Forget Negativity--Libertarians for Positive Liberty?
Ronald Bailey | March 12, 2007, 12:15pm
My friend Jonah Goldberg, posting a blog item over at National Review, muses on what he sees as a momentous shift in libertarian thinking. Libertarians, he argues, have moved from primarily focusing on the struggle to keep the government out of our businesses and bedrooms to championing the maximization of our cultural and life choices. He points to economist Tyler Cowen's interesting observation that as wealth increases so too does government.
I can't help but note that it is not as though a lot of Jonah's conservative buddies have shown themselves to be overly concerned about the size and scope of government intrusion in our lives.
Anyway, are libertarians in danger of selling their liberty for the mess of pottage of mere material wealth and comfort? Discuss.
Guy Montag | March 12, 2007, 2:09pm | #
So, what is supposed to be wrong with what Mr. Goldberg wrote that touched off all of the snotty e-mail to him?
What makes Lindsey's overture significant is that he comes from the branch of libertarianism that actually matters: economics. Economic libertarians, under the leadership of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, have been so successful in the conservative movement — and the conservative movement has been so successful because of them — that "economic conservative" and "libertarian" have long been synonyms. But here's Lindsey, an economic libertarian par excellence, trying to convince liberals that free markets are "progressive." He wants liberals to accept the fact that libertarian means achieve liberal cultural ends. Rich societies become more tolerant of sexual freedom and civil rights, and invest more in education and the environment — and societies become rich by following the advice of the Friedmans and Hayeks. Lindsey proposes finding common ground with liberals on issues from agriculture subsidies (which are bad for the environment) to tax reform. His policy proposals would warm the cockles of any NR editor's heart, and we should wish him luck.
Other topics, like getting government out of marriage, are difficult, I will admit, to explain to Libertarians, Liberals, Leftists and Conservatives.
The biggest problem I have encountered there is that all but the most hard-core of the Libertarians of the mentioned set use the same tactic for getting their "lifestyle" (anything, not just marriage) recognized: more laws and more government.
Social Conservatives want laws against behavior, Leftists want laws on damn near everything including the drugs they want, Liberals want laws against speech they do not approve of, the list goes on.
Perhaps I am seeing this in an odd way, but Libertarians are the only
positive ones in the political spectrum.
I find the Leftist method to be quite negative: 'He gets the drugs he wants at the drug store, so I want pot in a government drug store, the laws are unfair so we need more of them.'
From the Conservatives we get: 'We need more laws to prevent people from getting hooked on bad drugs.' (as Penn Gillette would respond: 'Maybe we just need those laws to keep YOU from getting hooked on bad drugs, but not me.')
The Libertarian position, as I understand it, is the quite positive: 'Just make it all legal and don't expect everybody to join you.'
The same can be applied to economics, with both the "Left" and the "Right" wanting endless regulation, but they just have different talking points.
Actually, I am not buying that Libertarianism can even be negative. Even the most militant "big L" thing I can think of is "Leave us alone and nobody gets hurt." What is so negative about that?
JasonL | March 12, 2007, 2:10pm | #
The use of 'positive freedom' is being confused in relation to libertarian understanding of rights.
It is good that more people can do more things as we all get wealthier. It is a legitimate way to argue for libertarianism when you are talking to a utilitarian who does not agree that negative liberty is a first order good in itself.
If more people at the end of the day being able to do more things is the outcome we call positive freedom, that is fine, but note that this has never been the point of dispute between liberals and libertarians. The dispute is that liberals believe in prescriptive measures to produce this outcome, and many of these measures are, from a libertarian perspective, doomed to create greater harm to liberty as a whole.
Why can't you replace a right of property with a benevolent resource allocation from the government? Well, one reason is that there is a right in property - it is immoral to take from a person the hours of their life spent producing by just confiscating their product.
But there is another reason. The power of freely exchanged property produces better outcomes for everyone at the end of the day. If you trust a government to be benevolent, you are a fool. If you think a government is wiser or remotely as flexible than a market's billions of transactions, you don't appreciate what the market is really doing. If the government allocates in a way that a market would not, it must be understood that there is an up front cost to that decision - something is not being made that would have been made and something is being funded that would not have been funded. You are up front harming people to help them, so you'd better be sure what you are doing.
I read Cowen's argument to be something like, "Look, there are likely types of government action that can amplify positive outcomes without causing a death spiral of inefficiency. Regulation of pollutants, done right, is one of those areas. There is a real commons problem and we need a way to address it, so lets we as libertarians influence the debate to prevent people not sensitive to the harms interference causes from being the only ones to shape policy."
D.A. Ridgely | March 12, 2007, 2:17pm | #
As an initial reaction, I'd say the apparent contradiction lies in two confusions. First, a confusion between correlation and causation and, second, a confusion between more government and more government oppression.
Except for our anarcho-capitalist friends, most libertarians would agree that at least a minimal government is necessary not only for (minimally) ordered maximum liberty but also for the creation of wealth that such liberty enables. However, there is little evidence that more government, per se, causes greater wealth. Moreover, as others have noted, there are any number of contemporary and historical examples of societies with lots of government oppression and little wealth.
Totalitarian states may have massive governments, but such governments are either indifferent to or abysmally incapable of providing services to their subjects. Contemporary Western governments are massive, too, at least by libertarian standards, but their growth has come not so much from the inherently oppressive potential of the state to coerce but from their ability, however inefficiently, to provide services to a sufficient number of citizens to gain their support.
But, if anything, this has been made possible only because such citizens have been wealthy enough, at least by historical standards, to
afford unnecessary government. That is, they are acting as consumers, albeit foolish consumers, in purchasing more and more government as luxury goods.
The libertarian assertion that they are being foolish in that regard is grounded in three separate concerns. First, the inevitable effect of even democratic government is that it coerces those who do not consent to any or all of its (dubious) services. Second, the larger and more powerful government is, the more likely it is to become coercive even toward its supporters. Third, oppressive or not, it is also inherently wasteful and inefficient.
Finally, to answer Mr. Bailey's question at least a bit more directly, it should come as little surprise that people will too often gladly sell their liberty for at least the promise of material security and no surprise at all that people with the means to do so will spend their resources, including both liberty and wealth, foolishly.
