Freedom without virtue leads to chaos

Why principled Americans need moral foundations, not just procedural guidelines for living

There’s something seductive about libertarianism that draws good people into its orbit—the crisp clarity of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), the promise of maximum freedom with minimal government, the elegant simplicity of “live and let live.”

For decades, principled Americans have gravitated toward this philosophy like moths to flame, convinced they’ve discovered the perfect synthesis of individual liberty and social order.

They haven’t.

What they’ve found instead is a beautiful theory that crumbles upon contact with the messy realities of human nature and moral complexity. Libertarianism isn’t the third way between progressive tyranny and establishment Republican politics that many of its adherents believe it to be. It’s a philosophical dead end—a movement so obsessed with ideological purity that it has rendered itself irrelevant to the cultural battles that will inevitably determine America’s survival.

The core problem lies in libertarianism’s fundamental misunderstanding of what political philosophy should accomplish. The NAP—that golden rule which prohibits the initiation of force against others—is indeed a worthy ethical guideline.

But here’s where libertarians go astray: They mistake this procedural rule for a comprehensive moral doctrine.

They confuse the boundaries of permissible action with the full scope of human flourishing.

This is not merely an academic distinction. It’s the difference between a traffic code and a way of life or between knowing when you can’t hit someone and knowing why you should help them.

The NAP tells us what we cannot do to our neighbors. It says nothing—absolutely nothing—about what we should do for our families, our communities, or our nation.

Consider the libertarian response to America’s cultural decay. While traditional families disintegrate, communities fragment, and young Americans lose themselves in the vast canyon between digital escapism and pharmaceutical dependency, what does libertarianism offer?

A shrug.

“As long as no one’s initiating force,” they say, “it’s not our concern.” This is procedural politics at its most sterile—moral philosophy stripped of moral content.

The contrast with authentic conservatism couldn’t be starker. Where libertarians worship at the altar of abstract principle, traditionalist conservatives ground themselves in concrete wisdom accumulated through centuries of human experience.

Society doesn’t need elaborate theories about individual rights because it has something better: the tested truths of Western civilization—the moral foundations that built the greatest society in human history.

This is why libertarians find themselves perpetually frustrated, always pure but never powerful. They approach politics like mathematicians approaching an equation, seeking perfect logical consistency rather than practical wisdom.

They would rather lose magnificently with their principles intact than win messily with compromises that might, in the end, preserve what matters most.

Ironically, libertarian impulses align perfectly with paleoconservative principles. There is an instinctive suspicion of government power, a commitment to individual responsibility, and an unwavering rejection of the nanny state.

The tragedy is that libertarians were once natural allies in the great restoration that America desperately needs. They could be again.

Shared between both traditionalism and libertarianism are many common enemies. To wit: the administrative state that suffocates enterprise, cultural Marxists who poison our institutions, and the global financiers who treat American workers as disposable commodities.

But here’s the rub: while traditionalist conservatives fight for God, family, and country, libertarians fight for... what exactly?

The right to be left alone? The purity of market mechanisms? The theoretical consistency of their philosophical system?

When the cultural war demands soldiers willing to die for transcendent truths, libertarianism offers accountants with calculators.

This obsession with ideological purity manifests most clearly in libertarian economic theory. Yes, free markets generally produce better outcomes than government planning—any student of the 20th century’s catastrophic experiments in socialism understands this basic truth. But libertarians take this insight and transform it into religious dogma.

The libertarian movement has trouble distinguishing between crony capitalism and genuine market freedom. When the choice is between economic nationalism and economic suicide, they have an even harder time.

The economic patriot understands what the libertarian theorist cannot grasp: Markets exist to serve nations, not the reverse.

When global trade arrangements hollow out American manufacturing, when Wall Street speculation destroys Main Street businesses, and when multinational corporations ship jobs overseas while importing cheap labor stateside, the response cannot be “well, that’s what the market decided.”

The market decided nothing—powerful interests gamed the system while libertarian purists often cheered the resulting “low prices” from the sidelines.

This is where libertarianism reveals its ultimate bankruptcy as a governing philosophy. It offers no vision of the good life, no sense of shared purpose, no understanding of what makes a civilization worth preserving. It mistakes the absence of coercion for the presence of freedom, the elimination of barriers for the achievement of flourishing.

Traditionalism understands that human beings need more than negative liberty, often described as the freedom from external restraint. On the other hand, people do require positive liberty, or the freedom to pursue genuine goods within communities that support and sustain such pursuits.

Humanity demands institutions that cultivate virtue, traditions that transmit wisdom, and authority figures commanding respect—not through force but—through legitimacy earned across generations.

The founding fathers grasped this distinction intuitively. When they spoke of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they weren’t endorsing the modern version of libertarian individualism. They were acknowledging that political freedom requires moral foundations and that self-government presupposes self-discipline.

Eighteenth century Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, a contemporary of the founders and a fellow sympathetic to many of their concerns, asked, “what is liberty without wisdom and virtue?” He concluded that it degenerates into “the greatest of all possible evils; folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

Look at the society that libertarian principles have helped create: rampant pornography defended as free speech, drug legalization promoted as individual choice, family breakdown celebrated as personal liberation.

Is this the freedom our ancestors died to preserve? Is this the civilization we want to bequeath to our children?

The answer from forgotten Americans—those who still believe in marriage, community, and transcendent purpose—is a resounding no.

They understand instinctively what many libertarian intellectuals have forgotten: that unlimited individual autonomy destroys the very conditions that make meaningful choice possible.

In Libertas Praestantissimum or On the Nature of Human Liberty (1888), Pope Leo XII wrote,

“Liberty, the highest of natural endowments, being the portion only of intellectual or rational natures, confers on man this dignity—that he is ‘in the hand of his counsel’ and has power over his actions. But the manner in which such dignity is exercised is of the greatest moment, inasmuch as on the use that is made of liberty the highest good and the greatest evil alike depend. …
Having a false and absurd notion as to what liberty is, either they pervert the very idea of freedom, or they extend it at their pleasure to many things in respect of which man cannot rightly be regarded as free.”

This is not an argument for authoritarianism or theocracy. It’s an argument for recognizing that healthy societies require both formal and informal constraints on behavior, both legal and cultural boundaries that channel human energy toward productive ends. The alternative isn’t maximum freedom—it is maximum chaos.

Libertarians recoil from such language because they’ve been conditioned to see all social constraints as threats to individual liberty. They cannot distinguish between legitimate authority and arbitrary power, between traditions that liberate and traditions that oppress.

They throw out the bathwater of government overreach and the baby of social order together.

The irony is palpable: In their zeal to preserve individual freedom, libertarianism has enabled the very forces that destroy it.

By refusing to make moral distinctions, libertarians cleared the field for those who make immoral ones. By insisting on ideological purity, they’ve ensured political irrelevance.

Meanwhile, the real battle for America’s soul rages on without them. While libertarians debate the finer points of Austrian economics, progressives reshape our culture through captured institutions. While libertarians argue about the theoretical limits of state power, genuine tyrants exercise unlimited cultural power through media, academia, and corporate bureaucracy.

This is not to say that libertarianism offers nothing of value. Its insights about government failure, economic efficiency, and individual responsibility retain their force. But these insights must be subordinated to higher goods—family, faith, nation, civilization itself.

Libertarianism cannot stand alone as a complete political philosophy any more than traffic laws can substitute for moral education.

The path forward requires what libertarians seem constitutionally incapable of providing: a recognition that politics is fundamentally about moral questions, that governing requires wisdom as well as principle, that preserving freedom demands more than just constraining government power.

America’s conservative remnant deserves better than procedural guidelines masquerading as moral vision. It deserves leaders who understand that the good society requires good people, that good people require good institutions, and that good institutions require the cultural confidence to distinguish between right and wrong, noble and base, civilized and barbaric.

The libertarian experiment has largely run its course. It gave Western Civilization valuable insights about the dangers of concentrated power and the benefits of decentralized decision-making. But it also gave moral relativism disguised as principled neutrality, cultural surrender disguised as tolerance, and national dissolution disguised as global freedom.

The stakes are too high, and the hour is too late for such luxuries. America needs defenders of tradition—economic and cultural, political and spiritual, national and eternal. The nation needs warriors willing to fight for more than just the right to be left alone.

The choice before Americans today is stark: Restore the moral foundations that made America great, or watch those foundations crumble beneath the weight of unlimited individualism.

Libertarianism, for all its theoretical elegance, cannot make that choice. Only the people can.