Christopher Beam at New York Magazine has a good article on libertarianism. It describes the different types of libertarianism and its popularity – it has a great tagline. Libertarians believe that the best government is the one that governs the least and empowers the individual over the state. This sounds really nice in a soundbite but how does this work in real life?
Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central bank—otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.
And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because “states’ rights” had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system evolved because private charity didn’t suffice. Challenges to the libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor, charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their families will take care of them. If they have no families to take care of them—well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Of course, we’ll never get there. And that’s the point. Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.
Yes, this is the problem with libertarianism. It’s an idealistic system that requires everyone to be acting in a rational manner and that the “free market” is completely without manipulation. We all know this isn’t true. People are messy, they aren’t machines. Many of them make crummy decisions. It’s no use (IMO) talking about how people SHOULD behave. We should talk about how they DO behave.
Here is the lesson of the exercise for me:
There’s always tension between freedom and fairness. We want less government regulation, but not when it means firms can hire cheap child labor. We want a free market, but not so bankers can deceive investors. Libertarianism, in promoting freedom above all else, pretends the tension doesn’t exist.
Of course we all worry about nannystatism. But where is the line? I don’t really believe in the slippery slope anymore. Seatbelt laws don’t mean that we’re going to submit to involuntary DNA tests. Sometimes government intervention is a good thing, even if it is choosing the winner and pre-empting the free market. I certainly agree that this can be done too much but I don’t think the answers are so glib and easy. Real life is messy and is something we learn by making mistakes. I imagine democracy is the same way.
The best we can do I think is to incorporate libertarian ideals where we can. The anger about TSA searches is healthy, as is questioning our indefinite detention policies. Libertarians have painted themselves in a corner IMO by allying themselves so closely with social conservatives. It’s hard to take them seriously when their allies believe women’s uteruses are state property.