Best of the Blogs: Jason Kuznicki on Libertarians’ Unfinished Revolution
by The Editors
March 21st, 2007
Brian Doherty and Libertarians’ Unfinished Revolution
by Jason Kuznicki
Positive Liberty
April 12, 2007
The libertarian ecumenism of Brian Doherty’s “Libertarianism: Past and Prospects” at Cato Unbound is rare, rich, striking stuff. It’s also a bit hard to believe:
Rand was right: we need to work on root metaphysical and ethical principles about humans and the state. Mises and Read and Friedman were right: we need to educate the public about the operations and richness of an unfettered free-market economy. Hayek was right: understanding the information-spreading functions of the free price system and the reality of spontaneous orders without central control is vital. Rothbard was right: an uncompromising moral passion about liberty and theorizing on how a wonderful social order could function without any monopoly source of force at all is bracing and inspirational. Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation is right: nuts-and-bolts work showing how market competition and deregulation can function and slot into an existing world of state functions can demonstrate that government doesn’t have to, and oughtn’t, do everything it has traditionally done.
It’s possible, but only just barely, for libertarians in the know to agree to all of these things at once. Anyone familiar with these thinkers and their works can tell you that they spent much energy trashing one another, often with good reason, and often without (for an assessment of the score that I find entirely accurate, see Sandefur, downblog).
A similar but inverted paragraph would be easy enough to write: Rand was wrong, because she mistrusted the notion of spontaneous order; Mises was wrong, because he placed too little stress on psychology and the life of the mind; Rothbard was wrong, because foundational questions in ethics must not be shunted aside; Hayek was wrong, because he could not account for how reasoning individuals confront traditional institutions; and so forth.
And, through all of this, the average American would be left… bewildered. Who are all these people that all these other people are arguing so passionately about?
The general ignorance, and dismissal, of the libertarian movement among mainstream Americans is one of the great paradoxes of our time: From roughly the mid-twentieth century up to the present, something remarkable has happened. A way of thinking about social and political questions, a disposition of mind that lay dormant for decades, has reasserted itself. Quietly, it has influenced even those who have nothing but scorn for libertarians and their ideals.
It came first in the exuberant system-building and radicalism of a few people who would have been counted serious eccentrics even setting their politics aside. And then, in the decades that followed, it developed into a set of institutions, cultural values, and basic assumptions about life itself, assumptions that have had an ever-wider currency and that have yielded surprising, usually unacknowledged results. (Someone should please, please write a libertarian history of the American republic of the last sixty years, giving credit where credit is due. What a revealing exercise this would be to the general public.)
The change in cultural values and attitudes has come so quickly that it could well be called a revolution. It’s also left libertarians scrambling, sometimes, to adjust our own paradigms: At a recent discussion, I overheard a much older libertarian disagree with a younger member of the movement who had made some remark on the constant downward spiral of statism: “You have no idea,” said the older one in effect. “You have no idea the stuff that used to happen, in this very country.”
He went on to mention the Interstate Commerce Commission, Nixon’s price controls, the military draft, and the onerous regulations on heavy industry that were dismantled in the Carter and Reagan administrations. He could easily have continued: the 90% tax bracket, the indecency laws, the blue laws, the “fairness doctrine”… all have either been abolished or severely curtailed.
Things have gotten vastly better on a number of fronts, and it’s actually arguable that we’re not on the road to serfdom anymore at all. While state power has continued to assert itself in many troubling new areas, it’s also faced a powerful and growing critique. These examples prove just how successful the attack has been; how much better off we are without them proves just how right the attack has been.
But libertarians have more to be proud of than just preventing or rolling back the improper use of state power. Libertarian tendencies have pervaded many of the most interesting new technological developments of the last few decades, and in the United States at least, the government has generally been content to follow a laissez-faire policy in these areas.
Perhaps the most spectacular libertarian achievement of all has taken place spontaneously, in the almost entirely unregulated growth of the Internet and the related communications media that now define how we learn, work, shop, and play. When most or all of us voluntarily abandon the regulated areas of human life, and when we enter new, unregulated areas, the result is… an increase in human liberty. Where do so many of us really live? Online. And the online world is almost as close to the libertarian utopia as one could reasonably get. Revealed preferences, anyone?
Now libertarians can’t claim full credit for what was, at the outset, a government-subsidized program. But the way that the Internet developed — I should say, the way that it was permitted to develop — reflects a profound cultural change. Had the World Wide Web arrived in the 1950s, I would probably need a government license just to be writing this. And yes, there is still government protection against online threats of force and fraud — but many libertarians have no problem whatsoever with the night watchman state as we find it online.
The degree to which ordinary voters and policy makers intuitively appreciate libertarian arguments and libertarian social arrangements has increased remarkably, and the effects of this tacit change can be seen all around us. Both online and in the so-called “real” world, libertarians have inserted into the public mind two vital questions: Should the government be doing this? And can the government do it successfully?
The short answer may well be no. The longer answer? Wellllll… Doherty writes,
Ayn Rand, a central inspiration for the movement, gadfly, truculent sometimes-comrade to the early generation of libertarians, and mentor and inspiration to many in the later ones, believed that when it came to libertarian political change, it was “earlier than you think.” The modern “radical for capitalism” must realize that generations of education are needed before a truly libertarian culture and politics would take hold. This was rooted in Rand’s belief that political change was insufficient if not reached for the right philosophical reasons—which means: by grasping her Objectivist philosophy from ontology through epistemology through ethics.
Earlier than you think, indeed. So often, the libertarian thought of the mid-twentieth century would supply principles, but it did not yet supply a convincing model of how a given problem would be solved if all the principles were faithfully adhered to. So often, it had its big, theoretical ideas shot down because no one could imagine — or make believable — a solution better than the one currently on offer from the government.
But things have changed a lot since then, and aside from leading an external revolution, the libertarian movement has changed a good deal itself. From big, far-reaching principles, libertarians have increasingly gained a quirky mastery of the small, unexpected stuff: School vouchers, market-traded pollution credits, taxi cab liberalization, even Julian Simon’s brilliant (and now ubiquitous) idea that airlines could use market incentives rather than randomly “bumping” passengers off of overbooked flights. If you ever agreed to layover in Atlanta rather than Newark, and got bumped to first class for your time, thank a libertarian. I’m old enough, but only just barely, to remember people ridiculing the notion that the U.S. Postal Service could ever be privatized — No private business could ever make money delivering the mail. No one makes this argument anymore; they cannot, as it has been refuted in practice: The allegedly unprofitable third class sector now sports not one but two private nationwide competitors. And now there is no remaining justification for the official monopoly on first class mail.
Libertarians, the erstwhile radicals, are learning to play the game, learning a general, intuitive feel for how to make things work in American political culture, and this manifests itself in dozens of little techniques of social management, each one driven by an understanding of market incentives and a respect for individual liberty. That we are learning to play the game at all is a matter of fierce internal debate, like everything else in libertarianism. But it is happening, it’s almost entirely inevitable, and it’s almost certainly a good thing for everyone concerned.
A good example of this comes in Tyler Cowen’s response essay, “The Paradox of Libertarianism,” in which he argues that not all increases in the size of government are either bad or avoidable. In principle, this is undoubtedly correct. While libertarians for decades assumed that every increase in the size of government was invariably a bad thing, this is not necessarily the case. If we accept that a night watchman state really is the best, there may still be times when the size and scope of the government must nevertheless grow, as when new forms of social and economic life require new forms of protection against force and fraud. Agreed entirely. But I cannot bring myself to accept uncritically the “package deal” that Cowen proposes, which seems to make a virtue — more government is good! — out of a necessity — libertarian ideas increase wealth, and wealth increases the temptation to compromise on libertarian ideas. More government still tends overwhelmingly to mean worse government, and the exceptions remain exceptional.
Indeed, one could almost make the case that all of the most interesting and provocative public policy initiatives of recent years have either come directly from libertarians or have at least taken some inspiration from libertarian thought. As if to prove my point, and before I even had the chance to proofread and post this entry, along comes a landmark judicial decision — It turns out that the Second Amendment really does confer an individual right to bear arms. Who knew? We did.
Now for the cold water. Sandefur writes of Objectivists as follows, but he would have been equally correct to write it of libertarians, vis-a-vis the general public:
It is true, of course, that Objectivism has its share of crazies and embarrassments. More than its share, probably, both because we are such a small minority, and because Objectivism tends to appeal to the young, whose natural awkwardness then increases the difficulties. But I wish Doherty were more willing to acknowledge that there are many of us who are not crackpots, not crippled with horrifying guilt and self-loathing, who read widely outside of Objectivist literature, who lead happy and successful lives of purpose and fulfillment. And I wish that he would have acknowledged more openly that there are legitimate reasons for us to criticize other libertarians, and to want in many cases to distance ourselves from them.
While Doherty may not have the most felicitous views of Objectivists, the public at large thinks likewise of libertarians. This state of affairs, where a great many perfectly sane and indeed brilliant people are characterized by the worst of their hangers-on, cries out for an explanation (I might say for an apology, but I am not a bitter person). So I’ll offer one here.
I call it Kuznicki’s Rule of Crackpottery: A crackpot does not choose his political beliefs through reasoned consideration, through emotion, through peer pressure, or through any other discernible mechanism at all. Instead, he lists every available ideology, large or small, in one big list — and then he selects one at random. In other words, the population of crackpots tends to distribute itself evenly among the various schools of political thought. But when they adhere to a small school, they are more readily noticed.
Enough about them already. Enough, too, about the libertarian infighting, most of which is counterproductive. A successful movement will be multifarious, even if we personally think that many or most of the factions are wrong (or even if all of us are wrong, but wrong in interesting and productive ways). This is only understandable, and it’s bound to happen whenever any reasonably sized group of people decides, collectively, to re-think politics from first principles.
The revolution, however, is well underway, whether we all agree on its means and foundations or not. So it is with all revolutions, and the effects of libertarian thought can already be felt in many areas of life, even if little or no credit comes to the pioneers of the movement.
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