Monte Solberg writes an extraordinary piece today, addressing the three words which have always justified every single terrible thing done by any government, anywhere:

He means well.

Monte writes humourously about Ken Dryden’s hockey career, and Stephan Dion’s tilting at environmental windmills, but his message is deeply serious. Every violation of an individual’s rights by The State, and indeed every flawed “liberal” argument, is justified by those frightening words. Try to dispute any “liberal” policy, from the Gun Registry to Medicare to Equalization Payments to Peacekeeping, and you will be attacked for lacking in good intentions.

I regret this generalization, but socialists–and perhaps some religiously-minded conservatives–sometimes act as if their good intentions were all that mattered. We should care about sick people! And so it becomes illegal to pay for your own health care. We should care about crime victims! And so duckhunters and farmers, not to mention taxpayers, must be legislated into a prince’s ransom of a gun registry. We should care about the environment! And so the economy must be held hostage by innumerate Hockey Sticks of global warming fantasy.

Although conservative commentators (er, including me) can be carried away on flights of rhetorical fancy, to the extent of sometime accusing their liberal “foes” of being evil, I think liberals really do mean well. I think that Liberals and New Democrats honestly hope to make the country better, and believe that they pursue noble ends (although I would add that much socialism does appear motivated by envy and rage). But their good intentions do not substitute for good judgement. More importantly, good intentions do not justify bad behaviour: it ought not be good enough, when Liberals and Dippers are confronted by the poor outcomes of their noble plans, for them to cry loudly about their own blessed ends and the Tories’ hidden agenda. But we see this all the time: when the Tories confronted the Liberals with their actual record during the last federal election, the Liberals responded by attacking the Tories’ supposed evil intentions (including, but not limited to, hurting pregnant women, polluting the air, declaring war on everybody, and, if memory serves, shooting television viewers).

I wish I were a better writer, to capture what I mean to say here without resorting to cliche. But still, my intentions were good…

As an afterthought, I am enormously heartened by Monte’s position, by his “sense of life” if you will. Harper captured much the same libertarian-ness a while ago, in a discussion about smoking and alcohol use: “People are going to have a drink and have a smoke and that’s kind of the way life is going to be.” This kind of approach seems all-too-rare in Nanny State Canada, and it deserves to be rewarded. I know Jay Currie and The Flea have rejected the Tory Party because of the latter’s anti-gay posturing. I agree that the anti-SSM plank in the Tory platform is morally wrong. But I wonder if pro-SSM libertarians might be encouraged to support the only reasonably electable party in Canada that could field a candidate like Monte Solberg?