Hell Is Other Producers
John Quiggin’s musing on why nobody has recently really tried to build Libertopia for real reminds me of a professional libertarian friend’s jibe that, “The problem with a libertarian society is that it would be full of libertarians.” He was having fun with the common perception of the libertarian personality as being . . . differently socialized. But the quip encapsulates one of two concerns that motivated the ideological “conversion” that some people wish I would talk more about.
The “progressive” case for libertarianism always held that private charity and voluntary mutuality could and should replace (what passes for) the Welfare State in succoring the needy, halt and lame. And the State as an institution is an engine of such evil that one (me) wants that to work out. Still! But the road from Here (the actual existing American mixed economy) to There (minarchism, say) seems to run through very resentful country.
Boiled down, I know and have known a lot of committed libertarians, and a lot of them belie the stereotype of the Randroid “I’ve got mine, Jack” egoist. They’re wonderful, generous, compassionate people. But over time I lost faith that they (we) made a movement that could build a society expressing those best impulses. I grew to worry that the habits of mind required to thrive in a society “without a net” would militate against the voluntarism that “progressive” libertarianism prefers to “coercive” support structures for the weak. More particularly, actually motivating the destruction of such safety-net as America currently has seems to involve stirring up the sort of resentment against “moochers” and “parasites” that has put Atlas Shrugged on the Tea Party syllabus. Who is going to voluntarily donate a significant portion of their time and income to help moochers and parasites?
Again, the State is a very bad thing. It fosters murder on a staggering scale, one no smaller group of predators can match. But some states manage to kill a lot fewer people than this one does. And it doesn’t follow that the first step to replacing it with something better is getting rid of Medicaid.
Comment by Adrian Ratnapala —
August 20, 2010 @ 8:19 am
A big reason no such a Utopia has been tried is that most of us are pretty happy with the world as it is, even if we have Definite Views about our preferred direction of change.
In real world politics, one can easily end up in the liberterian corner even if one beleives in a robust, taxpayer funded, (but limited!) welfare safety net.
Comment by Eric Martin —
August 20, 2010 @ 8:33 am
But some states manage to kill a lot fewer people than this one does.
Sweden!
Comment by dhex —
August 20, 2010 @ 8:48 am
But the road from Here (the actual existing American mixed economy) to There (minarchism, say) seems to run through very resentful country.
that’s true, but it’s true of any large-scale change. you gotta motivate people somehow, and demonization works well for that. the welfare state is the least of our problems, but that has little to do with kulturkampf.
and it’s not necessarily a terrible thing in the end, just during the process.
for example:
- demonizing opponents of illegal immigration as de facto racist may very well help push immigration reforms that are less evil.
- demonizing proponents of the war on drugs as people who hate minorities and cancer patients and children and families and flags and whatnot may help push drug policy in a better direction. (though that will probably come from states having the economic sense of a drunk college freshman, really.)
- demonizing the sweetheart deals of public sector pensioners may help roll back some of the more egregious and crippling obligations. (though probably only in the very short term, as there’s a lot of money and political power at stake)
- demonizing farm subsidies…and so on.
Comment by matthew h —
August 20, 2010 @ 9:19 am
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” — GK Chesterton (analogize as apporpriate)
Comment by Maxwell James —
August 20, 2010 @ 10:12 am
In my experience there are very few libertarians who work or volunteer in the “voluntary safety net” professions – charities, rescue organizations & the like. There are lots of lefties and lots of conservatives who do. I do find a fair number of libertarians among funders & donors, however.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 20, 2010 @ 11:54 am
I used to do a lot of volunteer work, even while identifying as a libertarian. You know what caused me to do less volunteer work? My wife and I went to a one-car lifestyle, and suddenly anything other than work and home became complicated.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
August 20, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
Boiled down, I know and have known a lot of committed libertarians, and a lot of them belie the stereotype of the Randroid “I’ve got mine, Jack” egoist.
“There are better, more just, and more efficient ways to help the less fortunate than via the state”
and
“Fuck the less fortunate”
aren’t two different means to the same end. They’re not different stopping points on the same ideological continuum. They’re fundamentally different approaches to…well, life in general. And as long as you’ve got both outlooks represented by a common political label, you’re going to have a problem.
I don’t doubt that you know many wonderful, generous, compassionate people who identify as libertarians, Jim…but don’t they get this?
Comment by matthew h —
August 20, 2010 @ 12:22 pm
“Jesus is our salvation but there are other ways than force to bring people to Him”.
and
“Fuck the supersitions of the Church and peasants”
have been indeed two different approaches tending to the same end while being two opposite approaches to life.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 20, 2010 @ 12:59 pm
Uncle Kvetch,
First, what matthew h said. People journeying toward the same end will tend to travel together, even if they are uncomfortable.
Second, I don’t claim to enjoy sharing the label with certain people, but battles over who gets the label tend to be as counter-productive as sharing the label with bad company, unless the bad guys damage the brand worse than an internal fight would. There’s a reason for so many punch-lines involving “People’s Front of Judea” and “Judean People’s Front.”
Besides, why should I leave the label? Why not them? As long as I express my disagreements with them when those topics come up, why should I go farther and also re-brand myself? At best the good ones would come across as one more narrow ideology obsessed with labels rather than concrete issues, and at worst the good ones create a new label that’s so respectable that all the bad ones glom on.
If “the good ones” established a new brand, reputed to be hip and tolerant while pro-market and fiscally cautious and all that, how long before the corporate shills would start using that self-description? As it is plenty of blatantly Team Red pundits go around calling themselves “libertarian” because it sounds good. It doesn’t sound good because it is full of other Team Red cheerleaders, it sounds good because it gives plausible deniability to Team Red cheerleaders. If the good ones leave, the “libertarian” label loses that plausible deniability and some other label gains it. At which point they flock to the new label. Basically, market forces in the marketplace of ideas.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
August 20, 2010 @ 1:08 pm
First, what matthew h said.
Maybe I’m just dense, but you’ll have to explain to me what matthew h said, because I can’t make sense of it.
As for the rest: That does make sense — I’m going to ponder that for awhile, because you make a good case.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 20, 2010 @ 2:33 pm
Mind, Sweden only has nine million people and the 14th per-capita income. They couldn’t kill nearly as many people even if they bent all their energies to the task.
That’s the problem with comparing and contrasting with other first-work countries – we’re a weird outlier. We’re by far the largest first-world country, at more than twice the population of Japan, five times the population of the UK, etc., and we’re spread out over a really huge geographic area. In terms of scale, we’re much more similar to Russia, China, India, etc. than any European country.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 20, 2010 @ 2:57 pm
One of the points libertarian movements, especially the LP, have pushed has been a separation of the personal and political.
I am sympathetic to the idea that a big part of the problem with statist politics is that quite a lot of is people forcing politics into the personal arena. In theory, libertarians with entirely different ideas of what the personal response to issues like gay marriage or poverty should be can agree to work together to take them out of the political arena. In practice, they tend to have very different priorities when it comes to state-slashing.
In real practice, it really doesn’t matter because all the libertarians together are a negligible fringe. Group them all with Team Red, group them all with Team Blue, team them up with the Green Party, divvy them up however you want, they’re still all wildly outnumbered by every random twit who calls emself a “libertarian” because ey frowned at eir tax forms or smoked some pot last week.
Comment by Glaivester —
August 20, 2010 @ 3:39 pm
Let’s do some word association:
random twit who calls themself a “libertarian” because they frowned at their tax forms or smoked some pot last week.
Bill Maher.
Comment by Wonks Anonymous —
August 20, 2010 @ 3:42 pm
Patri Friedman is trying to build libertopia (or, more accurately, Nozick’s utopia of multiple utopias). Paul Romer is up to something somewhat similar.
Do you read Roderick Long, Kevin Carson & Charles “Radgeek” Johnson? They seem more up your alley.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 20, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
Thoreau and I have a mutual acquaintance in the Free State movement who was involved in the campaign to legalize medical marijuana in NH, for that matter.
Maybe the real problem for the original writer is that libertarianism doesn’t translate to communes. It’s one thing to hand over your personal possessions to the group and live by shared effort or whatnot – governments can work with that. It’s another to assert you have the right to do X thing that’s forbidden in the larger society – governments will break down your door.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 20, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
I read all three of those at least occasionally, Kevin most regularly. In fact, I was just pasting links to their sites into an IM window for a friend.
Patri Friedman is trying to build something, to be sure. Let me ask a real and I swear not leading question, because I do not follow Patri’s exploits closely: has his seasteading project in any way reached the point where one can say, “It’s definitely not just a pipe dream because _________ ?”
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 20, 2010 @ 4:03 pm
Glaivester: Maher yes, though perhaps someone pointed out to him that he always seemed to say that before going into why the government needed to restrict peaceful, private activity. Beck and other teabaggers. Many others.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 20, 2010 @ 4:18 pm
@Maxwell: Well, there are very few libertarians period, right? So in itself that’s not surprising.
@dhex: I think the distinction is whether demonizing “opponents” in the present society undermines the logic of the society you say you’d prefer.
So:
Core Tenet of Compassionate Libertopia 1 – “Free movement of peoples across what today are borders preventing same.” The tactic of demonizing restrictionists as racists doesn’t contradict the principle you want Compassionate Libertopia to live by.
Core Tenet of Compassionate Libertopia 2 – “No one can tell you what to put into your own body!” The tactic of demonizing drug prohibitionists doesn’t contradict the principle you want Compassionate Libertopia to live by.
Core Tenet of Compassionate Libertopia 3 – “People will help the needy our of compassion rather than compulsion.” The tactic of demonizing the needy as parasites and moochers unworthy of aid or even concern – indeed, as compelling outright scorn – does most definitely contradict the principle you want Compassionate Libertopia to live by. Why would anybody help a moocher or a parasite? Or even spare a moment’s concern for them?
[Note: In each example the "you" is an impersonal pronoun.]
And really, that game – Voluntarism FTW! – is over once the sentence construction classes the poor as such with libertarianism’s “opponents.”
Comment by b-psycho —
August 20, 2010 @ 4:51 pm
About this:
The irony of that attitude here is how it uses the words of a philosophy that boils down to “collectives are bad, BAD!!” to in reality say “YOUR collective is bad, BAD!!…but my collective (religion/race/country) is friggin awesome”. Ayn Rand’s biggest fans in the U.S. are, as a group, people that Rand herself would’ve sneered at.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 20, 2010 @ 5:00 pm
Jim: not to mention that even if you don’t class “the poor as such” among your opponents, everyone else will do that for you. One side will rail about moochers and the other will rail about starving children; the effect of both will be to drown out anything but the mainstream positions.
Comment by Barry —
August 20, 2010 @ 6:26 pm
Jim: “Again, the State is a very bad thing. It fosters murder on a staggering scale, one no smaller group of predators can match. But some states manage to kill a lot fewer people than this one does. And it doesn’t follow that the first step to replacing it with something better is getting rid of Medicaid.”
Jim, this is confusing – it’s true that many states manage to kill a lot fewer people that the USA does (I’m assuming that this is true, even when looking at it on a per-capita, per-GDP $ and per-budget $ basis).
But the road from where we are to there is in the opposite direction of getting rid of Medicaid. The War State doesn’t need Medicaid.
Comment by dhex —
August 20, 2010 @ 8:15 pm
Core Tenet of Compassionate Libertopia 3 – “People will help the needy our of compassion rather than compulsion.” The tactic of demonizing the needy as parasites and moochers unworthy of aid or even concern – indeed, as compelling outright scorn – does most definitely contradict the principle you want Compassionate Libertopia to live by. Why would anybody help a moocher or a parasite? Or even spare a moment’s concern for them?
well, yes, but that’s neither here nor there. my point was that resentment (and ressentiment!) is a core component of all politics, libertizzly or otherwise. e.g. the comments section over at crooked timber.
a necessary human conceit is believing our opponents are evil AND wrong.
besides, the compassionate libertopian ™ would just demonize the apparatus and mechanics of the welfare state, and portray the victims as victims. much like everyone else. an explicit “fuck the poor” campaign would have little traction.
we may hate our enemies – servants of evil one and all – but we tend to like to think of ourselves as “not evil”.
Comment by John Quiggin —
August 20, 2010 @ 10:45 pm
As regards contests over labels, back when there was something that called itself “actually existing socialism”, I used to describe myself as a democratic socialist to counter their claim to the name.
But now that’s not an issue, I think it’s more important to defend “actually existing social democracy” than to advocate a nebulous ideal of socialism.
So, I’ve switched (as Daniel Davies said, running the CT gamut from dem soc to soc dem).
Comment by Happy Jack —
August 20, 2010 @ 11:00 pm
But some states manage to kill a lot fewer people than this one does. And it doesn’t follow that the first step to replacing it with something better is getting rid of Medicaid.
I suspect that most of the examples you’re thinking of have had their fair share of killing in the past, when they had their turn at reaching for the brass ring of empire. Maybe step one is for a hegemon to get kicked in the gooch.
Sweden!
See above, or ask any Norwegian.
Comment by Maxwell James —
August 20, 2010 @ 11:17 pm
@Jim, yes, there are very few libertarians in general. But I’ve known quite a few of them in my life – probably a very disproportionate number given the total population (perhaps because I have some libertarian leanings myself).
All that said, I would not attempt to claim that my experience is representative.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
August 21, 2010 @ 10:46 am
an explicit “fuck the poor” campaign would have little traction
Where did you spend the 1980s, dhex? Just wondering.
Comment by Barry —
August 21, 2010 @ 10:54 am
Comment by —
August 20, 2010 @ 11:00 pm
Me: “But some states manage to kill a lot fewer people than this one does. And it doesn’t follow that the first step to replacing it with something better is getting rid of Medicaid.”
Happy Jack: “I suspect that most of the examples you’re thinking of have had their fair share of killing in the past, when they had their turn at reaching for the brass ring of empire. Maybe step one is for a hegemon to get kicked in the gooch.”
I’d agree. And I believe that back when those states had their day
bestriding the blood-soaked killing fields with a dripping swordin the sun, they didn’t spend much on the poor, or the working class.That’s why I believe that the road to a less-murderous state lies *through* the welfare state, not away from it.
In a certain sense, if the state withers away, eventually the war-making powers of the state do as well. However, aside from happy bands like Blackwater and the Pinkertons, who are and have been quite willing to wage private war, the history of the USA shows that even a miniscule state in modern terms can:
1) Hold a serious chunk of the population as chattel slaves,
2) Wage an ethnic cleansing campaign against a few million people, over a few million square miles,
3) Butcher strikers and other troublemakers as needed,
4) Take land and give it to corporations performing ‘vital’ tasks (the railroads), leading to the early megacorps with the power to extend the state, and run amok with it, and finally,
5) Wage a four-year, half-megadeath grinding war involving industrial power projection over a thousand miles, with the ability to move 100K troops that distance, and to keep them supplied.
Comment by Dave Trowbridge —
August 21, 2010 @ 11:03 am
As it happens, when I read this post I was about to begin reading Wendell Berry’s new book, “What Matters: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth” (which I can’t recommend highly enough) and there I find what seems to me a clue to the weakness of modern libertarianism. I call it “the idolatry of competition.”
Berry says:
“The ideal of competition always implies, and in fact requires, that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers. This division is radically different from other social divisions: that of the more able and the less able, or that of the richer and the poorer, or even that of the rulers and the ruled. These latter divisions have existed throughout history and at times, at least, have been ameliorated by social and religious ideals that instructed the strong to help the weak. As a purely economic ideal, competition does not contain or imply any such instructions. In fact, the defenders of the ideal of competition have never known what to do with or for the losers. The losers simply accumulate in human dumps, like stores of industrial waste, until they gain enough misery and strength to overpower the winners. The idea that the displaced and dispossessed “should seek retraining and get into another line of work” is, of course, utterly cynical; it is only the hand-washing practiced by officials and experts.’ A loser, by definition, is somebody whom nobody knows what to do with. There is no limit to the damage and the suffering implicit in this willingness that losers should exist as a normal economic cost.” (p.91, in “Economy and Pleasure,” 1988)
I find only one reference to Berry in your blog, a dismissive one back in 2002 in your red-meat libertarian days. If you haven’t read him lately, I highly recommend you do do. I think he might help the ongoing evolution of your political and economic thinking.
Comment by dhex —
August 21, 2010 @ 11:22 am
[quote]Where did you spend the 1980s, dhex? Just wondering.[/quote]
new jersey!
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2010 @ 11:47 am
In a democratic republic, no one is going to be able to get an undiluted version of their -topia. Therefore, a political platform has to do more than draw a pretty picture of what a perfect world would look like. It’s planks can’t just be steps to achieving Magical Ponyland, because we’re never going to get to Magical Ponyland. Those planks need to be useful, beneficial reforms and methods of governance in and of themselves, or they’re worthless.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2010 @ 11:57 am
Talking about “the state” as a monolith is pointless and misleading.
Did the public provision of firefighting in Boston become more or less important or effective because Woodrow Wilson got us into World War 1? Social Security turned the elderly age group from the corhot most likely to live in poverty to the cohort least likely to live in poverty, and it did so over the time period when the governments in the south were deploying ferocious force against black residents and those who hoped to help them gain their rights.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 21, 2010 @ 12:08 pm
Economic competition doesn’t always create losers. It can also create specialists. a new entrant to a competitive field funds that only some of his products are selling and only certain customers are interested, and focuses on them. People find that they do best at certain parts of the job and a manager night allocate people accordingly to get the best results, or they apply for different jobs.
I don’t claim that market competition _always_ does this. Sometimes it does produce losers. But the idea of a market only sorting the strong from the weak is an oversimplification of econ 101 that’s as popular among Randroids as it is among socialists.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
More particularly, actually motivating the destruction of such safety-net as America currently has seems to involve stirring up the sort of resentment against “moochers” and “parasites” that has put Atlas Shrugged on the Tea Party syllabus. Who is going to voluntarily donate a significant portion of their time and income to help moochers and parasites?
Ideologues who group humanity into a parasite class and a producer class, and fantasize about the former getting the punishment they so richly deserve, are best considered as a group. The precise details of who belongs in each class isn’t as important as the act of viewing humanity in this manner.
Comment by JMG —
August 21, 2010 @ 5:58 pm
Dear Mr. Henley: Thoughtful as usual. My generalization on this issue would be that in a world of 6 billion people and a country of more than 300 million, governments of all sorts are going to be very big even if they did nothing but deliver the mail and (here in New England) plow the streets when it snows.
Comment by Dave Trowbridge —
August 22, 2010 @ 10:58 am
A government that plows the street when it snows certainly doesn’t need to be big. In fact, the principle of subsidiarity suggests that it shouldn’t be.
Comment by ajay —
August 23, 2010 @ 9:54 am
the State is a very bad thing. It fosters murder on a staggering scale, one no smaller group of predators can match
I’m not sure this is actually true. People living in pre-state societies – hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon basin, for example – have incredibly high rates of violent death. An average of 14% of deaths in hunter-gatherer societies are the result of violence. In some societies, it’s as high as 40%.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17255-ancient-warfare-fighting-for-the-greater-good.html
If states fostered as much violence as typical pre-state societies, there would be nine million violent deaths every year. That’s World War II levels, every year. The actual figure worldwide is about 378,000 a year.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=5207645&page=1
States are lifesavers.
Comment by b-psycho —
August 23, 2010 @ 12:19 pm
Ajay: are you sure the reason for that is specifically lack of state, rather than lack of deliberate organization by any name?
If there’s one thing I could credit the state for though, it’s that the overall COST of violence is more obvious. Nobody other than the neighbors care about small tribal skirmishes with spears, but start threatening entire countries with nukes…
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August 23, 2010 @ 12:24 pm
[...] August 23, 2010 by dL in Liberalism, Libertarianism, Politics, Progressivism 0 Jim Henley sums up why, in the end, he rejected libertarianism: The “progressive” case for libertarianism always held that private charity and voluntary [...]
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 23, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
I don’t think ajay’s information proves anything.
On the other hand, it goes pretty far to disproving a certain thesis – that states are responsible for violence, or for increasing violence.
A government is a thing. It is a mere tool. Whether it is used for good or ill is a consequence of how it is used, like a hammer.
Or a rifle.
Comment by Nick Novitski —
August 23, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
That comparison reminds me of my simple-minded reservations of encouraging but not requiring donations to the needful: using private property to solve the problems that arise from the use of private property seems like police carrying guns in order to solve the problems that arise from widespread gun ownership. Or foreign wars to protect us from enemies made via foreign wars.
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August 23, 2010 @ 4:34 pm
[...] Jim Henley: “I dunno about that. But…too bad the popularity of limiting gov’t, let alone doing away with it, tracks with irrational fear of waves of Undeserving Darky.” [...]
Comment by Barry —
August 23, 2010 @ 8:35 pm
Comment by b-psycho —
“If there’s one thing I could credit the state for though, it’s that the overall COST of violence is more obvious. Nobody other than the neighbors care about small tribal skirmishes with spears, but start threatening entire countries with nukes…”
Except for the fact that you would be one of those neighbors, with tribal skirmishes happening around you from time to time, and a continual rate of individual killings.
Comment by b-psycho —
August 23, 2010 @ 10:58 pm
My point is how in a way the amount of devastation we’re technologically capable of wreaking on each other serves as a deterrent.
Comment by ajay —
August 24, 2010 @ 4:13 am
Ajay: are you sure the reason for that is specifically lack of state, rather than lack of deliberate organization by any name?
Pre-state societies are not lacking in deliberate organisation. Typically they’re highly organised on an extended-family and a village/tribe level. Everyone has complex social and kinship relationships. They’re not just amorphous mobs.
My point is how in a way the amount of devastation we’re technologically capable of wreaking on each other serves as a deterrent.
I don’t think this is the case at all. Except possibly with regard to nuclear weapons, and personally I think that historical contingency and pure dumb luck have a lot to do with the absence of nuclear wars.
And Barry’s point is correct. Everyone cares about small tribal skirmishes with spears if they’re happening to everyone all the time. Which they would be.