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What It’s Like To Be a Libertarian
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009A bit self-pitying for my taste, but the gist is spot-on.
49 Responses to “What It’s Like To Be a Libertarian”
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It’s more like being a doctor sent back 400 years and having to put up with cooky cures (leeches, bleeding, universal health care).
Like my daddy told me last night concerning the health care crisis, “If doctors were still getting paid with a dozen eggs and a couple of pounds of flour we wouldn’t have this shit!”
But I just don’t see that happening again.
Seems to me that prediciting an economic collapse is like predicting the sun is going to rise in the east. I have lived through half a dozen economic collapses in my life so far and fully expect to see a few more.
While I do agree with him about the frustration part, I think he should’ve used stronger arguments than “people don’t take our warnings seriously until it’s too late.” I observed that thing myself – as a contrarian, I automatically expect a change to better (or worse) when we are getting worse (or better). Over the long run, I tend to be correct (as my stock portfolio proves). However, out of my predictions, maybe ten percent actually turn out right in the short run. Same here: if someone predicts a market crash ten times, people will stop taking him seriously, but once he’ll be correct.
Waaaaaaaa!!!!!
I’m the smartest kid in the room!!!!!!!!
Waaaaaaaaa!!!
Why don’t you all see that??!!!
Waaaaaa!!!
Ayn Rand was right!!!!!
Waaaaaaa!!!
You’ll be sorry!!!
Good Grief, who knew that libertarians were now represented by emo kids sitting in the corner, wailing about the unfairness of it all?
People tend to catergorize Libertarians as being either anti-government anarchists or goofball pot-heads. I have been accused of both on many occasions when trying to discuss politics and policies. The US population seems to need to either fit into catergory A or B, to have a sound winner or loser, to have right or wrong, and to have left or right. There are no gray answers and there are no other options or alternatives. The nation likes the true-false questions; it loathes multiple choice and absolutely forbids essay questions…
What, a libertarian with a 1st-person paranoid-delusional persecution complex?
Now I’ve heard EVERYTHING.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/245063794_5ab866053b.jpg
(this doesn’t support image tags)
Wow, just wow. So may I conclude, based on the article and your link to it, that libertarians are a bunch of bubble-(white,upper-middle-class)boys completely lacking self-awareness, who consider only confirming evidence, and where events (let’s say, a MASSIVE failure of credit markets) are to be judged as insufficient adherence to orthodoxy? Government doesn’t work because it can’t possibly work and therefore any problem MUST be government produced, any success MUST be due to markets / who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes, etc.
So glad I ended my subscription to Reason – when are you all going to get so fed up that you Go Galt? The sooner the better.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/28/liberals-libertarian-economics-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html
[...] What It’s Like To Be a Libertarian. [...]
#9 — Not sure where you see all of that in the essay. Libertarians don’t say a libertarian society would be utopic. There would still be hardship. Failure is a part of capitalism. The difference is that when companies fail, they die. Or they take a hit, and the failed ideas die. Government failures get more funding, and increased responsibility. And government owns a monopoly over the services it provides, so there’s little incentive to do things better. On the contrary, the government agency that solves the problem it was created to solve puts its workers in the unemployment line. The incentive is actually toward prolonging the problem. Or exaggerating it.
Not going to get into an argument over the collapse of the credit markets. My take is that it was a market failure that was exacerbated by government policy. And that thanks to the bailouts softening the punishment for bad decision making, it’ll be a hell of a lot worse the next time around.
Again, the argument isn’t that markets never fail. It’s that failure makes markets stronger. And government intervention rarely accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish, and usually makes things worse.
I’ve been reading John Hasnas for years and recommending his work to readers here for at least a couple.
No one writes better than he does.
I didn’t find it as whiny as the rest of the board implied.
One must admit that it is rather frustrating to be vindicated by reality but ignored by everyone because of it (or in spite of it – I don’t know which).
And so we take our lumps.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/24/report-south-carolina-governor-traveled-argentina-appalachian-trail/
Not that it should be newsworthy when someone has an affair, but I find it more ironic that the new head of the Republican Governor Association is Haley Barbour. Radley, you had a link a few days ago about Mr. Barbour and the R half of the one-party system staying in obscurity if he became more prominent (or something to that effect). How prescient of you!
I don’t find it whiny. Perhaps somewhat self-pitying, but not whiny.
The frustration (for me, anyways) comes not from the grand failures (such as the great depression) which one could accurately write books on the causes of, but from the simple, painfully obvious ones, which anybody ought to be able to see & understand, but for some reason, hardly anybody wants to.
Stuff like… Rent control obviously makes it harder & more expensive to rent if you’re not one of the lucky ones to get into a rent-controlled apartment (I understand in some cities you have to pay for the privilege of getting a rent-controlled apartment, and not a trivial sum). Attacking suppliers (of say, water) during a shortage for raising the price obviously ensures that they’ll run out, and temporary suppliers (using more costly temporary methods) won’t come to fill the demand. Failing to meaningfully punish police officers obviously makes them more likely to commit wrongs.
“Again, the argument isn’t that markets never fail. It’s that failure makes markets stronger. And government intervention rarely accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish, and usually makes things worse.”
If everyone was a libertarian, maybe that answer would be okay. Most people aren’t. When things go wrong, a great many of the people affected want government action. The action may be good, it may be bad (almost always bad according to libertarians), but if those politicians everyone loves to hate don’t do anything, and the problems are seen as bad enough, they are either out of a job, or there is going to be a revolution. And while revolution is a poplar meme among many here it’s good to keep in mind that not every revolution brings more freedom and liberty in its wake. (Iran, Russia, China, etc).
That’s what gets me about the philosophy. It just seems like it assumes people are (or should be) rational actors, when the evidence is often to the contrary.
I attended an IHS seminar in 2006 where John Hasnas spoke at, and he definitely does come off as whiny or self-pitying. This particular article requires the insertion of emotion, because the title is “What it feels like to be a Libertarian”.
His lectures fundamentally changed the way that I think about the nature of government, and how to reform it. He has several other excellent articles up on his website. For anyone interested, I recommend, “The myth of the rule of law”.
I may be a bubble boy (not really, but WTF, it fits with Steve C’s little nerd-rage), but the logic here is sloppy at best.
We have the claim:
Gov’t tends to fail
To go from this to:
Therefore all problems must be the result of gov’t.
Is a classic example of a non sequitor. It is the same thing as the following scenario:
1. I have a royal flush, thus I have a winning hand.
2. I have a winning hand, therefore I have a royal flush.
We can see that the first is true, but the first one being true does not make the second true, and we know that the second is not ture.
Further, I don’t think any serious libertarian believes the implicit claim in #9 that the market does not fail. On the contrary they can fail. However, that is not a necessary condition for government action, at the very least. Sometimes private individuals can come up with solutions to such failures.
Yep, people want to be provided for like pets and operated like puppets. Freedom can be scary, because along with choice comes the possibility of making the wrong choice and in a “libertarian society” you have to live with that choice and deal with it, not push it off on othes.
And while it sounds nice to push it off on others it comes with problems like creating perverse incentives. If we spread the downside risk around amongst a large number of people, and only I get to keep the upside risk…well you can figure out I’m going to engage in riskier behavior. Kind of like a tragedy of the commons.
What has caused the current crisis? Lots of things, bad incentives for upper management at financial firms for one thing. But at the same time bailing those firms out basically sends a signal, its okay to loot a company, the government will step in and make things okay. And those kinds of bailouts have happend long before the current crisis. The concept of “too big to fail” has been around for awhile. Look at where many top level DC bureaucrats come from? How many Secretaries of Treasury have come from Goldman Sach’s? There is an incestuous relationship between DC and Wall Street. To say the current situation is a failure of the market is to stick one’s head up one’s ass. Our government was very much involved in the whole mess from the get go.
“When things go wrong, a great many of the people affected want government action.”
A perfect summation of the status quo: superstition rules the day.
#9 reminds me that there will always be people who refuse to accept evidence no matter how strong it is. Some people still refuse to think that evolution ever happened, that the Earth seems to be getting hotter, and some assholes think that ‘thetans’ are responsible for depression.
Government and religion are really the same thing. They are power hungry organizations that push morals and values on people whether they like it or not. They both cause a lot more problems than they cause. And those people dependent on their government or religion will defend it with every bullshit reason they can think of and discredit their critics with nonsense and straw men whenever possible.
Invoking the CRA and fannie and freddie to explain the housing market collapse, let alone the credit crunch, is simply incompetent. CRA accounted for an inconsequential number of bad mortgages and fannie and freddie didn’t change the securities market, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Phil Graham, Paulsen and a bunch of greedy short-sighted douches on both sides of the aisle did.
The problem is not that Hasnas is emoting, but that he has no idea what he is talking about.
Guns, gold and weed. Always popular
We need what the plants can teach us, what Philip K. Dick called “disinhibiting instructions” that allow us to access a vast store of innate, intuitive knowing. Cannabis, opium and mushrooms certainly are our birthright and help deprogram us form the false viral religions of the holy land.
You want to wake up and free yourself of the image of Europa, but it is not possible.
la Rana, what’s it like to be a total hypocrite and not even realize it?
#9 | Steve C
Bruce Bartlett wrote the dumbest synopsis of libertarianism I’ve read in a while. If you found wisdom in that AND canceled your subscription to Reason, your logic will never add up.
“Government and religion are really the same thing.”
I vote an amen for those words.
#18 uses the term nerd-rage and then immediately spends several paragraphs lecturing on non sequitur and royal flushes and such, apparently unironically.
When was the last time a libertarian said “You know what? We were wrong about markets in this case. There are important flaws that, even if the government option is a blunt tool and less optimal than some model we can entertain in conversation, those are models and this is the real world. So let’s accept reality, and some inefficiency, and do what works – what we see works now, that some states/countries like ours are doing.”. I’m pretty sure you can’t be a libertarian and have this kind of practical mentality at the same time.
After an FDR-led debacle, and a war (or two) to stimulate the economy, etc., etc., came a period of unprecedented growth…partly because it comes down to what most people inherently know and act upon: sh*t happens. Learn from it, move on, don’t repeat the failure, and keep your regulatory hands off me. Sh*t will still happen weather it’s government-run or not; one of the differences may be that, as a market-driven participant (for lack of a better word) I get to choose how I respond to the “failure,” and my response (to choose what I learn and how to apply it) is my own, thus perpetuating further mistakes (or errors, if you will) and growth.
hypocrisy? everything i wrote is true. look it up. disapproving of my comment is like disapproving of reality. though i suppose if you feeeeel like related government bureacracy caused the problem instead of government and wall street working together to generate wealth from thin air….
“government and wall street working together to generate wealth from thin air…”
Um…that’s kind of what Hasnas said. What Fannie and Freddie did was absorb half of the mortgages out there and pretend they were all sound and good dispite knowing that the lending regulations were so lax that all the new borrowers would never be able to pay back the loan. When other lenders said the standards were too low, the CRA and ACORN called them all a bunch of racists and threatened to sue them. As you said, the government worked with quasi-corporations to make money with MBS’s.
I don’t see where he made any arguement that bureacratic process was to blame. But then again, what do I know. I apparently read the article to cause me to ‘feeeel’ the way I do as opposed to just making shit up about a guy’s article.
Out of curiosity, is there anything at all that troubles you guys about capitalism? Is there any aspect of it that concerns you, or is it as perfect to you as Heaven is to the Christian? One of the reasons that some people – not you guys – have a problem with libertarianism in general is its adherents refusal to acknowledge that capitalism, as with all other ideas, isn’t perfect. That might be the reason that Hasnas is having a hard time. He lacks the ability, apparently, to criticize anything other than everybody else.
Also, by all means, commence dinging my post for not walking in lockstep.
Mattocracy, If that’s your complaint, I’m not sure you know what “hypocrisy” means. The upside is that i can’t really complain about being offended.
Yeah, “kind of” what hasnas said. Except not at all. Except his and your vague assertions about government entities and programs implicated in the housing bubble are impotent to explain either the housing bubble or the credit crunch. I mean, good lord man. Educate yourself. There is an explanation. Yours is both incorrect, and nonsensical. Its essentially “fannie and freddie did what everyone else did, and they are preosterous government entitities, and babble = explanation.” Volleying cliches gleaned from reactionary morons doesn’t help anybody. ACORN? seriously? Ya get that juicy nugget from Rush, or you make it up on your own?
Steve C:
Perhaps I am a blind ideologue, but I have a hard time looking at the problems in the mortgage and banking industry and then ignoring the fact that government policies were designed to encourage lending to people with insufficient ability to repay the loans. Whether or not CRA and similar policies were ever a large fraction of mortgages, they contributed to housing inflation and, in turn, fueled speculative practices such as interest-only loans and the widespread perception that there was no way to lose in the housing market.
I guess it’s tough for me to see that the two biggest players in that market were government-sponsored enterprises and ignore the instability brought to the market by the implicit (then, now explicit) understanding that following their lead was okay because the government would back whatever they did.
It’s hard for me to ignore that cheap money policies at the Fed contributed to the bubble and it’s equally hard for me to look at the deliberate pumping of more money into that market and not see it as an attempt to keep that bubble inflated. I guess my notion of the government (and, yeah, that includes the Fed) “doing what works” differs from others’. I will admit to laughing hysterically at the non-ironic use of “bubble boys” to describe those not in favor of bubble-producing and bubble-sustaining government policies.
It’s hard for me to look at the government regulations imposed to prevent any further meltdowns (imposed when the meltdown was at the top of the news and during the heat of a presidential election) and not put them in the context of all the regulations that came before – also nominally intending to prevent such meltdowns – and not shake my head. My ability to “accept” the utterly unproven “reality” of “what works” is insufficient to the task.
Further, it’s hard for me to look at a the impact of regulations intended to inspire “confidence” in the market by getting people to believe that the government is monitoring it and making it safe and not worry that, by decreasing people’s sense of caution, the government isn’t encouraging more risky behavior. For instance, it’s hard for me to not to wonder if those buying securitized instruments wouldn’t have pushed for more transparency about the value of insured assets (and the liquidity of the insurers) if there weren’t an underlying assumption that the government was somehow taking care of it all and there was no need for better independent analysis.
Even if I were glib enough to blame the whole problem on “corporate greed” and ignore the incentives put in place by government interference in the market to achieve political goals and contribute to false confidence, I would have a hard time thinking, “Well, at least now government has stepped in and eliminated corporate greed.” It would be hard for me to understand how the biggest players with the most to directly gain or lose by government regulations won’t have the most influence on determining regulations and won’t use that influence for rent-seeking and fiat advantage over less influential competition. I guess I don’t have that kind of “practical mentality”.
Even if I were naive enough to believe that well-meaning bureaucrats were smart enough to understand the market’s complexities and would guide it with their benevolent wisdom if they were uninfluenced by political pressures, it would be hard not to look at how quickly political populism imposed itself onto that scene (scandals over CEO bonuses, corporate jets, etc.) and pretend to believe that political pressure won’t determine regulations.
In short, what is difficult to do is to be a libertarian and at the same time look at a disaster in one of the most regulated businesses around and conclude, “Too little government.”
It’s not about capitalism. It’s about free markets.
It’s not about regulation. It’s about who is doing the regulating and how it is done.
To force or not to force, that is the question.
Sam:
Out of curiosity, where in Hasnas’ piece or in this thread do you find hear anyone claiming that capitalism is perfect? “Capitalism is perfect” is not the libertarian position. The libertarian position is not that the free market is without flaws, it’s that government almost always does a poor job of fixing them, often making things worse overall.
This “you guys religiously believe that capitalism is perfect” meme of statists is such an obviously glib strawman that I wonder how it persists. I can only think that it is yet another example of the bipolar fallacy that opinions only exist at the extremes and being against one view means that one must hold to the extreme opposite view. Since libertarians favor free markets over government intervention, the bipolar fallacy insists not just that libertarians think free markets are superior to the state intervention (which is basically the thinking), but that libertarians somehow think the free market is actually totally without problems (which is not at all the thinking). Total nonsense.
Freedomfan,
Where in Hasnas’s writing do you see any indication of doubt? He writes that he is always correct, and that everybody else is always wrong, and he whines about how difficult it is to live in that world. He makes no indication that his political/economic opinions have ever been wrong, and he makes it quite clear that he believes his ideological opponents to have always been wrong. So you’ll excuse me if I won’t personally accept the charge that I’m introducing polarity into this conversation. And of course, you’re the one who introduces the term “statists” which, I’m going to guess, is your term for anybody who supports any kind of government model.
We can argue within polarized confines (statistics versus anarchists) although that’s a conversation that’s going nowhere, a position that I think we both agree on.
““Capitalism is perfect” is not the libertarian position. The libertarian position is not that the free market is without flaws, it’s that government almost always does a poor job of fixing them, often making things worse overall.”
I fail to see how this is anything but “capitalism is perfect”, in effect. When something needs to be done – especially in situations that require coordinated action – there is either the tax-funded coercive entity or the profit-driven entity. Or charity, I guess. Or sitting around.
To add to freedomfan in #34 and to restate Cynical in #33: regardless of the fact that capitalism isn’t perfect, government action in the market is fundamentally immoral on top of being generally futile or even harmful.
Markets would still collapse, but — as it has been stated here or on Radleys post at Reason — businesses will have to get better or die. Does this mean everybody survives or thrives? Sadly, no. But it is necessary in order to force people to be innovative. The universal need for shelter and food on the table is quite a motivator.
Call us heartless if you want, but incentive is the name of the game. Without it, we will snuff ourselves out.
Danny,
If our government action is so fundamentally immoral, why are you still living here? Aren’t you, as an individual, capable of innovating a solution to your problem? Surely there are other nations with other governments (or non-governments) that are more appealing.
Sam, I’ll admit that “statist” is a loose term, but I tend to use it to characterize the view that (particularly the federal) government is a good general tool to solve social / financial / whatever problems. As a pejorative term, statism describes a tendency to rely too much on the state. BTW, in my last post, I wasn’t saying that you were a statist, just bemoaning the use of a statist strawman that holding that free markets are better than government intervention is the same as holding that free markets are flawless. However, I never said that you were “introducing polarity into this conversation”. I just offered the (informal term) bipolar fallacy as an explanation for a concept that you brought up here, though the bipolar fallacy is a common enough thing.
Meanwhile, we are right back at the point: Whether you agree with him or not, Hasnas thinking that his libertarian views are consistently right and his opponents are consistently wrong is simply not the same as his thinking that the libertarian approach leads to a world without flaws. I assume that Hasnas subscribes to the view that a perfect world (without inequity or suffering or fraud or whatever else) isn’t an option and that libertarian political philosophy doesn’t offer an exception to that reality.
…
Steve C:
(As an aside, that is a bit circular. If one starts out accepting the premise that “coordinated action” is “required”, then that directly implies coercion, unless everyone is voluntarily marching in lockstep.)
Anyway, the libertarian position that non-coerced approaches are superior is still not equivalent to “capitalism is perfect” because there simply is no libertarian presumption that the superior solution will satisfy everyone (or be “perfect” however one chooses to define it).
I’m not sure why this is so hard to get across. Look at it this way, if I were to say that all of the pro-regulation people think that a government-regulated market is perfect / without flaws / heaven on Earth, then you could rightly say that I was wrong because the pro-regulation crowd must (presumably) understand that there will still be some problems with whatever regulatory scheme is imposed. Even if they think it is better than a free market approach, I doubt they would say it was flawless. So, someone arguing “you statists think that government is perfect” would be fronting a strawman.
Stating that libertarians think the free market is flawless a strawman of the same sort.
Sam,
Please name a place where the government is substantially less coercive. And, that’s not to be snotty; I’d be happy to find out that there was a place with a government whose footprint didn’t extend beyond dealing with individuals doing direct, nonconsensual harm to someone else’s person or property (or posing clear and immediate threat of same). I haven’t heard of one.
I’m not an anarchist (though I don’t confuse lack of government with lack of order), but I would also be curious if there were a habitable area with no government. I haven’t heard of that, either.
If such a place doesn’t exist (I was going to propose Somalia as the perfect place for people who hate government, but you carefully worded your response in such a way as to exclude it), then what do you propose? You describe a government that still has the ability to interfere in the actions of individuals but you don’t describe how that government would do that without simultaneously being immoral.
Somalia has a government, it’s just junk and the provisional national government is weak compared to the local/tribal authorities. There are paid officials, it can collect taxes, etc. Ineffective government isn’t the same as no government.
BTW, let me reiterate, I am not an anarchist. I don’t hold that any government is immoral, just that proper government is an exercise in minimalism – the least government possible to defend individuals’ from nonconsensual direct harm to their persons and property. If I were arguing for no government, then I wouldn’t be arguing that it is obligated to do anything.
How does your system escape the immorality problem?
I agree with #21, CRA was insignificant in the housing bubble, while crazy CDS/CDO activity played a huge role.
Richard Posner has a new book on the subject, called _A Failure of Capitalism_.
Wow, freedomfan had the argument almost wrapped up, but Sam delivers a knockout punch — advocating even minimal government contradicts the nominal libertarian belief that one should not use force against someone if they are not infringing on someone’s person or property, because the government must still threaten and confiscate to maintain its existence. While that doesn’t prove anarchism is better, it has to be taken into account. And as a reader of this blog, it’s just hard for me to conclude that, whereas socialism in general is awful, socialized law enforcement is a pretty darned good idea.
“government action in the market is fundamentally immoral on top of being generally futile or even harmful”
I love how coercion to coordinate and solve collective action problems becomes “immoral” to libertarians – that’s the icing on the cake, the full-monty demonization. Not only is it inefficient, but it wants to eat your children! While the actual bad outcomes (I mean fraud and manipulation and death) produced by capitalism are just the cost of doing business. Gotta break some eggs and all that, right?
Modern liberal democratic police forces, healthcare systems, armies, judicial systems, etc to be some of the most positive moral institutions ever invented by man. They make taxation at gunpoint (to put it in libertarian terms) one of the best ideas anyone ever thought of. Those institutions that run on profit run the gamut from immoral to praiseworthy but they do not deserve any more respect than a tool that works well under certain circumstances (same goes for government or nonprofit or community organization or whatever).
“Stating that libertarians think the free market is flawless a strawman of the same sort.”
It would be, except that the actual arguments made by libertarians contain virtually no pro-government arguments. I suppose you think you’re the lone voices in a world gone mad with pro-government euphoria, but that you basically never offer any frank assessments of where markets get it wrong and collective action is required. You expect everyone else to respect the no-doubt moderate position you hold in your head, but seriously, why aren’t you *in actuality* exactly like the strawman you put forward? What is it that the educated layman (policy maker, academic, voter) is actually hearing from libertarians?
Where is this libertarian commentary that makes corrective assessments of actual capitalist outcomes – rather than apology after apology, “oh it just wasn’t done right” kind of crap. The defensive assessments of the capital market meltdowns remind me of communists “50 years of Mao and Stalin just wasn’t a fair test”.
Could it be that the external effects capital markets made them weird and special like insurance? No no it’s because deregulation wasn’t quite right and Fannie Mae getting black people in houses and blah blah blah.
Modern liberal democratic police forces, healthcare systems, armies, judicial systems, etc to be some of the most positive moral institutions ever invented by man.
You’re kidding, right? Armies? Taking money from citizens at gunpoint to pay men to kill other men is one of the “most positive moral institutions ever invented by man”?
You could make an argument that they’re necessary. But hardly moral. And if you read this site regularly, police forces and judicial systems aren’t doing so well either. Again, perhaps necessary. But not moral. And certainly not among the “most positive moral institutions ever invented by man.”
Private institutions, on the other hand, are voluntary. You don’t have to associate with them if you don’t want to (with the exception of some public goods issues, such as the environment — but then, government is a far bigger polluter than private industry). You don’t have that option with state agencies. Yes, some private companies have done some terrible things over the years. But they only have coercive power if it’s given to them by a government.
Yes, given the world we actually live in and have actually lived in, Roman Legions and US Aircraft Carriers are some of the best money ever spent by anybody, exactly like my local police force. At this point I guess we’re at odds on what ought to be labeled as moral.
Let’s put it this way: if a world dictator imposed a system like today’s Somalia or Thirty-Years-War Europe on us, where the other option was US military dominance, that would be an immoral act.
If Mayor Balko decided to reduce taxes to fund the city police force to zero and rely on community action or voluntary blah blah, the resulting anarchy and violence would be both criminal and immoral.
It’s an immoral act to allow a society to predictably descend into violence. Extracting taxes from people to fund militaries and police forces qualifies (in the grand scheme of things) as a moral act, and I would guess that only a very small sliver of educated people over age 25 – including certain libertarians and militia types – disagrees.