Contra Kinsley
January 14, 2008
Libertarians deserve a listen
Yes, they can drive an idea right over a cliff.
But it’s the journey that’s half the fun.
By Michael Kinsley January 12, 2008Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always
No condescension here, is there … But, it’s important to be earnest, ask Oscar Wilde.
Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether their activities expand freedom or contract it.
Legislators and regulators are not served if freedom is expanded.
Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny ofthe majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring people with odd Social Security numbers to give $1,000 to people with
even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what government does is essentially just that.
It’s not just “to libertarians” … it is so as a matter of fact.
So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want.
So far, so good. There are things into which we stipulate – via the social contract – the government may poke its nose. This is not because they are “public goods”, but rather those things which are required to preserve and grow liberty itself. Kinsley is making a bogus argument with this “public goods” business, because it allows for almost all manner of abuse – you can call anything you like a “public good” so along as you rationalize it as in the best interest of the group. This is the intellectual basis upon which all Collectivist systems rest (Communism, Socialism,Nazism, Facism, Hillarycare, W’s drug bill …)
Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want. There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference — often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it intervenes is purely pragmatic.
Right conclusion, but boneheaded foundation. Interdiction in matters of pollution – say, the raw sewage that emanates when Al Gore opens his mouth – is a matter of thwarting force. If I could pollute just my air, it would be none of the government’s business. But because pollution pretty much always harms others, the government has a role because impeding acts of force increases liberty. What is also not conveniently mentioned here is that the government just loves to do this via non-elected regulatory agents who answer to almost no one in practice.
Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenue to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to use it … and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency. Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection).
No, libertarians see things in terms of more- or less liberty. The example above that he cites as excessively complex sounds contrived to me – at least I’ve never heard it. If government is restricted to its Constitutional limits, these kinds of contrivances are not required. It has been the so-called “liberals” (who are no such thing) and “conservatives” (who are no such thing) that have chosen to prostitute government into the most complex, inefficient, and byzantine leviathan ever conceived by man. Libertarians want things simpler not more complicated.
Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: You are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation
As opposed, of course, to the “expert”, competent, beneficent, and generally great rendering of judgment that proceeds from the Congress, their regulatory appointees, and guys they meet in a Minnesota airport bathroom? Be serious. The peeeepul cannot possibly be worse at this than the unfirable hosts of public “servants”. I’ll take a jury of my peers over the smug, self-satisfied EPA regulators any day.
Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land,
private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competing routes keep it all efficient.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. In this case, libertarians are trying to fix an already broken system (and it’s is almost certainly too
late to do so). Moreover, there is a good case to be made for the roads being run by the government as a matter of national
defense – this was, after all, the original justification for the interstate highway system. The only beef I have with that is that, if the private sector wants access to those roads, then thems that use ‘em should pay for ‘em.
Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking
has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the approval maze at the Food and Drug Administration. The Terri Schiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.
Yeah, too bad Liberals as a group – who always love this part of libertarianism – fail to see that allowing abortion may arguably
be good for the mother, but its pretty bad for the child. To be fair, many libertarians don’t get this either.
The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to the right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt?
The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on me. I would pay good money not to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right, like the right to choose the time and manner of one’s death, may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or
irresponsible is not.
This argument is bogus on many levels. The most obvious is this: If “you” insist in sticking the government into the process of things that ought to be private – say, like healthcare – you have no business complaining when my behavior “imposes externalities” upon you. What’s next? “We pay for your healthcare, so you have to work out 5 times a week, quit smoking, stop listening to Hannity & Combs …” The externalities to which he refers are not an artifact of the behavior of free citizens. They are the artifact of nosy, self-righteous, save-the-world, self-anointed saviors of mankind who want to do “good” … at the point of a gun. (One also wonders what the criteria separating the “serious rights” from the rest of them might be. I shudder to think.)
A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated income redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even moderate libertarians disapprove of social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers.
Because it is wrong morally AND practically. It is wrong morally because it is done by threat of force. It is wrong practically because it “oursources” my choice of which charitable causes I wish to support. So, for example, some portion of my taxes go to support abortion – something I find vile and outrageous (and even worse than having to support “All things Considered” on NPR… which is pretty bad in its own right).
But freedom is only one of the two core values our nation was built on. The other is equality. Defining equality, libertarians tend to take a narrow view, believing that it means only political equality with no financial aspects. Defining freedom, by contrast, they take a broad view, and see a violation in every nickel a citizen is forced to spend.
No, Sparky, libertarians don’t “take that view”. It was the view of the Framers. They understood (imperfectly) that it was to
be equality of opportunity to government protections, not equality of outcomes. That is, government should serve its citizens equally. This is very different than various formulas (he cites below) wherein both liberals and conservatives wish to use government to mediate how “fair” things are generally, even/especially in the private sector.
Libertarians ask: By what justification does the government concern itself with inequality, financial or otherwise? They are nearly alone in asking this question. Even conservatives claim a great concern for equality of opportunity, while opposing equality of result. And the reasons seem obvious: some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life; etc.
This is neo-collectivist nonsense in the absence of a real argument. There are any number of vivid counterexamples of people who achieve great things in the presence of a manifestly unfair world, economic or otherwise. The moment government is injected into the fairness equation, no good thing comes from it. Why? Because, apart from defending liberty itself, anytime government decides what is “fair”, it almost always does so to the benefit of one group and at the expense of another. Liberty is diminished.
In rare cases, this is justified. For instance, the liberty of a murderer is limited intentionally, because not doing so causes a net reduction in liberty for victims. But that’s not the debate being had today. Today’s “fairness” police inevitably end up poking about in personal matters which – frankly – are almost never about our corporate liberty, but are a tinkering exercise designed to buy votes.
But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians. They force us to think it all through from scratch. Good for them.
Sadly, all that “thinking” we induce seems not to result in productive conclusions in those who are doing that thinking … at least as evidenced by this piece.
