By P.J. OıROURKE

August 19, 2002

FREEDOM IS MOSTLY about responsibility. My house, my car, my family may be a lot of responsibility, but I would rather take that responsibility than have any of you dating my wife or backing my car into phone poles or leaving your dirty socks on my bedroom floor.

There is a certain selfishness in libertarianism. But itıs common sense, really, more than common selfishness, that drives the libertarian philosophy. We are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively. When Elizabeth Hurley has a torrid love affair, I donıt get the pleasure. So why should I get the bill for child support?

In libertarianism there is, frankly, an element of despair, because we know that people arenıt good. We know that people are sneaky, people are greedy, people are cruel. Yet we, as Libertarians, want to turn people loose to do whatever they want. We want that because we also know that no matter what bad things individuals do, they are better than the things that get done to individuals by the collective will.

And I donıt even mean the really gross manifestations of the collective will such as totalitarianism or public television. I mean, imagine a rich farmer going door to door in your suburb, trying to get huge subsidies from you, out of your grocery money. Imagine a steel tycoon down at the docks in Long Beach trying to impose a one-man tariff on cheap foreign steel. Imagine Enron trying to cheat the whole nation without the help of an impenetrable tax code, obscurantist accounting principles, and the dark powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It couldnıt be done.

Real evil is coercive, and an individual does not have the power of coercion that a government has. Voluntary good is done by individuals, for the benefit of individuals. Some of that voluntary good is going to be tasteless and dumb and shortsighted. But the ugliest strip mall is better than the most beautiful gulag.

Libertarians have a lot of things to fight. Libertarians must fight the herd instinct. Libertarians must fight not only instinct but ideas. And two of the most ingrained ideas in the human mind are the idea of collective entitlement and the idea of zero-sum outcomes.

Collective entitlement is the notion that I am owed something, not because of what I made or did, but because I belong to a category. I am owed something because Iım a member of the proletariat who deserves the fruits of capital, a member of the female sex who deserves affirmative action, an African American who deserves slavery-reparations, an American Indian who deserves the whole darn country. Notice how the idea of collective entitlement is much more popular than the idea of collective forfeiture. Very, very rarely does somebody volunteer to go to jail because the other members of his ethnic group have been running the protection rackets in Brooklyn for decades.

And then there are zero-sum outcomes ' the notion that whatever it is youıve got, youıve got it because you took it from me. Itıs easy enough to see where zero-sum thinking comes from, but the era that it came from is over. Libertarianism comes from a different place ' a place that most people donıt understand and other people donıt believe in.

Libertarianism comes from the place that is in between taking and being given. And hardly anybody wants to go to that place. Itıs full of work and worry. And yet, I feel hope. I do think there is a future for the free individual, whether he wants it or not. And the reason that I say so is because of something thatıs right outside ' America.

Hardly anyone wanted to come to America. Even the original inhabitants were just following a mammoth farther than they meant to. The rest of us were dragged here as slaves and bondservants. We were exiled here as heretics and criminals. We were chased here by poverty and oppression. And we came here because no place else would take us. Weıre a bunch of losers and bums, the off-scourings of the planet. And now we are the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Why? Is it because weıre collectively good? No. Itıs because weıre individually free.

' P.J. OıRourke is an author and humorist who lives in southern New Hampshire. This column was excerpted from a speech he gave in Washington in May.