Give Me Private Property, Because It's Liberty!

I stumbled across this little gem, which doesn't really have anything to do with anything important, but is nevertheless an interesting read.  Well-argued, and what not.  The thing that tickled my fancy most was the concept of an ill-defined liberty as the most valuable characteristic, and more importantly the idea of individual liberty.  The author of the article does a good job of invalidating Nozick by switching to a different plane of immanence and discussing tax structure, the GI Bill, etc, but even without clubbing Nozick over the head with the wisdom of hindsight, it is possible, and even easy, to disarm the alleged arguments.  


Individual liberty is simply the ability to do what we want to the best of our abilities.  If there were only one person, the limits placed on liberty would be the laws of physics (gravity: it's the law), an individual's innate abilities, and the environment in which he or she was living (is there food? Is there water? How hot is it?  Am I fighting a host of predators?)  It's safe to say that a single individual enjoying a liberty only infringed upon by physics, physiology, and his environment is significantly repressed by the tyranny of an inscrutable and amoral nature. This individual spends a lot of time looking for food and water, and worrying about the need to fight bears, or what have you.  He would be so busy engaging in those activities that he wouldn't have much time to reflect on the benefits of liberty (hierarchy of needs).  


Fortunately, individuals alone and unafraid with (relatively) unfettered liberty are aberrations rather than rules in human history (if there was only one, how would he or she make more?).  We are social creatures who have, throughout history, been engaged in a collective effort to wrestle physiology and the laws of physics into submission.  This collective effort has primarily been characterized by warfare and repression, and somehow after millennia of this sort of behavior we've reached a point where the West is characterized by domestic tranquility, for the most part, and peace with other Western nations (usually, and as a result of two spectacularly large wars).  We've accomplished this by establishing governments capable of restraining the baser impulses of our fellow human beings, and then limiting the power of those governments to repress us.  


The individuals who formulated our popular contemporary conception of liberty did so from leisure that was possible only because of the existence of collective action, because of a relatively restrained government, and to further the idea of a governmental balance between potent and restraint as codified by law.  The libertarian idea of a free market of individuals defending their liberty is ridiculous.