Who makes the tradeoffs?
In the last couple of decades, one of the most popular political slogans on the left, especially among feminists, has been: “The personal is the political.” For feminists the phrase is invoked to point out that the personal choices women make — for example, whether to continue working full-time after having children — cannot be extracted from the larger political context in which they take place. The political environment profoundly affects personal choices, and personal choices thereby become political acts. The left sees “The personal is the political” as a kind of call to arms: Everything you do is political so you should think through the implications. In and of itself, that’s a point that libertarians can accept, though perhaps on a narrower set of issues. However, for those of us in the freedom movement, that same phrase takes on a very different meaning in the context of the continued expansion of government in both health care and the environment. As government’s role grows, mo
