www.amconmag.com/2005_03_14/article1.html
March 14, 2005 Issue Copyright 2005 The American Conservative Marxism of the Right by Robert Locke Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccent rics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, th e idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and gov ernment. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do th ings society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, o r take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigoro us framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seduct ive mistake. There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertariani sm (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varietie s avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them, and some of the more successful varietiesI recently heard a r espected pundit insist that classical liberalism is libertarianismenter a gray area where it is not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cock tail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commo nplace street libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the soph istical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged ph ilosophically. This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Ri ght. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altru ism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion t hat one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in f act requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and a ltruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political g ood without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspi res, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like M arxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its follower s feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society. The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, bu t one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in tha t it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoons wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfact ions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without ch oice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk aw ay from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are i n fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issu es that concern governments. Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only goo d thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose t o partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embr aces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that any thing is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishi ng foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. T aken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but tha t a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as wor thy a life as a Washington or a Churchill. Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inef ficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue? Libertarians rightly concede that ones freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another persons, but they radically und erestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of an it harm none, do as thou wilt, is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesnt like it, he can choose no t to view it. But what he cant do is choose not to live in a culture th at has been vulgarized by it. Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficul t portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental fail ing of libertarianisms believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doc trine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens fr om unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to bec ome sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed t o deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialist ic wealth redistribution? In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated soc ial capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertari anism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the liber tarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question. Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limi ting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the rig ht amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But i f limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism th at reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright l ibertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is Americas traditio nal liberties. Libertarianisms abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to se ll oneself into it. Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, wo uld not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused troubl e would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if cu rrent laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished . They claim a natural order of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society c ontinues to protect people from the consequences of their actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific freedoms is illegitimate. And si nce society does so protect people, libertarianism is an illegitimate mo ral position until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred. And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative conseq uences of some of their free choices? While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, ...
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