Entries associated with the tag "Libertarianism":

Food for thought from former Bush adviser Michael Gerson in the Washington Post: 

"The two intellectually vital movements within the Republican Party today are libertarianism and Roman Catholic social thought ...

"Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules -- free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government -- asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread -- it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering. This obligation has never, in Jewish and Christian teaching, been purely private."

Ramesh Ponnuru offers some qualifications here, but doesn't challenge Gerson's basic point.

"All across the country, proprietors, landlords and residents associations are privately, voluntarily implementing smoking bans," says the Cato Institute's Tom Firey (surely no pun intended). "Because those actions are voluntary and private, market forces will lead to the provision of establishments and housing for both nonsmokers and smokers. This is fitting in a free society that values choice and respects the individual. It also protects public health -- people who don't want to be around tobacco smoke, whether out of health concerns or dislike of the smell and nuisance, don't ave to be around tobacco smoke.

"This legislation [banning smoking in apartments, as proposed in some California jurisdictions] does not respect individual choice and it is not motivated by concern for public health. It is social conservatism pure and simple -- some politicians want to use their office to impose their personal morality on other people."

My first thought was that this was a nice takedown of a characteristic liberal fallacy (all good things should be required by law), and a good example of how markets can promote live-and-let-live. My second thought was that it was also a nice example of a characteristic libertarian fallacy (we're all individuals with no more basic interdependency than a bunch of billiard balls).

How exactly does the market protect the health of smokers' children? I don't think that question refutes Cato's case, because not everything that's bad for kids can be outlawed without producing even worse effects -- but it does suggest that libertarians have a shallow understanding of the way people live together.

IOW, my decisions to smoke, or to leave my motorcycle helmet at home, rarely affect only me. Sometimes it's best to think and legislate as if they do, but exactly when is the question for political philosophers.

Former CIA Middle East officer Robert Baer in Time:

"Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking. And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. 'IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran.'"

Somewhere along here the Bush administration has gone from wilfully ignorant to batshit crazy. The lesson going back at least to World War II is that bombing doesn't make the bombed population love the bombers, it unites them behind their leaders, no matter how evil.

Speaking of wilful ignorance, Rick Perlstein corrects some right-wing lies about Vietnam here. More here if you need a refresher course.

Of course, the spectacle of a right-wing president tying his foolish war to a liberal president's foolish war is bound to make one look around for alternatives. I have said, and will say, a lot of harsh things about dogmatic libertarianism, but one question libertarians -- unlike conservatives -- can be counted on to ask is, "Is this war really necessary?" The other day the Cato Institute's Jonathan Logan put it this way:

"President Bush's strategy for Iraq amounts to playing for time and hoping for a miracle. Bizarrely, the president has now invoked the Vietnam analogy in an effort to shore updomestic support for the war by reminding us that bad things happened after we left. This is true. It is also worth remembering that U.S. soldiers stopped dying after we left, and that the 'dominoes' that were to have fallen didn't fall. The United States won the Cold War just a decade and a half later. Our defeat in Vietnam did not prevent victory in the Cold War, and defeat in Iraq will not ensure defeat in the struggle against terrorism."

If you've heard of Herbert Spencer at all, you probably know him as the original social Darwinist, a radical libertarian avant la lettre. Now, thanks to Steven Shapin's New Yorker review of a new biography, I know why today's libertarians don't like to talk about him. He understood their philosophy deeply and followed it to its logical conclusions:

"For Spencer, the 'fundamental law' governing social life could not be more obvious: 'Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.' Yet if the fundamental law was clear and coherent, its applications to the contingencies of social life were not, and this gap in Spencer’s scheme between principle and practice proved a fertile source of misunderstanding. For example, natural and moral law required that all people should compete on a level playing field, but in practice land and other property were inequitably distributed, as the result of ancient crimes. And so this supposedly laissez-faire writer advocated both a progressive death tax and the nationalization of land, projects that put him on the side of the socialists he so vigorously attacked. The role of the state was, ideally, supposed to be minimal, but the fundamental law also meant, for Spencer, that equal justice ought to be guaranteed, and this, in turn, underwrote proposals for a vast extension of systems of free legal aid, far in excess of anything we have today."

Spencer isn't inconsistent; his original principle cannot be consistently followed. His logic's impeccable, it just doesn't attract donations from greedbots.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has a long and high-quality review of arguments about libertarianism. Among other things he quotes Cosma Shalizi:

"On the one hand, the sanctity of private property and private contracts is held to be a matter of inalienable natural right, guaranteed by the fundamental facts of morality, if not a basic part of Objective Reality; capitalism is the Right Thing to Do. On the other hand, much effort is devoted to arguing that unfettered laissez-faire capitalism is also the economic system which will produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number, indeed for all, if only people would just see it."

In fact, of course, this is wishful thinking. Both "free markets" and government action have mixed records. Chicago's Democratic machine has been stifling economic growth and stealing from taxpayers for at least two generations of Daleys, and if anything it is more entrenched now than two generations ago. The makers of lead paint and cigarettes spent decades and killed and disabled many people long after they knew their products were dangerously toxic, and only government action has limited or ended this evil.

One washed-up movie actor to the contrary, government is neither always the solution nor always the problem. Duh.

Shalizi again:

"Now, if the empirical track-record of what are conventionally called free markets is decidedly mixed, there are three courses of action open to the libertarian. (1) Embrace the natural-liberty argument wholeheartedly, and say that we should adopt laissez-faire even when it hurts us, because it’s the right thing to do. Unsurprisingly, moral austerity in defense of liberty finds few takers, though it has some. (2) Argue that the empirical track-record of alternative economic arrangements is actually no better than that of free markets (that, e.g., every instance of market failure is at least matched by an instance of 'government failure'), so that’s a wash, and accordingly we should go with the market solution, since that respects natural liberty. (3) Argue that, appearances to the contrary, free markets really are optimal."

The first two options are intellectually honest; the third is not, but it remains popular, as Shalizi says, in part because "it can be well-paid."

Campaign finance reform has failed. It hasn't gotten money out of politics, quite the opposite. But it has stifled political speech, the heart of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court this term will hear a challenge to the part of McCain-Feingold that prohibits corporations and labor unions and nonprofit advocates from mentioning a candidate’s name in an ad 30 days before a primary election and 60 days before a general election. Now what?

Mark Schmitt was in the thick of the fight for campaign finance reform. In a long article in the spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (free registration required but worth it), he looks back on it with an honesty and clarity that reformers of all stripes would do well to emulate. Instead of hugging McCain-Feingold ever closer and vilifying those who find ways around it, he reexamines what he was trying to do and why it didn't work. (This kind of reflection is vanishingly rare on any issue or from any point in the political spectrum; if you know of other examples, I'm all ears.)

Reformers wanted to remove "bad money" from the system. When I wrote about this for the Reader July 25, 1997, they acknowledged that they'd have to keep plugging one new loophole after another. Schmitt points out that whoever's not plugged yet becomes very powerful, whether it's movie stars or bloggers.

"And even if you could restrict every avenue, would you want to? The goal of political reform should be to expand the range of choices and voices in the system." Given the emergence of the netroots and more political involvement generally, he recycles the old ACLU idea of "floors without ceilings" -- public funding not tied to spending limits. He likes New York City's system, where small campaign contributions receive a four-to-one match, allowing the less affluent to speak the money language a little louder, without limiting the speech of the affluent.

This subject is never going to be easy, because Americans believe both in democracy (where every one counts for one and not more than one) and in capitalism (where the wealthy can own whatever they can buy). Those ideals are in tension with each other. What I like about Schmitt is that he has learned something from libertarian skeptics on the mechanics, without capitulating to their desire that almost all politics be subsumed under economics.

"Don't build complex systems that put government in the position of trying to equalize all resources or ban all contributions," says Schmitt now -- build simple ones that expand access.

Ross Douthat at the American Scene has an interesting take on Michael Tanner's new book from the Cato Institute, Leviathan on the Right: 

"The inconvenient truth, for writers like Tanner, is that anti-welfare state libertarianism remains enormously unpopular with American voters, and so fiscal libertarianism can only have a place at the political table if it weds itself to something like an Irving Kristol-style neoconservatism, and takes pride (as it should, given the correlation of forces pushing for ever-larger government) in keeping America's public sector from swelling to the size of Europe's, while seizing every opportunity -- as in the welfare debates of the 1990s -- to make the government that we do have run more smoothly."

Hmmm, a conservative with a brain. This would explain why my extreme right-wing Congresscritter (involuntarily retired in November) always sent out literature that said, in essence, what can the government do for you? Dishonest, but wise politics.

Indiana is best known for a lame Republican vice president (Quayle) and an invertebrate Democratic senator (Evan Bayh). But other politicians are expanding, not shrinking, the range of public policy options on the table.

The state's governor (a former Cheney administration budget official) has leased the Indiana toll road to the same Spanish-Australian consortium that's running the Chicago Skyway (he's taken some political lumps for it, not necessarily for good reasons). A similar arrangement may be the only way the much needed (or is it unwanted?) Illiana Expressway will get built.

Confronted with a similar dilemma, the state legislature is considering a radically different approach. Alarmed that NiSource, the holding company for the Northwest Indiana Public Service Company, is thinking of selling off the electric utility, it's moving in the direction of enabling local governments to buy NIPSCO. A committee of the house of representatives has reported out a bill that LaPorte County Commission president Barb Huston on Friday described as "an early victory in the fight for public power."

Read the story by Rick Richards in the Michigan City News-Dispatch (free registration required; additional coverage here). It's now possible to say in public that government, with all its failings, might serve the people of northwest Indiana better than an out-of-state holding company that can't tell Gary from Grayslake and couldn't care less. (I'm not convinced that government actually can, but the threat of an alternative seems to be the only thing that keeps big-time capitalists honest.)

With capitalist, socialist, and libertarian ideas all in play, things are sure to get interesting. (In Indiana, as in Illinois, the fates of Chicago and northwest Indiana will be worked out in the statehouses, for better or worse.)

Martha Nussbaum, a University of Chicago political philosopher, finds few opportunities to think carefully in public in this country because "the media are so sensationalistic and so anti-intellectual.... The New York Times op-ed page is very dumbed down, and I no longer even bother trying to get something published there, because they don't like anything that has a complicated argument."

But thanks to the Internet, even Americans can read what she thinks in a long interview in Eurozine, where, among other things, she contrasts liberalism and libertarianism.

"It's a hallmark of liberalism that ideas of choice and freedom are really very, very important.  Of course I think one has to stress that we don't have choice if people are just left to their own devices. The state has to act positively to create the conditions for choice. I think the libertarian position is actually quite incoherent.

"If you go out into the rural areas of Bihar in India, then you see what 'negative liberty' [a libertarian ideal] comes to. Total chaos, where nothing is being done, where there are no roads, no clean water supply, no electricity, and therefore where no one can do anything, no one has anything. I am sure my colleague Richard Epstein will agree, up to a point, that a state that's going to create liberty has got to act, has at least got to protect property rights and contracts and have a police force and a fire department. But then why draw the line at that? Why not also say that the State has to create public education, has to create the systems of social welfare that makes it possible for people to access health care, unemployment benefits, and so on? So I don't see any principled way of dividing those different spheres of state action.

"I have no objection to saying that the State could sometimes delegate part of its function to the private sphere when it judges that that's sufficient, but I do want to say that the State is the one that bears the final responsibility. The State is a system for the allocation of human basic entitlements. Its job is to promote justice and wellbeing for human beings; if it's simply delegated to private industry and that doesn't work, then the State hasn't done its job."

One short corollary: the people in charge of privatizing welfare or education or hurricane relief have to actually care that those jobs are done right, so that they won't hesitate to unprivatize them as needed.

(Hat tip to Butterflies & Wheels.)

Sam Smith at Undernews asks the unaskable: why is the military sacred? He prefers the teachings of Jesus Christ and midwestern socialist Eugene Debs, who said, "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination."

George Schmidt may be a ranter, but you would be too if you knew what he knows: "Problems are festering or growing at every general high school on the west and south sides right now. And the cause of the increase in those problems, this year and for the last three school years, has been the school-closing and 'Renaissance' policies of CPS." All the details are at the District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog.

"Give everyone a personal carbon ration. If you run out, buy it from someone else," says Treehugger, summarizing the strong global-warming medicine prescribed by George Monbiot the UK Guardian.

Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense tees off on libertarians who cling to a 60-year-old scripture: "When Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom that the growth of government spending was a threat to freedom, he had an excuse: at that time there was no evidence to the contrary."

Dudes, I swear he means it as a compliment!  Bill McKibben on the new WorldChanging book: "Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation."

Orac at Respectful Insolence calls the Chicago Tribune's Sunday story on alternative medicine full of a "little too much credulity." For one thing, personal testimonials, "with few exceptions, do not constitute useful data regarding the efficacy of a therapy."

Ezra Rosser of American University Washington College of Law has a forthcoming law-review paper online, "Obligations of Privilege," in which he asks a forbidden question:

"The contrast between the deserving and undeserving poor is found in hundreds of law review articles, but the rich are not subjected to such categorization. The deserving poor are thought to be those who are married, work hard, and limit the size of their families. The poor who are unmarried, are unemployed, and need help supporting their children are considered undeserving. But, as commonly conceived, the rich are considered deserving regardless of what they do or the characteristics of their families.  . . .

"While conservatives tend to demonize and vilify the poor, liberals' welfare discourse 'seeks to avoid blaming . . . poor people themselves,' and consequently, stories of a poor person's laziness or other undeserving traints are 'simply ignored.' But with very few exceptions conservatives and liberals alike take for granted the moral worth and desert of the rich."

Rosser is prying at the weakest point of the libertarian edifice by calling attention to the egregious lie Americans tell themselves: "I did it myself with nobody's help." Of course, nobody does it all by themselves -- we all benefit from inheritances and luck of all kinds, from education (for which nobody pays the full cost), and from growing up in a society that isn't unendurably polluted or unstable. If anybody ought to "give back" because of this, shouldn't everybody?

You can download the whole thing here, or see some critical discussion here.

I think everyone should get basic health care.  Does that mean I think we have the right to basic health care?  Not necessarily, because saying you have a right to X isn't just a more emphatic way of saying X is a good thing.

Bart Hinkle explains in the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch:

"Rights summon corresponding and irresistable duties. For instance -- hypothetically speaking -- if receiving timely medical treatment is an inalienable right, and a shortage of nurses and orderlies is causing unacceptable delays, then there would be a social obligation to draft people into service as nurses and orderlies, whether they wanted to become nurses and orderlies or not. Why? Because, as legal theorist Ronald Dworkin puts it, rights are trumps—the demands of rights outweigh all competing demands. But surely people also have a right not to be forced into servitude. So something has to give."  (Hat tip to Café Hayek, where most commenters fail to grasp the distinction, perhaps because they oppose universal health care on other grounds already.)

So far so good.  But Hinkle and his libertarian buddies aren't content to make a clarifying distinction. 

"What has to give is the notion of 'positive rights,' as Isaiah Berlin called them—the right to things, as opposed to 'negative' rights from things, most of which boil down to the same thing: the right not to be messed with.  You have a right to freedom of speech, but that negative right not to be messed with while speaking imposes no particular obligation on my part. My only duty is not to interfere with you, which requires nothing. To say, on the other hand, that you have a right to (for instance) housing implies that, if you lack a house, I have an obligation to build one for you, and that if I do not, then I should be made to."  

This extension proves too much -- it would lead to the conclusion, for instance, that no one who is arrested should have the right to be represented by a lawyer.  Mmm -- might lead to drafting people to be lawyers.  Can't have that.  How would Mr. Hinkle wiggle out of that one?

(Some references that go deeper are at Wikipedia, including the contention that the distinction between positive and negative rights in general is a linguistic will-o'-the-wisp.)

The MSM and blogs are coevolving into . . . who knows what. I'll leave the details for the techies to sort out in the future, but right now no one with even a passing interest in politics can keep up with the conversation without reading certain blogs--or talking to someone who does.

• In Illinois, Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and its cousin Illinoize--a metablog incorporating many points of view--are the best. This morning Miller drew on Tribune reporting to make clear the fact that Gov. Blagojevich's administration is setting up the same defense that Mayor Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich tried. Sorich claimed he only made "recommendations." That defense didn't save him, and Miller thinks it's unlikely to work for Blago.

• In the U.S., Brad De Long's Semi-Daily Journal is a gateway drug. Thursday morning he drew on New York Times analysis and other sources to explain why the upset of incumbent Senator Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary was an uprising of "irate moderates." In the process he pulverized what little is left of Washington Post columnist David Broder's reputation.

• For those who'd rather think about politics than commit it, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a splendid post ("The Libertarian Vice") explaining how libertarians often beg the question: "The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. . . . But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The interstate highway system in the U.S. was a high-return investment. In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship. . . . It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us. One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal. This possibility makes libertarians nervous, thus their desire to fix the quality of government in advance of making an argument."  Oh, just read the whole thing.  (FYI:  He links to his May 2, 2005, post on the characteristic vice of liberalism:  "The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of.")

A few years ago, I had to subscribe to multiple magazines--and wait up to a month--to find this much great reading. Now all this and more is at our fingertips every day.

Twenty-one years ago I kicked off my job at the Reader with a monstrously long profile of the then-newborn Heartland Institute and the philosophy of libertarianism.

For years now, Heartland has been frittering away its credibility, wasting its resources, and discrediting libertarian thought in general by claiming there's no such thing as climate change--and that if there is, people have nothing to do with it.

Libertarians pride themselves on dealing with the economic world as it is, not as do-gooders wish it was. Why should it be different where other sciences are involved? Real climate scientists agree that there's a problem here that we need to deal with. Hell, even Lloyd's of London has figured that out. There are ways of dealing with climate change that will enhance government power, and ways that will harness the power of the market to improve matters. Those are the issues worth debating, instead of presenting Michael Crichton--a fiction writer with a flimsy conspiracy theory--as if he were some kind of authority on the planet's climate system.

A good deal of my writing over the years has been influenced by libertarian thinking, much of which I learned at Heartland. These days I find myself hesitating to mention their good stuff because of their crackpot position on climate change. It gives the impression that libertarianism really is a right-wing philosophy, lined up with anti-science Republicans who think evolution is some kind of dubious hypothesis. What possible reward could be great enough for intelligent people to seek such company?