By Ilya Somin
Monday, September 23, 2024
In a recent essay, Georgetown
Law professor and libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett offered a provocative
indictment of American libertarianism. The movement needs several updates, he
argued, most notably regarding what he considers to be abuses of private power.
Instead of evolving, libertarianism according to Barnett has been “frozen in
amber since the 1970s.”
The state of libertarian thought may seem of little
importance to anyone but committed libertarians (some of whom disagreed
thoughtfully with Barnett’s piece). After all, libertarians are far from
being a dominant force in either major political party. The Trump-era GOP has
repudiated libertarian ideas it previously had some affinity for, such as
promoting free trade and cutting entitlement spending. Democrats are far from
libertarian as well. The idea—propounded by some conspiratorially minded people
on both left
and right—that
libertarians secretly dominate American public policy is patently false.
Though I don’t agree with most of Barnett’s assessment, I
do think he’s right that libertarianism still needs some updates—just
not the ones he proposes. Its traditional core remains valid, even more so than
ever in some ways. Nevertheless, libertarianism needs a better theory of the
tradeoffs between natural rights and utility; it needs better strategies to
address large-scale public goods problems; and it needs to recognize that
nationalism is the greatest threat to liberty in most parts of the world today.
Libertarianism’s recent policy contributions.
Depending on how the question is asked, public
opinion surveys suggest that 7 percent to 22 percent of the population
leans libertarian (though the lower figures are probably more accurate).
Nonetheless, libertarians often have influence beyond those numbers. Ideas
initially developed by libertarian academics or policy analysts—from the abolition
of the draft and school choice, to drug legalization and YIMBY
housing deregulation—periodically go mainstream. Libertarians, in other
words, can often punch above their weight.
The basic ideas of libertarianism need little updating.
Government power should be tightly limited across the board, in both
economic and social realms. Recent history reinforces that conclusion. The War
on Drugs, for example, caused the growth of the fentanyl
crisis. Government-imposed exclusionary zoning is at
the heart of the housing crisis besetting many parts of the country.
Out-of-control entitlement spending is the biggest cause of the federal
government’s looming
fiscal crisis. The list could go on.
Moreover, libertarian and libertarian-leaning thinkers
have recently developed many important new policy ideas. Scholars such as Bryan
Caplan and Jason
Brennan have made major contributions to the study of political ignorance,
showing that the vast majority of voters are both ignorant of basic facts about
government and thereby strengthening the case against allowing it to control
vast swathes of our lives. Elinor
Ostrom and others have demonstrated how the private sector—utilizing social
norms and institutions such as private
planned communities—can address many collective action problems and other
issues most previously believed only the government could handle. Bernard
Siegan and Edward Glaeser have
shown that abolishing all or most exclusionary zoning would enhance economic
growth and help the poor and disadvantaged the most. Economists and political
philosophers like Brennan,
Michael Huemer, and Michael Clemens
have made a strong case for at least greatly reducing immigration restrictions.
These are just a few of the relatively recent major
libertarian contributions to public policy debates, but they illustrate the
basic point: Libertarian ideas have not been “frozen in amber since the 1970s.”
That’s not to say, however, that they can’t be improved.
Principles and public goods.
In particular, libertarians have long argued about
whether natural rights, utilitarian consequentialism, or some combination of
the two is the basis of our ideology. But the issue still requires more
consideration.
Pure natural rights theories and pure utilitarianism both
have serious flaws. If you’re a believer in absolute natural rights then you
must, as David Friedman—the famous libertarian economist and son of Milton
Friedman—pointed
out, refuse to violate them even to a small degree, even if it’s the only
way to save thousands or millions of lives. Pure utilitarianism has similar
awful implications. If a large enough number of people get a large enough
amount of pleasure from watching a TV show where children are forced to fight
to the death, as in the Hunger Games series, the viewers’ gain in
utility outweighs the children’s loss for the pure utilitarian. This issue
isn’t just theoretical, as real-world tradeoffs like this periodically arise.
Consider vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a genuine but
small sacrifice of liberty could potentially save many lives.
The tension between natural rights and utilitarianism
isn’t unique to libertarianism, but it’s especially important for us because
the rights we advocate are so wide-ranging. The way out of this dilemma is to
concede that both liberty and utility matter, and that we can justifiably
sacrifice small amounts of liberty when it is the only way to achieve large
increases in utility, and vice versa (i.e. when sacrificing small amounts of
utility is the only way to get large increases in liberty). But that principle
needs far better elaboration, especially regarding relatively close
cases.
A second major issue libertarians need to address better
is the problem of dealing with large-scale public goods.
In economics, the term refers to “nonexcludable” and “nonrivalrous” goods and
services. Once the public good is produced, people who didn’t help produce it
or pay for it cannot be excluded from the benefits (making it nonexcludable),
and their enjoyment of it doesn’t inhibit similar enjoyment by others (which
makes it nonrivalrous). As a result, markets tend to underproduce public goods,
because would-be consumers have incentives to “free ride” on production, making
it difficult for producers to get compensated for their services. Conventional
wisdom holds that only government can produce public goods effectively.
But over the last several decades, libertarian-leaning
scholars have shown that many local and regional public goods can be produced
by the private sector. For example, Robert
Nelson and Fred
Foldvary’s work shows many public goods traditionally produced by local
governments can be better provided by private planned communities. Private
planned communities can, for example, provide security, trash removal,
environmental amenities, and more.
Libertarians have not done as well when it comes to
national and global-level public goods, such as dealing with pandemics and
global warming. These types of issues should concern libertarians (and others)
for two reasons. First, they can cause enormous harm. Millions of people died
in the recent pandemic, and global warming could cause great harm as well.
Second, if pro-free market ideologies don’t offer plausible solutions for these
issues, more statist ones are likely to step into the breach. Think of the
lockdowns and migration restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic, or of
“Green New Deal” plans for a government takeover of much of the economy to
address global warming.
Libertarian scholars have done some valuable work on
these issues. For example, Alex Tabarrok
has argued for increasing investment in vaccines to ensure they can be quickly
deployed in the event of future pandemics—a relatively cheap way to curb the
spread of disease with comparatively little infringement on liberty. Jonathan
Adler, Terry
Anderson, Donald Leal, and others have argued that climate change is best
addressed by targeted carbon taxes, which require less government regulation
and control than other approaches.
But much remains to be done on this extremely difficult
set of issues. Climate change is especially hard, given its global nature. Even
if a carbon tax is the best approach in principle, it’s not clear how
developing nations such as India, China, and Brazil could be incentivized to go
along. In some cases, it may turn out that a large-scale public good problem
cannot be solved at any acceptable cost. But, if so, libertarian experts need
to better explain the reasons why and outline ways that we can minimize the
cost of living with the problem.
Libertarianism’s emerging chief rival.
Libertarians also need to recognize how quickly
nationalism has emerged as the greatest threat to liberty in much of the world.
“Nationalism” is one of those terms that has many meanings. Here, I use it to
refer to the idea that government must promote the interests of a particular
ethnic, racial or cultural group, usually the majority group in a given nation.
Nationalists have come to dominate the political right in much of the Western
world, including in France and much of Germany. It has also risen in the United
States, where Donald Trump openly proclaims
himself to be one and where “national conservatives” are increasingly
influential on the right-wing intellectual scene.
The world’s leading authoritarian powers—China and
Russia—are also promoters of nationalism. This is obvious in the case of
Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its growing
alliance with Western right-wing nationalists. China remains ruled by the
theoretically Marxist Communist Party, but that government increasingly
promotes authoritarian nationalism, rather than Marxist socialism. Rarely, if
ever, does it still advocate class struggle, a transition to full communism, or
other traditional Marxist tropes.
Why should this worry libertarians? Because, as Alex
Nowrasteh and I describe in “The
Case Against Nationalism,” nationalists advocate a vast array of illiberal
statist policies, including pervasive
protectionism, severe immigration restrictions, government control of much
of the economy through “industrial policy,” repression of cultural trends they
dislike, and more. They also have a strong tendency toward strongman-worship
and rejecting the legitimacy of election results that go against them. Because
of its more sweeping agenda and much broader base of support, nationalism is a
much bigger menace than left-wing “wokeness,” even though the latter is
also a problem. And lest we forget, this nationalist agenda has much in common
with socialism—including a horrific history of repression and mass murder. In
our time, nationalists are far more politically powerful than socialists in
most of the world.
Nationalism is not a new adversary for libertarians. Our
late 19th-century European classical liberal predecessors opposed the
nationalists of that era. The great libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and
F.A. Hayek both fled fascist nationalism in Germany and Austria. In his 1960
essay “Why
I am Not a Conservative,” Hayek warned against conservatism’s “proneness to
a strident nationalism” and pointed out that “this nationalistic bias …
frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism.” That warning
seems prescient today.
Despite Hayek’s strictures, most libertarians today are
accustomed to a world where our main adversaries are on the political left.
Refocusing on the nationalist threat requires what for some will be a difficult
mental adjustment. But refocusing is necessary.
That is partly a matter of political strategy. Countering
nationalists will require a different set of political alliances than those of
the era of conservative-libertarian “fusionism.” We still have major
differences with left-liberals that cannot be ignored. But those differences
must, for a time, often be less salient than those with the nationalist right.
A reorientation is also intellectually necessary.
Libertarians have much to contribute to the analysis and critique of
nationalism, especially when it comes to its tendency toward dangerous
expansion and concentration of government power. But we can only do that if we
recognize the importance of the task.
***
So does libertarianism need updating? Certainly. It needs
to bolster its philosophical foundations and approach to public goods. It also
needs to recognize that nationalism has become the greatest threat to liberty
in most parts of the world.
But libertarians also should not undersell the movement’s
achievements. Libertarianism has a track record of impressive policy ideas, and
its traditional core remains as robust as ever. Still, the issues considered
here are particularly important at this point in history, and it is imperative
we address them better than we have so far. Libertarians should not shrink from
the challenge.
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