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Citation: The New Leader Feb 10 1997, v80, n2, p13(2)
Author: Clausen, Christopher
Title: The Libertarian heresy. by Christopher Clausen
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COPYRIGHT 1997 American Labor Conference on International Affairs
Libertarianism has been getting some respectful attention lately in the
press and on the talk shows. At first glance, it is hard to see why. The
Libertarian Party has been on the ballot in most states for 20 years and has
yet to elect a governor or a Congressman; its Presidential candidate in 1996,
Harry Browne, never got beyond C-SPAN. And no wonder: The party's platform
calls for privatizing Social Security, the Interstate Highway System, and just
about every other government function. We live in an age of budget-cutting and
downsizing, but there are limits to what even adventurous young voters in the
computer industry (a relative hotbed of Libertarian supporters) will go for.
Even though the party is probably stuck forever in the pack of eccentric
historical also-rans, the philosophy of libertarianism has a contemporary
appeal that may be giving it some real political influence. The iron law of
American electoral politics--third parties never go anywhere--has a corollary:
The ideology of a third party, if it fills a need, will be taken over by the
Democrats, the Republicans, or both. That's what happened when the Populists,
at the turn of the century, bequeathed social concerns to the Democrats that
still carry weight. A little later the Progressive Party left its reformist
influence on both Republicans and Democrats, especially in the Midwest.
Libertarianism may be reaching this stage. Three new evangelizing books
about it from major publishers have almost nothing to say about the
Libertarian Party, clearly regarded as a lost cause by the authors. Their
concern is to lay out the principles of libertarianism as a new political
philosophy--or rather an old one whose time has come back after a series of
failed experiments with big government at home and abroad.
"Libertarianism," says David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato
Institute, in Libertariarism: A Primer (Free Press, 314 pp., $23.00), "may be
regarded as a political philosophy that applies the ideas of classical
liberalism consistently, following liberal arguments to conclusions that would
limit the role of government more strictly and protect individual freedom more
fully than other classical liberals would. Most of the time I use liberal in
its traditional sense; I call today's misnamed liberals welfare-state liberals
or social democrats."
Since classical liberalism--especially its belief in laissez-faire
economics--is a major element in modern American conservatism, journalists
often describe libertarians as merely a subspecies of conservatives. Perhaps
some libertarians can be accurately pigeonholed that way, but Boaz isn't among
them. For instance, his book endorses not only unregulated capitalism and an
end to the welfare state, which most conservatives support, but homosexual
marriage, the right to abortion, and freedom to publish pornography, which are
anathema to conservatives.
He traces the genealogy of modern libertarianism through Thomas Paine,
Thomas Jefferson, the antislavery and women's rights movements, as well as the
early 20th-century Austrian School of laissez-faire economists. This line of
descent looks odd, Boaz would say, only because American welfare-state
liberals inconsistently support individual freedom in private life but oppose
it in economic matters. The Libertarian Reader (Free Press, 458 pp., $27.50),
edited by Boaz as a companion to the Primer, further documents the liberal
traditions his kind of libertarianism grew out of.
"In the libertarian view," he maintains, "we have an infinite number of
rights contained in one natural right. That one fundamental human right is the
right to live your life as you choose so long as you don't infringe on the
equal rights of others." This live-and-let-live philosophy is anything but
conservative and has a lot of resonance today, when most of the moral
authorities that maintained discipline even 40 years ago have become so weak.
It undoubtedly benefits, too, from the disdain government is held in at the
moment.
Some conservatives are alarmed. Robert Bartley, editorial page editor of
the Wall Street Journal, recently worried that "Among both Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs and Internet youths, a rather doctrinaire libertarianism already
prevails. Precisely because these groups are inmost ways so admirable, their
influence is bound to grow. They will be a wholesome force toward smaller and
more open government, lower taxes, faster economic growth, school vouchers,
term limits.... Yet it is also true that the most worrisome problems of
society today revolve around the erosion of social controls that have
traditionally enforced morality."
Religion, nationalism, family values, and other "social controls" would
have no public role in a libertarian utopia, though anybody who wanted to
practice them privately would be welcome to. Conflicts over prayer in the
public schools, or the sponsorship of offensive art by the National Endowment
for the Arts, could never arise because there wouldn't be any public schools
or NEA. Government would have few functions beyond protecting individual
rights or, as libertarians often put it, preventing force and fraud.
Everything else would be done by the market, "civil society" (all the
voluntary associations that people enter into spontaneously), or individuals.
"The real distinction," Boaz states, "is between associations that are
coercive (the state) and those that are natural or voluntary (everything
else)."
The possibility that it might take a fairly sizable government to guarantee
266 million people their rights rarely occurs to libertarians. To them
government is almost always an oppressor, never a liberating force. While they
support racial equality and sometimes praise the civil rights movement, they
ignore the fact that segregation was finally ended by the power of the Federal
government, which on some occasions used armed troops. Charles Murray, who is
best known for his earlier writings on welfare and IQ, maintains in What It
Means to Be a Libertarian (Broadway Books, 178 pp., $20.00), that the civil
rights legislation of the 1950s and '60s was unnecessary: "The good effects of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were bumps on top of a much larger, more
powerful, and healthier trend that was occurring in civil society and would
have continued if the government had done nothing. The price of those bumps
was to give a moral crusade over to the bureaucrats."
Murray has a long history of saying incendiary things and then claiming to
have been misunderstood; maybe he simply can't help himself. This kind of
assertion--that the greatest recent, long-over-due success of government
action was all a mistake--can't possibly help the reputation of either Murray
himself or libertarianism. It emphasizes the weakest point of the libertarian
argument--that government should never be strong enough to prevent the rich,
the powerful, or a majority from sticking it to the poor, the weak, an
unpopular minority, or anybody else who gets in the way. Nobody who seriously
believes in individual rights can describe the civil rights struggle as Murray
does without inspiring suspicions of either bad faith or abysmal ignorance.
It's only fair to point out that not all libertarians are so casual about
hard-won liberties. After denouncing racially motivated crime, Boaz declares,
"White people bear a special burden in this area. Their commitment to a
color-blind society is often suspect. Conservatives such as Strom Thurmond and
Jesse Helms never complained when black children were bused past white schools
to more distant black schools, or when voting rights and good jobs were
reserved for whites, so their current denunciations of busing and racial
preferences ring hollow."
Another vulnerability of libertarianism is its idealization of unregulated
capitalism. For Boaz, Murray and their parishioners, the Great Depression
never happened. The New Deal was a gratuitous plan to enlarge the power of
government. Except where government interferes, the economy is a model of
perfect competition--unhappy workers can always move to another job or
dissatisfied consumers to another product, and everyone enjoys the benefits of
unlimited progress.
It would be wrong, though, to conclude that libertarianism is just a front
for the interests of big (or for that matter small) business. Libertarians'
naivete about free enterprise is of a piece with their sunny concept of human
nature. "The genius of free human beings," announces Murray, "is that, given
responsibility, they join together to take care of each other--to be their
brothers' keepers when their brother needs help." Boaz is scarcely less
buoyant: "We look forward to a world bound together by free trade, global
communications and cultural exchange." Far from sounding conservative, these
writers remind you of 19th-century utopian anarchists. Abolish the State and
the Garden of Eden will return.
Heresy has sometimes been defined as a simple, valid point carried to an
implausible extreme. In case the implausibility seems more obvious than the
validity, it's worth emphasizing that the libertarian emphasis on individual
liberty is admirable and important in an overcollectivized world where
resurgent group identities sometimes threaten to overshadow it. American
governments (not just the Federal one) really have gotten too big and
intrusive; some social problems have been made worse by programs that were
meant to solve them. The Marxist idea, still encountered here and there, that
individual liberty is a bourgeois superstition an enlightened society would
properly sacrifice for economic advancement now seems both misguided and
quaint; bourgeois societies with individual liberty do better economically and
have less poverty than any other societies.
Exactly how much government is enough is a quantitative problem that can't
be settled by the application of a single principle. How much regulation of
food and drugs is cost-effective? What kinds of government protection of the
environment do we need, with what impact on private property? How should
social "entitlement" programs be adapted for the next century? Contrary to
what libertarians sometimes say, these are not all-or-nothing choices. They
properly involve a lot of compromises and tradeoffs. What libertarianism
rightly reminds us is that individual liberty, universally defined, remains
the most valuable element in the American political tradition.
The questions libertarians raise are always urgent. Early in the second
Clinton Administration they may have a special timeliness as the conflict
between those who want to extend and those who want to reduce the reach of
government approaches one of its periodic climaxes. Libertarians bring the
clarity of exaggeration to a struggle many politicians wage with a minimum of
candor. If their influence continues to grow, both big-government liberals and
values-oriented conservatives had better watch out.
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