A number of younger voters told me that they were libertarians:
"People should be allowed to live their lives anyway that they want to."
Sounds like a great ideas. That's what freedom is all about, right? Doing what you want, and no one getting in your face about it, as long as you do not hurt anyone, or in Thomas Jefferson's libertarian mantra: "What does not pick my pocket or break my bone."
The problem for many people is that they do not really know what they want. Whatever they are searching for they will never find, not in their efforts, not in their achievements.
Mankind on his own can do nothing. We speak a language that we did not create. We wear clothes that we did not make. We were brought into this world through parents whom we did not chose.
The notion of "free will" in vacuum simply does not exist. We enter into circumstances and certainties, verities and verisimilitudes which we do not define ourselves. We can shape our responses to what we see and influence in turn what influences us, granted, but the notion that we emerge in this world devoid of influence is simply not true, let alone logical.
Man has an embedded logical structure within himself. The "Law of the Excluded Middle" per Aristotle posits that either something exists, or it does not exist. This rule of identity cannot be corrupted without undue harm and disillusionment to follow.
Of course, man in his fallen state rebels against this inevitable limitation. Something exists or it does not. Truth is not malleable. The substance of the three-dimensional world cannot be swept away with idealized notions of "what should be".
If I want to do what I want to, I cannot renege on the consequences. By placing my hand in the fire, I am choosing to get burned.
Freedom as an absence of restraint, therefore, falls apart for die-hard libertarians. In addition to neglecting the fallen nature of man which craves security or control over freedom, he neglects that mankind emerges into political and cultural traditions, sources of identity which carve the pathway he is called to take. There is no freedom, there is no "doing what you want" if one has no awareness of a path to take, if a man is not choosing to do something.
Choice inevitably means surrendering our freedom at a later date. Choosing to raise a family will compromise a man's inner integrity and outer reality should he then decided to live out a bohemian life notwithstanding his conjugal investment. Using illicit substances will compromise a man's freedom of choice and will in the future should the person become addicted. Granted, the state cannot play Super Nanny to every citizen; but people who believe that they should "do what they want" must also recognize the consequences of their choices.
In this sense, too, freedom means nothing when misdirected or unfocused. Free to do "what", exactly? No purpose, no community, no identity, and the internal ravages of fallen man in a fallen world lend him to despair instead of prosperity. A young man who insists on learning everything himself will find himself in bondage to his desperate ignorance, and all of his freedom squandered trying to break free from the prison of self-will.
The libertarian temptation: "I Do What I Want" dilapidates for want of definition. Who is "I", and what does "I" want? The rugged individualism of striking out on one's own leads a man to strike out in every endeavor, sacrificing his radical freedom for a grand conformity in which our deep-set need for recognition and acceptance turns us into resembling, not just reflecting, everyone around us.
Contrary to the melodious assertion of "The Animals", this life is not just mine, or in one's desperate attempt to make it so, we turn into animals indeed, who follow inescapable instincts instead of living a life of distinction.
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