Comments on: Shmibertarianism

By: David T. Beito

David T. Beito — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:06:16 +0000

We must be listening to Boortz at different times. Every now and then he critizes Bush (somewhat weakly), but in my experience he spends about 90 percent of his time attack Kerry and the Democrats. It is interesting that he has endorsed Bush, rather than the Libetarians as he did last time, arguing that the war on terrorism trumps all other considerations.

By: David T. Beito

David T. Beito — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:06:16 +0000

By: David T. Beito

David T. Beito — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:05:14 +0000

By: Bill Woolsey

Bill Woolsey — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:23:30 +0000

I very rarely listen to Boortz. However, the few times I have listened to him in the last few years, he has been very critical of Bush’s domestic policies. He said something like many Libertarians critize his pro-war position while Republicans are upset with his harsh criticism of Bush’s domestic policies. Just now, I did a search on his website and found: http://boortz.com/nuze/200401/01302004.html To greatly summarize, the islamic terrorists are a greater threat than out of control government spending. At least that can be reversed in the future.

By: Bill Woolsey

Bill Woolsey — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:23:10 +0000

By: Bill Woolsey

Bill Woolsey — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 15:08:54 +0000

The usual view of libertarians regarding corporations is that their rights derive from the individuals who form them using their freedom of contract. Most libertarians believe that limited liability for third party torts, therefore, is illegitimate. On the other hand, limited liability regarding torts by those involved by contract—employees, customers, suppliers, creditors, are justified. Given this situation, the usual reform proposal is to end limited liability for third party torts. By the way, libertarians generally oppose separate taxation of corporations (calling it double taxation, looking past the corporate veil to the owners.) The minority position among libertarians is a rhetorical attack on corporations in general and a “reform” positions of abolishing all of them. Presumably, limited liability partnerships with tradable shares of ownership would need to be started anew, without any of this business about legal persons, state charters, and the like.

By: Decnavda

Decnavda — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 01:42:35 +0000

1) States are fundamental rights-bearers who cannot be aggressed against — which is a really weird thing for libertarians to think. Isn’t also a really weird thing for libertarians to think that corporations are fundamental rights-bearers who cannot be aggressed against?

By: Gus diZerega

Gus diZerega — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 15:57:32 +0000

I am jumping in to this without reading every previous comment – there are a lot. So I apologize if I cover old ground. But two issues I brought up in a debate with a libertarian hawk on the Liberty and Power blog seem very relevant. I send these points sequentially. First, in many ways the strongest case for markets and classical liberal values comes from the Austrian School of economics, such as the work of F. A. Hayek. Mises and Hayek emphasized that economic and social planning was impossible to do well because of the enormous complexity of economies and societies. The effort to recreate Iraqi society by force is as Stalinist in its thinking as anything the Soviets attempted. Consider Rumsfeld’s observation that we can just keep killing them till they give up. We will plan your future and kill you if you resist. THIS is libertarianism? THIS is classical liberalism? THIS is what the Declaration of Independence said? I think not. The US has done it before. In the Philippines US troops killed about 100,000 people in our attempt to force our vision of society on them. Today the Philippines is a democracy or close to it – but they did it their own way, many decades after we gave them independence. When we left they got strongmen and dictators. We have frequently occupied and intervened in Haitian politics, playing favorites and making them the raw material of the plans of ambitious social planners. I see no democracy there now. Those libertarian hawks who compare Iraq with Japan and Germany after WWII demonstrate their utter incomprehension of how societies work. Iraq is tribal, its borders drawn by arbitrary lines made without concern for the wishes of the people on the ground (hence the Kurdish problem), and its wealth comes almost solely from resource extraction. Japan and Germany were very cohesive societies, and no longer tribal. They had, and would again, been prosperous not because they had lots of oil but because they had the economic, social, and technical skills and capital to create prosperity even in the absence of many natural resources. Of course the Iraqis CAN do this – but they need to get there largely on their own. Halliburton is not helping.

By: Gus diZerega

Gus diZerega — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 15:46:43 +0000

I am jumping in to this without reading every previous comment – of which there are a lot. So I apologize if I cover old ground. But two issues I brought up in a debate with a libertarian hawk on the Liberty and Power blog seem very relevant. First, in many ways the strongest case for markets and classical liberal values comes from the Austrian School of economics, such as the work of F. A. Hayek. Mises and Hayek emphasized that economic and social planning was impossible to do well because of the enormous complexity of economies and societies. The effort to recreate Iraqi society by force is as Stalinist in its thinking as anything the Soviets attempted. Consider Rumsfeld’s observation that we can just keep killing them till they give up. We will plan your future and kill you if you resist. THIS is libertarianism? THIS is classical liberalism? THIS is what the Declaration of Independence said? I think not. The US has done it before. In the Philippines US troops killed about 100,000 people in our attampt to force our vision of society on them. Today the Philippines is a democracy or close to it – but they did it their own way, many decades after we gave them independence. When we left they got strongmen and dictators. We have frequently occupied and intervened in Haitian politics, playing favorites and making them the raw material of the plans of ambitious social planners. I see no democracy there now. Those libertarian hawks who compare Iraq with Japan and Germany after WWII demonstrate their utter incomprehension of how societies work. Iraq is tribal, its borders drawn by arbitrary lines made without concern for the wishes of the people on the ground (hence the Kurdish problem), and its wealth comes almost solely from resource extraction. Japan and Germany were very cohesive societies, and no longer tribal. They had, and would again, been prosperous not because they had lots of oil but because they had the economic, social, and technical skills and capital to create prosperity even in the absence of many natural resources. Of course the Iraqis CAN do this – but they need to get there largely on their own. Halliburton is not helping. My second major point is that none of these ‘libertarian’ hawks have apparently thought very deeply about what war does to the society initiating it. First, our own government grows enormously. Second, civil liberties are weakened. Third, the principle of respect for different views is undermined – consider what our government did to Japanese Americans during WWII and that now Michelle Malkin is making historically inaccurate arguments leading to a similar approach towards American Muslims. Malkin’s ravings would never have been printed by a major publisher in the absence of war. Zell Miller tells us at the Republican Convention that running against a wartime president is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. (I thought it was called democracy.) Cheney suggests voting for Kerry is voting for terror. Levels of political depravity not seen here for a very long time are raising their ugly heads – and mostly by the allies of the ‘libertarian’ right. By forsaking their responsibility as advocates of classical liberal values of criticizing aggressive war, hawkish libertarians helped justify the climate leading to the unleashing and legitimation of these people. They came from an intellectual tradition with a deep awareness of the destruction war and imperial dreams wreck on the societies captivated by them as well as their victims. These ‘libertarian’ hawks rejected this tradition but continued to claim to support it. I do not write these words as a pacifist. I supported taking out the Taliban because they were directly implicated in 9-11. In my view that was legitimate self-defense. I supported intervening in the Balkans long before we ultimately did for two reasons. First, I believed it would be a very good thing to have Muslim democracies as examples to the Islamic world. Secondly, I believe that sovereignty is not sacrosanct when a government begins murdering its own people on an enormous scale it is legitimate to intervene. I would also support intervention to halt genocide in Africa. The troops involved could be volunteers. (Interestingly, most but happily not all libertarian hawks and their right wing Republican allies opposed intervention in the Balkans – so much for their present squeakings about democracy and free societies.) There is another very worrying dimension to my second point. Ideologies change during the stress of war, and the changes are long term. Libertarians of the right, with few and honorable exceptions, have tended to support the Bush administration despite its being less sympathetic to classical liberal positions than moderate Democrats. Bill Clinton was more supportive of classical liberal policies than George W. Bush. Libertarian think tanks, with the exception of a small number such as the Independent Institute, have been remarkably quiet about issues of liberty that run at cross purposes to Republican radical right agendas. (War on drugs, anyone?) Libertarians of the right have too often sold out their ideology in order to pursue the fantasy that because right wing Republicans wear Adam Smith ties, they are sympathetic to what Smith wrote. Because they praise Hayek they supposedly agree with what he said. Besides, the well funded events sponsored by the Republicans’ corporate allies to which they are invited allow them to talk and drink cheek to cheek with the current political elite. In the absence of a direct need for self-defense or of ongoing genocide, the arguments in favor of war from a libertarian or classical liberal standpoint pretty much evidence the advocate’s incapacity to understand the ideology he or she claims to take seriously. It marks a move from equating libertarian views with a profound awareness of and respect for the complexity of societies, the desirability of leaving people alone except on mutually agreeable terms, and the need for people to deveop their own societies and their own lives by their own light. It is replaced, increasingly, by acquiescence to the immoral ravings of a Piekoff (referred to by an earlier poster – I assume the reference was accurate because Ayn Rand said much the same) that we ‘civilized’ people can act like Huns when encountering those weaker than ourselves.

By: roger

roger — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:14:07 +0000

Sorry about “There can’t, on this reading, be any force that represents the universal — onvr one concedes that there can be, it the structure of liberalism collapses.” Obviously, the last phrase should be “if one concedes there can be, the structure of liberalism collapses” You know, posting comments on Crooked Timber is sort of a crap shoot—sometimes it posts your corrected posts, sometimes it says it couldn’t connect to post your post and you end up posting twice, and sometimes it just refuses to post your post at all. I think it is some kind of experiment CT is running

By: Bruce Baugh

Bruce Baugh — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:09:04 +0000

David Beito: I think your “Perhaps a better explanation is that the pro-war libertarians have moved in a more statist direction on domestic policy as well as foreign policy.” is right on. I know that something of the sort has happened to me in the context of being increasingly anti-Bush’s particular kind of corporate statism. Sorting through my priorities led me to look at things with more of an emphasis on relatively honest and accountable proceedings as a priority, which made me more sympathetic to a bunch of proposed Democratic policy – I’d like a small state, but I want the state at any size to be no more ridiculously fraudulent than any large enterprise will be, so an honest big-government advocate is much preferable to a dishonest and/or incompetent one. It’s also led me to rethink a bunch of my expectations about what’s feasible under various conditions; there’s nothing like the really naked display of corporate privilege to make one freshly appreciate a state with some significant opposition built in. Anyway, yeah, I do think that drift on one issue leads to drift on others. Perhaps especially so when one will not admit (perhaps not even to oneself) that drift is going on, since uncontrolled, unacknowledged changes are likely to go wonkier than ones you take note of and respond to.

By: roger

roger — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:07:26 +0000

Russell, I’d agree that one can draw a lot of lines to a lot of different positions from the seminal liberal thinkers. Mill, who is the most philosophically complex of the classic liberals (Kant, I must say, I group with Enlightenment thinkers in another paradigm), had the genius not to be constrained by the bugbear of consistency. And he comes closest to providing a justification for imposing a system of governance from the top, while at the same time recognizing the seriousness of the Burkean objection to the overthrow of a traditional order. However, from classical liberal principles, it does seem odd to talk, on the one hand, of universality, and on the other hand, of imposing that universality by way of military rule from an outside force—given that it is one of the axioms of liberalism that every force represents some form of self interest. There can’t, on this reading, be any force that represents the universal—onvr one concedes that there can be, it the structure of liberalism collapses. This is just the thing that Cobden, Gladstone, and Benjamin Constant—to go to a liberal outside the Anglosphere—emphasized. In fact, Constant produced the classical liberal statement about the topic in the pamphlet he wrote against Napoleon (who foreshadowed Bush in the way he legitimated his wars as ways of spreading the universal principles of the French Revolution across Europe): The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation.

By: David T. Beito

David T. Beito — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 02:54:46 +0000

Mq: Your argument fails in one respect. The militarist libertarians rarely display their “anti state” swagger anymore when it comes to opposing to Dubya’s pro-welfare state policies. In my experience, they were remarkably complacent when Dubya signed the greatest expansion in socialized medicine since the introduction of Medicare. If they were truly across the board in their swaggering, as you imply, they would be criticizing Dubya’s massive expansion of the welfare/regulatory/education state. But they are not. A good example is Neal Boortz, a self described libertarian, who loves to swagger but hardly ever criticizes Dubya’s domestic policies. Perhaps a better explanation is that the pro-war libertarians have moved in a more statist direction on domestic policy as well as foreign policy.

By: MQ

MQ — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 00:39:29 +0000

great post by pjs above. I agree that it’s macho swagger that holds the whole set of pro-militarist, anti-state-redistribution beliefs together; emotional consistency is more important than intellectual. Someone else wrote: “For social libertarians, it is entirely possible to argue that the quantum of freedom is enhanced by welfare benefits, for instance. While those benefits might slightly restrict the freedom of the wealthy to act as they wish, they greatly increase the freedom of the poor.” I don’t think that libertarianism is compatible with this kind of consequentialist thinking about freedom maximization…true libertarians are believers in property rights as rights, not as vehicles to maximize something else (like freedom). In that sense, libertarianism is not really about “liberty” at all, it’s about property.

By: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 22:49:35 +0000

As far as Peikoff being the prototypical liberterian, I don’t think so. In deciding whether or not a view counts as liberterian, my question is usually whether or not it’s consistent with Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. Should I be checking whether or not it’s consistent with Atlas Shrugged instead?