Fun with libertarians

In my experience, libertarianism is chiefly a way for people with conservative beliefs to imagine they’re liberal. 

I have had many conversations with “libertarians”, and when I push them to get clear about what they really think, invariably one of two things happens: Either they back away from fundamental assumptions made by libertarians (“OK, but except for THAT, I’m a libertarian”), or else they wind up retreating into exactly the same policies espoused by “modern” (i.e. post-Gingrich) conservatives.

So Libertarians are conservatives — at least, the ones who are honest with themselves and those who are willing to actually think through the implications of libertarianism. This may not have been true once upon a time, but we are no longer living in the 1980s. The fact that the Cato Institute disagrees with Trump only means that they are more intellectually honest than most conservatives today.

And as for the idea of “left-libertarians,” I have met a few of them, as well. Like other less-than-clear libertarians, their arguments always collapse when you push them. They stand on the notion that you can somehow distinguish between social and economic issues, which is preposterous…if you’re paying attention. The economic is social.

Two issues invariably trip them up. First is the idea of the Commons, which everyone intuitively agrees with, but which is a dagger in the heart of ‘libertarian” property-rights arguments. Put simply, the idea is that there are issues that require government management of personal property, because everyone in society has a stake in them. The most obvious one is the environment: Not only does everyone agree that, for example, clean water and clean air are a necessity for the whole of society, and therefore must be managed by government intervention into the marketplace, but it is also easy to see that letting “the market” manage these things has failed miserably, to everyone's detriment. The worse the situation becomes with the environment, the greater the need for the government to step in and regulate.

From there it becomes clear that we are no longer able to cling to a principle of minimal government. On the contrary, we are talking about degrees of government management of private property. And that is exactly the traditional conservative-liberal debate.

No “left-libertarian” I have met has been able to withstand this simple point, because for the life of them they just cannot figure out a way to advocate for the environment without bringing government into the picture, since the free-market argument falls down completely. And it’s downhill from there.

The other issue that is fun to talk to libertarians about is social inequality. They’re opposed to it, of course, but they espouse the idea that “freeing everything up” will fix it. Maximum personal freedom, they call it. When I ask them for any examples of when this might have happened, when the so-called “free market” has produced more social equality, they cannot answer with an honest example. 

That’s because there aren’t any. Either they insist without evidence that “a rising tide raises all boats” — which sounds nice but which the history shows simply has never been true — or they are forced to acknowledge that a) there has never been a truly free market (so, there is literally no evidence to support their position); and b) every “free market” in history — such as it was — has been the product of the very government interventions that the libertarians want to avoid!

And of course libertarians, like honest conservatives, always decry the role of government in addressing social inequality. They claim that a “truly just” system would provide equal access to resources and equal opportunity to succeed. In this they are taking exactly the conservative line. It is a very seductive idea, and I’m not surprised that so many conservatives fall for it. The problem is the mechanism: How do you define a “truly just” society, and how do you create one once you do?

The “true libertarians” I have met have never been able to offer me a definition and a mechanism for achieving it that did not involve laissez-faire economics in one form or other. They hate quotas and call affirmative action “reverse racism” and so on. But it should be obvious to any honest observer that no “truly just” system can afford to ignore centuries of racism, sexism and classism that have baked privilege and social inequality into the web of society itself.  The powerful never give up their power willingly. They have to be forced…which leads right back to the very role of government that the libertarian objects to. Once again, we are talking, not about principles but degrees — the classic conservative-liberal debate.

So in the end libertarians always retreat either to stereotypically “liberal” positions on government by abandoning the idea of the free market, and so on (in which case they sound less and less like “libertarians” and more and more like “liberals”), or, more commonly, they ignore the problem and change the subject, because they have no effective answer to the question, and they know it.

Again: there is no way to separate economic from social issues. They are of a piece. You cannot be “left” on one and “right” on the other. It simply doesn’t work in the real world.

And this is why libertarianism is an internally incoherent point of view, one that merely allows some conservative-thinking people to imagine that they are not conservative.

But they are.