Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and
sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political
philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual
freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government.
Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do
things society presently restrains, like make more money,
have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent
formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy
analysis, a foundation in American history, and the
application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of
society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth,
as a whole it is a seductive mistake.
There are many varieties of libertarianism, from
natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to
anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some
of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most
of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I
recently heard a respected pundit insist that classical
liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray area where it is
not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But
because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at
cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is
a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to
allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar
libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a
refined version of their doctrine when challenged
philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.
This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the
Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one
can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then
libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run
it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact
requires both individualism and collectivism, both
selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism,
libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security
of a complete a priori account of the political good without
the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it
aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to
economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and
a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound
by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very
simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only
good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a
prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live
without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it
makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in
that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s
wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things
imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from
relations that we are either born into without choice or,
once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk
away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity,
and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real
people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is
not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods
to it through the concept of choice, claiming that
everything that is good is so because we choose to partake
of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly
embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by
denying that anything is good by nature, independently of
whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by
nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its
logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely
chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at
all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing
tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a
Churchill.
Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual
choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some,
like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are
inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some,
but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient.
Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back
to the factory that emitted it and sue?
Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at
the point at which it starts to impinge upon another
person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this
happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm
none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the
behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography:
libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone
doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he
can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been
vulgarized by it.
Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own
theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while
declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout
the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits
they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental
failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic
temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever
tried, just like Marxism.
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if
a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to
remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to
protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly
foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to
become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What
if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse
to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone
freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to
deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign
labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote
for socialistic wealth redistribution?
In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of
more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of
running down accumulated social capital and storing up
problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true
in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the
libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any
particular question.
Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it
tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the
day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in
fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited
freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which
makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want
is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even
better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional
liberties. There is no need to embrace outright
libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of
freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the
USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.
Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom
leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism
would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has
been possible at certain times in history to do just that by
assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism
degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the
problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting
the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific
laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It
likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.
Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like
legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society
because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined
by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws
that make it difficult to fire or evict people were
abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable
behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical
proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means
libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society
continues to protect people from the consequences of their
actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific
freedoms is illegitimate. And since society does so protect
people, libertarianism is an illegitimate moral position
until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred.
And is society really wrong to protect people against the
negative consequences of some of their free choices? While
it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of
their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid
ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes.
People are allowed to become millionaires, but they are
taxed. They are allowed to go broke, but they are not then
forced to starve. They are deprived of the most extreme
benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most extreme
costs. The libertopian alternative would be perhaps a more
glittering society, but also a crueler one.
Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute
freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian
governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute
freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise,
as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet
people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise
their freedom not to be libertarians.
The political corollary of this is that since no electorate
will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could
never be achieved democratically but would have to be
imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather
puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other
philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for
other people impose their values on the rest of us.
Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is
the one true political philosophy and all others are false.
It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its
attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof
will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.
And if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect a
farrago of bizarre policies. Many support abolition of
government-issued money in favor of that minted by private
banks. But this has already been tried, in various epochs,
and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but
only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement
followed by the concentration of financial power in those
few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many
other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the empirical
record.
A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve
view of economics that seems to have stopped paying
attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880.
There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez
faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in
the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies,
while nations in which government has essentially lost
control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic
paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not
entail going to the opposite extreme.
Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse
the absence of government impingement upon freedom with
freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state,
individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful
individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are
not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World
tyranny.
Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity
of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine
nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon
sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and
work on Monday. They assume that if people are given
freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois
lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral
of gratification that were pounded into them as children
without their being free to refuse. They forget that for
much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely
results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and
pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon
inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into
barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint.
Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being
replaced by the external restraints of police and prison,
resulting in less freedom, not more.
This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper
problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but
little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment
is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism
is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to
use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free
choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the
cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom.
Conservatives should know better.
