Libertarianism: An Obituary?

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a review by Barton Swaim of The Individualists. Swaim’s take on the book is gratifyingly positive. His take on libertarianism, however, is quite critical. So much so that he concludes his review by claiming that The Individualists serves as an “obituary” for libertarianism.

David Boaz has a nice piece over at Cato responding to Swaim’s review. And, as he speculates, John and I certainly didn’t see ourselves as writing an obituary. We set out to write the history of an idea to which we felt, and still feel, considerable attraction, but also an honest history that doesn’t shy away from pointing out where arguments fall short, or where ideals go unrealized.

It is true, however, that over the course of writing the book with John, I did find myself personally growing more and more reluctant to identify myself as a libertarian. But whether libertarianism is “dead” or not - even just by my own lights - depends a lot on what one means by “libertarian.”

In the book, John and I distinguish between what we call “strict” and “broad” libertarianism. We define strict libertarianism as “a radical political view which holds that individual liberty, understood as the absence of interference with a person’s body and rightfully acquired property, is a moral absolute and that the only governmental activities consistent with that liberty are (if any) those necessary to protect individuals from aggression by others.” Strict libertarians include anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard, but also minimal statists like Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand.

Broad libertarianism, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the six core libertarian ideas we identify in our book - private property, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberty, individualism, and spontaneous order. The idea is that you can endorse these ideas without accepting the radicalism, absolutism, and (often) rationalism that is characteristic of strict libertarianism. Friedrich Hayek, Richard Epstein, and David Schmidtz are all libertarians in the broad sense, though not in the strict sense. You can call these people “contemporary classical liberals” too. (Some people will also call historical classical liberals like Adam Smith “libertarian,” but to my mind that’s more anachronistic and confusing than helpful.)

In the broad sense of the term, I’m still a libertarian, and I don’t think that as a political philosophy or as a political movement it’s anywhere close to dead. Mike Munger’s idea of “directional libertarianism” is helpful here. To be a libertarian, in this sense, you don’t need to think that free markets and private property are moral absolutes. You just have to believe that a greater embrace of those ideas is the right direction for society to be moving.

Strict libertarianism, on the other hand, is strikes me as a philosophically untenable position. I’ve long been critical of the so-called Non-Aggression Principle, partly because it has a notoriously difficult time dealing with problems of externalities. The obvious problem here is environmental pollution, which seems like both a violation of the NAP and an inevitable feature of human social existence. But I’ve grown increasingly convinced by the conservative argument that cultural externalities matter too. A free society cannot flourish without an underlying substrate of habits, customs, and virtues in its citizenry. And it is not at all obvious that a libertarian polity would be adequate to develop and preserve the cultural foundations on which it depends.

But the problem isn’t just the NAP. The problem is the idea that we can construct a plausible political philosophy out of any single, absolute principle. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the NAP or the Law of Equal Freedom or the Principle of Utility. There are a plurality of legitimate moral values; these values sometimes come into conflict; and those conflicts require us to make trade-offs. Strict libertarianism either denies the existence of these conflicts, or insists that liberty always emerges from them the winner. Neither of these positions strikes me as remotely plausible.

In his essay, Boaz argues that “[a] popular summary of libertarianism, ‘don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, and keep your promises,’ is just the basic morality that allows human beings to live together in peace.” And he’s right, in a sense. These are terrific principles to live by. But none of them is a morally absolute rule, either in personal life or in politics. If you need to break a promise to pick a friend up from the airport in order to help someone with a life-threatening emergency, you should do so. And, I think, if the state can produce a massive reduction in child poverty by imposing a relatively small tax on the well-off (“taking their stuff”), it should do so too. Yes, there are sometimes unintended consequences. Yes, there is regulatory capture. And yes there is moral hazard. And those kind of broadly libertarian considerations will often mean that state action will wind up being much less beneficial than it appears at first glance. But none of them implies that the costs of state action are always greater than the benefits. They simply mean that we are forced to muddle through as best we can.