Where It Went
The bigthink piece of the week is David Frum’s argument that small-government sentiment in the United States and even in the Republican Party has collapsed. The littlethink piece of the day is a bit of classic ressentiment from Glenn Reynolds:
Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then.
UPDATE: Various people (with various degrees of enthusiasm) see the above as a call for invasion. It was, rather, a comment on the vacuity of the “imperialist oppressors” language. Though I was probably wrong there anyway: If we really were imperialist oppressors, the critics would be sucking up.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ah, I see that Scott Adams has engaged in a similar thought experiment. His closing line rings true.
But just to troll a bit more, I do think that seizing Saudi and Iranian oil would be entirely morally justifiable on terms usually approved of by the left: They didn’t earn it, they inherited it (it’s like the Estate Tax writ large!). They’re extracting huge profits for fatcats at the expense of the poor. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic theocrats! (Literally!) Surely if it’s ever permissible to redistibute wealth by force, this is the case. Right?
Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias offers a practical objection: That there isn’t enough surplus capacity in Saudi Arabia and Iran to make a difference. That’s possible, but hardly undercuts the point. He also quotes Tim Lambert, who invokes Iraq — but Lambert assumes, wrongly as usual, that Iraq was a war for oil. Had we wanted oil, we could have simply ended sanctions against Saddam, who after years of being limited to what he could launder through corrupt UN bureaucrats would have pumped plenty without us having to invade.
But practicalities aside, the point is — why isn’t war for oil not only morally permissible, but morally required, if the forcible redistibution of wealth in other ways (including “windfall profit” taxes — or Evo Morales’ seizure of natural gas wells in Bolivia) is OK?
There are almost more errors than I can count here, but I agree that, by the logic of forcible redistribution of wealth and “humanitarian” intervention, it’s hard to see a benevolent, well, hegemon putting the petrocookie jar down where the little guy can reach it as ipso facto illegitimate.
I notice, though, that this is a point Glenn arrives at rather late in the accretion of the post. He starts by saying that this gedankenexperiment he conceives somehow shows the “vacuity” of “imperial oppressors” language. I agree that it shows vacuity, but not in the critics that haunt Glenn’s mind. Because enacting Dungeons & Dragons ethics in the real world (”kill things and take their stuff”) is, simply put, imperialist oppression. We could beat Glenn to his third update and come up with a thought experiment of our own:
“Of course, if the government nationalized all the pharmaceutical and insurance companies and pumped out prescription drugs and provided no-wait surgery to everyone, the poor would get super healthy, the exploiters would go broke and we wouldn’t have to worry that John LeCarre might write a sequel to The Constant Gardener. Plus we’d all get really healthy ponies. But market fundamentalists would call this ’socialist oppression.’ “
Then we could follow it with an “update” that we were really showing the vacuity of “socialist oppressor” language. It would make as much sense and contain the same fundamental ethical, political and economic errors. No libertarian would have any trouble seeing that the logic of “kill things and take their stuff” in this case was a bigger problem than the alleged “vacuity” of its critics. There’s one difference, which is that it would probably involve a whole lot less killing, at least initially. (Just a lot of subtle threats.)
He also misunderstands Tim Lambert’s real point when he says that “If the war in Iraq was a war for oil,” implying that Lambert’s argument rests on the idea that all we wanted from Iraq was oil. Of course that wasn’t all we wanted from Iraq. As the one killer whale says to the other while contemplating the trainer with the herring in the classic Far Side cartoon, “I’m going for the whole shmear!” The US wanted regime change AND permanent bases AND to return Iraq’s full production capacity to the world market. What we’ve learned in trying to get Iraq’s full production back online and keep it online is it’s the easiest thing in the world for restive locals to sabotage an oil industry that resides in what they consider to be illegitimate hands. Glenn says Matthew Yglesias’ practical objections regarding actual Saudi production capacity don’t affect the pure universe of his thought experiment, but Glenn’s argument that Iraq wasn’t just “a war for oil” don’t affect Lambert’s argument either.
Beyond the sabotage angle discussed in the previous paragraph, there’s the straightforward Hayekian problem too: a dense web of local knowledge supports the Saudi and Iranian oil infrastructures, just as an intricate set of Iraqi competences and adaptations kept Iraq’s oil industry more or less working despite sanctions and dictatorial caprice. If we “seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields” we’d be necessarily shredding those webs. (Lots of people suspect the Saudis have their own “Samson option” for the oil fields too, since people, mostly in this country, have been talking on and off about how cool it would be to kill some Saudis and take their stuff since the mid-1970s.)
Figuring out why a professed libertarian or “whig” or whatever forgets everything he knows (or at least believes) about economics and property rights and voluntary versus coerced enterprise the instant an ocean intervenes between him and the object of his contemplation will tell us a great deal about why “small government sentiment” has collapsed on the right. Two things killed it.
1. War makes people stupid. Whether this is its purpose or its byproduct, what Orwell called “the lunatic atmosphere of war” fogs intellectual clarity. Logic, intellectual rigor and a fondness for fact come to be regarded as tantamount to treason. The ordinary citizen and the elite alike are urged not to think so much. Victory comes from feeling the proper emotions in the proper degree. One need look no further than Reynolds’ hero Max Boot, who only a week ago explained that the job of the press was to love the government, coincidentally the one whose power maximizes his own influence and status, and instill that love in the littles. On no account is it to further our understanding of what the government actually does: that way lies ruin.
2. Too much of what passed for the small-government right hated “the left” more than they loved small government. In microcosm, Glenn Reynolds can’t consider an issue without worrying – resenting – what “the left” will bitch about more than the merits of the thing itself. We’re all prey to brooding on our adversaries’ manifold failings, but for sectors of the right as much as the left the brooding assumes primacy; it controls thought. At that point, it’s ressentiment.
3. Maybe most importantly of all, the small-government right caught a bad case of American triumphalism from their nationalist coalition partners. (Not much of a partnership. Nationalism is doing great; limited-government, not so much.) At least since the Cold War, nationalist conservatives were hyper-sensitive to any sweeping criticism of the United States, variously “anti-Americanism”; “moral equivalence”; what have you. If you’re running down my country, boy, wrote a songwriter more interesting than most of the Right’s intellectuals, you’re gettin’ on the fightin’ side of me. The Right conditioned itself to defend America reflexively.
The problem, from a limited government perspective, is that the United States has been a managerialist welfare state for quite a long time now. Conservatism is often the liberalism of the previous generation, which by the 1960s included the New Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society. Neoconservatism originated in intellectuals who supported the creation of the modern regulatory state but decided the liberalism of the day was insufficiently triumphalist. (All that moral equivalence and anti-Americanism.) As neoconservatism became mainstream conservatism, it was natural that a Whatever America is, is right triumphalism should trump any searching critique of the nature of the American state. (In the famous neocons vs. theocons debate of the mid-1990s, the nationalists complained not that the theocons were wrong as such but that all that talk of illegitimate regimes made them sound like a bunch of “60s radicals.”)
In 2002, conservative Robert Locke wrote that “American Corporatism” was a fact of political life and Republicans should use it to their advantage, using state intervention in the economy to reward their allies and punish their enemies.
In sum, nationalism ate libertarianism. It was the Right’s Armin Meiwes and we were its Bernd Juergen B. It found libertarianism’s brain the tastiest morsel and consumed it first.
UPDATE: Three things killed it!
Comment by John Tabin —
May 4, 2006 @ 1:09 am
You missed Glenn’s point entirely. American intervention is already caricatured as ”imperialist oppression” when it’s nothing of the sort. That’s what he meant when he said he was highlighting the vacuity of the charge. It’s like saying ”The Yankees could make obscene gestures at the crowd in Fenway Park. But then Red Sox fans would hate them.”
Pingback by Crooked Timber » » History Questions —
May 4, 2006 @ 2:44 am
[...] . If you want someone virginally untouched by Hayekian wisdom, touch a lapsed libertarian. Jim Henley can put you in touch.) But I do grant that one reason the two-hundred year [...]
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 4, 2006 @ 6:46 am
John: Leaving aside the word ”oppression” because it drives you apologists batshit, American intervention is certainly imperialist and its chief boosters would like it to be even moreso. Do you think the rest of us have never heard of the Weekly Standard or Niall Ferguson et al? Besides, my point 2 is that even if your take on ”Glenn’s point” were all the truth there was to find in the matter, Glenn’s point would still be petty, and that pettiness is a causal factor in the collapse of the limited-government movement.
Comment by dave —
May 4, 2006 @ 7:09 am
… and that highlights the vacuity of the charge that Red Sox fans hate the Yankees.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 4, 2006 @ 7:39 am
Speaking as a ”left-liberal” (though I hate that term, it’s the only one that doesn’t involve a long explanation), I’m not sure how I feel about this collapse. One the one hand, it’s all to the good — libertarianism provided a certain amount of cover for imperialist big-government conservatism, and once the mask is stripped away, people might start to reject the whole thing. On the other, hypocrisy is superior to ”honest” thuggery, and people may not reject the underlying nationalism at all, preferring some form of christofascism. (Note: I’m not saying that any libertarians who have been anti-Iraq-war etc. for some time now are hypocrites. But there aren’t very many of them.)
Anyways, I expect most people who actually do care about small government to some degree to join the Democratic Party. Assuming that we win (since the alternative is that America will go down the tubes) our desire for social change plus reality-based orientation means that technocrats are going to have a seat at the table, and technocrats are concerned with whether things *work*. That’s better than staying with people who are going to expand government for a mixture of corruption, theocracy, autocracy, and endless wars. You have nowhere else to go — we welcome you!
Comment by Avram —
May 4, 2006 @ 8:19 am
What I’m wondering is why ”war for oil” always gets parsed by critics as ”war to increase oil production” rather than the (to me) more obvious meaning, ”war to grab a chunk of oil profits”.
Comment by MattXIV —
May 4, 2006 @ 10:23 am
Rich – While the Dems may be emergining a perferred clothespin vote for some libertarians (myself included), I doubt that this will ever calcify into a lasting realignment of libertarians into the Democratic party for a couple reasons
First, the Dems and their ideological backers are really quite hostile to libertarianism, even though they’d generally find it more agreeable than the strains of conservativism that currently hold sway in the Republican party. I’m reminded of when John Kerry accused the Bush administration of ”extreme libertarianism”. I have a hard time believing that libertarians will be able to find a place in the Democratic collalition when it’s leaders consider ”libertarian” to be a such a powerful slur that they’d incorrectly apply it to the Bush administration.
Second, elected Democrats fold with amazing speed and consistency on the issues libertarians actually agree with them on. The only personal liberty issue that the Democratic party is even remotely reliable on is reproductive choice. As long as them Democrats consistently sell out on civil liberties and personal freedom to look tough on drugs or terrorism or family values or whatever else the Republicans are bludgeoning them with at them momement, the libertarian case for voting Democratic will rely solely on the fact that Democratics don’t show quite as much zeal for social control in most areas and will focus on abating negative changes rather than implementing positive ones.
If the Democrats don’t even make token efforts (and given the current state of affairs, even token efforts would probably suffice) to appeal to libertarians and other small government types, the appeal of the Democratic party to these consituencies will hinge on Republican corruption and incompetence, which (hopefully for America’s sake) will not persist indefinitely.
Comment by Barry —
May 4, 2006 @ 11:23 am
Jim, I think that any discussion of Glenn should start with the point that he’s sold out to the right. He might have been a libertarian as some time, way back pre-9/11, but that’s his former life. In his current incarnation, he’s running what – 90% pro-Bush imperium? So discussing his arguments under the assumption that he’s libertarian is like discussing a fanatical religious convert’s arguments as if he’s still an atheist.
Avram, that’s a good and obvious point – the US took out one producer, with the clear intent to take control of that producer’s output (whether to increase or deacrease). The fact that Glenn, a guy who’s always willing to invoke economics, doesn’t admit that indicates that he’s either really screwing up, or doesn’t want to admit it. And considering that he’s shamelessly shilled for the right since 2001, I’d vote for the latter.
MattXIV, one important point is that the GOP starts off pre-folded on most libertarian issues: privacy, due process of law, expanding government powers, economic regulation, subsidies, control of information. The only reasons that they ever do things favorable to libertarians is that the more powerful lobbyists felt that such an outcome would be in their interest (e.g., de-regulate telecoms for the sake of the telecom industry, move something to the state level because that would give a more pleasing outcome, etc.).
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 4, 2006 @ 11:29 am
Barry, I agree with you. The question I’m trying to answer is why did the Glenn Reynoldses of the world sell out? They didn’t ALL come into a modicum of money and fame doing so.
I think the Bush-version of the GWOT, especially inflected through Iraq, has done to libertarianism what the start of WWI did to the socialist parties.
Trackback by Deltoid —
May 4, 2006 @ 12:11 pm
Why Glenn Reynolds is not a libertarian
Glenn Reynolds has kept adding updates to his “seize the oilfields” post, including a response to my post that managed to entirely miss my point. (Invading Iraq has reduced its oil production.) The resulting post is rather confused. Fortunately Jim…
Comment by MattXIV —
May 4, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
Jim – I agree, the GOP is definitely no place for a libertarian nowadays. What I’m torn over is whether it is worthwhile to try to work within the Democratic party to cultivate a new small government movement or to just vote Democratic for the time being to mitigate the damage and focus on issues activism.
Comment by radish —
May 4, 2006 @ 12:53 pm
I think your two, er, threefold answer can be wrapped in a simpler package: Reynolds’ view (Adams’, Steele’s, Boot’s, etc) is driven largely by fear. Nationalism and Corporatism have been trying to eat Libertarianism for decades (at last! something that’s actually sorta the fault of the Democrats!) but Libertarianism was holding its own until 9/11 came along.
”Everything” didn’t change on 9/11 — just the presumptions that Americans had about their own personal vulnerability. And subsequent events (most of all Iraq) have just multiplied that. In fact I would argue that treating it as a primarily ideological transition rather than a primarily emotional one does it an injustice.
Folks like Reynolds are worried about an existential threat, but they can’t quite figure out what the heck it is (”Islamofascism?” puh-leez!), so they have no idea what to do about it. You don’t have to be particularly smart to figure out that the US is in some very deep shit (or, apparently, to be a law professor at UT), but human nature being what it is you’re not necessarily willing to lose status by acknowledging your predicament, and once you decide to brazen it out you’re liable to go to outrageous lengths to maintain that.
This is the underlying mechanism by which war (and other disembodied threats) make people crazy. It’s Greg Bateson and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Leon Festinger (the cognitive dissonance researcher) writ large.
BTW I’d be interested in your description of what the start of WWI did to the socialist parties…
Comment by MattXIV —
May 4, 2006 @ 1:16 pm
My last post was directed towards Barry – I misread the comment labeling.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 4, 2006 @ 1:24 pm
radish: Fear is a big part of it. But fear overexplains, I think, since it explains a lot of the ”liberal hawks” too, and probably others.
Matt: It’s actually a question I’ve asked myself. I tend toward your second option: vote Democratic but put the effort into issues advocacy. The reason why, for instance, Democratic politicians have been bad on drug prohibition is that we haven’t QUITE established a rhetorical context that gives them space to go against the array of political and financial imperatives FOR drug prohibition.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 4, 2006 @ 1:24 pm
A reason why. ”The reason” overstates.
Comment by realish —
May 4, 2006 @ 3:37 pm
Second, elected Democrats fold with amazing speed and consistency on the issues libertarians actually agree with them on.
As a Democrat with many libertarian sympathies, let me just say YES, this is true, and yes, it sucks. If y’all libertarians would join us, we’d probably have an easier time stiffening the spine of the party on these issues.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
May 4, 2006 @ 4:12 pm
Let me ditto realish’s ditto. As a ”left-lib” and a gay man I find the Limbaugh/O’Reilly caricature of the Democratic Party as the home of wanton libertines both very funny and very sad. If only!
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 4, 2006 @ 5:07 pm
As a Democrat with many libertarian sympathies, let me just say YES, this is true, and yes, it sucks. If y’all libertarians would join us, we’d probably have an easier time stiffening the spine of the party on these issues.
But that’s what the Republicans with libertarian sympathies kept us about their party.
Comment by Barry —
May 4, 2006 @ 5:07 pm
Radish, with Glenn I’ve vote that it’s not smarts, or lack of analysis, but selling out. He’s gotten far more fame as ’Instapundit’ than he’d have gotten as Glenn Reynolds, professor at Tennessee-has-a-Law-School?.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 4, 2006 @ 5:08 pm
Kept telling us, even.
Comment by radish —
May 4, 2006 @ 8:41 pm
Jim, ah, I see what you mean. Point taken.
Barry, yeah, perhaps. I have no idea what he was like before. Maybe he does just know which side of the bread has the butter on it…
Comment by Barry —
May 4, 2006 @ 8:43 pm
I’ve been trying to post longer replies, but I get that recurring error, where I’m asked to fill in my name and e-mail, even thought they are already filled in.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 4, 2006 @ 10:23 pm
Crap, Barry send me one of your long replies and I’ll try to figure out what’s doing it. Sometimes the editor decides some innocent configuration of characters is actually a malformed tag.
Comment by Jeff in Texas —
May 5, 2006 @ 10:21 am
I arrived at libertarianism (or left-libertarianism) via more traditional, moderate liberalism in college (after very traditional conservatism in high school in red state South Carolina), so to me the alignment of libertarians and Democrats does not seem so revolutionary. It’s bound to be a tense partnership, but a bedrock belief in civil liberties should bind the two groups well enough. I guess I worry less about ”big government” per se than I do about ”big government that is utterly incompetent, faith (as opposed to fact) based, and prone to spying on and/or imprisoning me without probable cause or legal charge.” Many, many things about the Democratic party chap my ass (the initial left wing ”so what” reaction to the Kelo decision, for example), but that sort of disagreement fades in comparison to arguing with Republicans about whether America stands for torture, or war without end, or tossing US citizens down a rat hole based on Presidential fiat.
Comment by Gil —
May 5, 2006 @ 10:32 am
Jim, I would say its not so much fear as it is tribalism, and that’s what changed on September 11. It is suddenly ”them” against ”us” and of course ”they” possess a Superman-like, nefarious ability to utterly destroy us, unless we stiffen our spine and stop thinking so much and lower the boom on ”them” – regardless of how this might conflict with our previously-expressed ideological positions.
What I find telling now is the number of conservatives who are willing to admit that, well, sure Iraq had SOMETHING to do with oil but that wasn’t the biggest factor. What a change from the days when even the most threadbare connection was dismissed out of hand.
Comment by Hesiod —
May 5, 2006 @ 10:34 am
Here’s the thing, libertarians, when Democrats fall off the libertarian wagon, it is in favor of Gvt intervention into the economy. So, the worst you’d get is kind of a social democratic, European style government.
When the GOP does it, they turn fascist.
Woiuld you rather live in a country that’s run like Sweden, or one that’s run like 1930’s Italy, Spain or Germany?
Full-bore socialism will not take root in the United States for some time, if ever. We like money and the free market too much. Consumerism, if nothing else, would act as a check on it.
Democrats are not enemies of the free market, per se.
I have categorized the gop-leaning libertarians as Jack Benny libertarians. The name derived from the famous skit in which Benney was help up at gunpoint, and the mugger exclaimed: ”Your money or your life.”
Benny, famously, said ”I’m thinking. I’m thinking.”
That’s YOU guys. If you are more worried about yoru taxes going up than about creeping fascism, then you hung around with the GOP for as long as possible. But I think you are seeing the light now.
You probably figured that creeping fascism was overblown, and that the likelihood of it going full bore in this country was remote vs. your taxes being raised by Democrats.
But, now you know diferent.
Now, I know you can cite some instances of Democrats caviing on gun control or the Patriot act, for example.
But, at core, the Democrats are skeptical of using these tools in a way contrary to tehir narrowly intended purposes. They are less likely to expand and abuse those laws.
In other words, the Democrats are now the lesser of two evils. By quite a margin.
Comment by citizen k —
May 5, 2006 @ 10:57 am
So-called ”libertarian” qualms about the Democrats allegience to civil liberties are truly pathetic in the light of a Bush administration that argues to the SC that habeus corpus is a non-binding suggestion. There’s no shades of gray here. You either support or apologize for a party and government that demands powers greater than the ones that provoked the founders into armed rebellion against George III or you oppose them. The people who said ”I’m against despotism, but I don’t know if I can support Hamilton” were called ”Tories” during the revolutionary war.
Comment by liberal —
May 5, 2006 @ 11:11 am
Glenn Reynolds wrote,Surely if it’s ever permissible to redistibute wealth by force, this is the case.
Of course, many/most libertarians love forced redistribution: from those who don’t ”own” natural resources (including land) to those who do.
Here’s a nice essay on the biggest problem with libertarianism (viz, it has nothing against landowners effectively enslaving everyone else).
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May 5, 2006 @ 11:22 am
[...] Nationalism Ate Libertarianism By: Tim F. May 5, 2006 at 11:21 am Sounds about right to me. This helps explain how “libertarians” and R [...]
Pingback by John Moltz » Blog Archive » Not a war for oil —
May 5, 2006 @ 11:50 am
[...] out fucking time Not a war for oil May 5th, 2006 After reading this post by Jim Henley that Atrios links to, I have to say that it’s interestin [...]
Comment by eyelessgame —
May 5, 2006 @ 12:37 pm
There will always be a tension, and a difference in fundamental worldview, between those who believe economic force is force and those who don’t. Liberals and libertarians will need to recognize that difference and set it aside if they’re going to work together to try to achieve common goals.
I don’t think it’s intrinsically unlikely. Hell, if libertarians could put up with an alliance with the War on Drugs folks and the theocons (to say nothing of the bizarre enthusiasm of the support some of them provided the neocons), they can surely deal with an alliance — for a while — with those who believe economic force is force.
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 5, 2006 @ 1:02 pm
When I think of Libertarians, I invariably think of vaginas. I don’t know why. Perhaps its some obscure word association linkage, or a phonetic overlap, or maybe its because they’re a bunch of cunts. Who knows?
But more to the point, I think that Libertarianism is, at heart, an incoherent and irrational political philosophy, and I think that this leads, pretty directly, to incoherent and irrational political positions. It is all about attempting to make infantile selfishness moral.
The positions that Libertarians are apt to adopt, and the political platforms that they are inclined to support are highly arbitrary. Many ’right’ libertarians are remarkably silent on the issue of a woman’s right to choice. They’re not even terribly loud on the subject of availability of contraception, family planning or even sex toys or gay rights. One would think that these issues, which involve dimensions of freedom in the personal sphere would be near and dear to the hearts of every libertarian. Many feel quite happy to ignore, dismiss or oppose it.
Libertarians are also silent on the issue of tort reform, although many are quite vociferous about gun freedom. This creates a quixotic situation where, hypothetically, they would endorse angry retirees shooting up the Enron boardroom, but would not endorse these people suing to recover their life savings.
The contradictions and shortcomings in the real world are endless, and while the ratio varies, every Libertarian has his own unresolved bundle, which he is prepared to argue or ignore, as his mood strikes.
Intellectually, Libertarians posit a hypothetical world where there are no inequalities of economic or political or coercive power whatsoever. In such a theoretical model, the ultimate good is the ultimate maximization of personal sovereignty. This ultimate good contemplates that a given person, or the author, has some theoretical share of economic, political and coercive power to enable him to express and extend his sovereignty. The Libertarian conceives an endless vaccuum populated by sovereign individuals who, in his theoretical eden, can equally perpetually extend their personal sovereignties indefinitely, without truly impinging upon the sovereignties of others.
Well, as a theological notion, a science fiction idea, or a philosophical construct, it is very nice.
Of course, even this notion is ultimately untenable, collapsing under its own weight and contradictions. Any recognition of a finite universe invokes the risk of impingement and maldistribution of resources.
To escape this problem, the Libertarian proposes a hypothetical social compact. One which, under Libertarian theory, makes the whole thing work, but which its theory suggests is entirely discretionary.
Thus the Libertarian moves onto some faux Doric Greek City state commons, to a minimal (always minimal) set of laws, enforcement mechanisms and autonomous dispute resolution mechanisms.
Pure Libertarian, at the moment it has even the most glancing contact with reality, is unrecognizeably transformed and corrupted.
This leads to the doctrinal wars and extremism of position between and among libertarians. To a libertarian, just about every other libertarian not in lockstep agreement with his own corrupt compromises has engaged in corrupt compromise of unacceptble nature. He’s thus a sell out, a traitor.
This shows why Libertarians have, while widespread, never galvanized as a meaningful movement. The first thing they’d do on getting anywhere near their edenic paradise is turn on each other.
Of course, the more deeply Libertarians confront the real world, the more the contradictions and corruptions in their position multiply. Ultimately, they must either retreat from the world, or pick and choose their compromises and corruptions in an ad hoc manner. The structure throws up endless contradictions and hypocrisies. Libertarianism ends up as a sad joke, by or for people who have, at some deep level, the motivation of a puling child.
Libertarianism’s intellectual bankruptcy is apparent with its consistent failure to establish any kind of toehold outside certain sections of the United States. Go to Canada or Mexico for instance, and Libertarian ideas are mocked or greeted with puzzled stares. Europe offers amused contempt. South America comprehends not at all. Intellectuals and commoners alike turn away from it with contempt.
But Libertarianism is far from dead internationally. We can conceive Russia’s era of gangster capitalism as a Libertarian epoch, as is Afghanistan in the various phases of its civil war. Indeed, arguably, the bedrock Libertarian notions of unlimited personal power and a nonexistent state found their truest expression in Aghanistan. Another good test case might be Somalia, or perhaps the Congo.
See the running theme here. The libertarian ideal of maximized personal sovereignty and a minimal state leads to hell on earth. The result, under the operation of human nature and limited resources, is not a series of proud and sovereign individuals ushering a new age of enlightenment, but the almost instantaneous explosion of warlords, thugs and atrocities.
Perhaps that’s why Libertarianism doesn’t get much traction in the rest of the world, but is the philosophy mainly of a handful of pampered, well to do and selfish in a nation which venerates those qualities.
Another clue to Libertarianisms essential bankruptcy, apart from the lack of international spread, is the utter lack of intellectual rigour brought to it. Where is the Adam Smith? The Thomas Jefferson? The Karl Marx? Where is the great manifesto? Where is the scholarly tradition, the effort at analysis and rigour? Nowhere to speak of. Instead of a vision, there’s a collection of small sniping carping voices and an unwillingness to wrestle with its own contradictions and problems.
Someone, in support of the ’libertarian intellectual tradition’ threw the CATO institute in my face. I had to laugh. The Cato Institute? Another heavily subsidized right wing think tank without genuine academic standing or history, which operates on the basis of ideology and which avoids peer review? The John Lott/Mary Rosh episode tells us all we need to know about the nonexistent credibility of bodies like the Cato Institute or the American Enterprise Institute.
Let us be fair to the Cato institute. They are not an organ of intellectual discourse, but merely carnival barkers pitching their particular economic and social nostrum to the rubes. They’re not academics or intellectuals, certainly they’re not scientists of any sort, and not truly disciplined. That’s not what they’re about and not who they talk to. Rather, their target is the great unwashed, their concern is about making their nostrums look good by making endless claims. It’s all about selling the product, getting the money, and getting out of town.
So, spare me the Cato institute and the endless edifice of ’think tanks’ and ’institutions’ under which American ideologues undermine reason and thought and celebrate triumphal emotion and self absorption.
Which leads us back, I suppose, to Libertarianism.
Comment by liberal —
May 5, 2006 @ 1:08 pm
Den Valdron wrote, The positions that Libertarians are apt to adopt, and the political platforms that they are inclined to support are highly arbitrary.
IMHO the most arbitrary governs land and other natural resources.
Classical liberals (and honest libertarians) understand that people are, in the main, entitled to the fruit of their labor. Land is not the product of anyone’s labor, so there’s no reason why any particular person should get to infringe on the liberties of others by denying them access to it (without due compensation).
Dishonest, freedom-hating libertarians (which AFAICT are the majority, as opposed to ”geolibertarians”) solve this dilemma by saying the first person to find/use/whatever some natural resource is entitled to ”own” it and exclude everyone else from it.
The other problem with libertarianism is that which affects any (quasi-)anarchist mode of thought, viz, the problem of war of all against all brought up by Hobbes (which you essentially mention).
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 5, 2006 @ 1:13 pm
And my point is made.
Comment by donna —
May 5, 2006 @ 2:50 pm
I’m still a registered libertarian, and I’m working with the progressives right now. How about if we start a progressive libertarian party? Small government that takes care of the people and the country, securing our personal liberty and our national security.
Sort of like the founders intended in the first place. It’s all there in the constitution, after all.
Of course, if the Dems decide to BE that progressive libertarian party, I’m there.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 5, 2006 @ 4:02 pm
I’ll take you word for it that your point was made, Den, since MEGO took over after a couple of paragraphs.
Comment by Sirkowski —
May 5, 2006 @ 6:19 pm
”enacting Dungeons & Dragons ethics in the real world”
Best insult I’ve read in a long while.
Comment by r4d20 —
May 5, 2006 @ 8:28 pm
”Dishonest, freedom-hating libertarians (which AFAICT are the majority, as opposed to â€geolibertariansâ€) solve this dilemma by saying the first person to find/use/whatever some natural resource is entitled to â€own†it and exclude everyone else from it.”
Thats really not accurate.
The truth is that many oppose the opposite – a system that has no incentive to look for new resources because they will just be claimed by the state without compensation to the person who took the time and effort to find them.
No one ”deserves” a gold mine just because he found it, but no one is ever going to look for one if he stands to gain nothing for his find.
Comment by b-psycho —
May 5, 2006 @ 11:10 pm
Yes, two related ones actually:
1) a culture that doesn’t have respect for individual rights or any semblance of common-sense order will be unfree whether there is a stable government or not. Without a unifying concept of respect for one another’s life & personal space akin to that common to liberal societies, lack of overt central force is misinterpreted. People in such nations have no real concept of freedom as we understand it, only ”liscense” to do whatever until someone violently convinces them otherwise. Flowing from your insistance on blaming such disorder on ”libertarianism” when the structure of these nations more resembles something that far predates libertarianism, or even democracy, we discover…
2) you are full of shit.
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
May 6, 2006 @ 6:27 am
I don’t know anything about Den Waldron’s reading habits, but to claim that libertarians have nothing to say on issues like tort reform, abortion, etc, is plain crazy. Go and take a look at the Laissez Fair Books catalogue – available if you Google it up – and then tell me that libertarians have nothing to say about such issues. That’s a patent untruth.
On Jim’s wider point, I don’t think Glenn Reynolds and others have necessarily ”sold out”. Glenn and others have taken the view that the defence of the United States requires that regimes they think are hostile and dangerous be removed or pressured in certain ways, rather than taking a purist libertarian approach of sitting on your ass waiting for something bad to happen. I happen to agree with a lot of what Jim says about the Hayekian insight (intervention invariably goes wrong), but hurling abuse at Glenn for ”selling out” is unfair and silly. The man has repeatedly denounced the Patriot Act, etc, and it seems to be me that by supporting Bush on Iraq hardly makes him a fascist.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 6, 2006 @ 7:18 am
”Glenn and others have taken the view that the defence of the United States requires”
The defense of the United States requires? Iraq never attacked us. It never had the means to attack us, even if its leaders had suicidally decided to.
”Glenn and others” must know this; it’s been proven often enough by now.
I don’t like libertarians in general because I always thought that they were the type to rationalize aggressive war and torture if it seemed like ”we” found it advantageous. (Why not? They already rationalize every economic form of force by the richer against the poorer.) It’s true colors time now.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 6, 2006 @ 9:33 am
Jonathan: Couple or few things.
1. You’re still suffering from at least a mild case of the same category error that afflicts neolibertarianism, 9/11 Republicans and national-greatness conservatives – somehow the whole universe of possible US actions that DO NOT consist of invading Arab countries serially becomes ”doing nothing.”
2. Other people introduced the phrase ”sold out.” I really don’t care exactly how much Glenn’s decreasing functional independence from Republican Party/Bush Administration team spirit is due to money or audience capture, because like I say, there’s a whole lot of people who haven’t gotten semi-rich making the same trip. The short answer is a familiar one: collectivism.
3. It’s nice that Glenn has said bad things about things like the PATRIOT Act. (How recently? That’s a genuine question, BTW. I don’t read him regularly enough to know.) But there’s a difference between saying bad things and opposing something. In politics, at some point you have to say ”Throw the bums out” to show you mean it. Instead, all Glennism’s (not just by Glenn) REAL energies go into demonizing the critics of the people ACTUALLY PUTTING IN PLACE THE STRUCTURE OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN THIS COUNTRY.
Jonathan, the President has arrogated to himself the unilateral and unreviewable right to set aside any law he feels abridges his authority as ”commander in chief.” Signs at a march or faux pas by some soldier’s mom mean NOTHING next to that. But to Glennists the latter ”sins” outweigh the former.
4. Four years down the line we can pronounce the neolibertarian dream dead. The dream was explicitly laid out on Glenn’s site and others (including Samizdata IIRC) that we should support the war as an ALTERNATIVE to abridging freedom at home, that if we had these wars, and if libertarians supported them, the government would ”focus its priorities on what’s important” and hold off the demand for more draconian security measures. (Note another category error here: it assumes that government officials are captive to the ”demands” of the public, and would only introduce draconian security measures at the behest of an outraged public, not because they were agents doing so for their own sake.) A government that ”focused on what’s important” (war) would realize it didn’t have time for this cruel drug war or that wasteful antipornography crusade. And a libertarian movement that was a constructive coalition partner on the war would get a respectful hearing on its own issues from its ”partners.” (Check out the founding statement at Henke’s Neolibertarian.net if you haven’t.)
What has happened instead is that the actual controlling factions of the Republican Party happily pocket Glennist support for the war; then, the instant Glennism step out of line on drugs or immigration or social issues, they call ”libertarians” a bunch of libertine freaks.
It’s been the most spectacular failure of coalition politics (from the perspective of the limited-government side) I can recall.
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 6, 2006 @ 4:46 pm
Gee Whiz, b-psycho, same back to you. In regard to your idealistic screed about people knowing the difference between ’freedom’ and ’licence’, you illustrate my point.
Your hypothetical perfect libertarian world requires perfect libertarian people. Your world view implies a moral harmony which is nonexistent. Or perhaps there’s a racial base to your assertion? Nah.
”People in such nations have no real concept of freedom as we understand it, only â€liscense†to do whatever until someone violently convinces them otherwise.”
Hmmmm…
Well, we won’t get any deeper into racial politics. But the fact remains that your ’Libertarian’ society requires a completely arbitrary and quite unrealistic foundation. Sorry, but in the real world, human nature is human nature.
As for Johnathan Pierce:
”I don’t know anything about Den Waldron’s reading habits, but to claim that libertarians have nothing to say on issues like tort reform, abortion, etc, is plain crazy. Go and take a look at the Laissez Fair Books catalogue – available if you Google it up – and then tell me that libertarians have nothing to say about such issues. That’s a patent untruth.”
You’re correct as far as it goes. Libertarians are such a diverse and incoherent group that any point of view can be expressed and held. I assume that there are Libertarians who are prepared to hold forth at great length about their gray space alien friends.
At this point, I would hesitate to call Libertarianism as a social or political philosophy bankrupt. That would imply it had ever had credit or credibility.
Anyway, I leave you to your Libertarian paradises, in Somalia or Cloud-Cuckoo land. Enjoy.
Comment by b-psycho —
May 6, 2006 @ 9:53 pm
I’m black, dumbass, why the fuck would I have a racial base to that comment? What, you wanna call me a self-hating Uncle Tom now?
Race does not = culture, one can make a judgement call about a culture without indicting an entire race, the culture you refer to is not ”libertarian”, it is TRIBAL if anything. A libertarian culture does not consist of people running about bat-shit insane violating each others rights, in fact it’s the exact opposite, I can’t believe anyone would have to be told that.
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 6, 2006 @ 10:53 pm
Back at ya, dumbass. So your prejudice is cultural? Some populations are naturally beknighted and inferior. Some tribes, some cultures?
Besides which, you got your libertarianism ass backwards. Libertarianism isn’t about subscribing to codes of morality, it’s all about the unfettered pursuit of self interest.
In any case, your problem remains. Your hypothetical libertarian society depends on people not acting like human beings but as virtuous paragons of Ayn Randian steel. Sorry, but that ain’t the real world.
People are people. You can try your social experiment all you want, but in the end, your Libertarian paradise will inevitably devolve to Somalia or Afghanistan.
”A libertarian culture does not consist of people running about bat-shit insane violating each others rights…”
Nonsense. These people have very clear ideas about what their rights are, and they’re prepared to use any amount of retaliatory force to make their point. Give it up. They’re yours.
But of course, that’s no mind is it. No matter how many failures you get in the real world, the problem is always lack of ideological purity, and the solution is always ’pray’ harder. True Libertarianism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Yeah, I’ve heard that song before and I know where the tune leads.
Comment by b-psycho —
May 7, 2006 @ 12:57 am
Did I say it was natural? Did I say they couldn’t correct it eventually? Or did you attempt to read my mind and fail miserably? If people don’t understand that the right to swing their fist ends at the face of their neighbor then that is not the fault of libertarianism, I have never heard of a libertarian that advocated just plain ”do whatever the hell you want to do!”, it sounds more like you’ve met some nihlistic anarchists.
Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard this one before too: Some libertarians are objectivists, that does not make libertarianism equivalent to objectivism. I personally do not subscribe to objectivism at all, I don’t find selfishness to be a virtue, I don’t think the businessman is the most oppressed group on the face of the earth, in fact a large part of the reason I want the State dismantled is so that it can no longer be used as a tool of the elite. Hey! Narrow interests using the force of government to benefit themselves at the harm of the general public, whose fault is THAT one, eh? Not ours! That blood is on YOUR hands.
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 7, 2006 @ 1:07 pm
You want the state dismantled so that it can no longer be used by elites to impose themselves on the rest of us?
Oh my. So I guess, without the state, the elites will just have to get by with private armies, control of large masses of land and territory, domination of economic resources, and an old boys network that shuts everyone out.
Yeah, and in six months you’re back to Somalia or Afghanistan. Way to go.
Comment by b-psycho —
May 7, 2006 @ 3:31 pm
Much of that land was stolen, the government is currently defending property that was not obtained legitimately. None of what you describe came about through a true market order.
You don’t realize what I’m advocating, at all. Simply saying ”ok, no more government interference starting…NOW!” would be like forcing someone with a broken leg to compete in a track meet. We have to build outside of politics to undermine their unearned advantage.
In a way, one could say the only real problem with ”liberals” like yourself is that you’ve been fooled into thinking what has been a tool of elites for the longest can somehow be used against them. There’s an old saying, not from a libertarian but it applies here, that ”you can’t take apart the master’s shed using the master’s tools”, it would do you good to realize that.
Comment by b-psycho —
May 7, 2006 @ 3:38 pm
Y’know what? I’m not going to sit here larding up someone else’s comments to set straight your strawman. Try reading this & you’ll get what I’m talking about: Mutualist.org
Sorry about that, Jim.
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 8, 2006 @ 12:53 pm
”Much of that land was stolen, the government is currently defending property that was not obtained legitimately. None of what you describe came about through a true market order.”
Hmmm… So as soon as we kill off all the rich people and take their land and redistribute it properly, then we can have the Libertarian utopia? Provided that people are properly moral and the culture is right, because these are ’uber-people’ rather than just the common old dirt?
I dunno. Sounds like end-stage marxism to me. Are you absolutely sure you are a Libertarian?
Or maybe you were thinking ’kill off or dispossess’ all the white people who stole the land from the Indians in the first place, and then move on to the libertarian/socialist utopia?
Darn, I’m confused.
I don’t think you realize what you are advocating?
Hmmm. Maybe you are a real Libertarian, in that case.
Comment by b-psycho —
May 8, 2006 @ 3:58 pm
Are you blind? Did you even look at the link I left? There is nothing ”socialist” or ”marxist” about acknowledging that status obtained via government force is illegitimate.
You have yet to even share a fucking opinion on government power other than ”making fun of people who disapprove of it entertains me”. Why? Explain why you believe a few people can be trusted to guide everyone else by force, explain what incentive exists to make sure that they do not use their power to benefit themselves at the cost of the rest of us. Explain why after taking into consideration the extensive history of crimes by the State, you believe so fucking fervently in keeping it.
Comment by Den Valdron —
May 10, 2006 @ 4:50 pm
You can’t let go can you. Why should I voice a ’fucking opinion’? Obviously, I’m clearly not up to the exacting moral standards of libertarianism. Or to put it another way, I really don’t have anything but contempt for your half baked and dangerous political posturing. I do not have to defend or explain or justify the state. I’m merely pointing out how full of shit and contradictory your own views are.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 11, 2006 @ 12:07 am
Gentlemen, you may have confused this with an Atrios or Samizdata comment thread. It’s not one. Please read the comment policy and then decide whether it’s worth abiding by it. Because that’s what you’ve got to do to be welcome to post here.