On "libertarians"

Regarding my last post, an anonymous commenter asks:

Why do you insist that Angus is a conservative? Are you unable to make a distinction between conservatives and libertarians?

Hint: they are quite different.

Two questions here. The first is easy; I insist that Angus is a conservative because he says a lot of the exact same things that self-described conservatives say. Political ideology is defined by consensus, not by a dictionary. If you are marching in an army, and you point around you and say "I'm not with these guys," I'm going to have to be a little skeptical of your claim. (Yes, I realize that there is a substantial possibility that Angus did not leave the anonymous comment; hence, I realize that saying "your claim" is not entirely appropriate in this situation; it is a figure of speech).

The second question is harder: What is the difference between self-styled "conservatives" and self-styled "libertarians"?

The common answer is: Social issues. Though many conservative politicians and writers call themselves "libertarian," their stances against gay marriage, immigration, and drug use give them away as closet authoritarians. True libertarians, we often hear, agree with conservatives on economic issues (lower taxes, less regulation) and with liberals on social issues (legal marijuana, gay marriage, more immigration).

I do not buy this distinction. As I see it, the American "conservative" ideology is not a rigid and unified canon, but a diverse set of interest groups held together by an unusually stable alliance of convenience. From reading conservative blogs and magazines, watching Fox News, and talking to self-described conservatives, I have grokked that the groups that make up the alliance we call "conservatism" are three: 1. businesspeople and other well-to-do folks who want lower taxes and regulation, 2. ethnic tribalists who think that white, Christian, and Southern/rural people and groups should have political and social primacy, and 3. militarists who want our military to be really big and to go kick peoples' butts. These are known in the press, respectively, as "economic conservatives," "social conservatives," and "neoconservatives." Militarists are the smallest group, so I'll ignore them for now.

What do these groups have to do with each other? Why has this coalition-of-the-willing endured for so long? In a word, socialism. The conservative movement as we know it is an alliance of two groups that felt threatened by the socialist (or "leftist") movement of the 20th Century - economic conservatives because socialists wanted to take their money, social conservatives because socialists wanted to diversify and liberalize their culture. As Wooldridge and Micklethwait document in The Right Nation, economic conservatives had to hold their nose a bit to join with a bunch of moralizing Bible-thumpers, and lower-income social conservatives had to do a bit of doublethink to avoid noticing that conservative economic policies mostly benefit rich people. All this is well known. The difference in priorities between the two main conservative constituencies is undoubtedly why conservatives spend so much time demonizing liberals; they want to keep the focus on the common enemy.

Which brings me to the question: What the heck is the difference between an "economic conservative" and a "libertarian"? Apparently, whether or not that individual publicly endorses the big-tent alliance described above. A true libertarian, we are told, holds true to his ideological self-consistency, and either votes libertarian or not at all.

Which is absurd, of course. On election day, most libertarians hold their noses and vote Republican, exactly as many "greens" and Naderites and assorted other leftists hold their nose and vote Democrat, because at the end of the day, people are not fools, and they understand the two-party system and how it works. In other words, when push comes to shove, libertarians behave exactly like the economic conservatives with whom they are identically one and the same. A few snarky throwaway protest votes do not constitute a separate movement.

And economic conservatives (including many who routinely refer to themselves as "libertarian"), far from being marginalized or disaffected within their movement, comprise the intellectual and ideological leading edge of that movement. It is think tanks like the "libertarian" Cato Institute and publications like the National Review who create and/or promulgate all of the economic ideas that later get parroted at Tea Party rallies and on Glenn Beck's talk show. Why do you think that a bunch of anti-immigration, anti-gay marriage, anti-drug-legalization fire-breathers are snapping up copies of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom? Hint: it's NOT because "libertarians" and "economic conservatives" are quite different.

It is "libertarians" who have created and promulgated the idea that Obama is a leftist, despite his very middle-of-the-road attitude toward business. It is "libertarians" who have given the legions of social conservatives, who hated Obama from Minute 1 because he was black and weird and intellectual, an excuse to associate Obama with Hitler without sounding like the racist tribalist reactionaries that they really are. "Big government!", the Tea Partiers shriek, when in fact they are dog-whistling "Nigger hippie outsider!" The "libertarian" enablers of this little pretense smile behind cupped hands, knowing that when tribal animus propels the Republican Party to power (as it will this evening), they will get their lower taxes and their deregulation. And if gay marriage and immigration take a hit, well, not optimal, but not catastrophic; those issues were never top priorities for economic conservatives anyway.

And those who cast snarky throwaway protest votes on election day will shrug and say "Don't blame me; I'm not a conservative, I'm a libertarian. Don't you know the difference?"

A quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of discredited bullshit

Albert Einstein claimed that "God does not play dice" with the interactions of subatomic particles. Actually, as it turned out, He does. So there's plenty of precedent for very smart people to believe stubbornly in very silly ideas, even in direct contradiction of all evidence. Thus, maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Ed Glaeser, who is really a very brilliant economist, but who remains wedded to an outmoded and discredited intellectual religion:

It is both the best and worst of times for libertarians. On the plus side, real, live politicians who might conceivably get elected call themselves libertarians. On the negative side, true libertarians have lost their ancient luxury of being able to avoid any responsibility for the gaffes and errors of political leaders.

Libertarianism rests on two bedrock beliefs: human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up. The first belief is based more on faith than empirical result; the second derives from millennia of human experience. The increased appeal of libertarianism today reflects a nonpartisan view that the public sector has been deeply problematic under either party. It is a backlash against President Bush as well as President Obama. (Ron Paul was, after all, the only Republican to vote against the 2002 Iraq war resolution). Libertarians tend to think that the Bush years taught that all governments were flawed, not that everything would be better with a new leader who would expand the public sector.

Showing a remarkable sense of timing, my colleague Jeffrey Miron has just published an excellent primer on libertarian thought: “Libertarianism, From A-Z,” an engaging arrangement of brief essays illustrating one libertarian’s view on everything from abortion to zoos. Professor Miron’s libertarian mix of love of liberty and skepticism toward the state leads to his view that “radical reductions in government make sense for any plausible assessment of the effect of most policies.”...

I always find it refreshing to take a quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of libertarian thought...

The problem with dogmatic thinking, of course, is that it always falls victim to teleology; when you decide your conclusions first and then go looking for evidence in support of them, you'll see what you want to see. Thus, Glaeser looks at the Bush administration and sees proof not that good government is necessary and important, but that government itself is inherently inefficient. As Mark Thoma notes, this is more than a bit ridiculous:

Bush made his ideological belief about government self-fulfilling -- he stacked the deck in their favor (e.g. hiring incompetent people to head agencies like FEMA, filling regulatory agencies with people opposed to regulation, etc., etc.). Drawing general conclusions from an outcome that was forced by design, as libertarians have apparently done with Bush, does confirm preexisting biases, but it doesn't tell you much beyond that.

The lesson of the Bush administration is not that "all governments were flawed." We learned about an extreme, i.e. how bad things can be when a president sabotages government agencies by appointing cronies -- people who provided important political support -- to head important agencies rather than qualified, competent administrators...

The Bush administration was deeply flawed, no doubt about that, and it was partly (though not entirely) by design. But there is no general lesson here about all governments, only the particulars of an administration that did it's very best to validate libertarian beliefs about government.

In a word, yes.

More generally, though, Glaeser seems to be straining at the intellectual confines of his chosen dogma. He points out the problem posed to libertarianism by events like the BP oil spill. He proposes using the court system - one of the few government institutions that libertarians generally accept - to put things right, but is dissatisfied with this solution.

But he does not yet see the rot at the heart of libertarianism. Its two bedrock beliefs - that "human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up" - are deeply flawed. The moral belief is ill-defined and the empirical belief is factually false.

"Human freedom is a great good." Sounds good to me! But which human freedom? The freedom to murder? The freedom to dump pollution on your neighbor's land? The freedom to scream profanity in public? The fact is, different freedoms tend to be mutually exclusive; what we end up doing is choosing those freedoms we think lead to a better society - free speech, freedom from violence - and exalting those above the others, so that those "freedoms" become "good" by definition, while the opposing freedoms - the freedom not to hear ideas you disagree with, the freedom to punch annoying people in the head - get ignored and swept under the rug. Libertarians, sadly, rarely if ever acknowledge this. They merely pretend that all the murky, confusing cases - for example, smoking bans, or pollution regulations - don't exist, or else they go with their gut and pretend they're following a high moral principle.

As for the idea that "the public sector tends to screw things up," it's just not right. There is strong evidence that the public sector has done a GREAT job with roads, research, national defense, clean air regulations, and other public goods. And there is the nagging fact that every single rich country on the planet spends over a third of its GDP through the government. Libertarians, following the teleological imperative of their assumed conclusions, simply pick the examples of government failure - the Soviet Union's ham-handed economic planning, or the dysfunctionality of European labor markets - and claim that these constitute all the available evidence.

So both pillars of libertarian thought are made of Jell-O. But this does not stop libertarians from believing in them, and only gives pause to the very smartest among them (like Glaeser). Ideologies are attractive because they are "quick," "clean," "cold," and "pure." But those are just synonyms for "easy," "comforting," "rigid," and "simplistic."

John Galt is secretly on the dole

One of the enduring fantasies of the "libertarian" ideology is that there is a bright line between private-sector economic activity and the government - that "private" businesspeople work, produce, create stuff for their daily bread, while government workers get theirs by looting it from the private sector. This idea was on display when Rand Paul called Obama's criticism of BP "un-American".

There's just one small problem with this idea: it's utter bullshit. There is almost no company in our economy that succeeds without some sort of government assistance, and very rarely is that assistance limited to the kind of stuff that "libertarians" tolerate (protection of property rights). The government auctions off land to oil companies and mining companies. It auctions off electromagnetic frequencies to broadcasters. It dishes out massive R&D subsidies to tech firms, hires construction firms for infrastructure projects, supports U.S. manufacturing through defense contracts, boosts land prices through zoning laws, protects finance companies with favorable regulation and implicit guarantees of support, protects uncounted businesses from competition via licensing, and gives local monopolies to power companies. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Take the case of BP. Ryan Avent:

[I]f there is a greater potential risk at out-of-the-way fields, with greater potential social costs, then [the economically efficient policy is that] that cost should be reflected in the price of oil, ideally by a consumption tax, the proceeds of which could be used in part to finance a clean-up fund.

But the interesting point there is that such a tax would change the economics of drilling risky fields. Say ultra-deepwater wells become profitable with oil at $70 per barrel. An appropriate tax on environmental risk, however, might increase the sale price of the oil to the equivalent of $90 per barrel. But that price increase would reduce the amount of oil demanded, and that reduction in demand would mean that some subset of risky wells would become uneconomical. What we're seeing, in other words, is that some current drilling is only profitable because of the implicit subsidy to industry associated with the fact that oil companies don't have to face the full social, environmental, and economic costs of their accidents.

The fact is, the brilliant gung-ho individualist entrepreneurs that are the hero of Ayn Rand novels are, in practice, critically dependent on that looting, mooching government for their daily bread*. This does not mean that they are not brilliant, gung-ho, or individualist, or that there is nothing about them to admire. But it does mean that the government is an important stakeholder in those "private" businesses. When private businesses accept government largess and then turn around and do things that hurt the people to whom the government itself is beholden - the voters - then it is perfectly just, and even efficient, for the government to punish those private businesses.

This is something that smart libertarians have yet to admit, and Republican voters in general have yet to comprehend.

Libertarianism - just another bankrupt utopian 20th-century ideology

Rand Paul on Obama's criticism of BP:

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business," he said. "I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it's part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen."

This quote illustrates the fundamental um...for lack of a better word, dumbness...of the libertarian ideology for which Rand Paul is an unthinking foot soldier. Think about his statement for a minute. How did BP get access to the particular piece of the ocean floor that it was drilling when the spill happened? Answer: the government sold it the rights to use that land. Of course, BP bid for the rights to the land. But its bid was not just money; implicit in its bid was that it would work to minimize accidents that would hurt the citizens who elect and employ the government that sold it the land. And yet BP reportedly did just the opposite, using its political clout to minimize safety regulations. If the government had known the true probability of a spill, it very well might not have sold BP the land; thus, BP fleeced the government. And now the government has every right to criticize the company that fleeced it.

But libertarianism does not admit the possibility that natural resources are different from other types of property. The libertarian ideology holds that profit is earned by the effort and the inventiveness of the person who earns it, and therefore deserves to remain in the hands of the earner. But land is not created by the sweat of a man's brow or the ingeniousness of his ideas; it is pre-existent in the world, and its allocation comes about not as a result of efficiency but as a result of power. The land goes not to Jon Galt, but to the guy with the most guns.

Now, in order to make the most efficient use of land, we try to use market mechanisms to sell it to the highest bidder. But due to information asymmetries - like the fact that BP engaged in skullduggery to minimize safety regulations after it had already won the land rights - the market mechanism doesn't always work.

Libertarians crafted their ideology to be simple and internally self-consistent. But in philosophy, consistency always comes at the price of realism. In order to preserve the beautiful simplicity of their worldview, libertarians are forced to deny the existence of persistent information asymmetries, public goods, incomplete markets, and externalities - things that most obviously exist in the real world, and whose existence shows that libertarianism cannot be a blanket answer to the questions of economics. But libertarians are so eager to cry "This is it, boys! Man is saved!" that, like the communists before them, they have become devoted to squelching every piece of scientific evidence that pokes holes in their beautiful facade.

In the 20th century, the United States managed to avoid falling into the ideological pits of communism, fascism, and theocracy - and thank God we did. But at the end of the century, we stumbled halfway into the pothole of libertarianism, an ideology perhaps slightly less pernicious but no less blinkered and ignorant than the others. As a result, we are sliding toward a collapse of the basic functions of government, a nightmare scenario that in other countries has been fertile ground for takeovers by even more baleful ideologies (visit a Tea Party website to see that this is already happening). Ayn Rand and her many fellow-travelers convinced us to close our eyes to inconvenient reality, and close our minds to doubt and questioning, and we (temporarily, at least) lost access to the only advantage Western civilization has ever really had: adaptability.

It is time for libertarianism to follow communism into the intellectual dustbin of history. It has become an empty exercise in self-deception.


Updates:

Blogger tristero agrees with me.

Salon writer Gabriel Winant agrees with me.