> > We take the best political dogma from both sides and create a reasonable philosophy.I always assumed that you were a Libertarian, because of various things that you said in your Usenet posts. You could not have known, prior to this exchange, what I do or don’t know about the Libertarian Party. In reality, I do know a good deal about it, and about libertarianism in general. It’s hard to have much exposure to the Internet, and to the digerati who inhabit it, without the subject coming up at least once in a while. What I do know, I must tell you, causes me real concern. That, in essence, is the subject of this reply.
It’s a common conception, fostered by Libertarians themselves, that libertarian philosophy does not fit clearly into one end or the other of the political spectrum. Libertarians position themselves as an alternative to conventional mainstream politics, attempting to appeal to the Right by espousing free-market principles, while proclaiming that they share the Left’s antagonism to authoritarian repression. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. What libertarianism does appeal to is a set of attitudes that are typical of my generation (yours too, I’d guess), whom I will call Boomers (without any implied prejudice). While the appeal of libertarianism to Boomers is understandable, I do not see it as a socially progressive or desirable philosophy, but instead as a step backwards.
While Boomers (especially college-educated ones) like to think of themselves as enlightened and idealistic, in reality their views are usually quite self-serving. In the 1960s, most of them opposed the Vietnam War and the draft. But my take on it is that most of them held these attitudes, not because they were deeply appalled by the carnage going on halfway around the world (although certainly there were large numbers of people who genuinely had compassion for all the war’s victims), but mostly because they didn’t want it disrupting their plans for the future—or, even worse, putting them at grave risk. Especially galling was the notion that some gray old men in the Pentagon could be making these decisions for them, without their having any say in the matter. Now, these are sentiments with which I can certainly empathize. But I can’t help noticing that this youthful idealism and agitation for change does not seem to have stood the test of time very well for most of my generation. Instead, I’ve seen many of those ‘60s radicals turning into self-satisfied Yuppies in the ‘80s. I’ve seen one of the early Boomers, after a comfortable and idealistic experience at Oxford in the ‘60s, turn into someone who, as our President, would willingly adopt conservative positions when it suited his political interests, including the use of military force for dubious purposes. And I suspect that Jane Fonda has devoted as much effort to promoting her workout videos as she did to opposing the war in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
It’s not at all surprising that so many Boomers place great emphasis on personal liberties vis-a-vis the state, even to the point of sounding like left-wing radicals, while at the same time screaming that taxation is theft, and that they have a right to unencumbered enjoyment of all the wealth that they make. It’s also not surprising that Ayn Rand was a darling of many of those “idealistic” ‘60s radicals. It’s simple: She told them what they wanted to hear, which was, in a nutshell, that they had no responsibility to anyone but themselves. For them, that mattered more than all of the usual left-right arguments.
The libertarian appeal to the Left rests on the insistence on personal liberty. Now, I don’t deny that there are egregious abuses of personal liberty by most states. That you could wind up in prison for twenty years just for smoking a joint, among other things, made a big impression on the youth of the ‘60s (although, in all but a few cases, it never went quite that far for such a small transgression). It continues today, with such things as mandatory sentencing and the three-strikes rule combining to put some unfortunate persons behind bars for life purely for drug-related offenses. But it really has been looking to me as though most of those who have been talking the loudest recently about personal liberty, free speech, and so on are those voicing purely selfish concerns.
Is it any wonder that Howard Stern is a Libertarian? It gives him what he wants. It sanctions his desire to be a shock jock. But those who truly have suffered deprivation of their personal liberty will, I think, understand when I say that true freedom involves more than just license. The more appropriate word would be democracy, which implies some connection to the interests of the larger community. Ultimately democracy is much less about more freedom to indulge personal whims, than it is about less freedom for those who rule us (a group that, by the way, is not limited to states). Those who were roasted in Waco, or shot up at Ruby Ridge, I’m sure would agree that they were not victimized because they expressed eccentric views, but rather because they posed a challenge to the authority of the state: However pathetically small that challenge may have been in practical terms, in the view of the government they could not be allowed to set a precedent. But that issue is worlds away from comparatively frivolous questions such as whether you can say “motherfucker” on the radio.
Meanwhile, how much personal freedom you really have, in practical rather than theoretical terms, has much to do with economic issues, and how you’re treated by the larger community. As I’ll explain later, I believe that the libertarian view of how society should work leads to individuals being less powerful in the face of larger economic forces, and ultimately less free in most important matters. So I think that the appeal to the left made by libertarianism does not possess nearly as much substance as its other component: its economic principles, which clearly appeal to right-leaning persuasions.
The bedrock libertarian position is that you should be able to do whatever you want to make money, as long as you don’t resort to force or fraud. Excuse my presumed naïveté, but isn’t this basically nothing more than warmed-over social darwinism? Libertarians will doubtless protest that it is not, that there is nothing that prevents neighbor from extending a helping hand to neighbor. I can reply to that in at least two ways.
First, co-operation emulates government. If people get together and form organizations to help each other, that’s a step toward forming what amounts to a government. Now, of course, we know what differentiates a community organization from a government, don’t we? The government has guns. It has the police power—“a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” Libertarians (in contrast to anarchists) acknowledge the need for a government that can exercise police power against those who would use force against us. So if the community can get together to form cooperative organizations—which will involve something equivalent to taxation, since nothing comes free—and if the government can exercise police power to keep the peace, then how does that differ from what we have now? The only difference is that the two functions are kept separate. The government can’t forcibly seize your property because you don’t pay your property taxes. But that “non-police” arm of the government can certainly impose all manner of other sanctions, in the form of various forms of non-cooperation that could ultimately be just as painful as hauling you off to jail.
With that said, dividing the government into two separate components might clarify important issues. It would make it clear that not all of government is, at bottom, a protection racket, and it would puncture the “taxation is theft” argument. I doubt seriously, however, that it would fundamentally change anything, even if you could get people to go along with it (and it’s seriously questionable whether The Powers That Be would give up police power as a way of furthering their economic interests, when push came to shove).
Second, libertarianism doesn’t propose social darwinism, but doesn’t prevent it, either. There is nothing in libertarian philosophy that prevents social darwinism from taking hold. There is simply no safety net at all inherent in it. In this sense, libertarianism mirrors marxism. There is nothing in marxist philosophy that prevents the existence of a communist society that fully expresses all of the “process” freedoms that we are accustomed to as Americans. But there is also nothing that insists on them. Complete primacy is given to guaranteeing the economic rights of the workers. Libertarianism simply stands this on its head and says: We guarantee you complete process rights in your relationship to the state and others but, in the economic arena, you’re on your own. As long as the other party is not using force or fraud (and some would even dispense with the “fraud” part), you have no complaint. If you don’t like the game, you can go off and start your own. If you don’t like your crummy job, or your employer has downsized you, you can always start your own business.
I hope that I’m not seriously asked to explain what is wrong with social darwinism but, in referring to it, I’d like to make this observation: Among even modestly successful people in this society (a group which includes most of us), there is a perception, at times, that certain people seem simply grossly incompetent in almost all areas of life—even after you allow for the fact that, as Scott Adams (of “Dilbert” fame) puts it, “We’re all idiots some of the time.” Even the most generous-spirited of us may feel, at times, that, in the interest of society, certain individuals should be selected against, that their kind should not propagate. (That there are those of us who feel that some such people have impressive stock portfolios is another matter, of course.) In the broadest view of things, without a doubt nature should select some people over others, no matter the state of civilization; I just do not want to hand over that decision-making power to a capitalist marketplace that is, in fact, a very recent human invention. We all know that, in principle, in a purely free-market economy you can be top dog one day, and dog meat the next. Granted, most economic sea changes that require us to make big adaptations have long warning times. But people are not completely free to adapt to those paradigm shifts. This is especially so for those who are not rootless, and most notably for families. The obvious question that can be asked is: Do we really want to put “rooted” people at a disadvantage? Mark Dery, writing in 21C in 1996 (“Wild Nature: The Final Word on the Unabomber”) puts this sentiment well:
The libertarian philosophy of minimal government and maximal individual freedom appeals, as well, to the globe-trotting computer professionals who are less citizens than netizens, wired by cel phone, fax and modem into the world space of ceaselessly circulating information and liquid capital, but increasingly disengaged from public space and social responsibility (many of them live in the guarded, gated enclaves that are the nation’s fastest growing residential communities), a disquieting dynamic Robert Reich has identified as the “secession of the successful.”What comes out in the end is that libertarians want darwinian selection, but they want it their way. They want it within the context of modern civilization, and they want it on terms that favor the worth of intellectual prowess as the primary currency in ther marketplace. They will acknowledge the market value of a good stand-up comic, hairdresser or champion athlete, but they know that those individuals are not nearly as close as they are to the driving forces of the high-tech economy and, taken together, their appetites represent no threat to their slice of the pie.
One more comment on this particular point. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how we need to accept that life is not always secure or predictable; about accepting responsibility for our actions; and so on. Some of those observations are well taken. But, as with many other things, there needs to be some moderation in that position. To put it in very basic terms: In the widest sense, isn’t protection from the workings of blind chance one of the fundamental reasons for having a civilization? I can’t help feeling that those who talk the most about how we shouldn’t expect security to be the usual condition of human existence are themselves quite secure, at least against real privation. Their idea of insecurity is likely to be less concerned with basic survival than with whether they lose $10 million of the $20 million in one of their mutual funds; that kind of insecurity is easily accepted as part of the big-stakes game that they play.
Note, too, the things that the “no force or fraud” dictum does not forbid. It does not forbid collusion. It does not forbid price fixing, dumping, or the “old boy” network. It does not stand in the way of nepotism, or any of the kinds of discrimination that have become illegal in the last several decades. While it does not sanction fraud, it does permit selective withholding of all kinds of information that may be crucial to the functioning of individuals or institutions. It doesn’t even keep people from engaging in outright espionage! In effect, it says that you cannot steal with a gun, but there’s no problem if you do it with a briefcase. And what should we expect? Which instrument does the typical Yuppie wield more skillfully? I say that force vs. no force is not the place to draw the line. And note well that the world’s major religions have views that differ strikingly from no-force-or-fraud: The Golden Rule, in either the Confucian or the Christian form, is conspicuously silent about what means you employ to “do unto others.”
The fact is that the real world is more complex than can possibly be covered by glib prescriptions of letting the free market rule, or allowing all but forcible or fraudulent tactics. Over long periods of time, large bodies of legal precedents have been developed that deal with all of the different hairs that have to be split in such things as antitrust suits, and what the rules of fair play need to be. (Some of us have noticed that Libertarians aren’t too big on lawyers.) And that is why I’m frankly not very worried about Libertarians taking over in any future time—although their influence can certainly be disturbingly evident at times. Most people eventually recognize that there is always going to be a tension between individual rights and collective responsibility. So I don’t think that there will ever be a truly libertarian society on any large scale, just as there has never been a truly communist society bigger than San Marino.
While I’m on the subject of oversimplification, there is one special case that I want to mention. A key position of libertarianism is that you should get to keep wealth made through your own efforts. I’m sure that a marxist would counter that you should not get to keep the wealth that you make by the efforts of others—in other words, what you have gained by exploitation. The failure of both groups seems to be in not clearly defining just what exploitation is. Libertarians seem to want to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Marxists, on the other hand, seem to consider all profits to come from exploitation (“Property is theft”). What is really needed is to define just what is, and isn’t, exploitive. There needs to be a systematic, comprehensive effort to codify our notions of this, so that those who face off over such issues can quote chapter and verse at each other in the most specific ways possible. But I have no illusions that this will be simple. Dealing with such questions is the sort of necessary messiness that makes absolutist positions like libertarianism and marxism look superficially more attractive than modern liberal democratic philosophies.
Even if a truly libertarian society existed on a serious scale, it would have to function in a real world which would greatly complicate its actions. You can start out with a vision of millions of economic entities freely interacting on a level playing field, but this is really just as silly as the marxist notion of communism as an end state in the historical evolution of political economy, in which people would do work for its own intrinsic satisfaction and the good of the community, and would share as much of the wealth as their needs required them to. There are things which would subvert an incipient libertarian state, and there are things that would be problematical even in a totally libertarian world.
Take trade, for instance. Libertarians, predictably, think that free trade is a good idea. But when workers in a libertarian economy wind up competing against low-wage workers in a police state where wages are held down by the government, do we have a level playing field? In effect, a libertarian state would have to deal with being surrounded by enemies, as surely as the Soviet Union had to. But even if the whole world were libertarian, there is absolutely nothing in that philosophy to prevent concentrations of power from spoiling the game. The concentrations are already here, primarily in the form of large, transnational corporations. They can engage in all manner of unfair and cutthroat practices, either against each other or against their smaller neighbors, and against individuals.
Even if they were all cut down to size, there remains one stubborn problem: the “tragedy of the commons.” In a competitive environment, each of them will be pressured to do things that are harmful to the society as a whole, simply because “the other guys are doing it too,” and they would otherwise be at a disadvantage. Again, collective action, by whatever name you call it, is the only sensible alternative to mutual destruction through a “race to the bottom.”
But after all the intellectual points and objections have been made concerning the philosophical tenets of libertarianism, my deepest concern is one regarding attitude and character. There is an undercurrent that I sense running through both the behavior and commentary of libertarians (with or without a capital L), and it seems to be one of intellectual sophistry and smug self-satisfaction. There was an essay written in Mother Jones about three years ago, by Pamela Borsook, called “Cyberselfish.” I’m sure that you know about it; my guess is that it’s one that you love to hate. But I think that it was dead-on about the real problem with the laissez-faire attitudes expressed by you and your ideological brethren: They serve your interests well, even if they might not have done so before you got where you are now.
One place where this attitude seemed notably transparent was in the recent newsgroup exchange where someone was trying to drum up support for a petition or some such thing, in support of legislation to protect gays from hate crimes, following the truly heinous murder of Matt Shepard. I recall you objecting that that particular newsgroup was not the place to be placing such an advertisement. In general I’d have to agree with that complaint, but I also recall that there was an objection made that existing laws adequately protected people against murder, so there was no reason to place gays in a special position. We’ve all heard such arguments before. They were made constantly during the struggles leading to the Civil Rights Act in the early ‘60s, and they show clearly the motivations of those making them. The concern of such persons is focused on what is “proper” and “logical,” rather than on what is actually happening to the victims of violence. In this case, someone was specifically targeted as a member of a despised group, and victimized on that basis. That makes the situation exceptional, even though responding to the exception makes the laws and their enforcement more complex and inelegant. And when concern for what is logically elegant outweighs concern for flesh-and-blood realities, the true motivation behind such political positions becomes clear.
Insisting on treating everyone according to the same consistent standard is just as inadequate as the stereotypical liberal lament that, if we could just love one another and learn to get along, everything would be all right. And yet again, it also stands marxism on its head: Rather than the end justifying the means, the means are justified regardless of the end. The laws made logical sense but, in their weakness, they failed to prevent a crime.
In the final analysis, it looks to me as though the least attractive feature of libertarianism is the example of those who espouse it. When I consider its most visible supporters, those whom I’ve seen tend to come across either as pompous or stuffy intellectuals (Dick Cavett, Andre Marrou, the talk-show host Gene Burns) or as glib smart-asses (P. J. O’Rourke and Howard Stern (and possibly Bill Maher, although I’m not sure what his stated political affiliation is)). Even Frank Zappa seems to be a case in point: For all his obvious and prodigious talents, I don’t recall anyone speaking of him as a particularly warm human being, nor do I hear that trait coming across in his music.
Finally, as if we needed any more bad P. R. to drive home the point, there was the time when I just happened to stumble across “Politically Incorrect” one night a couple of years ago, when Hugh Downs made his now-famous statement that the Libertarians are the only ones with any new ideas (to much cheering, predictably, from the audience). So there you have it: A TV personality who deserves to be taken just slightly more seriously than Andy Rooney, on a late-night show with just slightly more credibility than the National Enquirer, offering an off-the-cuff endorsement for a political philosophy driven by dubious motivations. That’s almost like getting six planets lined up in the sky at once. Do I have great luck when I channel-surf, or what?
And then, well, I hate to put it too bluntly, but there’s you. You have to admit that you’ve forged quite a reputation for being, at the very least, a bit truculent in your interactions with others on Usenet. Admittedly, most of the flames I’ve seen do not involve politics explicitly, but obviously some have, and I have a hard time not thinking that there’s a connection between how you express yourself and the political views you espouse.
There are some attitudes that I do share with libertarians (and, I expect, with you). We both believe strongly in progress, and in the scientific approach to most questions (as do marxists, by the way). But my idea of progress includes social progress—toward a society where, not only do people enjoy individual rights, but they also pull together (at all levels, from the neighborhood to the planet) and look out for each other. For the reasons just described, I just cannot see libertarian principles taking us there. If they were implemented with complete success, I believe that they would reduce human civilization to a state of complete individualism, with everyone looking out for No. 1—the human equivalent of an ideal gas. More likely, though, we would wind up with a state of pseudo-libertarianism, where that “ideal gas” would be contained by large concentrations of power—mostly in the form of multinational corporations, backed by the military might of a few large remaining nation-states (primarily, no doubt, ours). It would be fundamentally the same kind of failure to translate theory into reality that caused the failure of the Soviet experiment with communism.
Whichever of the two scenarios just described occurred, I’m sure that there are those who would not mind the consequences that would ensue following the final deification of The Market Forces. They would be prosperous, and perhaps even safe within their walled communities and workplaces. I would not be able to prove to them that they are wrong. But my failure to convince them, and their economic success, would not make them right, no matter how successful they might be. For libertarianism is mainly, in the end, an error more of the heart than of the head.