A Week With The Libertarians
Posted: June 13th, 2007 | Author: Sam | Filed under: Blog Posts, Libertarians, Politics, Sleep |
I have just returned from a week spent at an Institute for Humane Studies Summer Seminar. The seminar itself was an amazing experience. The people I met, particularly the people pictured above, are amongst the most impressive intellects I have ever met. These were people so far out of my league that I cannot for the life of me imagine why I was allowed to into the photograph. Being bigger than all of them and tattooed probably helped my cause.
The essence of the seminar was a very in-depth exploration of the free-market position (also known as the Classical Liberal or libertarian position), which meant lectures on economics, history, economics, economics, philosophy, economics, and economics. There was also frequent discussion amongst the gathered students - again, these people were unbelievably smart. We had small discussion groups and larger discussions groups. The ideas put forward were incredibly interesting.
For the record, I am not now, nor do I plan to be anytime soon, a dogmatic Classical Liberal. A week spent amongst them was enough for me to realize that I lack the faith necessary in the free market to ever fully endorse their positions. In fact, spending time with people of this particular ideological bent helped me to fully understand my three objections to their position. (For the record, I only have one objection each to Democrats and Republicans: they’re douchebags.)
Objections to To What I Learned
1. Libertarians replace faith in God with faith in the marketplace.
For the record, there were some unbelievably religious folks at this conference, people who believed that dinosaurs were hunted to extinction my man. I long ago abandoned arguing such things with people - nobody wins and everybody ends up angrier as a result.
But the majority of the people I met looked at the marketplace in exactly the same sort of way that people look at God: perfection. Simply put, through market processes, everything that we now know and understand will be improved. The chance that things won’t be improved doesn’t exist for one very simple reason: time. Open market advocates give the market infinite time to prove its effectiveness. In other words, all objections to potential problems are written off with the following defense, “Sure, there might be short term problems, but over time the market will fix any problems.”
Of the most convincing arguments made by free-marketeers is that planned economies - the sorts of which were seen in the Soviet Union, amongst other Communist countries - fail because it is impossible for governments to know exactly what the market needs. The enforced pricing is almost always wrong because it almost always can’t be right; how can a government know what individuals are willing to pay for? I’m completely willing to accept that. But you can’t ask me in the next breath to believe that you know how the market will be functioning next year, much less five, ten, or thirty years from now. It is fine to say, “Oh, the market will fix itself,” but that is an act of faith, not evidence. And the price for being wrong seems like it might be absolutely enormous.
2. Support systems for the poor are based entirely upon charity.
To listen to extremist free-marketeers tell their story, any and all taxation you pay (voluntary or otherwise, a somewhat unanswered question) is akin to slavery. Whether or not you believe this, and I remain confident that a black man in South Carolina in 1825 would take our current tax structure 100 times out of 100, the argument is that government offered welfare systems involve the repression of tax-paying individuals. Because the money is coming from taxation, any and all forms of government welfare are abhorrent and should be immediately abolished.
Fair enough, but what about those Americans who rely on welfare to make it from day to day. We might not like them very much, but there certainly are plenty of people with children to feed and no job. The Libertarian response seems to be, “Screw ‘em. If the market is interested in caring for the poor, it will. If not…well. What can we do?” If you accept the argument that taxation is akin to slavery, and then assume that we ought to immediately end slavery, then I can see the poor being the collateral damage of that freedom. Maybe.
But ending some forms of government welfare punishes individuals in conditions that they cannot possibly change. Children, for example, are poor because of their parents. They should go without health care, without clothing, without food if the market doesn’t feel like helping them out? That seems a cruel thing to say. One of our lecturers remarked that children complicate all political arguments, and he was absolutely right.
If you have enough faith to believe that the market will fix all problems, good on you, although the infinite time objection again comes into play. Sure, over the course of 50 years, the market might find a way to make sure all children, regardless of wealth, have food, clothing, shelter and healthcare (although this is again a huge leap of faith), but what about those 50 years? We should damn 50 years worth of poor children on the off chance that things will eventually work themselves out? I don’t see that as being reasonable, but then, I don’t see paying taxes as akin to slavery.
3. Libertarians believe deeply in the free and open market of goods and services, but also in a very regulated market of political ideas.
This probably applies even moreso to the anarcho-capitalists that I came into contact with, but because any political idea that involves the notion of coercion is an immediate no-go, we’re only allowed to consider the ideas that don’t involve government. Once that has occurred, we’re only allowed to consider their ideas. That hardly seems fair.
One of the most impressive things advocated by lecturers at this week-long seminar was the idea of tolerance, the idea that for this proposed society to properly function, tolerance is a key part. It seems to me that if that we’re supposed to extend such tolerance into the marketplace of goods and services, we owe people with differing political ideas the same sort of respect.
Which leads me to this. Bryan Caplan was one of the lecturers at the seminar, and he was unbelievable. But what on Earth is convincing about maintaining that all of your ideological opponents aren’t rational, going so far as to apparently believe that they’re sheep? If anybody thinks that this sort of approach is ever going to work, they’re sadly mistaken. Convincing people to change their political positions is an absurdly difficult task - why start out with insults?
One of the problems with the seminar was the insistence of others not to tolerate ideas they didn’t personally agree with. Nothing grinds a discussion to a halt faster than accusations of fascism or slavery or sheep or whatever else. Implicit in the cover of Caplan’s book is the notion that rationality stems from agreeing with him; if that isn’t dogmatism, what is? And oddly enough, despite the lack of religious views maintained by a majority of the conference’s attendees, these are precisely the same sorts of tactics used by the super-religious. “You don’t believe in the existence of God? You must be the Devil!” Where can a conversation go after that?
If libertarians and their more extremist brothers believe so deeply in the ability of the market to properly decide what works and what doesn’t, then it seems as though they have a responsibility to participate in the the market of political ideas. Currently, they don’t seem to be offering a very convincing product - our government keeps getting bigger and more bloated. But it seems to me that it is their responsibility to change our minds, and not the other way around. That means marketing things very, very differently than they have been thus far.
Conclusions
All of that said, attending this conference was one of the great experiences of my life. And although I agree with Libertarians less now than before I attended, I wouldn’t trade that knowledge for anything. And as forthe the people I met, I can’t gush enough about how intelligent and impressive they were. Again, these were people shockingly out of my league. I’d be lucky to know half of what they know. And so, I am lucky to have met the people in the above photograph, and more who snuck out of it. To be around such intelligent people was an opportunity I cannot appreciate enough.
You need to read Caplan’s book before writing it off like that. That’s not what he was arguing, at least according to the reviews I read. He is saying people don’t know what they’re voting for, so they make irrational (in an economic sense) decisions — meaning they often vote against their material well-being, or they vote for candidates who knowingly advocate disastrous policies. Think of George Bush’s election in 2004 - that wasn’t an economically rational decision, nor was it necessarily an ideologically rational decision; for the most part, it was fear.
I’m moving in muddy waters myself, as I haven’t read Caplan’s book, but he is not setting out to insult people. He is setting out to explode a commonly-held assumption in the field of political economy.
Whatever Caplan’s arguing is outweighed by the message he seems to be conveying. I have no idea if he’s correct or not, although I’m not sure where I read that rationality stemmed only from economic triggers. The point is that he’s undercutting his own message by suggesting (or seeming to suggest) that anybody diverging from his own political opinions are “sheep.” That’s a convenient worldview.
Loved having you there, to keep us all honest. I’m adding you to my feed, so keep writing. I like the photos, too.
[...] One of the stranger things that I learned during my week with the Libertarians is that it isn’t a tremendously diverse group. Out of a group of forty, I’m 99 percent certain that there were no gays, although one of the men there remains up in the air. That’s his business of course, but if any political ideology could understand the plights of a socially marginalized group of people, it is a group of politically marginalized Libertarians. You’d think. [...]
[...] A few days ago, I noticed a compatriot of mine on Facebook was attending some sort of function that advertised itself by trying to attract people who like to “think rationally.” The group - a free-market student magazine out of Arizona State University - is one of many such organizations under the absurd delusion that to think rationally means to agree with them. This is a problem that I’ve run into before with folks of this political persuasion. It is one of the reasons that they’ll never get themselves fully off the ground. [...]
It’s not just libertarians who define themselves as rational thinkers - it’s atheists, and often, religious conservatives.
What they are really doing is railing against the forces of irrationality that they often rightly perceive out there - but usually, they throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Atheists see religious dogma as unthinking and irrational, even anti-rational. And in abusive cases where people have abandoned reason rather than making a useful marriage of Faith and Reason, of course they are being irrational. Atheists and secular materialists respond by despising, discarding, disregarding, or marginalizing faith rather then seeing how dogma (in tradition, human wisdom, and dare I say revealed faiths) can balance our tainted reason.
Conservatives see emotional fanaticism as unthinking and irrational. And when environmentalists, for example, would rather allow thousands to die of malaria than to moderate how we use DDT, conservatives are right to scream “we need scientific environmentalism, not emotional panic reasoning.”
In fact, not only have anti-global warming panic conservatives thrown out the environment with the panic mongers, some environmentalists are realizing this error, but instead of rejecting environmentalism as some have, they have written a book charting a smarter strategy - see Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.
All I am saying is that this type of “we are the rational ones” is a reaction to those who fail to balance reason with faith and emotion. We should, however, look for the balance rather than the “reason only” solution.
Regarding your objections to libertarianism, I remark:
1. On the divinity of the market
I agree with you that structured growth is necessary for markets to succeed. But the reason that structure and some governmental limitations are needed is not just that we need to leverage wisdom and reason in building something.
The more salient reason is that man is not entirely virtuous - the founding fathers of the US understood that we must appeal to the “better nature” of man, but also be aware of the fatal moral flaw that all men have - hence the problem of ultimate power and corruption. This, btw, is the biblical perspective, as you know I have oft repeated in such essays as Is Man Basically Good or Evil?
2. Charity and the poor.
Again, I think the error here is assuming that mankind is by nature virtuous enough to take sufficient care of the poor without incentives or disincentives. It assumes that man is basically good, which is a half truth.
The balanced (biblical) perspective is, imo,
a. Charity can be forced by legislation, but that is neither optimal nor does it address the real problem - our lack of concern.
What is optimal? That men give willingly from their hearts, with compassion as their motive. So the real quesion is, how to we create such compassion?
Through legislation? Through redistribution schemes like communism that have the downside of eliminating reward for hard work?
As with all solutions to the ills of man, I think that we need to address the whole man, spirit and soul and body.
We should FIRST address his spirit by preaching the Divine commands to repent of our selfishness and be restored to God (I know you don’t believe that stuff). Once we are regenerated, we can begin to do good as God changes us, and out of thankfulness and growing emotional and spiritual health, not out of compulsion.
Second, we need to address the soul of man by educating him on the rewards of such virtues, which include personal satisfaction, contribution to something larger than himself and to investment in something that will live on (a legacy).
We can also educate by modeling the change we want to say (as per Ghandi).
LASTLY, we can actually physically demand some level of generosity through legislation. But this approach by itself is a poor substitute for the harder task of inspiring generosity. And at best, you can perhaps get some baseline services in place.
But as Jesus said, “the poor you will have with you always.” That is, this problem, though we can and should address it (there are many biblical commands to do so), will never be totally solved in this era, this kingdom. That’s one reason why Jesus promised a coming kingdom with no tears, no sorrow, and no war. The one with HIM as the supreme ruler, not fallen mankind.
3. Regulating political ideas
I totally agree that we should have a free market for ideas, rather than some libertarian’s minimalist ideas based on the flawed assumption of man’s innate goodnes.
But in the marketplace of ideas, we need to understand that not all ideas are of equal value - some ideas have been proven by history and reason to be failures (like anti-religious atheist states), nor laissez faire governments that tolerate everything from infanticide to free drug use (even Denmark is now having a backlash against the chaos created by prostitution and laxity towards drugs).
While we should remain civil and appeal to common ethic and reason, in the marketplace of ideas, we must do ideological battle for the ideas that we think have merit, and not think that every idea is worthy.