The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
On Boxing Day, December 26th, New York Magazine ran an article, The Trouble with Liberty,
by Christopher Beam, that has provoked a bit of blogging and more than a bit of hand-wringing
The Austrian economist Bob Murphy published a response a couple of weeks ago here on this website, and a fine response it was,
incisively identifying the problems with the way that New York Magazine article portrayed libertarian ideas about taxation, banking policy and war.
I'd like to add a few comments of my own to the ones Bob made, focusing my own attention
on different issues and perhaps doing my part to make certain libertarians understand that,
on the whole, this article was a good thing, not a bad thing.
Oh, it won't win any prizes for the accuracy with which it depicts libertarians and their
ideas, but the author, a young freelancer, not yet 30, did, as Bob Murphy noted, do his
Homework.
To put matters a bit more exactly, Beam did a quick study of the relevant material so
that he could appear to be more knowledgeable than he really is.
One of the basic skills you need to master, it seems to me, if you want to be a successful
practitioner of intellectual journalism.
And on the whole, he did pretty well.
As Bob Murphy puts it, Beam wasn't setting out to write a hatchet job and tries to be
fair to libertarians.
Bob himself managed to read two-thirds of the way through Boehm's article before he even began to feel annoyed by anything in it.
He writes that followers of Murray Rothbard should be grateful for at least certain passages in the article,
so fair and even-handed and accurate are they with regard to libertarians and the libertarian movement.
Needless to say, the entire article is not as fair and even-handed and accurate as certain passages in it may be,
may be.
But even when Boehm makes the usual crude errors commonly made by people trying to understand
the libertarian movement as outsiders, he manages to be less offensive than he might
have been.
Like most outsiders, Boehm is strongly drawn to the notion that libertarians and conservatives
have something in common other than putting their pants on one leg at a time.
He's strongly drawn to the idea, that is, that libertarians and conservatives have something
in common ideologically.
Beam gives evidence early on of actually understanding what libertarianism is.
He quotes the definition offered by David Bowes of the Cato Institute in his book, Libertarianism
a Primmer, the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses
so long as he respects the equal rights of others.
This is a good definition.
But before you can even begin to feel congratulatory toward Young Beam, he messes it up.
Like any political philosophy, he writes, libertarianism contains a thousand sub-strains,
ranging from anarchists who want to destroy the state to picket-fence conservatives who
just want to put power in local hands.
Oh, and how do conservatives who just want to put power in local hands exemplify the
view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses, so long as
he respects the equal rights of others?
How exactly do such conservatives qualify as libertarians at all?
Are laws regulating what drugs people can take, what pictures they can look at and what
What They Can Read, Long Pet Enthusiasms of Conservatives, rendered somehow libertarian
by being imposed on people by local hands?
In another passage, Beam insists that the Tea Party is the closest thing to a mass libertarian
movement in recent memory, despite the fact that, by his own admission, tea partiers surveyed
by Cato split down the middle between social conservatives and social liberals, making
half of them traditional republicans and half libertarians.
But what sort of libertarians are these people?
The kind who say they want lower taxes, a smaller government, a free market and personal
freedom, but also believe it is self-defense to drop bombs on innocent civilians who happen
Beem also writes that libertarians want less state intrusion into the market, which aligns
them with Republicans, but also less interference in social choices, which aligns them with
with Democrats Wrong, on both counts.
First, Republicans do not want less state intrusion into the market.
John McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee for president and a good example of a mainstream Republican,
supported Obama's bailout of the financial services industry.
He also supports regulating tobacco as a drug.
Second, Democrats do not necessarily want less interference in social choices.
It is Democrats who have given us laws regulating speech that is politically incorrect, that
is, speech that might offend someone.
It is Democrats who urge us to ban or regulate every legal product some bureaucrat has decided
is not good for you.
It is Democrats who stand most firmly and fanatically behind laws restricting the ownership
and use of guns.
Still, admittedly, Beam's understanding of American political realities is not so crude
that he thinks of libertarians as simply part of the American right.
As he himself puts it, there's no inherent reason that free marketers and social conservatives
should be allied under the republican umbrella.
It's true, he acknowledges, that republicans speak the language of libertarianism.
They talk about shrinking government and cutting the deficit, but Boehm frankly regards this
Republican talk as hypocrisy.
For not only have Republicans studiously avoided specifics when it comes to deficit reduction,
they have also followed a consistent policy when in power.
They talk shrinkage, do growth.
Even right-wing godhead Ronald Reagan expanded the federal government, bailed out Social
Social Security and signed off on tax hikes. Bush 43 was only the latest in a long line
of Republican spenders.
It should come as no surprise then that libertarianism has adherents on the left, too. They just
organize around different issues. Whereas righty libertarians stew over taxes and bailouts,
lefty libertarians despise de facto suspension of habeas corpus, surveillance and restrictions
on whom you can marry.
Thus, right-wing libertarians charge that the Bush presidency gave the lie to small
government can't by pushing Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and a $3 trillion
war, while left-wing libertarians are furious that Obama talked a big game on civil liberties
but has caved on everything from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to the Defense
of Marriage Act to Gitmo.
Meanwhile, the country faces a massive and growing deficit, too much government, that
neither party has the power or the inclination to fix.
Beam thinks it's significant that, as he puts it, the biggest victories of the right
and the left in the last weeks of this lame duck session of Congress were about stripping
down government, tax cuts, and releasing the shackles of don't ask, don't tell.
He comments, If there were ever a time to harness libertarian energy, on left and right, it's now.
Beam goes further.
The controversy just before Thanksgiving about the Transportation Security Administration's
new airport body scanners, he writes, was a reminder of just how strong, not to mention
loud, the libertarian streak is in American politics.
He believes that there's never been a better time to be a libertarian than now.
The right is still railing against interventionist policies like the troubled asset relief program,
the stimulus package and health care reform.
Citizens of all political stripes recoil against the nanny state, which is nannier than ever,
passing anti-smoking laws, banning trans fats, posting calorie counts, prohibiting
Behm presents some interesting statistics to back up this part of his argument.
He reports, without identifying his source, that about one in ten Americans self-identifies
As I've already observed, this rough-and-ready sorting device, economically conservative and
and Socially Liberal is not a particularly useful one if what you're trying to do is
separate out libertarians from the surrounding statists.
Economically conservative is really just another name for looking with favor on handouts to
big business.
Conservatives do not advocate a truly free market, and it is those who regard themselves
as socially liberal who are largely responsible for the recent penetration of the nanny state
and to Issues of Nutrition.
More important, you can be economically conservative and socially liberal while also taking the
profoundly un-libertarian position that it is all right, or even admirable, to reign
death on innocent third parties to a dispute between states, one of which may well be worse
than the other, but both of which are illegitimate.
Still, Beam reports that the number of Americans who describe themselves as economically conservative
and socially liberal seems to be growing.
In a 2009 Gallup poll, he notes, 23% of Americans responded to questions about the role of government
in a way that categorizes them as libertarian, up from 18% in 2000.
A survey conducted by Zogby for the Cato Institute has put the libertarian vote at around 15%.
Loosen the wording and the pool expands.
When the Zogby survey asked voters if they would describe themselves as fiscally conservative
and socially liberal, also known as libertarian, the number rose to 44%.
Of course, the more you loosen the wording, the greater the risk you run of counting as libertarians people who erroneously believe themselves to be libertarians because they don't really understand what libertarianism entails and implies.
Still, setting all my caveats aside for the moment, it seems encouraging that such a large
proportion of American adults think of themselves as advocates of small, inexpensive government,
a free market, and a society in which people mind their own business and leave their fellow
citizens alone to live their own lives as they prefer.
A society in which anything that's peaceful is tolerated.
On the other hand, whatever people tell opinion pollsters, however they may say they identify
themselves, it is not yet possible to achieve any significant portion of the libertarian
agenda through the use of the political process.
As Beam puts it, if a libertarian wants to get elected, he's going to have to bend
a few principles, deal with reality as it exists.
The same is true if he wants to legislate.
He points out that since the election that made the supposedly libertarian-leaning Rand
Paul a Senator from Kentucky, the newly elected Senator has challenged Republican orthodoxy
by suggesting he's willing to cut military spending, but during an appearance on CNN
on November 9th, a week after the election, he ended the interview rather than name a
spending cut.
And as for Ron Paul's heroic call for abolition of the Federal Reserve Board,
Beam writes correctly that if he tried, Republicans would smother him just as quickly as Democrats would.
It might seem ironic that libertarian goals are politically unattainable at present,
even though there's never been a better time to be a libertarian than now.
For as Beam notes, there's no idea more fundamental to our country's history.
Every political group claims the founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase
than most.
The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government
power.
The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society's
most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and
a military to protect them.
So some founders, like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to centralize power.
All the government-run trappings that came after—the Fed, highways, public schools,
a one-and-a-half-trillion-dollar-a-year entitlement system—were arguably departures from our
society's hard libertarian core.
And so they were.
For that matter, contrary to Beam's rather naive assumption, the U.S. Constitution was
was a departure from our country's hard libertarian core.
It was, really, the founding document of the Counter-Revolution that set in only a few
years after the Revolution itself was supposedly won and began rolling back its achievements.
If Beam had a firmer grasp of the realities of American history, he would not have made
this error.
Similarly, it might be argued that if more Americans had a firmer grasp of the realities
of American History, they might support libertarian reforms more readily at the ballot box.
For example, most Americans believe that, as Christopher Beam puts it, 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.
Well, no.
The Constitution is not a particularly libertarian document.
The Federal Reserve does not help the government reduce economic uncertainty.
The government is the major source of economic uncertainty.
The Federal Reserve is its principal tool in creating such uncertainty.
The Civil Rights Act outlawed freedom of association on private property, which up to that time
had been entirely constitutional.
And actually, a combination of private charity and families taking care of their own did
suffice to provide for almost all cases of indigence up to the time of the New Deal.
For more about the specifics, see Marvin Olasky's 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion.
The welfare system evolved to give politicians something to trade for votes, and to advance
the agendas of certain politically influential special interests.
Beam would do well, as would all other interested parties, to take a look at Murray Rothbard's
article Origins of the Welfare State in America, written around the same time as Olasky's
Look.
Rothbard reminds us, for example, that among the interests lobbying hard for adoption of
the Social Security Act in 1935 were big businesses who were already voluntarily providing costly
old age pensions to their employees and were hoping to use the Federal Government to force
their small business competitors into paying for similar costly programs.
So it is, Rothbard explains, that the enabling legislation for the Social Security boondoggle
deliberately penalizes the lower-cost employer and cripples him by artificially raising his
costs compared to the large employer.
Also injured, of course, are the consumers and the taxpayers who are forced to pay for
this largesse.
So, all in all, I agree with Bob Murphy that Christopher Beam did his homework before undertaking
his article, The Problem with Liberty.
I agree that he didn't set out to do a hatchet job on us.
And I think that by and large he did an unusually creditable job, particularly for one so young
and for a reporter working in the mainstream media.
Beam's chief problem is a certain degree of historical illiteracy, but that's commonplace
in our society.
It is, therefore, one of the chief things we have to focus on in our educational efforts
to reach the day when something seriously close to libertarianism is politically achievable
in this country.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
The Theory of Money and Credit