Contra Libertarianism

In this the day of creeping (perhaps galloping) statism it has become fashionable to rediscover the Randian canon; indeed the belle of the objectivist ball is selling books at a torrid pace. Populist tea parties mix conservative and libertarian shibboleths. I resist the temptation, however, for reasons I will now outline.

Libertarianism is the flirtation of almost every collegiate conservative. It is undoubtedly appealing; like other utopian schemes it has a plug and play answer for virtually every policy question of consequence. It allows one to remain "progressive" or at least neutral on most social issues, which tend to inflame and ostracize to a greater extent than, say, fiscal policy.

And yet in many manifestations it is fundamentally incompatible with conservatism. For the same reason Whittaker Chambers wrote Ayn Rand out of conservatism, some British conservatives balked at Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. Conservatism is, among other things, the predisposition toward the settled, the anti-ism. In the language of Jonah Goldberg it is "but a partial worldview." Conservatives have a tactical alliance with libertarian economic policy, but it is ephemeral and when free market fundamentalism runs afoul of efficacy and of social imperatives it must, for the conservatives, give way.

Without getting too technical (both for the sake of reader confusion and for the sake of my own) the proper role of government in the arena of corporate finance is to ensure fair dealing and transparency. To the extent that an unregulated market in various forms of complex debt instruments requires opacity to operate, the fortunes of a great many who did not know themselves at risk will be reliant on the skill and altruism of a tiny cabal treading in virtually uncharted territory. We cannot decline to act merely because the theoretical or quasi-quantitative precepts of a universalist ideology say otherwise.

The issue of gay marriage is not one that excites particularly strong feelings in me. Maybe I'm ambivalent, maybe I have a subconscious fear of being on the wrong side of history. But witness the libertarian programme (of course this varies by exponent), which in many instances calls for the state to absent itself from the business of marriage entirely, presumably by dismantling the set of protections and incentives it offers to married couples. The predisposition toward the settled that I referenced earlier presupposes that this edifice exists for reasons; whether we once took pains to enumerate them and have simply forgotten or whether they were simply so intuitive we deemed explication unnecessary is immaterial. Now this is not to say that the reasons a given policy is deemed "settled" are everywhere and always valid ones; they can be overtaken by changing mores, by technology or by events. It is to say, however, that in addressing an institution as old as civil marriage we can fairly be said to owe it to ourselves to attempt to discern them before we adopt such fundamental legal changes.

Let's look at some more plug and play. Some libertarians advance the belief that road construction and maintenance could be privatized. To a degree, sure. Toll roads in a number of locales offer low-volume alternatives to busier free roads, and so consumers can pay for the luxury. To attempt to privatize every road, or even every main road, would be to create huge transaction costs, both in the cost of collection and in the lost time of the consumers. Yes, the technology exists to collect tolls automatically, but this offends that second of libertarian bogeymen, privacy. And local roads provide still greater problems. The simpler solution is to add this to police and defense as legitimate government functions. Even for small-government conservatives, it's the appropriate one.

This is not to say that libertarianism doesn't advance important ideas. One does not have to embrace the "legalize it all" solution to recognize that contemporary drug policy is problematic. Likewise the demolition of various sacred cows underpinning the welfare state, such as the monetarist attack on the prevailing interpretation of the Great Depression, laid the foundation for the so-called Reagan Revolution. Milton Friedman was integral in the transition to a volunteer armed forces, and the contemporary educational imperatives of limiting or ending affirmative action and advancing vouchers and school choice are ideas that owe much to libertarianism. But the gap between libertarian-as-skeptic and libertarian-as-utopian, hats that can occasionally be worn by the same people, seems too great to bridge.

For more emphasis on the libertarianism-as-utopianism phenomenon, read Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism. He discusses the cult of Ayn Rand and denunciations of this or that libertarian thinker as "socialist" by his peers for heretical opinions, occasionally expressed before the party line has been set down. Such denunciations mimic the old Marxist obsession with decrying this or that heretic as a "petty bourgeois" thinker.

So yes, consult Brink Lindsey on trade, read Friedman and Hayek on the superiority of free markets and free societies, and listen to libertarian ideas. But view them through a conservative prism, and when you can't reconcile the two tendencies remember that one is at heart a partial, pragmatic programme and the other a universalist, utopian one.  ¶ The Anonymous Conservative 12:03 PM