Next on 20/20: Libertarians discuss the poor
John Stossel has it both ways
Remember John Stossel? In my childhood memory, he was the formidably mustachioed reporter for the news program 20/20, often exposing dangers in various consumer goods. As a child I looked forward to watching his fresh and clear reports after the TGIF line-up. I don’t think anything says pre-9/11 like that TGIF line-up (Balki, Eurkel, etc.). That’s the good kind of pure. Anyways, apparently in addition to his duties at 20/20, which still airs each week I’ve just learned, Stossel is a fairly established libertarian commentator, often writing for Reason.com, the movement’s home base online. Yesterday he published a statement of first principles, which mostly outlines a libertarian take on poverty. Here are his major points:
When I first explained libertarianism to my wife, she said: “That’s cruel! What about the poor and the weak? Let them starve?”
For my FBN show tonight, I ask some prominent libertarians that question, including Jeffrey Miron, who teaches economics at Harvard.
“It might in some cases be a little cruel,” Miron said. “But it means you’re not taking from people who’ve worked hard to earn their income (in order) to give it to people who have not worked hard.”
But isn’t it wrong for people to suffer in a rich country?
“The number of people who will suffer is likely to be very small. Private charity … will provide support for the vast majority who would be poor in the absence of some kind of support. When government does it, it creates an air of entitlement that leads to more demand for redistribution, till everyone becomes a ward of the state.”
Besides, says Wendy McElroy, the founder of ifeminists.com, “government aid doesn’t enrich the poor. Government makes them dependent. And the biggest hindrance to the poor … right now is the government. Government should get out of the way. It should allow people to open cottage industries without making them jump through hoops and licenses and taxing them to death. It should open up public lands and do a 20th-century equivalent of 40 acres and a mule. It should get out of the way of people and let them achieve and rise.”
David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, took the discussion to a deeper level.
“Instead of asking, ‘What should we do about people who are poor in a rich country?’ The first question is, ‘Why is this a rich country?’ …
“Five hundred years ago, there weren’t rich countries in the world. There are rich countries now because part of the world is following basically libertarian rules: private property, free markets, individualism.”
This is an important but unappreciated point: Before the New Deal, people of modest means banded together to help themselves. These organizations were crowded out when government co-opted their insurance functions, which included inexpensive medical care.
Boaz indicts the welfare state for the untold harm it’s done in the name of the poor.
“What we find is a system that traps people into dependency…. You should be asking advocates of that system, ‘Why don’t you care about the poor?’”
I agree. It appears that when government sets out to solve a problem, not only does it violate our freedom, it also accomplishes the opposite of what it set out to do.
I discussed two competing strands of libertarianism in an earlier post: libertarianism as a matter of philosophical principle and the libertarianism as pragmatic policy (i.e. no matter how nice your philosophical argument is to justify a welfare state, it won’t work in reality.) Stossel seems to fit into both categories.
More generally, though, I think Stossel’s argument reveals the human desire to have a political philosophy without any sacrifices, a political philosophy that fulfills all of one’s moral intuitions at the same time. He wants libertarianism and he wants to take the high ground on caring for the poor, arguing that libertarianism represents the best method for their prosperity. Of course, there’s nothing ex ante philosophically wrong or impossible about a simple, single theory to answer all possible political philosophical questions. It would be incredibly useful to have one. It’s not my point here to say that Stossel or libertarianism is wrong, but rather that they seem to claim to have discovered such a foundational policy or moral criterion, one which will clearly guide one to the answer in any question of political principle, and create a harmony of sorts, at least philosophically. On the liberal-socialist end of the spectrum, NYU philosopher Ronald Dworkin has been trying to discover just such a foundational principle, working on a final masterpiece for a number of years called Justice for Hedgehogs.
-Jake
Related posts:
- Libertarianism
- Cato on Cato
- Evaluating democracy promotion
- Born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
- Is American libertarianism dead?
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