned by this. They shouldn’t be, and Kirk lays out significant differences between the two in his article.

Kirk highlights the essential fault of libertarian zealots when he writes:

The ruinous failing of the ideologues who call themselves libertarians is their fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle -- that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil order, and indeed of human existence.

In this one paragraph he encapsulates the superficial, abstract, and utopian thinking behind libertarian “philosophy.” He then goes on to show how detached from reality such thought is.

Kirk traces libertarian thought back to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the doctrines of which libertarians carry “to absurdity.” Mill declares, “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” These are fine sounding words from an ascetic intellectual who experienced life principally through books, and who seemed to assume, as Kirk notes:

…that most human beings, if only they were properly schooled, would think and act precisely like John Stuart Mill.

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