Libertarian stirrings

With the growing disenchantment, not to say disgust with the Democratic and Republican Parties, many are giving up their traditional allegiance to these groups. The most common solution, which I have adopted, is to declare oneself an independent. One can also join one of the minor parties. Most of these are on the left, and are hobbled with the burden of defending an anticapitalist world view that died in the twentieth century.

A solution that is more attractive, at least marginally, is to join the Libertarian Party. In terms of numbers it is not having much success either. However, various libertarian (small l) ideas have percolated into our general body of thinking, and this process is likely to continue. Therefore it is worth checking in from time to time to see what libertarians are up to.

During the 1970s I regarded myself as a libertarian. Eventually, though, I began to question various key tenets. This process of disillusionment peaked some years ago when I took a tour of our National Parks. Without government intervention we simply would not have these treasures. Even today their privatization is not in the offing. I am still receptive to some libertarian ideas, however. Moreover (full disclosure), I did contribute an article to the 2008 Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (Sage), edited by my friend Ronald Hamowy.

I sometimes think of myself as a “libertarian with sanity.” In this fusion, the sanity (or so I would hope) takes precedence over the libertarianism.

Libertarian thought stems from nineteenth-century anarchism, and some who regard themselves as left-libertarians retain this connection, which is felt above all in their critique of private property. However mainstream libertarians--at least in the US--defend private property as an essential bulwark of liberty.

Libertarianism rose to prominence during the 1980s. Starting in that period a number of its ideas received serious consideration, some in fact being implemented. These include the following. Many trade barriers have been lifted, reducing what most libertarians argue are unneeded interference with functioning markets and the right to use one's property as one sees fit. Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan have exerted considerable influence over monetary policy in favor of libertarian goals. During his presidency, Ronald Reagan popularized libertarian economics, and fostered anti-statist rhetoric. He managed to achieve some reforms, though many libertarians remain ambivalent about his legacy. In the United States, the military draft was ended in 1973. Some of the burden of senseless criminalizing of victimless crimes, such as sodomy, has been lifted. A growing number of states and local governments have relaxed laws on marijuana for private use and medical marijuana, though libertarians argue that the War on Drugs still constitutes one of the greatest threats to liberty in the United States. In this they are surely correct.

Ayn Rand’s popularity continues to generate recruits for libertarian ideas. In my view (and apparently in hers as well) she was not really a libertarian, and it is a serious mistake to caricature that mode of thought by simply identifying it with her extravagant persona. Today, the dashing John Stossel continues to produce popular 20/20 TV specials investigating government actions from a libertarian perspective. Most recently, Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign sparked a brief spate of libertarian exposure in the media.

These accomplishments notwithstanding, the immediate future does not bode well for libertarianism in the US. The reason is that the trend is widely blamed for the lax regulation thought to be responsible for the financial crisis that started last year. Alan Greenspan, it should be recalled, began his career as a semi-libertarian.

At all events a kind of Reformation seems to be taking place within the libertarian world itself, or at least in some sectors of it, witness the following report by the prominent investor Jim Manzi, which I derive from Andrew Sullivan’s site, the Daily Dish.



“The Paradox of Libertarianism” by Jim Manzi

“I’ve been attending a fascinating series of monthly dinners here in Washington, in which liberals and libertarians exchange ideas. One thing that has become clear to me through these dinners is that there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism. Obviously, one can hold both of these beliefs simultaneously, and many people do. But in my observation, when pushed to develop a position on some difficult issue, most self-described libertarians reveal a temperament that leans strongly in one direction or the other. Again, in cartoon terms, I’d describe the first temperament as idealistic, deductive and theory-based, and the second as practical, inductive and experiment-based. To lay my cards on the table, I fall squarely into the second camp.
“Liberty-as-means libertarianism sees the world in an evolutionary framework: societies evolve rules, norms, laws and so forth in order to adapt and survive in a complex and changing external environment. At a high level of abstraction, internal freedoms are necessary so that the society can learn (which requires trial-and-error learning because the external reality is believed to be too complex to be fully comprehended by any existing theory) and adapt (which is important because the external reality is changing). We need liberty, therefore, because we are so ignorant of what works in practical, material terms. But this raises what I think of as the paradox of libertarianism, or more precisely, the paradox of liberty-as-means libertarianism.
“Start with a practical question: should prostitution be legal? The canonical libertarian position is that this is a consensual act between adults, and should be legal. The liberty-as-means position is far more tentative. We don’t know the overall effects of legalized prostitution. Some people have the theory that it will make people happier, provide incomes and stabilize marriages. Others think it will lead to personal degradation, female victimization and societal collapse. It is very hard to know which theory is right, or if there is only one right answer as opposed to different best answers for different social contexts, or if the relative predictive accuracy of various theories will change over time as the environment changes. What the liberty-as-means libertarian calls for is the freedom to experiment: let different localities try different things, and learn from this experience. In the best case this is literally consciousness learning from structured experiments, and in the weaker case it is only metaphorical learning, in that the localities with more adaptive sets of such rules will tend to win out in evolutionary competition over time.
“This leads then to a call for “states as laboratories of democracy” federalism in matters of social policy; or in a more formal sense, a call for subsidiarity – the principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest competent authority. After all, a typical American lives in a state that is a huge political entity governing millions of people. As many decisions as possible ought to be made by counties, towns, neighborhoods and families (in which parents have significant coercive rights over children). In this way, not only can different preferences be met, but we can learn from experience how various social arrangements perform.
“The characteristic error of contemporary conservatives in this regard has been a want of prudential judgment in trying to enforce too many social norms on a national basis. The characteristic error of liberty-as-goal libertarianism has been the parallel failure to appreciate that a national rule of “no restrictions on non-coercive behavior” (which, admittedly, is something of a cartoon) contravenes a primary rationale for libertarianism. What if social conservatives are right and the wheels really will come off society in the long run if we don’t legally restrict various sexual behaviors? What if left-wing economists are right and it is better to have aggressive zoning laws that prohibit big-box retailers? I think both are mistaken, but I might be wrong. What if I’m right for some people at this moment in time, but wrong for others, or wrong the same people ten years from now? The freedom to experiment needs to include freedom to experiment with different governmental (i.e., coercive) rules. So here we have the paradox: a liberty-as-means libertarian ought to argue, in some cases, for local autonomy to restrict some personal freedoms.
“Now, obviously, there are limits to this. What if some states want to allow human chattel slavery? Well, we had a civil war to rule that out of bounds. Further, this imposes trade-offs on people who happen to live in some family, town or state that limits behavior in some way that they find odious, and must therefore move to some other location or be repressed. But this is a trade-off, not a tyranny.”