Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green:
James Craig Green said:
This concept of property originated in some of those primitive tribes when individuals claimed possessions for themselves as against the collective ownership of their groups. Based on individual initiative, labor, and innovation, some were successful at establishing a separate, private ownership role for themselves. [...]
Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.
The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards.
The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.
Some people aren't much bothered by libertarianism's lack of real-world success. After all, they argue, if no one tried anything new, nothing would ever change.
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It's the libertarians, not me, who stand in the way of such accountability. If I point out examples of nations partially following libertarian views-- we'll get to this below-- I'm told that they don't count: only Pure Real Libertarianism Of My Own Camp can be tested.
Again, all-or-nothing thinking generally goes with intellectual fraud. If a system is untestable, it's because its proponents fear testing. By contrast, I'm confident enough in liberal and scientific values that I'm happy to see even partial adoption. Even a little freedom is better than dictatorship. Even a little science is better than ideology.
An untested political system unfortunately has great rhetorical appeal. Since we can't see it in action, we can't point out its obvious faults, while the ideologue can be caustic about everything that has actually been tried, and which has inevitably fallen short of perfection.
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At this point some libertarian readers are pumping their hands in the air like a piston, anxious to explain that their ideal isn't Rothbard or von Mises or Hayek, but the Founding Fathers.
Nice try. Everybody wants the Founders on their side; but it was a different country back then-- 95% agricultural, low density, highly homogenous, primitive in technology-- and modern libertarianism simply doesn't apply. (The OED's citations of the word for the time are all theological.)
All American political movements have their roots in the 1700s-- indeed, in the winning side, since Loyalist opinion essentially disappeared. We are all-- liberals, conservatives, libertarians-- against the Georgian monarchy and for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It's also worth pointing out that the Founders' words were nobler than their deeds. Most were quite comfortable with slave-owning, for instance. No one worried about women's consent to be governed. Washington's own administration made it a crime to criticize the government. And as Robert Allen Rutland reminds us...
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The process of giving life to our constitutional rights has largely been the work of liberals. On the greatest fight of all, to treat blacks as human beings, libertarians supported the other side.
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Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it
The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition. The libertarian voter is chiefly exercised over taxes, regulation, and social programs; the libertarian wing of the Republican party has, for forty years, gone along with the war on drugs, corporate welfare, establishment of dictatorships abroad, and an alliance with theocrats. Christian libertarians like Ron Paul want God in the public schools and are happy to have the government forbid abortion and gay marriage.
I never saw the libertarians objecting to Bush Sr. mocking the protection of civil rights, or to Ken Starr's government inquiry into politicians' sex lives.
If this is changing, as Bush's never-ending "War on Terror" expands the powers of government, demonizes dissent, and enmeshes the country in military crusades and nation-building, as the Republicans push to remove the checks and balances that remain in our government system--
if libertarians come to realize that Republicans and not Democrats are the greater threat to liberty-- I'd be delighted.
But for that, you know, you have to vote against Bush.
A belief in social liberties means little if you vote for a party that clearly intends to restrict them.
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Let's look at some cases that came within spitting distance of the libertarian ideal. Some libertarians won't like these, because they are not Spotless Instances of the Free Utopia; but as I've said, nothing is proved by science fiction.
If complete economic freedom and absence of government is a cure-all, partial economic freedom and limited government should be a cure-some.
At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted-- and it did. The result was robber barons, monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests.
The New Deal itself was a response to crisis (though by no means an unprecedented one; it wasn't much worse than the Gilded Age depressions). A quarter of the population was out of work. Five thousand banks failed, destroying the savings of 9 million families. Steel plants were operating at 12% capacity. Banks foreclosed on a quarter of Mississippi's land. Wall Street was discredited by insider trading and collusion with banks at the expense of investors. Farmers were breaking out into open revolt; miners and jobless city workers were rioting.
Or take Russia in the decade after the fall of Communism, as advised by free-market absolutists like Jeffrey Sachs. Russian GDP declined 50% in five years. The elite grabbed the assets they could and shuffled them out of Russia so fast that IMF loans couldn't compensate. In 1994 alone, 600 businessmen, journalists, and politicians were murdered by gangsters. Russia lacked a working road system, a banking system, anti-monopoly regulation, effective law enforcement, or any sort of safety net for the elderly and the jobless. Inflation reached 2250% in 1992. Central government authority effectively disappeared in many regions.
By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.
Today's Russia is moving back toward authoritarianism under Putin. Again, this should dismay libertarians: apparently, given a little freedom, many people will demand less. You'd better be careful about setting up that utopia; ten years further on it may be taken over by authoritarians.
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The newest testing ground for laissez-faire is present-day America, from Ronald Reagan on.
Remove the New Deal, and the pre-New Deal evils clamor to return. Reagan removed the right to strike; companies now fire strikers, outsource high-wage jobs and replace them with dead-end near-minimum-wage service jobs. Middle-class wages are stagnating-- or plummeting, if you consider that working hours are rising. Companies are rushing to reestablish child labor in the Third World.
Under liberalism, productivity increases benefited all classes-- poverty rates declined from over 30% to under 10% in the thirty years after World War II, while the economy more than quadrupled in size.
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Thirty years ago, managers accepted that they operated as much for their workers, consumers, and neighbors as for themselves. Some economists (notably Michael Jensen and William Meckling) decided that the only stakeholders that mattered were the stock owners-- and that management would be more accountable if they were given massive amounts of stock.
Not surprisingly, CEOs managed to get the stock without the accountability-- they're obscenely well paid whether the company does well or it tanks-- and the obsession with stock price led to mass layoffs, short-term thinking, and the financial dishonesty at WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, HealthSouth, and elsewhere.
The nature of our economic system has changed in the last quarter-century, and people haven't understood it yet. People over 30 or so grew up in an environment where the rich got more, but everyone prospered. When productivity went up, the rich got richer-- we're not goddamn communists, after all-- but everybody's income increased.
If you were part of the World War II generation, the reality was that you had access to subsidized education and housing, you lived better every year, and you were almost unimaginably better off than your parents.
We were a middle-class nation, perhaps the first nation in history where the majority of the people were comfortable. This infuriated the communists (this wasn't supposed to happen). The primeval libertarians who cranky about it as well, but the rich had little reason to complain-- they were better off than ever before, too.
Conservatives-- nurtured by libertarian ideas-- have managed to change all that. When productivity rises, the rich now keep the gains; the middle class barely stays where it is; the poor get poorer. We have a ways to go before we become a Third World country, but the model is clear.
The goal is an impoverished majority, and a super-rich minority with no effective limitations on its power or earnings. We'll exchange the prosperity of 1950s America for that of 1980s Brazil.
Despite the intelligence of many of its supporters, libertarianism is an instance of the simplest (and therefore silliest) type of politics: the single-villain ideology. Everything is blamed on the government. (One libertarian, for instance, reading my list of the evils of laissez-faire above, ignored everything but "gunboats". It's like Gary Larson's cartoon of "What dogs understand", with the dog's name replaced with "government".)
The advantage of single-villain ideologies is obvious: in any given situation you never have to think hard to find out the culprit. The disadvantages, however, are worse: you can't see your primary target clearly-- hatred is a pair of dark glasses-- and you can't see the problems with anything else.
It's a habit of mind that renders libertarianism unfalsifiable, and thus irrelevant to the world. Everything gets blamed on one institution; and because we have no real-world example where that agency is absent, the claims can't be tested.
<<skipping REALLY GOOD stuff on markets here, read at the link for more>>
A proven solution to most of these ills is liberalism.
For fifty years liberals governed this country, generating unprecedented prosperity, and making this the first solidly middle-class nation.
If you want prosperity for the many-- and why should the many support any other goal?-- you need a balance between government and business.
Perhaps the most communicable libertarian meme-- and one of the most mischievous-- is the attempt to paint taxation as theft.
First, it's dishonest. Most libertarians theoretically accept government for defense and law enforcement. (There are some absolutists who don't even believe in national defense; I guess they want to have a libertarian utopia for awhile, then hand it over to foreign invaders.)
Now, national defense and law enforcement cost money: about 22% of the 2002 budget-- 33% of the non-social-security budget. You can't swallow that and maintain that all taxes are bad. At least the cost of those functions is not "your money"; it's a legitimate charge for necessary services.
Americans enjoy the fruits of public scientific research, a well-educated job force, highways and airports, clean food, honest labelling, Social Security, unemployment insurance, trustworthy banks, national parks. Libertarianism has encouraged the peculiarly American delusion that these things come for free. It makes a philosophy out of biting the hand that feeds you.
Second, it leads directly to George Bush's financial irresponsibility.
Would a libertarian urge his family or his software company or his gun club to spend twice what it takes in? When libertarians maintain that irresponsibility among the poor is such a bad thing, why is it OK in the government?
It's no excuse to claim that libertarians didn't want the government to increase spending, as Bush has done. As you judge others, so shall you be judged.
Libertarians want to judge liberalism not by its goals (e.g. helping poor children) but by its alleged effects (e.g. teen pregnancy).
The easiest things in the world for a politician to do are to lower taxes and raise spending. By attacking the very concept of taxation, libertarians help politicians-- and the public-- to indulge their worst impulses.
Finally, it hides dependence on the government. The economic powerhouse of the US is still the Midwest, the Northeast, and California-- largely liberal Democratic areas. As Dean Lacy has pointed out, over the last decade, the blue states of 2004 paid $1.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received, while red states received $800 billion more than they paid.
Red state morality isn't just to be irresponsible with the money they pay as taxes; it's to be irresponsible with other people's money. It's protesting the concept of getting an allowance by stealing the other kids' money.
Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.
First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else-- love, humanity, justice.
I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don't need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don't need a cheering section; they are-- by definition-- not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It's the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.
Second, it's the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who's read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.
Third, and perhaps most common, it's the worldview of a provincial narcissist. As I've observed in my overview of the 20th century,
liberalism won its battles so thoroughly that people have forgotten why those battles were fought.
It's hard to read libertarians without concluding that they've never been out of the country-- perhaps never out of the suburbs.
They don't know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don't know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US;
they don't know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they've never experienced a depression; they've never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they've earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.
In short, they're spoiled, and they've evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." --Franklin D. Roosevelt
I have my own articles of faith. I think a political philosophy should
* benefit the entire population, not an elite of whatever flavor
* offer a positive vision, not just hatred for another philosophy
* rest on the best science and history can teach us, rather than science fiction
* be modified in the light of what works and what doesn't
* produce greater freedom and prosperity the closer a nation comes to it.
On all these counts, libertarianism simply doesn't stack up. Once people are able to be rational about politics, I expect them to toss it out as a practical failure and a moral mess.
