To repeat my mantra for the last year, I'm not a libertarian, I'm a conservative.

I believe a small, limited government is the most effective, and I believe free markets are better than any known alternative. But I do not believe these things are the end-all be-all of life, nor do I think these institutions alone guarantee our freedom. In fact, sadly, I believe that many policies embraced by libertarians (and shunned by conservatives) ultimately lead to dictatorship.

(Yet I value them as political allies. Go figure.)

But I won't bore you with the details now.

For the moment, I just want to relate a few interesting snippets I'm discovering about the life of Eliot Spitzer, whom Roger Donway (a libertarian) likens to Robespierre, the autocratic leader of the French revolution. It's another classic case where capitalism brought wealth, and where wealth without morals produced leftism.

By background, Eliot Spitzer is the very model of the “limousine liberal,” a familiar figure in New York, where Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Nelson Rockefeller all served as governor. Spitzer bodes to be the fourth in that line. Born to a real-estate tycoon, Spitzer attended the elite Horace Mann School, Princeton, and Harvard Law. Although he got a job at the prestigious Paul, Weiss law firm, Spitzer found it “unfulfilling” and left to join the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Six years later, he returned briefly to private practice and then jumped into the 1994 Democratic primary for attorney general. After finishing fourth in a four-way race, he immediately began running for the 1998 election, using his father’s money in a way so sleazy that even the leftist New York Times was reluctant to endorse him in the general election. A year after he was sworn in, however, the cheers of the Times had begun; within two years, they had reached deafening levels.

There's this belief out there that rich people are generally conservative, but that doesn't seem to be true -- especially if you look at the second or third generation. Bill Gates: fairly strong liberal. Warren Buffet: dittos, and moreso. And do I even need to mention George Soros? And I can't recall the number of times I saw even parents with good ethics, and who believed in hard work, and yet ended up raising children who believed money fell from the sky.

Spitzer, sadly, didn't even have that kind of parent, apparently:

Evidently, Spitzer’s self-made father knows how the world works. He reputedly won every game of Monopoly that he ever played with his children by contriving unheard-of arrangements and deals utterly at odds with the game’s official rules. Nevertheless, since coming to office, Eliot Spitzer has used an utterly vague anti-fraud law (the Martin Act) to criminalize free-wheeling capitalism and force businessmen back into his static model of a public-service economy.

What an awful role model! It's no wonder young Eliot got the impression that rules were just something to manipulate to get your way, and that what really mattered was winning at all costs. But I'm more appalled that the majority of New York voters felt this was the sort of man they wanted running their state.

Being a libertarian, the author's thesis is that Eliot Spitzer was (until recently) a hero if you accepted two premises: "that self-interest is evil (altruism) and that the rule of law is expendable (pragmatism)". He even ends with a cheery assertion of his dogma that selfishness will save us all:

And that is why people opposed to Spitzer need to attack the moral foundations of his career. Not his publicity-seeking. Not his vaulting ambition. Not even his procedural missteps. Spitzer’s opponents must uphold the morality and legality of pursuing one’s self-interest.

From someone writing on an "objectivist" web site, with a photo of Ayn Rand at the top, this is not surprising. Rand herself, an atheist, was famously disdainful of altruism, and championed selfishness. So it's perhaps also unsurprising that Rand's private life was an ongoing train wreck.

Well, which is it? Is altruism good, or is selfishness good?

My answer is neither, consistently: only goodness is good, and one's ultimate idea of goodness is defined by one's religious beliefs. (And that everyone has a religion, that is, a set of philosophical propositions accepted on faith.) In my view, sometimes altruism is good, and sometimes selfishness is good. But if another (a leftist, or an Objectivist) has no higher measure of "good", then it's easy to see how he or she could fall into either trap.

To illustrate: Imagine you lived long ago and discovered an abandoned, starving baby. Should you take it in, and save its life? And is the morality of that choice really determined only by whether you feel saving the baby's life was in your benefit (selfishness) or not (altruism)? Indeed, either choice could be viewed as altruistic or selfish depending on the circumstances. You have to appeal to some higher standard to answer the question without falling into moral absurdity.

Of course, the overlooked point here is that while Spitzer believed quite strongly that others needed to be altruistic, he certainly did whatever was in his own interest. The author is way off base, then: far from a person who believed in the values of altruism, Spitzer was undoubtedly just as selfish and ego-driven (and evidently far more so, in most cases) than any CEO he prosecuted. His goals were merely at odd with theirs.

The other religious belief promoted by Donway is faith in "rule of law." Now certainly, I generally prefer rule of law to the opposite, but, again, his argument falls flat on its face: Spitzer frequently used a vague law to do his dirty work in a perfectly legal fashion. And would Donway approve if more laws were passed, by normal legislative means, which criminalized capitalism? On what basis, then, would he protest the enforcement of such laws? He would find himself arguing against the rule of law.

When it comes to protecting free trade and limiting the size of government, I consider secular libertarians to be allies. But, as this critique of Spitzer demonstrates so well, they often ultimately have the exact same moral bases as their liberal opponents, rendering their complaints at least incoherent, if not ultimately harmful.

Is more selfishness really what our culture lacks? The Spitzer case would imply the exact opposite. I think we need something higher than either a blind belief in the goodness of selfishness and trade, or a reflexive hatred of the same. And I write this as a fan of free trade, markets, and liberty, as one who wants to see these things continue.

H/t Instapundit.