How to reach the left? Well, thank you. So how can Austro-libertarians reach the left?
Well, it depends which left. There are some left-wingers I call the aristocratic left,
and I despair of reaching them. These are left-wingers who have a particular vision
of an idyllic society and that are prepared to hammer into place anyone whose preferences
or behavior doesn't align with the vision. In effect, they see other people as their property.
Back when I lived in North Carolina, on the city line between Chapel Hill and Carrboro,
I used to watch with mixed amusement and horror as the affluent white liberals who ran the
city councils of those two communities competed to see which city could impose the most callous
and intrusively micromanaging legislation. In Carrboro, which incredibly billed itself
as the Paris of the Piedmont, the council thought that old cars looked unsightly and
and so declare that residents will be forbidden to park in their driveways any car older than
a certain number of years, if they get the exact number. Unsurprisingly, this law had
a more burdensome impact on lower income households than on higher ones. So much for the idea
these liberals are supposed to be caring about the poor. This says I'm supposed to get closer
The chapel Hill Council, with similar solicitude, forbade a local copy shop to list their low
prices or to use the word discount in their advertising because its emphasis on low costs
seemed tawdry and inconsistent with their vision of an upscale community.
I'm not making this up.
I have to laugh when conservatives accuse liberals of practicing class warfare, because these
regulations were class warfare all right, but just not in the direction that we're supposed
to be thinking of. The Carver Council thought that cul-de-sacs looked unfriendly and not
only wanted to ban new ones, but it wanted to ram streets through existing cul-de-sacs
and sort of open up these little private fiefdoms to the wider community. So the liberal mantra
The same council wanted to require drive-in banks and drive-in restaurants to have a downward
slope as you drive through the driveway, so that once you're done with transacting your
business at the drive-in window, you can drive down without turning your engine on, and as
you can slide noiselessly and emissionlessly down onto the street, I'm still not making
What sort of gun laws are these two hyperactive councils favored?
I don't know how to sell austral libertarianism to those guys. They seem like enemies of the human race.
It's not as though the free market couldn't address some of their concerns.
They could form private communities and impose all these rules if they wanted.
But the mentality of privilege and entitlement that these guys seem to have I think wouldn't welcome the market discipline of actually having to pay the costs of these policies rather than externalizing them onto their unconsenting neighbors.
But that's not the whole story on the left. There are many, many left-wingers whose primary motivation is in some ways a very libertarian impulse to protect people they see as being pushed around.
So these left-wingers look at contemporary society. They see an economy dominated by mammoth and personal corporations with enormous and seemingly unaccountable power.
They see lower and middle income people disempowered in the workplace, struggling to make ends meet.
They see institutions and social practices rigged against blacks, women, gays, immigrants, other oppressed groups.
And they turn to government to address these inequities because they see the democratic state as an institution that's in principle accountable to the public.
whereas they see these private power as something that's not accountable to the public and so we need to turn to this publicly accountable institution, the democratic state, to protect us against private power.
So let's call this variety of left-wingers the anti-privilege left.
Now of course there's overlap between these two groups.
There are people who have strands of both the aristocratic left and the anti-privilege left in their thinking and so to the extent that you get one strand or another your mileage may vary in terms of talking with them.
The Anti-Privilege Left is the left we can reach.
They're already largely on our side on a number of issues.
Civil liberties issues, mostly, not guns alas, but other civil liberties issues by and large.
They're mostly anti-war.
There are a bunch of leftists out there who didn't change their minds about civil liberties and war
once we switched from Republicans and Democrats in the administration.
They aren't the ones who get on TV all the time, but you talk to them, there are plenty of them who are very unhappy with what the current democratic administration is doing.
Their chief sticking points are economic. So what we need to do is to show them that a free market can actually achieve the goals, or a lot of the goals anyway, that they're concerned about.
I think we can do a better job of reaching the anti-privilege left than we've been doing.
I think we've been making a less persuasive case to them than we could,
because I think we ourselves have actually been underestimating the extent to which a free market would address their concerns.
I think we can do a better job of reaching the anti-privilege left than we've been doing.
I think we've been making a less persuasive case to them than we could,
I think we ourselves have actually been underestimating the extent to which a free market would address
their concerns.
And I think it's also because to a large extent we have underestimated the extent to which
features of present-day society that the left-wingers think are the results of markets are actually
the results of state intervention.
So to some extent we've bought a little bit too much into the left's conception of what's
caused by free markets.
It wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, libertarians weren't just aligned with, but often thought of themselves as part of, in effect, the anti-privilege left.
Radical free marketers were in the forefront of the labor movement, the feminist movement, the anti-slavery movement, and more broadly movement for racial equality, a fever of sexual deregulation of various kinds.
In the 20th century, libertarians felt largely drawn into an alliance with conservatives.
That's because state socialism was, you know, seemed out on a triumphant upward march everywhere,
and libertarians and conservatives agreed in being against that, and so they relied with each other.
And I think that although the alliance didn't really last, I think a lot of things rubbed off on each side.
What conservatives got from libertarians is they picked up a lot of our free market rhetoric,
which they then used to festoon their anti-free market policies.
But I think that to some extent we picked up from them
an excessively rosy picture of the economic status quo
and thus to some extent a knee-jerk aversion to a lot of the concerns of the anti-privilege left.
Now in 1966 Murray Rothbard wrote the following
quote, for some time I've come to the conclusion
that the grave deficiency in the current output and thinking of our libertarians
and classical liberals
is an enormous blind spot when it comes to big business.
There's a tendency to worship big business per se,
and a corollary tendency to fail to realize
that while big business would indeed merit praise
if they won that bigness on the purely free market,
in the contemporary world of total neo-mercantilism
and what is essentially a neo-fascist corporate state,
bigness is a priori highly suspect,
because big business most likely got that way
through an intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges,
The Rothbard's lament about the pro-big business orientation among libertarians is less applicable
today than it was when Rothbard wrote it, and Rothbard's own efforts are largely to
thank for that.
But I believe there still is some tendency for us to underestimate the effects of this
intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges and monopoly grants.
I like to use the term conflationism for the tendency to see the economic order that prevails
in present-day industrialized societies as a close approximation to free market, rather
than a more corporative system of massive government intervention, largely on behalf
of big business.
Conflationism comes in both left-wing and right-wing varieties.
In left-conflationism, you look at all the undesirable features of the present-day economy
that are actually features of corporatism, and you blame them on the free market and
and you take that as a reason to reject the free market.
The right-wing version is you take the existing economy
to be a rough approximation to a free market
and then all the things in that economy
that the left complains about, you think,
well, those are the results of the free market,
so they must be okay and you reach to defend them.
A good example is the recent debate in the US
for Healthcare, which was billed not only by the Democrats but also by the Republicans
as between something like a free market, the free market version of healthcare that we
now supposedly have versus a more, Republicans would call it socialist, the Democrats would
call it something else, but basically a more government-oriented one.
And so we think that we're being asked to decide between our current free market health
care versus more of a socialized health care.
But of course, we don't have a free market health care.
We have a deeply corporatist system.
So if you like the free market, then you're tricked into supporting the existing system,
which is actually corporatist.
If you don't like the existing system, then you're tricked into opposing the free market.
And so either way, you know, one wing or the other of the ruling class ends up winning.
Now the right-wing version of conflationism is a lot more common among conservatives than
is among libertarians.
I think there's still a decent tinge of it within contemporary libertarianism, and it
works against us because when we find ourselves sort of tricked by this way of thinking into
supporting the economic status quo, then it just confirms the left-wing suspicion that
free market language is just a cover for advancing the interest of big business and so we lose
any chance we have of reaching them and you know so whenever there's a corporation that's
under attack by the left, Microsoft or Walmart or wherever it may be, we're often tempted
to rush to its defense because we think oh well they think that these things got their
power in the purely free market and they're against the fairly free market and they're
And of course, these corporations didn't get their power solely through free market means.
We often see things like, well, after all, in a free market, no one forces anybody to
deal with this corporation.
Well, that's true, but what free market are we talking about?
The existing free market, where these companies are the beneficiaries of all sorts of regulations,
it's not so clear that they really deserve our support.
That's one reason that William Gillis has recommended using the term freed market instead
of free market.
To sort of get ourselves past thinking of this is something we have and think of it
as something to accomplish.
As he puts it, it moves us to the idea of after the revolution, the market being freed.
Now a lot of the claims I'm going to make are controversial among libertarians.
They're defended by myself and my associates in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, but
But other libertarians, such as my friend Walter Block, who's sitting right there grinding
his teeth in despair at my confusions and heresies, think that a lot of what we have
to say is horribly wrong. Walter has a couple of articles on why we're horribly wrong, and
the number of other libertarians, Peter Klein, Brian Kaplan, and so on, who've written about
why we're wrong. So you should read those, but you should also look at the Alliance of
the Libertarian Left website and read what we've got to say and make up your own minds
One of the central left libertarian claims is that businesses would most likely be smaller,
less hierarchical, and more numerous in a free market. Why is that? Well, it's because
in addition to economies of scale, things that make it easier and more efficient to
do things when you're bigger, there are also diseconomies of scale. Remember, the firms
are like islands of central planning in an ocean of markets. As a firm grows larger,
As internal transactions become increasingly dissociated from the price system and inefficiency results,
information flow in large hierarchies is also notoriously inefficient.
Moreover, even the economies of scale themselves generate diseconomies of scale.
For example, suppose your economy of scale makes your business more productive.
So you produce more. Great.
But now, in order to sell all the stuff you've produced, you have to distribute it over a wider geographical area.
You know, because everyone within this radius has already bought your stuff, so you've got to expand it, which means your transportation costs go up.
At some point in the firm's growth, the diseconomies start outweighing the economies, and that puts a limit to how big the firm can get.
Unless government intervention comes along, it can help the firm by enabling it to privatize its profits and socialize or externalize its costs.
There are lots of ways it does this. Subsidies, eminent domain seizures, grants of monopoly privilege, all things are sort of direct help to these big businesses, but lots of indirect ways too.
Government interventions in general, licensing, zoning regulations, taxes, fees, capitalization requirements, plus of course inflation, all these things are more burdensome to newer and smaller companies than to larger and more established ones.
And so this work is a kind of semi-cartelization of big business.
And that's the reason that all these regulations, which people often think of as being anti-big business, were actually historically lobbied for, and in some cases even drafted by the companies.
And Rothbard was responsible for, or one of the ones responsible for, bringing into libertarianism a lot of the New Left analysis of people like Gabriel Kolko, who didn't like their work being used to defend the free market, but, you know, screw them.
Another example is intellectual property laws, which libertarians are increasingly coming to recognize as not a legitimate form of property, but really a form of protectionism, a tool of government privilege, which is another way that established companies can make it harder to compete with them, because our ways of doing things, if we've gotten, you know, patents on them, then you can't do what we're doing without, you know, our suing you. Another example, transactions
Between firms are taxed, transactions within firms aren't taxed so much, so that makes it cost-effective to move more and more functions inside, and that tends to encourage companies to get bigger, more than they would in a free market.
Having tax funding for highways and other kinds of transportation subsidies also helps large firms overcome those transportation problems associated with larger scale that I was mentioning.
What I was mentioning, think of the wear and tear that's done on highways by big trucks
and shipping and so forth. Well, the most of the wear and tear on highways comes from
long-distance shipping, but those don't bear a proportionate burden of the tax, so actually
highways represent a redistributive tax from less affluent to the more affluent.
So when left-wingers complain, there are all these big, hierarchical corporations with
With global reach dominating the economy and crowding out smaller and more local production,
the thing they're complaining about is actually a situation in large part created by the government.
So our reaction should be to explain that to them rather than to say, oh, you're attacking
big business, you're attacking the free market.
I mean, they are attacking both those things because they think those things go together,
but they don't necessarily.
The regulatory obstacles that make it harder for newer, smaller firms to compete with older
and more established ones and larger ones also have a negative effect on the labor market.
They suppress the number of employment opportunities.
If in a free market there'd be many more employment opportunities, they would put workers in a
better position either to bargain for better conditions or to start their own companies
either thanks to increased demand for labor on the one hand or thanks to the leveling
of the playing field that laissez-faire would bring on the other.
That's one reason that in the 19th century libertarians were much friendlier to the labor movement.
And nowadays libertarians like to point out, you know, when they're criticizing the labor
movement, oh well, unions have often engaged in violence either directly or indirectly
through the state against employers, against non-union workers and so forth.
That's true.
It's also true that employers have often engaged in violence against workers, against unions
It's either directly through hired goons or through the state.
That's not an objection to businesses as such, that a lot of businesses have done that.
So likewise, it shouldn't be an objection to unions as such, that unions have often
done that.
We live in a society where it's pervaded by state privilege and everyone wants to achieve
what their goals, wherever they are, by means of the state.
I think the knee-jerk opposition to unions among libertarians often tends to obscure the extent to which a lot of the goals of the labor movement actually would be more greatly facilitated in a free market.
Now, it's true that a lot of unions nowadays are just basically labor cartels, government-privileged labor cartels.
But what brought that about?
In large part, it was a result of legislation that was supported by big business.
If you look historically, big business said, well, look, if we have to deal with these unions,
we'd rather have them sort of tamed and brought in as junior partners of the government business partnership.
So we'll give them certain rights in exchange for their agreeing, you know, no sympathy strikes, no this and that, and so forth.
You know, you think of, when the left talks about the achievements that unions won during the heyday of labor,
when they talk about the weekend and the eight-hour day and so forth,
Well, those were largely achieved through non-government action, primarily by market means and indeed over government resistance.
And indeed, if you look at sort of the most interesting and notable victories of unions in recent times,
they've been ones that were done outside the system of union legislation, you know, by sort of non-privileged unions,
whereas ever since the mainstream unions got these government privileges, their membership and their influence has been steadily going down
Because they got bought off, they got sucked into the system.
And so when left-wingers complain, oh, unions are in decline,
we should say, well, maybe the government
has something to do with that.
When the unions accepted the devil's bargain
of help from government with all the regulatory strings,
then went with it, basically turned them
into labor cartels, which a lot of the time, originally,
they weren't.
Now, it's also important, when we're communicating
the left-wingers, to pay attention
to how what we say sounds to them.
For example, we often say, oh, we're against the conservatives.
Conservatives are interventionist.
Well, here's how they hear that.
Because the left-wingers assume, they already
come in with the assumption that conservatives are
the less interventionist one.
So when they hear us say that we think they're interventionist, too,
to them that sounds as though their reaction is going to be,
oh, you libertarians are so extreme that even
the conservatives, even these pro-free market conservatives
are too interventionist for you.
That's how they're going to hear it.
So what we need to make clear to them
is that it's not as though there's a continuum with the liberals
over here and the conservatives here,
and then we're somehow just a notch libertarian word
of the conservatives.
But in fact, there isn't really that much difference
in degree of intervention between the liberals
and conservatives.
It's often an indifference of style.
I mean, on the whole, liberals tend
to favor more direct government intervention.
Conservatives tend to favor more indirect means
of sort of empowering, giving special privileges to cronies, although of course both factions
do both.
For example, looking back to the healthcare debate again, the whole individual mandate
part of the democratic healthcare program is clearly a giveaway to big business, that's
a corporatist side.
It's probably one reason that the Republicans didn't attack it as much as they attacked
The Point of Statism isn't necessarily any less intense for being less direct.
We should talk about what the conservative version of health care is, how it empowers
insurance companies and HMOs and the MA, we should talk about how it drove the mutual
When conservatives are perceived as deregulators, oftentimes they are stripping off some secondary regulation that was meant to serve as a limitation on some primary regulation.
The government gives some group a government-granted privilege and puts restrictions on how they use the privilege, then the Republicans come along and strip off that privilege.
So we do deregulation, and often there's a bad result, but that's because that's not real deregulation.
It's important for us to overcome this idea that we're just like conservatives over only more so.
Similarly on discrimination, we often say, well, there couldn't really be much discrimination in a free market
because a worker's wages are determined by their marginal revenue product.
We don't have a free market, maybe so, but we don't have a free market. We have an artificially constrained market where the costs of discrimination are lowered.
And also, when the companies are larger and more hierarchical, it's harder to tell what an individual worker's marginal product is.
And as a result, pre-existing prejudices are more likely to guide that result.
Likewise, when we talk about the environment, some environmentalism is just sort of the aristocratic, idyllic, impose a certain idyllic vision on everyone.
But a lot of left-wingers are concerned about the environment because they see resources being wasted and misused.
And we need to point out the ways in which government enables that to happen,
in which government either by directly controlling resources itself or giving rights to these resources away to privileged companies,
Allowing logging companies to log its sub-market rates in national forests, accessed by tax-funded roads, and so forth, is worth putting.
Now, can this approach work? I think so. Those of us who are working in the sort of Alliance of the Libertarian Left thing are often being told by liberals or leftists of various kinds,
I could never stand libertarianism or take it seriously until I heard it presented the
way you guys presented it. So I think that that's evidence that it is possible to win
at least many left wing types over by emphasizing these sides. So I think in some extent we've
been leaving one of our most powerful weapons in our arsenal not using it and I see we need
to take it out and use it. Fight the power.