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Dialog With an Absolutist

by Bruce Ramsey

Maybe there aren't enough libertarians to screw in the light bulb.

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Some months ago I attended a luncheon of libertarians, and found myself in a conversation with an absolutist. He was opposed to the initiation of force in any circumstance, and believed that anyone who disagreed with him was no libertarian. Further, he believed that this view put him in a unique corner of the political boxing ring, equidistant from Left and Right.

I thought it put him somewhere in the Crab Nebula. Because in the real world, most people identifiable as libertarians, including myself, believe nothing as radical as that.

We are libertarians because liberty is our central political value. It is our defining principle, our badge. That does not mean we follow it without thinking.

Two quotes will help clarify this. The first is from H.L. Mencken, who was asked in a radio interview how much freedom of speech he was in favor of. He was in favor of a lot. Memory tells me his answer was "as much as people can stand."

The second is from Louis Rukeyser, the host of Wall Street Week. I interviewed him years ago, and asked him how he would describe his political philosophy. He said: "First, I am for liberty; second, I am for what works."

That's me. Liberty, and what works.

Libertarianism is the theory of a society organized around one principle. I cannot think of a social principle that does better work. But it cannot do it all — not satisfactorily. Here are ten cases in which it falls short.

1. Pursued to its ultimate end — which is where the absolutist pursues all ideas — the non-coercion principle does not allow the imposition of taxes or even of citizenship. It leads to anarchism, a philosophy that has no more real-world application than an M.C. Escher drawing.

2. Libertarianism is designed for adults. Children are subject to the will of their parents, but also to the rules and protection of the state. How should that work? Libertarianism doesn't say. Most libertarians, it seems, don't think about that, but then it seems that most libertarians don't have kids.

3. Rights theory cannot deal with emergencies — that is, "lifeboat situations." Consider if your country is being invaded. As journalist Garet Garrett argued, if you are in a war for the existence of your country, and to fight that war your government needs steel, you cannot allow the civilian sector to bid against the government for steel. The government may need that steel to win the next battle, and it may be the last battle there is. In order to win it, you may have to suspend the free market.
More than that: you may have to suspend personal freedom. Grant that a draft is temporary enslavement of a sort, is that not preferable to permanent enslavement of a worse sort?
Libertarians have said that a society that cannot raise enough volunteers is a society not worth defending. Ayn Rand made that argument, as did Robert Heinlein, who was usually more sensible on matters of survival. It is a preposterous argument. Was France in 1940 not worth defending? Had the America of 1955 been invaded by communist Russia, would it have not been worth defending? Imagine yourself standing up and saying, "Forget it, folks; our country is not worth defending."
I think a draft is unnecessary in my country right now, because of the geography of America and the nature of modern war. I have never supported a draft and I don't expect I ever will. But I think I would have supported a draft in Switzerland in 1940. Switzerland did have a draft, and it was one of the things that kept it free. (See Angelo Codevilla's "Between the Alps and a Hard Place.")

4. Libertarianism has not dealt adequately with questions of public health. How would a libertarian society have handled AIDS? In Randy Shilts' book, And the Band Played On, he describes the fight over the gay bathhouses in San Francisco in 1983. The public health officer knew these private enterprises were spreading deadly disease — quicker than any other institution in the city. Yet disease was being spread by consenting adults, most of whom refused to believe they were frolicking with lethality.
Public health extends beyond emergencies. Should a municipality have the right to set sanitary conditions of restaurants? Libertarians may say, "The market will handle it." But historically it hasn't, because restaurant patrons don't feel free to inspect the kitchen.
On to drugs. All libertarians were for Peter McWilliams' right to smoke marijuana to keep from vomiting up his anti-AIDS drugs, and were outraged when he died following the government's stupid rules. But when they oppose all drug laws with the term "prohibition," thereby making an analogy to liquor prohibition, they imply the existence of a safe use. And for some prohibited drugs there is no safe use. But libertarians argue as if chemistry and biology were irrelevant, which would imply that it would be okay to sell any drug that did anything. Is that a defensible position?

5. How would a libertarian society build highways without eminent domain? When I asked him that years ago, Nathaniel Branden replied that if a person did not want to sell his land, the road builders would have to go around it. He wrote, "There is no great problem with this, nor has there ever been."
But all societies have used eminent domain to build roads and other connectors like private railroads. A libertarian society will not want eminent domain for the building of ordinary things in one spot, like a shopping center. A highway is different. I note that Richard Epstein thinks so.

6. What of city streets? Are whole neighborhoods to be private? Then you have a condo association or neighborhood council telling you what color you can't paint your house and what political sign you can't put in your window.
Absolutist libertarians envision a world 100 percent privately owned. That means there will be no public place to hold, say, an antiwar demonstration. The absolutist will say, "You'd have to find a private owner." You might find one out in the sticks — I think of Yasgur's farm — but can you imagine a commercial property manager allowing a "No Iraq War" rally?
I think I'm freest with millions of islands of private property — little sanctuaries for owners like me — connected by public arteries and supplied with occasional public spaces.

7. Many libertarians want gold currency and no central bank, but the case for this is not a slam dunk.
During the gold-and-no-central-bank years, 1879 to 1913, the currency held its value. That is the good side. But up to 1896 there was deflation, which was statistically gentle but bitterly complained of. In 1896 inflationists took over the Democratic Party and nominated William Jennings Bryan for president. Bryan lost, but it was a near thing. Milton Friedman suggests that had a new process of extracting gold from ore not been invented, and gold mines developed in South Africa and the Yukon, the inflationists would have prevailed. As it was, the new gold supplies created inflation from 1896 to 1913.
Statistically this inflation was small. But in the psychology of the time, the difference was considerable. The "free silver" movement went away. A slight inflation made all the difference between a currency rule that was tolerable and one that was not. And that slight inflation did not depend upon policy, but upon physical discoveries of gold and a new technology for extracting it.
We live in a world today with fiat money and 2 percent inflation. That is not a bad deal. I remember the world of 1979, when it was 12 to 15 percent inflation. If the government is going to run its paper money like that, then we're better off with a gold standard, even with an occasional run on specie. But as long as we have Alan Greenspan or his clones running the fiat-money system, the case against the status quo will be entirely theoretical, which means that system will not change.

8. Libertarians want individuals to have complicated choices. But choices require information, and information is costly. Government drastically lowers the cost of certain information by demanding that it be produced for free. I am thinking of the rule that requires commercial lenders to calculate their rate of interest in a specific way — a rule to which free-market advocates objected 30 years ago. I am thinking of the list of ingredients on packaged foods, the list of side effects on patent medicines, and the disclosure documents for new issues of stocks and bonds.
A libertarian might argue, "If the market demanded this information, the producers would supply it." But they didn't supply it. A century ago, companies put opium in medicine to calm crying babies, and didn't mention it on the label. When federal law demanded it on the label, the opium came out. Today, no U.S. law requires the listing of ingredients in beer, and the beer makers don't list their ingredients.
In a commercial society, people have to deal with strangers. People are presented with choices, some of them affecting their health and survival. If you want a society like that, you'd better make sure it's not too difficult for people to make good choices. Otherwise you will have too many sore losers, and that will be a political problem.

9. Libertarians typically say, "Let every man be armed." Armed with what? Rifles and pistols only? Machine guns? Stinger missiles? Land mines? Tanks? Nuclear bombs? All societies set limits, and a libertarian society would have to do so, too — particularly in public spaces. This question would have to be answered with an eye to practical consequences, not theory alone.

10. How would a libertarian society handle the commercialization of sex? Is everything allowed? How about a bordello designed as a ten-story erect penis? How about a billboard for that bordello, advertising its Monday night chains-and-leather special? A TV ad for said special? I am willing to stipulate that a libertarian society would be pretty damned open, that there might be a Mustang Ranch at the edge of my town. But how in-your-face could it be?

Those are my ten points.

The reader might say, "Hey, if you disagree with us on all that, why are you here?" It is because none of the ten points are of any practical importance. None are issues currently on the table: our society is not debating commercial sex, or the right to own rockets, or the selling of city streets. It is talking about issues such as:

1. War and foreign policy;
2. Taxes and government spending;
3. Schools;
4. Welfare;
5. Social Security;
6. Medicine;
7. Race preferences and the freedom of association.

On these, libertarian theory has something to say. One still has to evaluate it, and sometimes to come up with a softer version, like Social Security private accounts, that might make a sale.

I know the absolutist libertarian. He will be listening impatiently, with a pained "he-doesn't-get-it" expression, waiting to say: "I trust in a free people and you don't."

I trust a free people in cases of economic demand and a working market. Not always otherwise. Maybe there aren't enough libertarians to screw in the light bulb. And maybe I don't want to be in the dark.

I return to Rukeyser's principle: I am for liberty, and I am for what works. The absolutist libertarian is for liberty, and he assumes, a priori, that it will work. Which means, in practice, that he doesn't care whether it will work or not.

But the fact is, other people do care, and if some rule doesn't work, they will throw it out. That is what Mencken meant when he said, "all they can stand."

The absolutist will admit that, but it is a mere practical question, and he is not interested in those. He says, "How do you decide whether it 'works?' If you set up a principle of liberty, and you allow that principle to be compromised when you conclude that it doesn't 'work,' then you are nothing but a pragmatist."

Not entirely. I start with liberty, not with equality or some other thing. That is not pragmatism.

"But you are on a slippery slope," the absolutist will say. "If you compromise your principle at point A, you will be led to compromise it at B, C, D, and E."

Not necessarily. I am used to slippery slopes.

"But you are not consistent."

I suppose not. To be consistent, in this sense, is to accept that one political idea can give an optimum answer to all questions. It is to receive a philosophy as a black box, and to accept whatever comes out of the box.

Well, it is a nice box, but I'm not going to trust it that far.

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