Originally posted by CharlieDigital (thanks!) in the PolitGAF thread, but really deserves its own discussion rather than being buried in there.
The whole article is long (hell, these excerpts are long as it is), but it deserves to be read in its entirety.
An introductory note:
Also relevant, but I'll leave it to someone else to excerpt (that, or just quote Charlie's excerpting): the same author on the 20th century and liberalism.
The whole article is long (hell, these excerpts are long as it is), but it deserves to be read in its entirety.
An introductory note:
If you--
* have never heard of (or don't think much of) Rothbard, Rockwell, Rand, and von Mises
* accept that the FDIC is a pretty good idea
* want a leaner, more efficient government, but don't dream of getting rid of it
...then this page isn't really addressed to you. You're probably more of what I'd call a small-government conservative; and if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine.
On the other hand, you might want to stick around to see what your more fundamentalist colleagues are saying.
Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green:
This concept of property originated in some of those primitive tribes when individuals claimed possessions for themselves as against the collective ownership of their groups. Based on individual initiative, labor, and innovation, some were successful at establishing a separate, private ownership role for themselves. [...]
Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.
The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards. The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.
[snip]
Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:
As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.
The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.
At this point some libertarian readers are pumping their hands in the air like a piston, anxious to explain that their ideal isn't Rothbard or von Mises or Hayek, but the Founding Fathers.
Nice try. Everybody wants the Founders on their side; but it was a different country back then-- 95% agricultural, low density, highly homogenous, primitive in technology-- and modern libertarianism simply doesn't apply. (The OED's citations of the word for the time are all theological.)
All American political movements have their roots in the 1700s-- indeed, in the winning side, since Loyalist opinion essentially disappeared. We are all-- liberals, conservatives, libertarians-- against the Georgian monarchy and for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can certainly find places where one Founder or another rants against government; you can find other places where one Founder or another rants against rebellion, anarchy, and the opponents of federalism. Sometimes the same Founder can be quoted on both sides. They were a mixed bunch, and lived long enough lives to encounter different situations.
It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. --James Madison
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. --Thomas Jefferson
All the Property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it. --Benjamin Franklin
The Constitution is above all a definition of a strengthened government, and the Federalist Papers are an extended argument for it. The Founders negotiated a balance between a government that was arbitrary and coercive (their experience as British colonial subjects) and one that was powerless and divided (the failed Articles of Confederation).
The Founders didn't anticipate the New Deal-- there was no need for them to-- but they were as quick to resort to the resources of the state as any modern liberal. Ben Franklin, for instance, played the Pennsylvania legislature like a violin-- using it to fund a hospital he wanted to establish, for instance. Obviously he had no qualms about using state power to do good social works.
It's also worth pointing out that the Founders' words were nobler than their deeds. Most were quite comfortable with slave-owning, for instance. No one worried about women's consent to be governed. Washington's own administration made it a crime to criticize the government. And as Robert Allen Rutland reminds us,
For almost 150 years, in fact, the Bill of Rights was paid lip service in patriotic orations and ignored in the marketplace. It wasn't until after World War I that the Supreme Court began the process of giving real meaning to the Bill of Rights.
The process of giving life to our constitutional rights has largely been the work of liberals. On the greatest fight of all, to treat blacks as human beings, libertarians supported the other side.
Why are they trouble?
[snip]
At least some libertarians have understood the connection. Rothbard again, writing in 1994:
The truth is that since we have been stuck with a two-party system, any electoral revolution against big government had to be expressed through a Republican victory. So it is certainly true that Newt Gingrich and his faction, as well as Robert Dole, have ridden to power on the libertarian wave.
Can you smell the compromise here? Hold your nose and vote for the Repubs, boys. But then don't pretend to be uninvolved when the Republicans start making a mockery of limited government.
What about the social side?
The Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There's the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).
I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.
The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition. The libertarian voter is chiefly exercised over taxes, regulation, and social programs; the libertarian wing of the Republican party has, for forty years, gone along with the war on drugs, corporate welfare, establishment of dictatorships abroad, and an alliance with theocrats.
For the purposes of my critique, however, the social side of libertarianism is irrelevant. A libertarian and I might actually agree to legalize drugs, let people marry whoever they like, and repeal the Patriot Act. But this has nothing to do with whether robber baron capitalism is a good thing.
The problem with markets
[snip]
Libertarian responses to such lists are beyond amazing.
* "Businesses would be stupid to do those things." Then they're stupid, because they do them. Private racial discrimination, for instance, lasted a hundred years; and it wasn't ended by businessmen changing their minds, but by blacks and liberals organizing. The Libertarian Party platform actually hopes to legally re-enable private discrimination.
* "The market will correct those problems." In a few cases it will-- if you wait long enough. But very often it's simply impossible: e.g., the monopolist has made sure no alternatives exist. (One of the railroad tycoons, for instance, was careful to buy up steamship lines.) And though it was sometimes possible to break a monopoly by starting a well-bankrolled competing business, that was no consolation to (say) an oil producer who saw Rockefeller consolidating all the refineries. He could hardly start up his own refinery, and he'd be bankrupt before anyone succeeded in doing so.)
Slavery is another example: though some hoped that the market would eventually make it unprofitable, it sure was taking its time, and neither the slave nor the abolitionist had any non-governmental leverage over the slaveowners.
(Libertarians usually claim to oppose slavery... but that's awfully easy to say on this side of Civil War and the civil rights movement. The slaveowners thought they were defending their sacred rights to property and self-government.)
* "We believe in laws too." And they do, rather touchingly; they just don't believe in enforcing them. Enforcement of the laws passed by democratic legislatures is called "men with guns" or "initiating force" in libertarian ideology. And without enforcement, laws are just pretty words. You can see this today in Latin America, which often has very progressive laws. The business and landowning elite just ignores them.
* "So what do you want, state-run movie theaters?" The single-villain ideology is so strong that the only response some people can make to a market failure is to invent a statist response and criticize that. Sometimes the best solution to these problems is to use the market-- once it gets a good liberal kick in the pants to go find one.
And those are the better responses. Often enough the only response is explain how nothing bad can happen in the libertarian utopia. But libertarian dogma can't be buttressed by libertarian doctrine-- that's begging the question.
Government costs money
Perhaps the most communicable libertarian meme-- and one of the most mischievous-- is the attempt to paint taxation as theft.
First, it's dishonest. Most libertarians theoretically accept government for defense and law enforcement. (There are some absolutists who don't even believe in national defense; I guess they want to have a libertarian utopia for awhile, then hand it over to foreign invaders.)
Now, national defense and law enforcement cost money: about 22% of the 2002 budget-- 33% of the non-social-security budget. You can't swallow that and maintain that all taxes are bad. At least the cost of those functions is not "your money"; it's a legitimate charge for necessary services.
Americans enjoy the fruits of public scientific research, a well-educated job force, highways and airports, clean food, honest labelling, Social Security, unemployment insurance, trustworthy banks, national parks. Libertarianism has encouraged the peculiarly American delusion that these things come for free. It makes a philosophy out of biting the hand that feeds you.
[snip]
Finally, it hides dependence on the government. The economic powerhouse of the US is still the Midwest, the Northeast, and California-- largely liberal Democratic areas. As Dean Lacy has pointed out, over the last decade, the blue states of 2004 paid $1.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received, while red states received $800 billion more than they paid.
Unacceptable morality
Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.
First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else-- love, humanity, justice.
(And let's not forget that lurid fascination with firepower-- seen in ESR, Ron Paul, Heinlein and Van Vogt, Advocates for Self-Government's president Sharon Harris, the Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell's site, and the Mises Institute.)
I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don't need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don't need a cheering section; they are-- by definition-- not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It's the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.
Second, it's the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who's read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.
Third, and perhaps most common, it's the worldview of a provincial narcissist. As I've observed in my overview of the 20th century, liberalism won its battles so thoroughly that people have forgotten why those battles were fought.
It's hard to read libertarians without concluding that they've never been out of the country-- perhaps never out of the suburbs. They don't know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don't know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US; they don't know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they've never experienced a depression; they've never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they've earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.
In short, they're spoiled, and they've evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.
The bottom line
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." --Franklin D. Roosevelt
I have my own articles of faith. I think a political philosophy should
* benefit the entire population, not an elite of whatever flavor
* offer a positive vision, not just hatred for another philosophy
* rest on the best science and history can teach us, rather than science fiction
* be modified in the light of what works and what doesn't
* produce greater freedom and prosperity the closer a nation comes to it.
On all these counts, libertarianism simply doesn't stack up. Once people are able to be rational about politics, I expect them to toss it out as a practical failure and a moral mess.
Also relevant, but I'll leave it to someone else to excerpt (that, or just quote Charlie's excerpting): the same author on the 20th century and liberalism.
