Liberty is for me…

“You! Cake or death?”
“Uh, cake please.”

For those unfamiliar with Eddie Izzard, he’s an Emmy Award-winning stand up comedian that does lots of skits poking fun of famous historical incidents. One of his classics is the Cake or Death skit, which you can watch here. I definitely recommend checking out a full routine at some point.

Perhaps this skit can provide an analogy — granted a simplistic and imperfect one — between the welfare and warfare states. With the Presidential race consuming the news, there’s lots of talk about different policy proposals, particularly universal health care and the War in Iraq.

Libertarians tend not to get too excited about their choices for political leaders. Democrats are disliked for many reasons, notably their advocacy for the welfare state. Conservatives, on the other hand, usually like the idea of bombing lots of brown people in far-away lands.

Not very good options. But it brings up a philosophical point that I think is important for libertarians to contemplate.

There is a fundamental difference between the “liberal society” and transfer payments. By liberal society, I mean preserving life and equality before the law, securing property rights, civil and economic liberties and the freedom to choose how one lives their lives. By transfer payments, I mean taking stuff from Peter and giving it to Paul.

It is more important to preserve the liberal society than to diminish transfer payments.

I’m not advocating for transfer payments and understand Milton Friedman’s point that a voluntary market process will likely produce goods and services — be it health care, education, cake, etc — at a higher quality for a lower price. But I am distinguishing these from the liberal society.

We can look to many countries, Denmark for example, that have a generous social safety net — that is, lots of transfer payments — and yet still preserve the liberal society. For example, it’s easier to open a business in Denmark than California. And your chance of being involved in — or paying for — a war is much lower.

There’s no central path to liberty, yet our efforts are misplaced if we spend all our energy fighting transfer payments instead of preserving the liberal society.

While Democrats are by no means noble stewards of the liberal society, when it comes to choosing between a candidate that is pushing expensive health care versus one that wants a trillion dollar, civil-liberty raping, 100-year war with mounting casualties in a country on the other side of the planet that never attacked us, the choice should be clear.

That is, whenever we’re given the choice between cake or death, the correct response is, “Uh, cake please.”