Massive Government Freedom
Lots of excellent discussion downblog. Let me excerpt a question from Steve, because it turns out I wrote about it three years ago. Steve writes
. . . it’s not surprising that Republicans are down with military interventionism. I don’t know that I consider it that surprising that the Democrats are in favor of military interventionism, either, for both crass political reasons and an underlying belief in the transformational power of government shading neatly into the Wilsonian belief in the power of America to lead a more unified world (by force if necessary, Wilson’s example in Haiti be damned).
What is surprising to me is the libertarian strain. Is it necessarily obvious that the group of Americans most likely to understand that, ”I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is a punch line is going to feel ideological kinship with America’s biggest, baddest government agency? Are sociological explanations really the best basis? I’m not well read in such political philosophy as might be said to unify American libertarians, but I certainly don’t remember anything in The Road to Serfdom (or even The Fountainhead) that might have led me to expect this result.
I’ve discussed the roles of fear and nationalism ad nauseum. But let me also express some sympathy for my estranged neolibertarian and anarchomilitarist brethren here. One reason why libertarian-inclined thinkers fall prey to the interventionist temptation is that they really really really hate tyranny. This comes through very clearly if you read much at all on, say, Samizdata, a site where only one contributor, Jonathan Pearse, can bring himself to speak to or even of me any more. As I wrote in June 2003,
The reason why people like Perry de Havilland and I end up shouting at each other, despite agreeing on almost everything there is to agree on, is precisely because of what neither liberals nor conservatives understand about libertarians - we are all moralists at heart. Liberals imagine that all we care about is money and utility, conservatives that our driving concern is satiating our various appetites. But we actually hate evil. We may not define “evil” the way a given liberal or conservative does. And when one libertarian weights a pair of evils differently than another it can get very heated very quickly.
Saddam Hussein, for instance, was a terrible tyrant: a vicious, vulgar jumped-up thug. Why wouldn’t people hate him? Libertarians don’t just intellectually oppose tyranny; they feel it, keenly. If you feel it keenly enough, you start looking for reasons to discount what you know about state attempts to improve the human condition, which is what a “humanitarian intervention” is before it’s anything else.
The next step is a category error, one Glenn Reynolds made early on. Libertarians believe self-defense is the most basic right: you may kill the person trying to kill you. The trouble comes when you generalize an individual right to respond to the press of immediate danger to a collective prerogative to obviate speculative harms. Despite the Bush Administration’s attempts to shine its foreign policy with a “let’s roll” gloss, the voluntary efforts of a group of ordinary citizens in the face of immediate danger is in a completely different political and ethical category from an elite decision to commit an entire country to initiate wars against other countries based on what might happen. Reynolds wrote
“I think there’s a split among libertarians between those who view government as the enemy and those who view individual self-defense as the most important right. There’s a lot of overlap in political positions between people who take those views. To a lot of libertarians, the war looks like self-defense writ large. Whereas to another class of libertarians, anything that strengthens the state is wrong, even in self-defense.”
And there’s you’re trouble, right there: thinking of speculative war (not preemptive, which is a whole different thing) as “self-defense writ large.” This thinking goes wrong at both ends. Speculative force fails the moral tests we place on self-defense, and we go in fear, if we are libertarians, of likening government actions to individual actions “writ large.”
What’s useful about the quote regarding Steve’s question is that it does show a characteristically libertarian path toward militarism. It’s a road to hell that a passionate intention to rid the world of tyranny is likely to lead one down.
Comment by Sifu Tweety —
May 10, 2006 @ 12:06 am
Which has always seemed to me to be a puzzling, central fallacy of libertarianism: if you’re willing to extend a full-throated defense of individual rights to non-individuals, e.g. states or corporations, aren’t you kind of shooting yourself in the foot? Of course the goals of supra-state entities are going to be counter to the interests of individuals: confusing the two is the ur-category mistake. That’s why capitalism is amoral, and why government intervention untempered by humanism sucks so bad.
Here is my deal for any libertarian: you restrict yourself to arguing for individual rights, and I will restrict myself to seeking government intervention only for those who desire it. Sound fair?
Comment by T. J. Madison —
May 10, 2006 @ 1:16 am
This libertarian, for one, isn’t happy with either the ”State” or the ”Corporate” aspects of State Corporatism. There are all sorts of shaky aspects to the construction of public corporations. I have much more confidence in privately-held corporations, where it’s possible for the smaller number of owners to keep the rest of the company both morally and financially accountable.
Exhibit A: Google. The whole ”Don’t Be Evil” mission went right out the window when the company went public, because afterwards management had a legal fiduciary duty to sell out ethics in the pursuit of profit.
Comment by Steve —
May 10, 2006 @ 6:42 am
Thanks, Jim — I’m not sure that’s the entirety of what’s going on, but it provides a sensible answer to why (some) libertarians swoon for militarism and is probably more considered than my question deserved.
Comment by ajay —
May 10, 2006 @ 7:04 am
Here’s an alternative explanation. Some (not all!) people who call themselves libertarians are simply using it as a way of saying ’low taxes, legal dope, and no snooping around’They’re looking at it, in other words, from a very personal, bottom-up point of view - they don’t want government interfering with them. Obviously, since ’Government Out of My Business’; is not a slogan to attract mass support, they tend to generalise to ’Government Out of All Our Business’.
I’m setting this up as an alternative to another strand of thinking, which is more top-down - you start from the position that Government is per se a Bad Idea.
Now, the end product of the second approach is minimal or no government, full stop. The end product of the first approach, for some people, is a government which stays out of their business - and, if they define ”us” narrowly as ”Americans”, for example, then the government can rampage around the rest of the world without offending them (except by exacting taxes to pay for its rampaging).
Comments?
Comment by matthew hogan —
May 10, 2006 @ 8:13 am
Re: Jim’s post.
Yep.
Comment by ran —
May 10, 2006 @ 8:15 am
Even if you fervently wanted Iraqis free from the tyrant Saddamm how stupid/gullible would you have to be to believe the corrupt, lying assholes running this country started this war in order to liberate the Iraqi people?
Clearly the plan was to replace a thug who had gone off the reservation with a new one who understands that we call the shots. And the Iraqis we ”liberated” from this mortal coil in the process? We don’t do body counts I believe Tommy Franks said.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
May 10, 2006 @ 8:56 am
Is it necessarily obvious that the group of Americans most likely to understand that, ”I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is a punch line is going to feel ideological kinship with America’s biggest, baddest government agency?
Because in the mental universe of most people who call themselves ”libertarians” or ”small-government conservatives,” the military isn’t part of ”the government.” It hasn’t been since Reagan, and probably before that.
A $50,000 NSF grant to some botanist studying pond scum? Cue wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.
$9 billion unaccounted for in Iraq? [chirp]
Maybe someday an honest libertarian (my money’s on either you or Silber, Jim, because you two are just about the only ones who fit the category) can solve this mystery for us.
Comment by jlw —
May 10, 2006 @ 9:30 am
This puts an amazingly positive gloss on pro-war libertarians. I’m not sure I buy it, though, not entirely.
There’s obviously a strain of self-defense running through the militarist libertarians, but I’m not sure I’d place the category error as confusing rights of an individual and rights of a state. Rather, the psychology we’ve seen in the last five years seems closer to projection: they are personally scared (pissing their pants even though they are a thousand miles from any conceivable target) and want to strike in some way to assuage that fear. Since flying to Pakistan and strangling Osama is not going to happen (for a variety of reasons) they use the millitary and the war as a means of wish fulfillment. Stand in the way of their war and you are frustrating their chances to vicariously teach ”them” a lesson.
Category confusion? Yup. But the categories are physical harm and psychological harm, personal self-defense and the Department of Defense, shooting madmen invading your home and Gitmo. Sometimes, even for self-identified libertarians, politics is personal.
Comment by Leonard —
May 10, 2006 @ 9:30 am
Sifu, it’s not that we extend rights to collectives as if they are separate, new individuals. Rather, everyone has a right to proxy his rights to others to enforce, or to proxy a right to contract to others, etc. Thus, when a state or corporation acts, it can only do so morally if some specific member of that state or corp has the right to act.
Corporations as they exist in the modern world are not strictly libertarian, because they have privileges granted to them as fictional individuals which cannot be accounted for as the proxied rights of their individual owners. Thus, as an example I can start a corporation, use it to hurt someone (intentionally or not) at a large financial gain, pay out the gains as dividends (to the owner, that is, me), and then declare bankruptcy. If and when my malfeasance is discovered, there’s nothing the victim can do. The ”person” that hurt her - my corp - no longer exists! Mwahahaha! But note that the problem here is not the corporate form per se - it’s that the corp has a legal existence as a ”person”, even though it isn’t. That is, by incorporating I gain a privilege from the state: to act with impunity. If I did the same thing without using the corp as a liability shell, and then killed myself, I might indeed ”get away with it”. But that’s not a viable exploit.
It’s clear in libertarian theory that you can proxy your right to self-defense to others to enforce for you. Thus the state, or defense agency, can morally operate in your stead. That includes using unlimited force against criminals in the act of victimizing you, as well as using more limited force to investigate and rectify already-commited crimes.
Given that Saddam was victimizing people actively, unlimited force against him was warranted from a strictly moral POV. Only him, mind you, not ”Iraq” in general. Perhaps as wide as the executive apparat of his state, but no wider than that - no innocent people. And I might have supported any voluntary agency - call it Snipers Without Borders - that might have decided to eliminate him (after a fair trial, of course). But that’s not what happened. For one thing, the agency that did take down Saddam violated the rights of many Iraqis. Also, it violated my rights. Knowing that it is a rogue agency according to my moral standards, I would have never consented to the taxation that it required.
To the libertarian, the means matter more than the ends. If the ends are not attainable with moral means, you must give up those ends, regardless of how attractive they might be. In this case, I agree with Jim that a lot of libertarians let their outside biases, including their hatred of oppression, lead them into accepting evil means. There’s no real excuse for that, but then a lot of people accept evil means to do things, thinking that their noble ends of Saving the Children justify their depredations of my liberty. It’s also worth pointing out that almost everyone these days does talk and think about states as if they were gods, not constrained by the moral codes of us mortals. Given the ubiquity of this viewpoint, it’s hard to be completely uninfluenced by it.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 10, 2006 @ 9:42 am
jlw: I think it’s important to recognize that people can go wrong for noble reasons as well as base ones. That’s both a conservative AND a libertarian precept.
ran: I think there’s a certain ahistoricity to your complaint. Libertarians didn’t start out with the *reflex* distaste for the Bush Administration that liberals did. Events have shown that reflex distaste justified and a great time-saver, but prior to the Axis of Evil speech the Bush White House looked positively *adroit* in prosecuting the nascent War on Terror. Tora Bora would prove a massive strategic defeat retrospectively, but let’s recall the real stakes in late 2001: Pakistan falls and Osama gets the Bomb. The Bushies kept this from happening.
Plus, particularly early on, Rumsfeld talked a good game. I mean, to libertarian ears, he said *some* things that sounded sweet. He waxed as rhapsodic, for instance, on the famous satellite picture of the Korean penninsula as any first-generation warblogger.
Now, I cannot excuse the progressive neolibertarian proclivity to forgive or minimize in the name of The Cause the Bush Administration’s depredations against truth and constitutionality. But once they found themselves going down that road it was very hard for some of them to reverse course. You look for reasons to believe this is the right road after all.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
May 10, 2006 @ 12:12 pm
One reason why libertarian-inclined thinkers fall prey to the interventionist temptation is that they really really really hate tyranny.
Amen and amen. Posts like this are why I keep reading.
Comment by ran —
May 10, 2006 @ 12:27 pm
Jim,
*Adroit* huh? I didn’t find them to be that exactly. They were asleep at the switch leading up to 9/11, they botched Tora Bora and clearly had a raging hard on to occupy Iraq long before they remotely finished the job in Afghanistan (they still haven’t) and they were transparently lying about we just had to invade Iraq immediately. This 4th-rate clown Saddam was supposed to be some imminent threat to anyone besides domestic political enemies? Yea, sure.
OT, as something of a fitness buff myself, I miss your fitness blogging.
Comment by NeoDude —
May 10, 2006 @ 12:34 pm
Socializing medicine is a preemptive strike against disease that would harm the individual thus hurting the war on terrorism!
WOW!
I could use the state to justify protecting and promoting the individual for all sorts of reasons!
Social Democratic Libertarians…that would sell!
Socializing liberty all over the world! That would certainly put those Marxist in their place!
Comment by NeoDude —
May 10, 2006 @ 12:39 pm
There are anti-Statists and then there are Right-Wing Statists.
Most of the “libertarians” of the Republican Party are Right-Wing Statists!
They act like anti-Statists when liberals and left-wingers are in charge of the state.
Comment by jlw —
May 10, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
Actually, I’d vote for the Social Democratic Libertarian Party if I had the chance. Depending on which parts of the program were libertarian and which were social democratic.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 10, 2006 @ 2:27 pm
”One reason why libertarian-inclined thinkers fall prey to the interventionist temptation is that they really really really hate tyranny.”
And other thinkers don’t?
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 10, 2006 @ 2:31 pm
No, they love it. Particularly liberal thinkers. Some liberal thinkers SAY they hate tyranny, but really they love it. Particularly liberal thinkers who spend a lot of time at libertarian blogs. Particularly YOU, Rich Puchalsky. You don’t hate tyranny. In fact, you are quite fond of it. Your very rhetoric betrays you. You know the old saw about ”protests too much?” You don’t do that. Nor do you protest ”too little.” You protest in just the right amount that would tend to demonstrate your sincerity. And that’s how I know.
Tyranny-lover.
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax —
May 10, 2006 @ 2:36 pm
One reason I’ve been disappointed to see ”libertarians” turning all militarist is that, actually, the people who introduced me to libertarianism (people affiliated with the Libertarian Party, with whom I cooperated in peace activism, way back in the time of the dinosaurs when I was a student) were actually like you, Jim, in not thinking Hayek stops at the water’s edge.
While I’m not prepared to be generous enough to think that all of the ”libertarian” militarism I’ve seen lately is the product of passionate hatred of tyranny (I suspect ajay’s alternative explanation that some self-styled libertarians want ”Get The Government Off My Back” also has some truth to it), I take your point about recognizing that people go wrong for noble reasons as well as base ones. It’s a caution worth remembering, because, of course, without that reminder, it’s easy to assume that I, having only noble motives, won’t go wrong.
Comment by Barry —
May 10, 2006 @ 2:57 pm
I have to disagree with the idea that hatred of tyrants is the primary motivation for warbloggers. How many warbloggers/right-libertarians were calling for US invasions of countries which had tyrannical governmetns, before 9/11? Jim, and other non-war supporting libertarians - before 9/11, how often did other libertarians get down on you, due to lack of support for the numerous wars whichthey supported? How many of them supported numerous wars?
After 9/11, how many warbloggers were really hot for Iraq and the rest of the Middle East vs Africa? What about now? How many ’stay the course’ people are hot for a couple of US incursions into African nations?
It seems to me that their defense of the Iraq war for the sake of democracy parallels the administration’s support of democracy: in name only, raised or lowered as politics and PR require. The only reason that those elections were held in Iraq was that Sistani threatened to unleash the Shiites. The Bush plan was to have a government with no Iraqi involvement save obedience, for the first few years.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 10, 2006 @ 2:59 pm
You know, one of our prized regular commenters has been and may still be more intervention-friendly than I. I won’t name any names but he lives in Pittsburgh and is not gay. Perhaps he would like to weigh in on this issue?
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 10, 2006 @ 3:12 pm
I tried to post on that other thread just to express my appreciation for its overall brilliance, but the calendar was in the way. Why is it that I almost never find myself getting this enthusiastic over the articles and essays I find in the mainstream press? Can you only make a living as a political pundit if you are bland and boring and have nothing interesting to say? (Which is a little unfair to Krugman and one or two others, but not for most.)
Comment by Barry —
May 10, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
Donald, there’s lots of places in the MSM where being non-bland pays off; just look at Limbaugh, Steyn, Savage, Coulter, Laura Ingrahm, O’Reilly, Fox News, The Weekly Standard, VD Hansen, Krauthammer, etc.
Of course, there seems to be one common thread among those people, which Krugman doesn’t share. Can’t imangine what, though.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 10, 2006 @ 3:41 pm
That’s a great thread, but in the wider blogosphere, this stuff is sinking like a stone. ”Non-bland” means ”useful to the two-party squabble,” basically.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
May 10, 2006 @ 11:20 pm
re: comments 20 and 6. (Are there any other non-gay Pittsburgh libertarians who comment regularly here? And who is the gay libertarian?)
So, ran, I was that gullible and stupid.
Coming in to 2002, I had had a nearly decade long history of being wrong about pretty much every major foreign policy thing that the US had done.
1. In 1996, I had been skeptical about the US intervention in the Balkans, which I now think was a mistake — it may not have been perfect but I think on net it ended up saving a lot of lives. (Doug Muir once called it ”America’s last good war, sort of”, which in hindsight I think is about right.)
2. In 1998, I thought that Clinton’s Sudanese bombing was a wag-the-dog operation. Nope; this was actually a genuine attempt to bomb Osama bin Laden, and the fact that the Clinton impeachment thing was happening was an actual coincidence.
3. On September 9, 2001, I had a long talk with a friend where I vehemently maintained that mega-scale terrorism was an absurd idea. Two days later — wrong again.
4. Later that year, I was at first not really in favor of the Afghan invasion, thinking of the proper US response as police action rather than war. I changed my mind fairly quickly on that point, but was still very surprised at how fast the US won. CIA bagmen with briefcases full of cash basically bribed a country into rolling over.
So, come 2002, when the war drums were beating, I took a took a look at the neocon case and found it surprisingly convincing, and I had reason to doubt my own judgment. Here, by ”neocon” I basically mean ”Paul Wolfowitz”. His line of argument ran like this: the US history in the Middle East over the past half-century was a sordid and despicable tale of America propping up dictators, and this was why they hate us. This makes a lot of sense, and I still think this is true. Second, he said, let’s stop doing that and support democracy instead, which also makes sense.
The step to ”so let’s invade Iraq and shoot people until they’re democratic” was the fatal leap. Why’d I make that leap, too? In part: first, I looked over my past history of error and concluded that my skepticism about the limits of American power was probably wrong, and in particular the Afghan war made me think that the US had more cultural capability than I thought. Second, the US had been occupying part of Iraq and fighting a low-level war there (”no-fly zone”) for a decade, and I thought that the new Iraq war would be a decisive end to that, which would probably be good for the Iraqis. Third, when I checked myself for undo optimism, I figured that an Iraqi democracy of a quality on par with South Africa, India or Mexico was reasonably plausible, and that this would be a net benefit.
My optimism started to fade very soon after the war started, as the US started behaving like a distant, incompetent, indifferent imperial power. (Jim and Leonard are doubtless going, ”I told you so! I told you so!”, and with justification.) I kept hoping for a fools, drunks and Americans miracle, until I decided that I was completely, utterly 100% wrong. This happened when the news of Abu Ghraib broke, and there was no real response from the American government. (This Timothy Burke essay from this March (2006) is pretty much a perfect critique of what I thought, where I went wrong, and why I had to get off the war train.)
In retrospect, I think a smarter reaction would have been to propose something like tying Egypt’s aid money to real liberal reform, rather than invading another country. Hindsight is 20/20, but god damn it smarts being as wrong as I was.
Iran, now? I don’t really believe anything the torturer-in-chief tells me. Maybe I’m wrong about this, too, but hopefully I’m learning from my mistakes.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 10, 2006 @ 11:36 pm
Neel, thank you very much for that. I always appreciate learning what you think, and had remembered our brief, congenial pre-war correspondence on such matters and wondered where you were now.
I hope Neel’s report buttresses my point that it was entirely possible for libertarian-minded people *with the best will in the world* to favor a military solution to the Iraq issue in the context of 2001-2002. I thought they were wrong and tried to tell them so, but it wasn’t venality and nothing but venality that drove them.
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax —
May 11, 2006 @ 9:14 am
As a pacifist, I took a narrower lesson than Neel about where I was wrong about US intervention in the Balkans and about war in Afghanistan. (Wrong, that is, in my military assessment of both situations, not wrong in holding to the Quaker peace testimony.) In both cases (besides reaffirming my general pacifism), I underestimated how well we would do in military terms by assuming we had to commit more in ground troops than we wound up needing for initial success. So I concluded from those two wars that air power plus having someone else be the ground troops works better than I thought. I didn’t go on to conclude anything about military force being more useful for general policy goals than I’d thought, and so, when the Iraq war rolled around, was still working from my old assumptions about intervention in general: that governments in general aren’t much to be trusted when they say they’re supporting freedom abroad with guns, and that only very rarely indeed will wars abroad result in a net increase in democracy, and it’s safer to bet on the reverse.
I appreciate Neel’s frankness in explaining how he came to make a mistake about this one; I remember watching with puzzlement and dismay as people whose intelligence I’d respected started either to waffle about Iraq or even to support the war.
Comment by jlw —
May 11, 2006 @ 9:30 am
Jim:
On Neel’s testamony, I’ll concede your point, though for the record I find his description of his own thought processes much less theory-based and more personal than your post might suggest. He came to support the war against his better judgement based on a history of misplaced skeptism.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 11, 2006 @ 9:35 am
Funny! But aside from the obvious bit about how liberal hawks also said that they hate tyranny — and how deservedly little sympathy that gets them — is this like a ressentiment thing? I mean, should I analogize the libertarian who hates foreign tyrannical governments and wants to overthrow them with the full force of the state to the leftist who gets more and more authoritarian because he or she hates rich people?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
May 11, 2006 @ 11:07 am
Rich, I think the analogy between your libertarian and your leftist is exact, though in neither case is it hatred that’s the animating spirit — rather, it’s the slippery slope, the local logic of the moment. How’s that line in Milton go? ”So spake the fiend, and with necessity, the tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deed.”
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax —
May 11, 2006 @ 2:13 pm
The other thing is that, where economic issues are concerned, often the choice that the two main parties present seems to be between one complicated way of arranging government intervention in the economy and a different complicated way of arranging government intervention in the economy. And I’m not sure the choice that gets politically presented as less intrusive always even really is (social justice considerations aside).