Apostasy?  

Am I a Libertarian?

by Brink Lindsey

Two very different libertarianisms jostle uneasily together under a common label. Though they generate broadly similar answers to many current policy questions, they are sometimes as different as Mises and Rand.

---

Am I a libertarian? I call myself one, but some people hotly deny that I have a right to do so. Which raises the question: what's in this particular name? Who deserves the "libertarian" label, or who deserves to be stuck with it?

My libertarian credentials would appear to be fairly solid. I work at the Cato Institute, which is generally acknowledged to be the leading libertarian think tank in the country. And I'm a contributing editor of Reason, the country's most-read magazine of libertarian opinion. Yet I'm sometimes told by self-described libertarians that I'm not a member of good standing in their club, and, some days at least, I tend to believe them. What gives?

The people who contend that I don't deserve to call myself a libertarian argue that some of my political views are un-libertarian. Specifically, I support military action against Iraq, a position that has put me at odds with many (though by no means all) of my fellow libertarians, including the foreign policy scholars at the Cato Institute. And the disagreement goes beyond Iraq: although I am by no means a knee-jerk interventionist, I do believe that sometimes the projection of American military power abroad is necessary to safeguard American lives and advance American national interests.

Meanwhile, on the domestic policy front, I hold a range of views that many self-described libertarians consider to be, for lack of a better word, heretical. I support some types of health, safety, and environmental regulation, as well as tax-funded spending programs to aid the needy, educate the young, and ease the burden of economic dislocation. That is not to say that I support anything like today's regulatory and welfare state; on the contrary, I favor a dramatic retrenchment in government spending and controls. But I do not believe that the "minimal state," much less anarchy, is the desirable end point of reform.

If some libertarians are uncomfortable with me in their movement, let me say that the feeling is mutual. When I describe myself as a libertarian, I usually hasten to add some kind of qualification. For example, I'll say that I'm a 'small-l' libertarian, meaning that I disavow any affiliation with the Libertarian Party, which I consider to be an embarrassment. Even beyond the matter of the political party, the fact that so many self-described libertarians are hard-core ideologues makes me ill at ease when using the l-word to identify myself. Dogmatism, rigid orthodoxies, "excommunication" of "heretics," the narcissism of small differences, these are the vices to which ideologues of all stripes are prone, and in my mind they have precisely zero to do with the true spirit of liberty. What place do I have or want to have in a movement in which such vices seem to be fairly widespread?

But here's my problem, and the problem for all the anarcho-Savonarolas who want to read me out of libertarianism: if I'm not a libertarian, what am I?

Am I a conservative? Let's see; I support the legalization of drugs and prostitution, abortion on demand in the first trimester, and the use of early-stage embryos in scientific research. I think that a flag-burning amendment and the restoration of prayer to public schools are dumb ideas. I don't subscribe to any organized religion. And I'd argue that much of the social and cultural ferment of the 1960s was positive. You think the conservatives will have me?

Am I a liberal? Calling myself a liberal in early 21st-century America doesn't make much sense. I support a flat tax, full Social Security privatization, and school vouchers. I can call myself a free-market liberal, and I sometimes do, but that still doesn't clear up the confusion. After all, I'm for capital punishment, and I oppose racial preferences. I favor restrictions on abortion after the first trimester, and an outright ban on late-term procedures. And I find bobo prejudice against red-state America to be insufferable. Who will understand what I mean when I call myself a liberal? (Yes, I've tried "classical liberal," but most people don't have the slightest idea what that means, and furthermore, the term suggests a backward-looking nostalgia for some mythical golden age that strikes me as both bad marketing and out of sync with what liberty is all about.)

Two Libertarianisms

The root of the problem is that there are two very different libertarianisms jostling uneasily together under a common label. Call the first one radical or utopian, and the second pragmatic or reformist. Though they tend to generate broadly similar answers to many current policy questions, their philosophical underpinnings are miles apart.

The radical libertarian vision starts with an abstract ideal: a polity in which government's sole function is to protect individual rights to life, liberty, and property. A "true" libertarian, in this view, is someone who upholds this ideal as the summum bonum. True libertarians may get their hands dirty in the real world and advocate incremental reforms, and they may even be coy about their long-term hopes, but when pressed they must declare their allegiance to the ideal. Any deviation from the ideal, any support for any extension of government's proper role beyond rights protection, is seen as impure and compromised. Such deviations represent concessions to statism; they "open the door" to relentless and limitless expansion of Leviathan.

Pragmatic libertarianism, on the other hand, starts with the status quo in all its wretched messiness. Reformists share with their radical confreres a moral commitment to the sanctity of individual rights, and a deep appreciation of the fertility of competition and the limits of centralized control. But reformists apply their principles in a very different way: not as blueprints for an ideal society, but as guides to incremental reform. As to the precise outlines of an ideal society they are agnostic or even indifferent. For them the goal is expanding the real-world frontiers of liberty, not spinning utopias.

Pragmatists do not measure a person's libertarianism on the basis of doctrinal arcana, by whether he supports fully privatized roads, for example, or the elimination of compulsory vaccinations even during epidemics, or the repeal of laws against blackmail. That anyone would actually hold such positions, or, worse, use them as litmus tests, strikes the pragmatic libertarian as crankish and bizarre. No, reformist libertarians determine their allies on the basis of the major issues of the day. Does a person support reforming the tax code to shift its focus away from social engineering and toward raising revenue in the least burdensome way possible? Does he support the phasing out of pay-as-you-go public pensions? Does he support measures that would subject the public school monopoly to vigorous competition? Does he support a move away from drug prohibitionism? These are issues that matter, and all those who are willing to join in these causes are welcomed as fellow reformers, not scrutinized for hidden heresies.

Pragmatic libertarians do not worry that their acceptance of a broader role for government concedes some vital principle. Radicals charge that anything short of complete ideological consistency creates openings for the statist impulse to take root and then run rampant. It's a concern that might make some sense if we were currently living in a libertarian polity and were worrying about setting dangerous precedents. But, hey, here's a news flash: that libertarian polity is nowhere in sight! There's no need to worry in our day and age about giving away the store to the collectivists; they run the store already, folks, and our job is to convince them to give it back. Appealing to them on the ground of principles that neither they nor the vast majority of the American public share (for example, that the state has no proper role at all in education, or in safeguarding against destitution among the elderly) is not, in my view, the most effective strategy.

Utopians Get Nowhere

Reformist libertarians eschew utopianism, not because they are less intellectually rigorous than their radical cousins, but because they are more intellectually rigorous. A utopia of pure rights protection, upon careful scrutiny, turns out to be a will-o'-the-wisp. Let's start with examining one niggling little problem: that full-fledged protection of property rights is incompatible with industrial civilization. In the normal common law of property, we are able to enjoin trespassers from coming onto our property, even if their trespass causes us no tangible harm. If I own a 5,000 acre spread, and my neighbor makes a daily practice of stepping onto one far corner of it, I can go to court and get an injunction ordering him to stop it. So if that same neighbor runs a factory that sends effluents into the air over my spread, I should be able to stop that, too. I shouldn't have to prove that it constitutes an "unreasonable" nuisance; I shouldn't have to prove that it imperils my health; the only thing that should matter is that there is a trespass on my property that I don't like. Which means that all it takes is one property-owning green zealot per airshed to shut down the whole economy.

There are many other ways in which property rights are bent to further the public good of economic development. How about the common-law refusal to enforce cartel agreements? A purist regime would enforce those contracts as a matter of course, which would throw all those free-market arguments about how cartels are inherently unstable right out the window. Many humdrum, totally-taken-for-granted laws subordinate rights protection to economic considerations: the restriction of damage awards to compensation for "foreseeable" harm, limited tort liability for corporations, adverse possession, the rule against perpetuities, bankruptcy law, first-to-file title rules, and the protection of good-faith purchasers of negotiable instruments. Straighten out all these little deviations from utopian purity, and kiss the modern industrial economy goodbye. I'm afraid that most radical libertarians simply haven't thought through such issues, or, worse, that they maintain their utopian faith by willful blindness to its many inconvenient complications.

Although a regime of legal protection of individual rights is one of the greatest achievements of civilization, and the surest basis of most of the rest, nonetheless it is not a project that can be pursued with unswerving consistency, at least not with results that would be broadly acceptable. More basically, the project of securing individual rights cannot even be launched without a political decision to embrace certain values at the expense of others. Rights theorists argue that rights ultimately can be justified as compelled by reason, and I have a good deal of sympathy with that argument. But such an argument, even if successful, still leaves unanswered a fundamental question: why be reasonable? Why value a system based on reason over one based on other human values or needs? Clearly there are alternatives: people have been unreasonable throughout most of history. A Wahhabi imam believes unbending adherence to the Shari'a makes for the ideal social order, and reason isn't going to convince him otherwise. Indeed, he believes that unbridled reason is an evil to be combated. Ultimately, then, the case for liberty is an assertion of values: a society in which liberty is the primary political value is a better society than the alternatives, both because liberty is intrinsically valuable and because it is a potent instrument of our other values.

But, if people in society achieve a consensus on the primacy of liberty and then deploy the coercive powers of government to uphold that value, it should not be surprising that they want to assert other values through collective action as well. In my view, therefore, the only intellectually defensible libertarian position is that liberty should be the primary political value, and that other values should supplement rather than supplant the sphere of voluntary activity or civil society. I don't think the position that liberty is or ought to be the exclusive political value is tenable.

Where to draw the line on which subsidiary values can be recognized, and how, is not a question susceptible to principled resolution. There are no analytically sustainable bright lines. Rather, such questions are matters of judgment. It is inevitable that people will disagree on these judgment calls. But the general principle of liberty as the highest political value is something that unites us all and defines us as libertarians.

Pragmatism and Modesty

Libertarians of the pragmatic variety are no less fervent than their radical friends in their dedication to liberty. They are, however, much more modest about the nexus between liberty and any abstract ideological formulations. For utopian libertarians, "true" liberty is a kind of Platonic form, an imagined state of affairs that conforms exactly to a specific conception of individual rights. In the pragmatic vision, by contrast, liberty is, at bottom, an actual civilizational achievement that has historical existence and that we enjoy, to a greater or lesser extent, in our daily lives. Abstract principles of individual rights and market competition shed light on real-world liberty and serve as tools to help us protect liberty and, with luck, foster it. But libertarian principles, like all human concepts, are reductions of human experience; they are partial truths, necessarily incomplete. They are maps to guide our action, but we should always remember that the map is not the same thing as the territory it describes. All maps leave things out; all maps have distortions. And so, when we use our libertarian principles, we should satisfy ourselves with plotting the day's journey; it is folly to presume we can know the location of some ultima Thule at the end of all history's travels.

The intellectual modesty of reformist libertarians includes the realization that there is not a "correct" libertarian answer to every contemporary public policy question. All libertarians agree about the importance of property rights, yet they can disagree, and disagree fiercely, about how to define those rights in certain instances (for example, intellectual property) and what to do when workable property rights are impossible to assign (for example, in the case of rights to clean air). And while libertarians agree generally about the desirability of market-oriented reform, they can clash over the proper sequencing of incremental reforms. It is often an open question whether one marginal reform, on its own, will actually improve the transmission of market signals or instead only amplify the distortions of market signals created by policies left unreformed.

Pragmatic libertarians also realize that the principles of individual rights and market competition offer little guidance in the realm of foreign affairs. Of course, no libertarian could advocate a policy of conquest and colonial exploitation of conquered peoples. Beyond that, though, libertarian principles offer little guidance. The primary desideratum is the protection of liberty here at home from foreign threats; at the same time, though, libertarians wish for the advance of liberty abroad. How do we accomplish these things? Does self-defense stop at our borders, or does real security sometimes depend on the deployment of forward defenses, or the preemption of incipient threats? Does the active encouragement or protection of liberty abroad stir up threats against us, or does it prevent them from arising or worsening? I do not believe there are any pre-packaged answers to these questions. They must be sorted out, case by case, in the tangle of actual, real-world circumstances.

So, to return to the original question: am I a libertarian? Yes, I am, if you mean a pragmatic, reformist libertarian. If, however, the libertarian label is reserved for radical utopians, then the shoe doesn't fit, thank you very much.

Unsurprisingly, given my views, I believe that pragmatic, reformist libertarianism represents the most vital and promising expression of the libertarian impulse. First, it accords far better than the radical alternative with the great current of the freedom-loving intellectual tradition. Neither Jefferson, nor Madison, nor Paine, nor Smith, nor Hume, nor Tocqueville, nor Cobden, nor Hayek, nor Friedman advocated the chimera of a minimal state; all saw a broader, if still tightly circumscribed, role for government. Utopianism is not the distillation of the libertarian tradition; it is a caricature of it.

Furthermore, reformist libertarianism offers the best hope for expanding freedom's frontiers in the future. The false alternatives of American liberalism and conservatism create an enormous opportunity for a libertarianism grounded in the real world. Liberals weary of their movement's obeisance to anti-market interests and victims' lobbies, conservatives repelled by their movement's coziness with the religious right, these are the broad constituencies to which reformist libertarians can make their appeal. But for the libertarian alternative to really gain ground, it must fashion a message and a program that begins, not with unworkable ideological contraptions, but with the here and now of political reality. It must lead public opinion in the direction of greater appreciation for the sanctity of rights and the creative power of competition, gently, firmly, patiently, and just a few steps ahead of those whose minds it seeks to change. It must recognize that there is only a path of ongoing reform and adjustment, no final destination of perfection, and that we all have much to learn along the way.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.