Libertarians Are Not Our Friends

This is by way of follow-up to yesterday’s post (Reasons For Long Term Pessimism), but it can’t be repeated too often: Libertarians are no friends to conservative and normal people.

While there is no question but that Classical Liberalism did have an influence on the American Founding, that influence was not embodied in our Constitution. There is, likewise, no doubt that a sort of mushy libertarian attitude—not a well thought out position, per se—has become the default American mentality to a great extent, informing both liberal as well as much “conservative” thinking. At least to the point that this seeming default mentality, which takes the place of principled thinking, tends to paralyze Americans in the face of policies that they know at a gut level or degrading and harmful.

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch provides a list of reasons why Libertarians are no friends to normal people who desire to live in some semblance of a normal society. Malloch is writing with explicity reference to Friedrich Hayek’s famous Libertarian manifesto—Why I Am Not A Conservative. Malloch’s indictment of Hayek is short and to the point:

[Hayek] loudly denounced the argument for tradition and custom by calling for a form of anything goes liberalism and atheism.

That would contrast with Chesterton’s dictum is that conservatism is the truest form of democracy because it gives a vote to the dead. Anyway …

Libertarians Are Not Our Friends

All thinking persons know, and evidence abounds, that libertarians with anti-statist mentalities are dangerous, ideological, illusory, and impractical.

I will grant that some allowance may need to be made for Hayek’s European perspective, but Malloch’s list is useful:

Let me state the argument against libertarianism, as clearly as possible. There are seven points that need to be made, pondered, and then remade. 

• Individualism, an ism, is a harsh and insane ideology and not the same thing as viewing individuals as human persons, created by God and made in His image. In truth there is much more to reality—which is multidimensional, variegated, and complex. Families, marriages, communities, schools, churches, and civil associations are, in fact, the bulwark of life—not isolated, atomistic individuals untethered to anything.

• The market works and also at times, fails. We are citizens in nation states, not global individuals adrift and rootless. We are certainly more than contracting consumers.

• Opposed to Natural Law as upheld and described in our Declaration of Independence, libertarians deny there are any self-evident truths, a Creator, or even inalienable rights.

• The “harm principle” of John Stuart Mill upon which libertarianism rests, is a moral claim that demands a moral basis both for human flourishing and ethics, neither of which libertarianism provides.

• “Conscription is slavery and taxation robbery,” according to Murray Rothbard, the ultimate and exemplar libertarian. Is that extreme? No Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard? We would be, for all practical purposes, defenseless. And a principle of no taxes is not the same as limited government.

• For a libertarian, virtue does not exist and cannot be coerced. Freedom does work, as Hayek thought, but surely [freedom] cannot be evaluated apart from the ends that it serves.

• Facilitating the debauchery of society by eliminating any sense or definition of good character is, by definition, debased, and results in a form of narcissistic nihilism. There is nothing above the self. Think of Burning Man writ large and you can picture the result of libertarian rule or lack thereof. Would you want that?

A few points of my own.

Many libertarian leaning conservatives like to appeal to what they think is Occam’s Razor as an indubitable principle. It’s not. In fact, as Malloch states in his first point, reality is complex and multidimensional. The reductionist libertarian idea that society is a voluntary association of atomized and autonomous individuals actually leads to the societal breakdown that facilitates authoritarianism, whether of the right or of the left. That may seem paradoxical to those who accept the libertarian premise, but it’s not for those who recognize the reasonable limits for human reordering of society and uphold the organic nature of free human institutions. Which is to say, the complexity and multi dimensionality of all reality and especially of human nature, as opposed to the leveling oversimplifications of libertarians.

Malloch’s argument regarding John Stuart Mill—a sort of patron saint for many libertarians—is also well taken. Libertarian’s typically present their goofball arguments with a moral fervor. And yet libertarianism itself offers no basis at all for such moralism.

On the other hand, I would want to be rather more cautious than Malloch is with regard to conscription and taxation. America has, in general, had a bias against conscription, using it for the most part for true national emergencies. An exception to that led to the current volunteer force. Likewise, the income tax—as opposed to other taxes—came somewhat late to America. I think there’s a strong argument that the income tax has contributed mightily to the virtually metastatic degree of corruption in our federal government, by enabling a narrative of a bottomless pit of revenue.

Finally, I very much like Malloch’s argument that freedom must be understood as having a purpose—the good of human nature—rather than being an end in itself. Freedom that is not informed by understanding is no freedom at all.