Libertarianism
What the Cato Institute doesn’t want you to know. Not really.
Libertarians are gaining political steam in light of the worries over Obama’s proposed healthcare changes. But what is libertarianism?
To describe any ‘ism’ is a challenge, but libertarianism presents a more modest task than its mainstream ideological friends, liberalism and conservatism. That is not to say that this analysis is exhaustive–far from it.
That said, there are two clear strains to libertarianism: the philosophical and the practical. I’ll attempt to outline them and present some critiques.
A. The philosophical one, popularized in recent decades by Robert Nozick, prioritizes the idea of rights.
Here’s the basic argument, as I understand it, pared down, and as relates to the economy: (1) People own themselves; (2) Because of this, people own what they make; (3) Because of THIS, people can choose to trade what they make with other people, in almost any manner they see fit; (4) Because of THIS, they own what they get on the free market.
This can be transmogrified into rights discourse through the right to make contracts and strict property rights. You have a firm right to the property you get on the market because that property derives from your person, which you entirely own. Thus taxes are inherently wrong. Related is the idea that if the government intrudes into the free marketplace, they are infringing upon people’s rights to make things and trade them as they see fit.
This correlates to social liberialism insofar as since people own themselves, they are free to live and act in any manner they see fit, so long as they don’t encroach upon another person’s property or other rights.
Some critiques of the philosophical view:
1. One could argue that everyone is a priori equally deserving and inequality should only derive from different choices, not different luck. There is so much luck involved with the free market and one’s success, goes the argument. It’s false to say that the property you get on the free market derives entirely from you and things you own. Related is the idea that when people make choices in the world, they aren’t always “free” in the sense that libertarians imagine. And, finally, one could argue that even if people own themselves and make entirely free choices, their access to property is not a product of their person or their choices. You need money to make money and people are born with unequal access to money and property.
2. Why do we have rights? To protect autonomy is the standard answer. Why can’t we soften our conception of rights–and tax people here and there, and regulate the market–if it maximizes overall or average autonomy? There are a lot of possible critiques, which I’d like to discuss in a later post.
3. It’s just political conservatism couched in fancy philosophy. The test of this is to see if the supposed libertarian supports social liberalism.
4. It leads to crazy conclusions. For instance, libertarianism has difficulty dealing with the problem of monopoly. If the workings of the free market are stamped with the seal of morality and free choice, but the free market leads us to a place of monopoly, true libertarians should have a difficult time arguing that the government can regulate this problem.
5. It ignores basically every other moral concern with no justification. The right to make contracts and the right to property, if we prioritize them completely, might preclude or constrain the operation of other concepts, like equality, recognition, positive freedom, etc. Libertarians, goes this argument, have not sufficiently justified their prioritization.
B. Political libertarian is basically utilitarianism, though the term ‘pragmatism’ might fit better. Political libertarians believe that the market is the best device for making people happy and creating prosperity. They may or may not be concerned with other ethical concerns, but they have an empirical assumption that any government intrusion into the marketplace will end up worse than if they didn’t interfere at all.
A critique:
1. It’s just not a true empirical assumption. I won’t touch that debate here.
A final comment:
Too many philosophical libertarians hold the political libertarians’ empirical assumptions. For instance, many argue that not only is government regulation of monopoly immoral, but that monopoly is good for the market.
The concern here is the assumption held by many that the moral world is coherent, linked, harmonious, logical, and complete. So if two thing are definitely moral (say, strict property rights and utilitarian outcomes)–and the moral world is perfect and all connected–they must be logically connected. Thus many philosophical libertarians argue that strict property rights necessarily lead to utilitarian outcomes. Now that may be true, but it is also might not be, and we need to be wary of this human impulse to imagine the moral world as smooth, and be willing to bite the bullet on occasion. This phenomenon is not unique to libertarians.
-Jake
Related posts:
- Is American libertarianism dead?
- FreedomFest
- Cato on Cato
- Libertarianism: for and against assisted suicide
- Next on 20/20: Libertarians discuss the poor
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[...] Jake: Political libertarian is basically utilitarianism, though the term ‘pragmatism’ might fit better. Political libertarians believe that the market is the best device for making people happy and creating prosperity. They may or may not be concerned with other ethical concerns, but they have an empirical assumption that any government intrusion into the marketplace will end up worse than if they didn’t interfere at all. [...]
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[...] discussed two competing strands of libertarianism in an earlier post: libertarianism as a matter of philosophical principle and the libertarianism as pragmatic policy [...]