Anarchy, State and the Squidger*
From comments downblog, frankly speculative musing that may even count as libertarian “bashing,” finally vindicating Radley Balko’s accusation all these months later. But it might just be excuse-making.
What I’m wondering is whether “libertarian” is an inevitably temporary political outlook. The answer must surely be No, right? I mean, Brian Doherty has a big, thick book of people who lived and died as libertarians of one sort or another! So let’s say that at best I’m speaking in tendencies; I am also talking about “operational” identities; and otherwise opening myself up to flavors of “No True Scotsman” (No FAKE Scotsman?) critiques.
But I also remember an early “blogarama” in Adams-Morgan where I got to meet fellow bloggers and readers, and some folks fussing over me not just because I was a libertarian, but because I was a middle-aged libertarian with kids and everything. Which, I was assured, was a rare breed. The people they knew were mostly libertarians until they became older, and parents, and for whatever reason changed their outlook. I think of Frost and Borges in old age, embracing JFK and the Argentine junta respectively.
So my suggestion is that “libertarians” are like tiddlywinks discs that haven’t been flipped yet. Sooner or later, the Great Squidger, Circumstance, presses on you, and you end up in one of the cups over here on the left or over there on the right. At that point you may still be proud of your unique translucency or striking striations, but you have jumped one way or the other. You may formally renounce your libertarianism. You may insist on keeping the label while justifying what amounts to joining the conservative coalition on the grounds that “Economics is primary, and the Republican Party is the lesser of two evils economically,” or explaining away operational liberalism because, “while liberals tend to overreach in regulating the free market, at least they want to keep the Hand of the State away from your nether parts.”
For a lot of so-called neo-libertarians, the squidger was the Global War on Terror. In particular, supporting the Iraq War tended to align them with neoconservatives and “Jacksonians” in the GOP coalition, and over time they became “Republican Party Reptiles” and, eventually, just reptiles. The Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing Great Recession pushed others leftward. These people decided events had falsified the strong version of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and demonstrated that Wealth would always be able to make the political system socialize its own risks. In such an environment, gutting such safety nets as exist for the non-wealthy amounted to unilateral disarmament by the bottom 90% of the income distribution.
And maybe you think that second category is me, and maybe I had to delete “us” and “we” from the first version I wrote, because it would have been dishonest. Because I think my real *flip* was the Bush Administration’s social-security privatization proposal in 2005-6, and the enthusiastic advocacy for it by libertarians like my, well, young friend Will Wilkinson. As long as privatized social security was abstract, I was all for it. But when it became, seemingly, a real possibility, I looked at the law, and I looked at the Henley-family finances, and I knew fear. Real “maybe I won’t sleep; maybe I’ll just stare at the ceiling all night” terror. Somewhere in there, I recovered enough other-directedness to recall that we are very far from the worst-off household I know. And I realized that my stated beliefs were a sham. A luxury. I leapt, at least in my secret heart, into one of the available cups.
* In tiddlywinks, the squidger is the larger disc the players press against the playing-piece discs to pop them toward a target.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 26, 2011 @ 9:51 am
Several years ago there was an infamous episode on Hit and Run where Dan T., a lefty troll (rather unusual, since most H&R trolls are to the right of Dick Cheney) said to Kerry Howley “You’ll change your mind when you have kids.” This led to an in-joke among a breakaway H&R faction with their own message board: We often say “You’ll feel differently when Kerry Howley has kids.”
Anyway, your point about the rarity of old libertarians with kids reminded me of that.
For myself, my libertarianism has mostly been about decisions on the margins, not about drastic changes (except for drug policy and the size of the military), so I think that, for good or for ill, it will be a bit less threatened by changing circumstances. I have no desired endgame, just a set of guidelines (few, if any being completely rigid) for decisions on the margin. That flexibility is either a strength or a sign of ideological weakness. Either way, it is what it is.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
September 26, 2011 @ 9:59 am
Alliances and historical conditions are temporary and “always” is a very strong term. The ability of (certain sectors of) Wealth to socialize risks is the bigger threat *today* to the realization of the moral principles of the market. It has been often before. But it hasn’t always been and it may not always be so (and i say…)
Which all just means that one should care less about who people voted for in the last election, or what policies they think are lesser evils, than about their micro-ethical beliefs. How should you, as a single individual, live? What is justifiable for you to do with, or for, or to, other individuals? What can you, in good conscience, claim should be done not just as a lesser evil but as a matter of right? Those are the permanent questions. Those are, indeed, ultimately the only questions whose answers can make any real difference to most of our lives.
I’ve changed my alliances a lot in the past ten years, like you largely in a lefty direction, partly because of the GWOT, partly because of the late increase in kleptocracy, partly just because some of the old battles have been won to the extent they can be won by coalition with the right (see e.g. gun rights). But my (roughly Georgist-anarchist) micro-ethical beliefs haven’t changed much at all AFAICT. I’d be curious to know if yours have, and if so, why.
Comment by D.A. Ridgely —
September 26, 2011 @ 10:08 am
Apparently I’m much younger than my children believe, waiting, as I am, to be flipped eventually.
BTW, “Anarchy, State and You Dope, You!” would have been a better title. (Which, come to think of it, I’ll use if I ever start blogging again.)
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 10:35 am
Shorter Jim Henley: I changed my beliefs when they became inconvenient and/or hard to adhere to. Wow. News at 11.
Comment by matthew h —
September 26, 2011 @ 10:37 am
Parentage has always been the great enemy of libertarianism. I suspect this has many factors — not a parent myself, sadly for me, but happily for those potentials who escaped being raised by me — but the most important seems this:
– Parenting requires social/economic conservatism. You are risk planning for generations of currently fragile unknowns while one’s own strength and life-remaining horizon starts to turn towards dim. Even merely proposed radical changes on long-term matters(Jim’s squidger to an operational left landing is actually CONSERVATIVE, ie system preservation-y) gets too scary to play around with. For some, operational right reactionatryism is also or primarily attractive. Drug wars and laws even start making sense as well.
Parenting is about long-term control, that’s the job description. Libertarianism, tends the opposite. (There are other reasons probably, and I am not thinking Jim here at all, including parenting subtly inculcating comfort in feeling to be entitled to decide what is better for others than the others themselves, and feeling comfortable barking orders to others.)
But to the original point, parenting is a conservative drive (except when society is very low in functioning in caretaking areas — tyranny, corruption, unemployment etc.)and in so far as the (modern American) left and right are both conservative in their quests for maintaining institutionalized social or economic senses of security/care-taking, it is a problem for libertarians. The same way as rowdy independent youthhood tends to lead even traditionalists and yes, even females, towards libertarianism.
Comment by Barry —
September 26, 2011 @ 10:58 am
Or rather, ‘Jim had it pressed home hard just what many of these proposals meant, in the real world (with the added knowledge that the libertarian proposal would generally be carried out by people doing it for personal gain).’
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:00 am
@Barry: Really, either works, right?
Comment by homunq —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:21 am
“changed my beliefs” is simpler, as long as you don’t give it baggage of bad flip-flopping or good empiricism. It just is what it is.
Comment by Professor Coldheart —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:24 am
I like the idea that a belief should be cleaved to like a wounded whale, even as reality tightens the rope around our leg and forces the water into our lungs.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:32 am
Whatever one thinks of the self-interest angle on Jim’s shifting views, it’s important to note that few people who undergo a substantial ideological shift will admit that self-interest is a part of it. Jim’s candor sets him apart from the crowd, I think.
Comment by matthew h —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:34 am
I don’t know but I do have the sad sense I am witnessing Kepler joining the Papal Inquisition against Galileo in order to suppress the Copernican theory because he has seen in real life, as opposed to that ivory tower theorist, the clear error of the Copernican theory that planetary orbits are perfectly circular. (Allow for any anachronisms.)
Comment by digamma —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:51 am
My libertarian-going-left reaction to Social Security privatization was “This has a certain probability of making us richer and a greater probability of being a massive market-distorting giveaway to Wall Street douchebags that will end with a massive bailout to all the seniors whose investments go south”.
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:51 am
Not sure that is an accurate summary of my statement, if that was directed at me.
Is it not entirely possible to recognize that one is “right” and that “rightness” can sometimes be inconvenient? I find it terribly inconvenient I do not believe I should go about smashing windows and stealing what I “need”, but that still does not make me wrong for thinking theft is bad.
Sheesh.
Comment by Shannon's Mouse —
September 26, 2011 @ 12:32 pm
? -
You might want to entertain the possibility that the real reason you don’t smash windows is because the risk/reward profile of a life in thievery isn’t appealing to you given your accumulation of social capital and marketable skills.
Jim’s just being honest about the fact that “where we stand depends upon where we sit” applies to himself as well.
Comment by IOZ —
September 26, 2011 @ 12:39 pm
I find it terribly inconvenient I do not believe I should go about smashing windows and stealing what I “need”, but that still does not make me wrong for thinking theft is bad.
Now needless to say this is not true; you do not find this inconvenient; you’re misrepresenting your sentiments and misusing the word, which is exactly the sort of bogey golf one expects in libertarianische circles–vaguely more consistent than the duffers of the mainstream right-and-left, but still, in the end, compared to that which is really smart, skillful, and compelling, a lousy game, or as Twain like to say: a good walk, spoiled.
It amusingly mirrors the crackpot Hobbesian, anti-libertarian argument that but for the strong state we’d all be slaughtering each other in the street. But actually most of us are not murderers, nor thieves, nor yet even blog trolls! Decency is not a matter of convenience one way or other; people are social creatures; “we must love one another or die”; etc.
The flaw of libertarianism in almost every variety is that it presumes its values to be transcendent when they are purely situational; you would be hard pressed to locate a political philosophy more intimately and inextricably tied to a time and a place. I mean, your project is effectively to build a vast system of categorical imperatives based on the cobbled-together political project of a bunch of late-eighteenth-century tax cheats, and to somehow do so within the context of a metastasized 20th-century military-industrial global hegemon . . . I mean, I could go on, but the point is that almost nothing could be more contingent, and the universal values of liberty that you think you espouse are, as the saying goes, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
That a guy like Jim H. woke up one day and realized not that it would be more convenient to accept some modest handout from the state, but rather that the superficially coherent philosophy to which he had long held allegience in fact was totally inadequate to the life of the mind and body and spirit is something to be commended, not condescended to. It is in the end those who seek the consolations of A Philosophy whose intellects and moral imaginations are prisoners of mere convenience; what you call consistency and coherence are mere habit; your universalisms are idiosycracies; like all philosophies, yours is not an epiphany, but an alibi.
Love,
IOZ
Comment by Stevo Darkly —
September 26, 2011 @ 12:52 pm
Eh. Point of counter-data: I started out my own political awareness as a vaguely economically liberal/socially conservative sort. As I became more aware and less vague, I found myself to be be a Reaganite free-market (mostly) small-government conservative Cold Warrior. Then I evolved into a mildly confused libertarian conservative. Then a mildly confused conservative libertarian. Then I engaged in some deep introspection, examined my beliefs and values further, unraveled some commonly unexamined contradictions, and thought further about some basic moral issues, and I found myself forced morally and logically into adopting the position of anarcho-capitalist. And now I’m 50. Now, get off my sovereign lawn before I call my security company!
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 12:57 pm
gee, ioz, you could have just reeled off that famous misquote of Emerson and saved me five minutes.
I am not going to go out on a limb and commend somebody (like you) who exhibits a lack of rigor or discipline (which I know is your bailiwick, and people love you for it, for whatever reason). I know that orthogonal koans are like, your thing and all, but most of us want and need a system. And there may be flaws in libertarianism, but it’s kinda like Churchill and democracy – better than all the alternatives.
superficially coherent philosophy
But, I assume, you find it substantively empty. Why and how?
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 12:59 pm
Stevo – you won’t be so principled once you have kids.
/raspberry
Comment by Alex Knapp —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:04 pm
“It amusingly mirrors the crackpot Hobbesian, anti-libertarian argument that but for the strong state we’d all be slaughtering each other in the street.”
Well, among hunter-gatherer, pre-state societies, the number one cause of death after childhood disease is homicide, so there probably is something to this.
Comment by Stevo Darkly —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:06 pm
Yep, that’s what I keep hearing. Apparently once you reproduce, your moral values go right out the window.
Comment by Stevo Darkly —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:07 pm
Dammit, my last comment was aimed at “?” — I’m not used so such an active forum!
Comment by IOZ —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:17 pm
Well, among hunter-gatherer, pre-state societies, the number one cause of death after childhood disease is homicide, so there probably is something to this.
Based on what, the census?
“Dr. Bloomquist, do you think the anthropologist, Margaret Mead’s strange behavior of late might possibly be explained by a private marijuana addiction?”
Comment by GinSlinger —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:30 pm
IOZ is the anti-anarchrist? Balance is preserved in the universe.
Comment by dhex —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:31 pm
noble v. savage: the assertioning
Comment by D.A. Ridgely —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:54 pm
Contra IOZ, libertarian ideologues are no different from other political ideologues in confusing the map with the terrain. If he finds them particularly hard to swallow, that may be more because of his tastes than the cuisine.
Being neither a fan nor a detractor of Mr. Henley either in his putatively libertarian period or his apparently post-libertarian period, I have no axe to grind as to whether he is an apostate of or convert to the One True Church. Up to a point I’m inclined to agree here with Thoreau; but self-interest, even of the rational variety, is probably no more sufficient a reason to abandon libertarianism than to embrace it.
But so what? One need only look at the politics of academic philosophers to conclude Hume had it pretty much right about reason and passions. That the blogosphere provides further evidence should hardly surprise anyone.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
September 26, 2011 @ 2:10 pm
Shorter Jim Henley: I changed my beliefs when they became inconvenient and/or hard to adhere to. Wow. News at 11.
I know. How selfish.
Comment by William Burns —
September 26, 2011 @ 2:27 pm
“most of us want and need a system”
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least its an ethos.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 26, 2011 @ 2:59 pm
Quoting Lebowski is IOZ’s beat, Burns.
Or:
SHUT THE FUCK UP WILLY!
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 26, 2011 @ 3:02 pm
@?: It’s a complicated case with a lot of ins and outs.
Comment by Professor Coldheart —
September 26, 2011 @ 3:29 pm
Not sure that is an accurate summary of my statement, if that was directed at me.
Your statement itself was a summary. If you want to make a sarcastic summary of our host’s argument and then raise your hand when someone responds to your post with a little sarcasm in turn, well, friend, I don’t know what to tell you.
But, yeah, to take what I think was your point at face value, our host found it inconvenient to keep believing in something that he feared would impoverish his family. What would you suggest is the “right” course here?
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 3:33 pm
Because all systems are morally the same.
*bump* Next.
Ironic that libertarians are criticized as selfish beings, yet that same selfishness is to be lauded in the abandonment of principle.
Like I said, it would be short-term unenlightened selfishness to smash a window and steal a Wii. I would be just as cynical about someone who writes emotional anecdotes about justifying that behavior, too.
Say five Hail Marys, go forth and sin no more? Seriously, I fail to see how a short-term emergency means all your principles go out the window.
Comment by b-psycho —
September 26, 2011 @ 3:56 pm
No kids here yet, and don’t particularly want any. But I have been growing older, so whatever.
Whether you want to call it life, mere re-examining of thought, or a combination of both, I’ve done pretty much the opposite move Jim describes over the years. Sometimes I kinda wish I had Thoreau’s time-messer-upper thingy so I could go argue with that right-leaning reformist moron that was posting stuff under my name back in 2002.
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 4:17 pm
test -I seem to be having trouble posting.
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 4:18 pm
It would be short-term unenlightened selfishness to smash a window and steal a Wii. I would be just as cynical about someone who writes emotional anecdotes about justifying that behavior, too. I really do not feel as if this is a difficult point to grasp.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 26, 2011 @ 4:32 pm
@?: I found three copies of one comment in the spam filter just now and liberated one of them. You probably fell foul of some combination of velocity checks and handle form-factor in Akismet’s algorithms.
If any more get stuck, don’t try re-posting because that just makes the velocity-check problem bigger. Instead, please email me, “jimhenley” where the Google does mail, and I will approve your comment manually as soon as the blog dashboard is accessible to me.
Comment by homunq —
September 26, 2011 @ 5:57 pm
I find it hard to believe that ? is arguing that Principles are something that should overcome evidence. If I had real evidence that a window-smashing, wii-stealing lifestyle improved the prosperity and diversity of humanity in general, I would be silly to let my “principles” get in the way.
The past is littered with principles which were once elevated to central moral importance and are now laughable. I don’t find the historical people who honestly lived by those principles laughable, but I do find anyone who apes them today to be a bit pathetic.
Comment by homunq —
September 26, 2011 @ 6:01 pm
My point is that principles can be a good reason to restrain your itchy fingers, or zip your fly, or scoop your poop, or quit your job, or whatever; but never a reason to shut your eyes.
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 7:29 pm
I never said anything about ignoring evidence. What I did say, though, was that the mere fact that one takes advantage of a government program does not require a complete re-evaluation of one’s philosophy. It’s a bizarro version of the ROADS argument: I mean, I drove on a road today, so, what, I can’t credibly be libertarian now?
Comment by BubbaDave —
September 26, 2011 @ 8:14 pm
It seems to me that the difference is that people with children become biased towards pragmatic goals. I was having a chat with a friend today, on the subject of flying. He asked how I could bear to fly, and my answer was that my obligations trumped my principles (which is, itself, a principle, but if I think about it too much my head hurts). Whatever else children may be, they are walking, talking obligations, and I see no contradiction between saying “I personally believe in X” and “I am unwilling for the consequences of X to fall upon those whom I have an obligation.” Jim is entitled to impoverish himself in the pursuit of Libertopia. In my opinion, he has no right to choose to impoverish his children, and I’m glad to see that he agrees. Where I differ with my libertarian friend is that I believe that in some sense I have an obligation to all the children. So I pay my taxes and wish they were higher; I wish the money we spend on robot bombers was instead spent on food aid and malaria nets; and I vote for liberals when I can and Democrats when those liberals are unavailable.
Dave +1
Comment by ? —
September 26, 2011 @ 9:26 pm
somebody get this guy a halo and a harp from props.
Comment by John Markley —
September 26, 2011 @ 9:50 pm
My own experience has always been just the opposite, with libertarians seeming to skew somewhat older and with changes in political outlook more likely to be in the opposite of the direction you describe-I know far more people who’ve gone from non-libertarian to libertarian or minarchist to anarchist than the reverse.
I think this has more to do with the sample being looked at then anything else. I was struck that your go-to example of an enthusiatic libertarian was Will Wilkinson, who is one of the standard bearers for “liberaltarianism” and has charatcerized his beliefs- mostly accurately, I think- as welfare state liberalism without the typical distatse for free markets. Similarly, you describe the libertarians you knew as enthusiastic about the idea of social security “privatization”- whereas the great majority of libertarians I knew were either had no strong feelings on it or condenmed it for providing yet another instrument and excuse for the government to involve itself with the private sector. I don’t know if the libertarians I’ve observed were more representative or not, but in either case it was quite different.
Back when you identified as a libertarian, my impression was that you generally got on pretty well with mainline liberals/progressive, and they with you, especially compared to the way such interactions usually seem to go. Most of the libertarians or people with significant libertarian leanings you commonly engaged with on this blog were similar in that respect. That being the case, I think it’s inevitable that you’d run into far more people who used to be libertarians, or whose friends and acquaintances used to be, than you would people who had remained libertarian for long periods of time and/or were “hardcore” (I hate that term, but it’ll do) libertarians whose rejection of mainstream liberalism or conservativism was thoroughgoing, because the latter sorts are simply less likely to have been moving in the same circles.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 26, 2011 @ 10:32 pm
Jim’s libertarian sample also has a large contingent of DC folks, with bright young writers and think-tankers heavily-represented.
Comment by BubbaDave —
September 27, 2011 @ 12:37 am
No, see, that’s just it. I know myself quite well, and I’m a self-centered antisocial bastard. If that still leaves me a better person than the vast majority of libertarians I’ve encountered on the Internet, well, we’ll leave drawing the obvious conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
Comment by nj —
September 27, 2011 @ 1:39 am
I found the social security “privatization” bit interesting as well. A lot of libertarians were opposed to it. I still find Wilkinson support of it extremely disappointing.
Otherwise great post.
Comment by ? —
September 27, 2011 @ 8:08 am
Bubbadave – I like how you have set it up that if one is skeptical about, say, raising taxes for food aid and malaria nets, then one is an antisocial bastard. How, exactly, do you think that money gets paid? Does the government just ask you nicely for it?
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 27, 2011 @ 8:22 am
Losing track of our cast of characters!
@BubbaDave: Who is your libertarian friend reffed in #39? Thoreau? Someone in this thread?
@nj: Over time I came to regard Will as awesome on what we might call “humanitarian” issues, but a terrible guide to thinking about economics.
@John Markley: I always got along well with anti-war progressives, yes, even before I was one.
And I had/have a bunch of Cato/reason peacenik buds too. But I also knew, both online and offline, paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives, FWIW.
Comment by dhex —
September 27, 2011 @ 8:27 am
i do have a kid, but the (future) questions concerning him that i wrestle with most are social, not political.
Comment by Eli Rabett —
September 27, 2011 @ 8:34 am
OK, a lot of this goes back to the idea of the naked savage, that noble people survive as lone wolves, a tendency exaggerated by the theater and movies. Even wolves don’t survive as lone wolves, not as puppies, not for long and not into old age.
As Hillary Clinton said about kids, it takes a village, and as Marx pointed out, property is theft (at least at some point)
Comment by BubbaDave —
September 27, 2011 @ 9:37 am
@JimHenley – Nobody in this thread, a friend of mine since high school. And for the record, neither you nor Thoreau is included in the “vast majority of libertarians I’ve encountered on the Internet” referenced above. I probably shouldn’t have written that phrase at all, because the fact of the matter is libertarianism appeals to both well-meaning people and sociopathic assholes, and since the Internet is composed primarily of sociopathic assholes the result is a hideous sample bias, plus sweeping generalizations that don’t advance the conversation.
@? – Skepticism about means of acting on one’s obligations to one’s fellow man is not necessarily bastardly. Arguing that anyone who believes in an obligation to assist his fellow man is angling for “a halo and a harp from props” is, I think, a different story. As a well-known statist dupe wrote long ago, “No man is an island;” I think those who believe differently are either immature or, well, failing at a fundamental part of humanity.
Comment by ? —
September 27, 2011 @ 10:27 am
I don’t care if you think you have an obligation; the “halo and harps” barb comes from the fact that you vote for people (and approve of) who think it is OK to drag the rest of us along in your chosen obligation.
Like I said, how do you think government programs get funded? Through the goodness and charity of voluntary donations?
Comment by Monte Davis —
September 27, 2011 @ 10:29 am
But it’s a principled failure, BubbaDave.
Comment by ? —
September 27, 2011 @ 10:39 am
I never realized how mentally broken some people can be. “If you do not support malaria nets/food aid/forcible taxation to support such, THEN you are either (a) a monster or (b) “failing at a fundamental part of humanity.”
Man, what an awesome argument. You are either with us or against us, I suppose…
Comment by dhex —
September 27, 2011 @ 10:57 am
everyone thinks people are islands when it comes to individual freedoms they like.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
September 27, 2011 @ 11:15 am
OK, a lot of this goes back to the idea of the naked savage, that noble people survive as lone wolves, a tendency exaggerated by the theater and movies.
Maybe this is nitpicking, but it’s not “exaggerated.” It’s a complete falsehood.
As for ?, I’m still trying to wrap my head around “In the name of libertarian principles, Henley needs to suck it up and take one for the team.” Am I the only one?
Comment by ? —
September 27, 2011 @ 12:27 pm
You are not the only one, but that is not what I said. What I did say was this: today, I drove on a federal highway. Does this invalidate my libertarian worldview?
It is entirely possible to think, “My short-term financial position will be compromised by a reform to Social Security. That said, I support the reform.” In a society where there are all kinds of rules where one’s short-term interest is sacrificed (e.g. not being permitted to steal, or murder, or what have you) I do not find this to be a terribly controversial position.
Comment by ? —
September 27, 2011 @ 1:11 pm
Marx didn’t say that. An interesting back-and-forth is on Wikipedia on this:
here
Comment by Leonard —
September 27, 2011 @ 1:20 pm
I think most people got (and get) on well with Jim because he is an interesting and thoughtful writer, and a pleasant and respectful interlocutor. (I’ll pimp anyone who gives me sweet, sweet brain-food.)
As for me, I have aged both more practical and more extreme. The two are not necessarily opposed. I was always libertarianish, which stance I hardened into moral libertarianism by maybe 25 and then anarchocapitalism by 30. In the past few years I have added neocameralism and a general reactionaryism to my thought, but I am still seeing these as practical means to liberty and the moral society. Coincidentally I also had a child, but I do not feel any relationship between my recent political evolution and his existence or well being. I must confess I cannot imagine lying awake worrying about Social Security, or any other program of USG. Partly this is because I feel I understand USG well enough to know it cannot really change unless under the most extreme duress. But most of it is that I do not feel USG is at all under my influence. I spend more time worrying about the weather.
I advocate what I think is morally right or at least what might work better than what we do now. If, by some odd chance something I advocated ended up happening, and it turned out to be a problem for me, well, too bad. I care about being right and doing the right thing more than holding on to the status quo. In that I have not changed at all.
Comment by mpowell —
September 27, 2011 @ 2:01 pm
I want to go back to something Thoreau says at the beginning of this comment thread about decisions on the margins. This a major problem I have with more practical libertarian types even if I agree with them more frequently than people with more extreme views. Tyler Cowen is another excellent example.
The problem with this perspective is that if you are only dabbling at the margins or just setting guidelines you have already given up the game. You cannot defend your position with the principles of libertarianism. Now you are just a liberal and we are debating details. But the only reason these types of people continue calling themselves libertarians is that they want to throw up some principles when their preferred policy is very difficult to defend on other grounds. Sometimes this is understandable since you can’t be an expert on everything. But other times it’s just an excuse to make bad arguments based on prejudice.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
September 27, 2011 @ 9:19 pm
So my suggestion is that “libertarians” are like tiddlywinks discs that haven’t been flipped yet. Sooner or later, the Great Squidger, Circumstance, presses on you, and you end up in one of the cups over here on the left or over there on the right.
Yet most people, as far as I can tell, are not in any of those cups. Not consistently/coherently socialist, not consistently/coherently liberal, not consistently/coherently conservative, not consistently/coherently libertarian. When I have political conversations with normal people — here defined as “people who aren’t obsessed with politics” — they’re usually odd patchworks. The former welfare mom married to the former sheriff whose dopesmoking kids get along with their dad because he hates the feds too, and she kinda likes Perot, and she doesn’t think Colin Powell would be a good president because (a) he’s military and (b) he’s black. (Yes, I am recounting a real conversation I had with a barber in the ’90s. Kind of an extreme example, but you get the idea.)
You really don’t need to land in one of those cups. Not even to vote, because you don’t need to vote. God knows most people don’t do that either.
Comment by matthew h —
September 27, 2011 @ 11:17 pm
Jesse — Get real. Sheesh, next thing, you’ll be saying is that most citizens haven’t read Hayek or Keynes. What planet are you on, dude, Gamma Statist IV or something?
Comment by davidly —
September 28, 2011 @ 5:44 am
I know more late-term libertarians, whose already latent, but once inconvenient philosophy experiences its coming-of-age with an unexpected accumulation of wealth.
That self-interest cuts both ways shouldn’t surprise anyone, unless of course their moniker is a question mark. Then, I suppose, all bets are off.
Comment by davidly —
September 28, 2011 @ 5:48 am
And anyway, isn’t the salient point here that that particular “privatization of social security” resembled in no way the liberation of anyone? It’d've been like saying, “We want to free you from your chains, but first we have to cut off your (insert favorite limb).”
Comment by ? —
September 28, 2011 @ 7:29 am
Is that tu quoque I am hearing? I believe that it is. “Some libertarians adopt their politics out of convenience, ergo…it’s OK when others do it?” Is that right?
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 28, 2011 @ 7:45 am
Jesse, people are marvelously various and special, absolutely. Still, I think the social-science literature suggests that people sort pretty reliably across a single left-right dimension.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 28, 2011 @ 7:49 am
?: As a late reminder, there is a sentence after “Real . . . terror.”
Comment by davidly —
September 28, 2011 @ 8:39 am
What it is is what it is. O.K. ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.
Comment by Jay —
September 28, 2011 @ 8:59 am
I’ve come to understand that when Americans say “liberty” they usually are thinking of “opportunity”, as exemplified by first the frontier and secondly the various industrial revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The oriental conception of liberty implies unemployment; if you don’t have a master, nobody’s feeding you.
This confusion caused trouble when we brought “liberty” to Iraq, and then wondered why they didn’t seem to care. Without opportunities worth pursuing, what good is liberty?
Comment by ? —
September 28, 2011 @ 11:47 am
JH,
I originally did not address this because I think this makes things even worse. I get that you have empathy and all, but my response to the fact that there are other households worse off is: so what? Imagine, if you will, an Afghan in Kabul whose life like, really sucks, right? And he hears about the United States leaving and he dreads the return of the Taliban. Do you lay awake at night worrying about him? An individual’s reliance on a government program or action is going to exist no matter what program or action we are talking about – your (or other household’s) dependency is not a rational argument for why a certain policy should or should not change, at least, no moreso than Mohammed Afghan up there’s dependency is vis-a-vis the Afghan war.
Comment by Ray —
September 28, 2011 @ 3:13 pm
I’d have had a lot more respect for the argument in the original post if the author hadn’t decided to invent that sockpuppet to argue against hi…
…
never mind.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
September 28, 2011 @ 4:06 pm
@davidly: I’ve known a fair number of low-income libertarians.
@Jim: I’m not sure they do. Or, put another way, I’ve certainly seen polling that sorts people into more complicated piles, even if they line up to vote in a reliably left-right direction in a country that organizes their voting choices in a systematically left-right way. When I read a book like Stanley Greenberg’s The Two Americas, I come away — despite the title — with a sense that the number of Americas out there is much larger than two, and that mapping them requires more than one direction.
Anyway, I think it’s a mistake to extrapolate the demographics of libertarians from the demographics of the D.C.-area libertarian blogging community circa 2003. When I lived in the Pacific NW, the libertarians I encountered (Liberty interns aside) tended to be middle-aged boomers. I’m sure there are other places with other patterns.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
September 28, 2011 @ 4:08 pm
Sorry, that was supposed to say “more than one dimension,” not “more than one direction.”
Comment by Keith Beacham —
September 28, 2011 @ 6:46 pm
@Jim I think Jesse has a point. I find most people harbor muddled and in many cases conflicting political ideals. Recently on Bloggingheads.tv Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention postulated that if the GOP was to ever to nominate a pro-choice candidate the Christian conservative vote would drop from a 75/25 GOP advantage to a 50/50 split. He went on to say that though many evangelicals were indeed social and economic conservatives as he is many are not. I found this to be one of the most interesting perspectives I’ve heard in a while.
Comment by Keith Beacham —
September 28, 2011 @ 7:03 pm
Here is link to the clip if you’re interested.
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/38505?in=04:22&out=06:38
Comment by Barry —
September 29, 2011 @ 8:11 am
Comment by davidly —
“And anyway, isn’t the salient point here that that particular “privatization of social security” resembled in no way the liberation of anyone? It’d’ve been like saying, “We want to free you from your chains, but first we have to cut off your (insert favorite limb).””
A good point. I was about to bring it up, and I notice pointedly that the people arguing from a hardcore libertarian point have not. Jim also covered this in his ’shackles and crutches’ post – which I again recommend as one of the top ten things I’ve read on real libertarianism.
Social Security privatization is the notion that we should take one of the more successful programs of the US government and trash it, for frankly foolish and dishonest reasons. The foolish reasons are libertarian ‘principles’, the sort of ‘principles’ which feel that Social Security is a higher priority that the vast quantities of corporate pork handed out every year.
The dishonest reasons are the fact that the major backers simply want to take that money for themselves, returning only the dregs to the people who put that in. All else is more lies, such as evaluating the ’solvency’ of Social Security and Social Security alone by methods which would list the entire Federal government as ‘insolvent’.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 29, 2011 @ 12:00 pm
@Jesse Walker: To be fair, I am also generalizing from the population of late-blooming transcontinental Rothbardian academics (Callahan), and others. Still, point taken.
@?: #68 makes me suspect you’re working with a defective understanding of the role of rationality in the matter, and possibly a defective understanding of rationality itself.
@Barry: There’s a good argument to be made that Bush’s social-security-privatization proposal wasn’t “really” libertarian, because with so many different flavors of “libertarianism” around, you can find some number it doesn’t fit. And you could find divisions among libertarian intellectuals over the merits of the proposal; frex. Tyler Cowen was famously against it. (In the same debate, James K. Glassman was for. I realize it overstates to call James K. Glassman an intellectual of any sort, but there were brighter minds in the movement on his side, such as Will.)
This is either the perennial dilemma or ubiquitous escape hatch for real-world libertarian advocacy though. You could make a libertarian argument for the Bush SS plan on incrementalist grounds – i.e. it will at least move us closer to freedom in retirement-savings choices and give the market a bigger role than it has now. Or you could say, it’s not true individual choice in how to dispose of your own money and therefore is just another flavor of statism and so don’t blame The Free Market(TM) if it goes wrong. Or, it’s just another flavor of statism so I’m against it; or, it’s just another flavor of statism so I don’t care whether it gets enacted or not.
All the “Ors” have problems. And the incrementalist approach gets swampy.
Comment by Barry —
September 29, 2011 @ 12:46 pm
Jim: “(In the same debate, James K. Glassman was for. I realize it overstates to call James K. Glassman an intellectual of any sort, but there were brighter minds in the movement on his side, such as Will.)”
When one is on the same intellectual side as Glassman, one is no longer considered smart (aside: Will is one of those ’smart’ people who is considered ’smart’ for – well why?)
In the Bush II plan, to accept it as libertarian one had to assume that it wasn’t just yet another Bush II scheme to hand over money to cronies. Which is a bigger assumption than I’d like to make with my money.
Comment by ? —
September 29, 2011 @ 2:16 pm
Whatever you say. There are winners and losers with government programs, regardless of what they are. Your detrimental reliance has zero to do with the wisdom of a particular program.
Comment by Will Wilkinson —
September 30, 2011 @ 4:28 am
Jim, I had no idea! And you’re welcome, I guess. The funny thing is that my argument for mandatory retirement savings accounts has practically zero libertarian content. It’s a mandatory savings program! My Cato paper was about how it’s a more honest and reliable form of social insurance, not that LIBERTARIANISM instructs: Always Privatize. So I’m wondering what exactly made your tiddlywink flip? You weren’t convinced you could depend upon a mandatory retirement savings program in the same comforting way you can depend upon the political will of the American electorate to keep something in the neighborhood of promised social security benefits flowing, come what may, fiscally? Fair enough, I suppose, but for the life of me I can’t see what that would have to do with *libertarianism*, so I must not be grokking you.
If the tiddlywink metaphor works (it doesn’t) mine flipped a long time ago, for philosophical reasons, which I suppose has something to do with why I was de-affiliated with Cato. My politics are queer. Despite my much-enlarged suspicion of criminality endemic in the financial economy, I still prefer forced savings social insurance over risk-pooling redistributive social insurance because trad welfare-statism has an inherently nationalist club structure that clashes with the aim of hugely alleviating global poverty through mass immigration. What is this ideology? I think it’s liberalism. I don’t really care much what it’s called, but other people seem to care a lot.
Anyway, “libertarian” is most definitely an inevitably temporary political outlook.
So, yeah, the tiddlywink metaphor is bad. It’s too binary, for me at least. My beliefs tend to change incrementally on lots of different margins at once leaving me nowhere with a marked address. Maybe you’re more a road to damascus sort of guy, who’s either fully invested in one of the rote, pre-defined culturally-available political identities, or not. But that doesn’t seem right. You seem to get along alright with both idiosyncrasy and ambiguity.
Also, re: “young”, I am pushing 40, though it’s true I look terrific. And don’t make generalizations about anything other than 1st gen DC bloggers from memories of Blogaramas. Good times, though. We were so innocent then.
Comment by E.D. Kain —
September 30, 2011 @ 9:22 am
Gosh, everybody who is anybody is here. Hell of a thread.
Comment by William Burns —
September 30, 2011 @ 10:09 am
“My politics are queer.”
That set me up for something completely different than what actually followed.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
September 30, 2011 @ 1:15 pm
Every political outlook is temporary, at least until the triumph of the Immortalist Party.
Comment by E.D. Kain —
September 30, 2011 @ 11:47 pm
Jesse that’s the best idea I’ve heard since Zen Anarchist.
Pingback by Balloon Juice » The case for democracy —
October 1, 2011 @ 9:58 am
[...] enjoyed Jim Henley’s explanation of his own departure from libertarianism, years ago when the notion of privatized Social Security really sunk in; for me it is simply this: [...]
Pingback by The case for democracy — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen —
October 1, 2011 @ 9:59 am
[...] enjoyed Jim Henley’s explanation of his own departure from libertarianism, years ago when the notion of privatized Social Security really sunk in; for me it is simply this: [...]
Comment by Killing in the Lame of —
October 2, 2011 @ 1:27 am
You should hear my dance-punk band, Living Confederate, do our send-up of the DK’s. “Holiday in Somalia” is tight.
Comment by John W. —
October 2, 2011 @ 9:14 pm
Good stuff, here.
Even though I’m a registered Libertarian, I’ve been lately “squidged” left.
Too bad I can’t register as a Bull-Moose Progressive.
Comment by Robert Hutchinson —
October 3, 2011 @ 1:15 pm
I’m young(ish?), I’m libertarian, I intend to be some stripe of libertarian for the rest of my days, blah blah blah.
The only thought I have on this topic that hasn’t already been covered would probably be considered a bit too rudely drive-by in nature, as it has to do with a particular person holding up another particular person as part of a foundation for a coherent shift in ideology, when said latter person had what may be the most incoherent, unexplainable, and logically unsupportable shift in ideology that I have ever personally witnessed.
But I’ve said too much.
Comment by midwesterner —
October 3, 2011 @ 3:33 pm
? says all he needs to say – about his intellectual seriousness, his maturity, the scope of his world – with his example of what he’d do if he danced with the Devil of “unenlightened selfishness”: steal a Wii.
Wow, really? Of all the temptations on God’s green Earth, of all the debauches you’d engage in if freed from the bounds of social orthodoxy, the furthest your imagination can stretch to is… a free video-game console?
Didn’t your parents ever tell you to be still when grown folks is talkin’?