I think I’ve been a libertarian all my life – I just didn’t know it until recently. I’ve always been “fiscally conservative, but socially liberal” as the saying used to go when I was younger (come to think of it, I don’t hear that saying anymore. Just like I don’t hear “it’s a free country.”). I’ve held a lot of opinions that made sense to me since I was very young, but always seemed outside the mainstream. For example
- I remember in my twenties, thinking about gay marriage, and wondering how in the world the goverment should have a say over that. We live on this blue sphere for only a short time. Life can be tough, and if you want to spend it together with another person, isn’t that your choice? How can anyone else possibly claim to have a legitimate interest?
- I’ve always deeply resented having part of my economic output harvested each day and used to kill people in the Middle East. I think Muhammed Ali got it right when he said “I ain’t got no beef with them Viet Cong.”
- I’ve always felt that non-violent crimes, like smoking pot, should just be left alone. When we were kids we always said “you can’t legislate morality.” I guess no one says that anymore, either. Busting down someone’s door in the middle of the night, shooting the dog and throwing a flash grenade into the kids’ room – I guess this is how pot smoking becomes violent.
- My first “blog”, back in 1998, had something like “I don’t need the government to tell me who to buy stuff from and who to sell to. If you don’t like free trade, move to a place where they don’t have any – like North Korea, rural China [how things have changed!], or Afghanistan.”
Once at work, someone handed out one of those “world’s smallest political quiz” cards. I scored libertarian. I was puzzled. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the above positions were also libertarian.
Most people I know haven’t the foggiest clue what libertarianism is. Most people say “that’s just anarchy!” or “it’s a society of each-man-for-himself where nobody cares about anybody else.” From my point of view, nothing could be further from the truth. I suppose they learned all this watching CNN. Next time someone says “Well, libertarianism is just blah blah blah,” ask for concrete criticisms of Hayek’s work, or what they think of Rothbard’s observations. You’ll find pretty quickly that they likely haven’t the foggiest clue what they are talking about. They read the first two sentences of a 300-page book and extrapolated threrest.
Now to be sure, there are a very wide range of opinions in libertarianism. It is about as far from group-think as you can get (after all, respect for our individual differences is one of the core principles!). It’s one of the reasons I find it hard to get behind the Libertarian Party – although most of them are good folks, there are some goofballs there. And not everyone even in the party truly gets libertarianism, AFAICT.
Libertarianism, for me, starts with a profound and fundamental respect for human beings. It respects the dignity of the individual. It refrains from telling people, “well, you’re not quite as smart as I am, so I know best what is best for you.” It recognizes that we all have to make the best of our lives for the time we are on this planet. The cornerstone is the “non-aggression principle”: the assertion that no one has a right to initiate aggression against another human being. Period. Unless that person is infringing on your rights (which means they initiated the aggression) you “use your words”, not your fists, to get what you want. In other words: the Golden Rule. Here’s a great quote from Tom Palmer, taken from his book Why Liberty:
As you go through life, chances are almost 100% you act like a libertarian…You don’t hit other people when their behavior displeases you. You don’t take their stuff. You don’t lie to them to trick them into letting you take their stuff, or defraud them, or knowingly give them directions that cause them to drive off a bridge. You’re just not that kind of person.
You respect other people. You respect their rights. You might sometimes feel like smacking someone in the face for saying something really offensive, but your better judgement prevails and you walk away, or answer words with words. You’re a civilized person.
Congratulations. You’ve internalized the basic principles of libertarianism. You live your life and exercise your own freedom with respect for the freedom and rights of others.
The key to a libertarian society is that your actions are voluntary. You buy from and sell to others voluntarily. You join civic organizations voluntarily. You job, your place of living, your friends, who you give money to – it’s all voluntary. No one has the right to force you to do otherwise. A true libertarian society would have a rich fabric of social and charitable organizations. Would there be those who refuse to contribute, who are only out for themselves? Of course. We respect that choice as well – but woe unto them when they need help, for they are unlikely to find many who are sympathetic to their plight. Note that the US was pretty much a libertarian society until about WWII – and as a result we still have more civic and charitable giving and organization than almost any other country.
Think about the difference between voluntary associations and mandatory ones. If you get a new boss at work that is a mean old SOB, sadistic and vindictive, you can quit and get another job. If your local schoolboard is incompetent, petty, and arrogant, you don’t have a lot of choice (well, you can go to private school; but you have less choice). If you violently disagree with a government policy, like 15 years of continuous bombing of Muslim countries, not only can you not end it, but you are forced to finance it. The immorality of it is staggering. You are essentially a milk cow financing projects you disagree with.
So how does libertarianism get the reputation that it has? One of the answers is that libertarianism is skeptical of government. A good definition of goverment is “the organization in a society that reserves for itself the sole legitimate use of force and violence”. When I first read that definition, I thought it was wacky. But as I turned it over in my mind for a couple days, I came to realize it was an important insight. Government actions are by their nature forceful. Don’t pay your taxes, see what happens – they will send someone over to collect. If you resist, they will arrest you. If you resist that, they will kill you. Given this inherent aggression, we might insist that goverment remain limited in order to reduce violence in general. Government should remain focused on protecting the people’s liberty, and not trying to socially engineer the world into a better place.
And that’s where it gets tricky. Most people have a fundamental and abiding conviction that if only they had unlimited power, they could fix the world just right and it would be all unicorns and rainbows. Failing that, they try to bend the goverment to their will, to get it to force everyone to live in the way they consider best. (I keep thinking of the movie Excalibur. Morgan LeFay has Merlin disoriented, and tells him “That’s it Merlin. Put the world to rights. Use the Charm of Making.”) And if things don’t improve, then dammit, use more force. Collect more taxes. Pass more laws. Throw more people in jail. Bomb countries into “freedom”. I believe there’s a belief here that the world is imperfect because of “bad people” and once we can legislate them into being “good people” all problems will cease. However, these goverment actions have a tendency to almost always backfire. Dr. Mary Ruwart does a great job of documenting this in her book Healing Our World: wage and work laws hurt the poor, goverment “guidance” of the economy destroys wealth (or simply transfers it to the rich), environmental laws end up hurting the environment, etc.
Not only that, but powerful interests know how to capture this regulatory framework. A hundred years ago, Americans were upset that New York banks had too much of the nation’s wealth. Eventually, the Fed bill was passed, promising to break Wall Street’s hold on the economy. After the Fed came into being, the New York banks had even more of the nation’s money. Ten years ago, Dodd-Frank was passed to end the problem of too-big-to-fail banks. After the passage of Dodd-Frank, those banks became even bigger. The examples go on and on. Daniel Hannan, a British Member of the European Parliament, describes his experience as (paraphrased): “I thought when I got to the EP, I would be engaged in an epic struggle against huge multinationals – me trying to regulate them, and the corporations fighting against regulation. In fact, what I found was that huge companies love regulation. Multinationals actually brought proposed regulations to me and asked me to sponsor them. They use the regulatory structure as a moat to protect their business.” Economists call this “regulatory capture.” The whole field of how goverment is frequently corrupted is called “public choice theory.” Go read about it.
People generally seem to think that if the goverment doesn’t do something about, say, poverty, then nothing will be done. In fact, there are a million responses to poverty besides goverment action. There are myriad charities that help the poor. There are churches, community groups, soup kitchens. Last century, there were mutual aid societies. Given choice, you could give your money to those organizations that fit your personal philosophy (tough love, job training, free meals?), location (nationwide, close to home?), etc, and you could give your time and money to the groups that have the most impact. With goverment action, it’s one-size-fits-all, no opting out. And it’s incredibly ineffective – the War On Poverty has gone on for half a century, cost trillions of dollars, and the poverty rate is stubbornly the same. Numerous researchers have documented how government poverty programs actually help keep people in poverty.
One of the big questions in libertarian political philosophical debates is “what is the proper limit to goverment power?” Libertarianism is not anarchy; goverment plays a central role in all libertarian thinking. Everyone agrees that goverment should protect our liberty, life, and property from aggressors – without that, we definitely have anarchy and survival of the meanest and toughest. But how much further can government go? Hitler was elected, and the purge of the Jews was totally legal under German law – does that mean the Nazis were correct to incite the Holocaust? If you say “no, that was not right”, then you believe in the limitation of government power. So now my question for you is, how far can goverment go? Here’s a hint: the answer is not “as far as they want as long as I like the program; not at all if I don’t like it.”
To quote Tom Palmer again:
Rights require protection by institutions that are empowered to use force in their defense, but those same institutions often represent the greatest and most dangerous threat to rights, meaning that they must be strictly limited through constitutional mechanisms, including divisions of and competition among sources of power, legal systems that are independent of executive power, and widely shared insistence on the supremacy of rule of law over power.
Another way to look at it is through humility. A quote from Aaron Ross Powell in Why Liberty says it better than I could:
I could be wrong about pretty much anything. What I don’t know so outweighs what I do that my actual knowledge appears as little more than a small raft on an ocean of ignorance.
I suffer no shame admitting this unflattering fact, not only because there’s never any shame in acknowledging the truth, but also because everyone else is in the same boat. Our ignorance — what we don’t know — always and enormously outweighs our knowledge. It’s true of even the smartest and most educated.
Recognizing that fact ought to humble us. And that humility, informed by a realistic picture of how government operates, ought to make us libertarians. Libertarianism is a philosophy of humility. It’s one that takes us as we are and grants us the freedom to make as much of ourselves as we can. And it’s a philosophy that understands just how damaging human failings can be when coupled with the coercive force of government. Libertarianism limits rulers because it recognizes that rulers are just ordinary people who exercise extraordinary power — and that the harm that power can inflict more often than not outweighs any good it might achieve.
Libertarianism rests on humility and refuses to tolerate the hubris of those who would consider themselves higher and mightier than others.
So how did I end up coming out of the closet and becoming a card-carrying libertarian? One day I realized that, having seen every episode of Star Trek, before I die I should read some of the great works of Western Civilization. I picked up Frederick Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. I was blown away, a brilliant work. Then I read John Locke’s Treatise of Two Governments. That was a tough one. I read It’s Dangerous to be Right When the Goverment is Wrong – pithy saying by Voltaire, book by Judge Andrew Napolitano. And I read Atlas Shrugged – although I’m not an Ayn Rand fanboy (I disagree with many things she said) this book has some real insight into the human condition. If you want to understand more about this philosophy, I wouldn’t go this route unless you are a total wonk – start with Healing Our World. And then maybe Napolitano’s work.
A lot of people have espoused some wacky ideas and called them libertarian. For most libertarians, some of the key issues of the day are foreign policy (we don’t think our government should go around killing people, especially not on a daily basis for 15 years), and ending the War on Drugs (we don’t think our goverment should go around killing and maiming our own citizens, especially poor people of color, for non-violent crimes). Libertarians opposed slavery from the beginning. Libertarians supported gay marriage long before it was cool and trendy. Libertarians are anti-war and anti-violence. Libertarians supported equal rights for women. And so on. Maybe those seem like cold-hearted, mean, selfish policy positions to you. I hope not.
In any event, societies are incredibly complex, these issues are deep and interconnected. I can’t go into everything that is libertarianism here. And silly counter-arguments like “what if my neighbor is building an atomic weapon in his basement?” are not really useful. We are talking about a principle here. Libertarianism isn’t a watertight philosophy of everything that has a clear and unambiguous answer to every situation. It’s not a computer algorithm for human behavior. But it is a set of principles to aspire to, a constellation to steer by. From what I’ve understood in this life, it’s the most humane, gentle, and dignified such philosophy that I’ve come across.
Divergent Nexus 