Defending Libertarianism

Writing In The American Conservative, Robert Locke examines Libertarians and finds that:

... while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.

I consider myself somewhere in the Libertarian wing of the Republicans. I do not agree with everything that the Libertarians are for but neither do I agree on all points with conservatives like Locke.

Locke's article is a perfect example of a straw man. He quotes the Libertarian principal “an it harm none, do as thou wilt” but this is a Wiccan principal. Libertarians phrase it quite differently:

As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives, and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others...

...we defend each person's right to engage in any activity that is peaceful and honest, and welcome the diversity that freedom brings.

He passes no opportunity to confuse the issue on who Libertarians actually are. He describes them as "Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics". If you have any sympathy to Libertarians, which of these describes you?

Locke admits that there are various branches of Libertarians but he never says who he is quoting from. He is not willing to give Libertarians this liberty:

But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.

By quoting "street Libertarians" he meets at cocktail parties, he can ascribe nearly anything he wants to them. To be clear, I am using the official platform of the Libertarian Party in my rebuttal. If the Libertarians ever come to power, this is their platform.

Locke never says who he is quoting from. This is part of building a straw man. You use a distortion rather that the truth. For good measure, he equates libertarians, libertines, and anarchists.

Other examples of the straw man argument:

Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.

This argument would work better if Locke explained how his alternative works better. After all, his examples were born in the 18th and 19th centuries. With billions of people born since then, the current system must be encouraging lots of tiddlywink players.

Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?

This is where he is confusing libertarians and anarchists. The Libertarian Party Platform does not call for an elimination of the military. It does call for increased use of high-precision weapons and for closing most of the US bases around the world. In general, it is not very different from the platform of Pat Buchannan. This is a lot weaker than I believe in but it is still stronger than Locke gives Libertarians credit for,

As for pollution, a close reading of the platform allows for class-action suits. It also calls for eliminating the legal loopholes that corporate polluters hide behind.

Locke clearly believes in limiting what other people do if it offends his sensibilities:

Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.

Is a repressed society better than a vulgarized one? I don't think that it is as self-evident as Locke believes.

Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.

This entire passage mystifies me. Some examples would be nice. When he talks about government benefits, does he mean Social Security? Unemployment? It is impossible to answer such a vague charge.

Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?

Ok, Locke asked some hard questions. Some of them have hard answers. To examine them:

What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free?
This means a wholesale invasion by a foreign nation. This just isn't possible in the age of nuclear weapons.

What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners?
This is a trick question since it cannot be done. A US boycott would not affect the world oil supply. If the US refuses to buy oil from Saudi Arabia then the world price of oil would rise. The rest of the world would buy Saudi Arabia's oil while we pay premium prices for non-Saudi oil. It is likely that middlemen would buy Saudi oil and resell it from a neutral country.

What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society?
I'm sorry, how does the current system do this?

What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways?
Locke is talking about Eminent Domain but he cannot use the term because government has been abusing it on many levels. Eminent domain is often used to obtain land for below-market price and recently has been used to buy residential areas for private developers. Does Locke support this?

What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
This is a red herring. Do poor foreigners who become citizens vote socialist? So does Locke support an ideological test at the boarder? Or is this a jab at Mexicans? I've worked with a lot of immigrants. Two Russians report to me. They are rather conservative as are the Africans who have reported to me. So who does Locke mean?

Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.

I defy Locke to find a Libertarian who believes in indentured servitude. I will admit that Libertarians have supported companies that use child labor overseas. It sounds cruel but the alternative is not kids in school - it is starvation. As a rule, bringing more prosperity to a country, even if it is through child labor, quickly the affluence enough that child labor is no longer profitable. This can be debated at length.

As for the insane and senile, Libertarians would turn them over to private hospitals, not turn them onto the street.

Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen.

Actually, there is. The Scandinavian countries have been experimenting with drug legalization for some time. Locke makes other statements about the lack of empirical proof but these the Cato Institute and other think-tanks produce exactly this sort of proof. Locke mentions empirical proof several times. Strangely, places like the Cato Institute write up numerous of case studies that should provide exactly this sort of proof. Locke, on the other hand, does not provide a shred of proof for any of his assertions. Here's another one.

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments.

The US is the main bastion of Libertarianism but the Libertarians have not been around long. Two party rule is built into our government with huge barriers to third parties.

At the same time, Republicans have had a strong Libertarian wing since Reagan won the 1980 election with a promise to get government off peoples' backs. It can be argued that embarrassing Libertarian ideals allowed Republicans to take the White House and Congress for the first time in 50 years.

Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday.

I have terrible news for Locke - people already do this. Sadomasochism between consenting adults is perfectly legal and alcohol remains the drug of choice for most Americans. Hidden in here is the implication that S&M should be outlawed. If so, I wonder how far Locke would go in regulating the bedroom. As recently as the 1960s, married couples could not get birth control.

They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

Just because Libertarians say that certain actions should not be outlawed does not mean that they encourage drunkenness, etc. Drinking is legal but no one except the makers tell you to drink. Locke makes it sound like civilization depends on a youth spent in Catholic school (but he couldn't mean that since they are not public).

Since the last election, Democrats have been saying (hoping) that hubris would destroy the Republicans. Maybe they are right. While the Democrats represent a coalition between many special interest groups, Republicans are mainly Libertarians and the religious right. Republicans are in the majority, but it is a close majority. If the religious right splits with the Libertarians then Hillary has a good shot at the White House.