Libertarianism

David Boaz

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780684847689
• eBook ISBN: 9781439195154
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tens of millions of Americans, from Generation X-ers to baby boomers and beyond, are rediscovering libertarianism, a visionary alternative to the tired party orthodoxies of left and right. In 1995 a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans said "the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens." Later that year, The Wall Street Journal concurred, saying: "Because of their growing disdain for government, more and more Americans appear to be drifting—often unwittingly—toward a libertarian philosophy."
Libertarianism is hardly new, but its framework for liberty under law and economic progress makes it especially suited for the dynamic new era we are now entering. In the United States, the bureaucratic leviathan is newly threatened by a resurgence of the libertarian ideas upon which the country was founded. We are witnessing a breakdown of all the cherished beliefs of the welfare-warfare state. Americans have seen the failure of big government. Now, in the 1990s, we are ready to apply the lessons of this century to make the next one the century not of the state but of the free individual.
David Boaz presents the essential guidebook to the libertarian perspective, detailing its roots, central tenets, solutions to contemporary policy dilemmas, and future in American politics. He confronts head-on the tough questions frequently posed to libertarians: What about inequality? Who protects the environment? What ties people together if they are essentially self-interested? A concluding section, "Are You a Libertarian?" gives readers a chance to explore the substance of their own beliefs. Libertarianism is must reading for understanding one of the most exciting and hopeful movements of our time.

Chapter 1
THE COMING LIBERTARIAN AGE

In 1995 Gallup pollsters found that 39 percent of Americans said that “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” Pollsters couldn’t believe it, so they tried again, taking out the word “immediate.” This time 52 percent of Americans agreed.

Later that year USA Today reported in a front-page story on post-baby-boom Americans that “many of the 41 million members of Generation X… are turning to an old philosophy that suddenly seems new: libertarianism.” A front-page report in the Wall Street Journal agreed: “Much of the angry sentiment coursing through [voters’] veins today isn’t traditionally Republican or even conservative. It’s libertarian…. Because of their growing disdain for government, more and more Americans appear to be drifting—often unwittingly—toward a libertarian philosophy.”

Writing in 1995 about the large numbers of Americans who say they’d welcome a third party, David Broder of the Washington Post commented,

The distinguishing characteristic of these potential independent voters—aside from their disillusionment with Washington politicians of both parties—is their libertarian streak. They are skeptical of the Democrats because they identify them with big government. They are wary of the Republicans because of the growing influence within the GOP of the religious right.

Where did this sudden media interest in libertarianism come from? As USA Today noted, libertarianism challenges the conventional wisdom and rejects outmoded statist ideas, so it often has a strong appeal to young people. As for myself, when I first discovered libertarian ideas in my college days, it seemed obvious to me that most libertarians would be young (even though I was dimly aware that the libertarian books I was reading were written by older people). Who but a young person could believe in such a robust vision of individual freedom? When I went to my first libertarian event off-campus, I was mildly surprised that the first person I encountered was about forty, which seemed quite old to me at the time. Then another person arrived, more the sort of person I had expected to meet, a young woman in her late twenties. But her first question was, “Have you seen my parents?” I soon learned that her sixtyish parents were the leading libertarian activists in the state, and my mistaken impressions about what kind of people would become libertarians were gone forever. I discovered that the young woman’s parents, and the millions of Americans who today share libertarian beliefs, stand firmly in a long American tradition of individual liberty and opposition to coercive government.

Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. (Throughout this book I use the traditional “he” and “his” to refer to all individuals, male and female; unless the context indicates otherwise, “he” and “his” should be understood to refer to both men and women.) Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property—rights that people possess naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should be voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force—actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.

Most people habitually believe in and live by this code of ethics. Libertarians believe this code should be applied consistently—and specifically, that it should be applied to actions by governments as well as by individuals. Governments should exist to protect rights, to protect us from others who might use force against us. When governments use force against people who have not violated the rights of others, then governments themselves become rights violators. Thus libertarians condemn such government actions as censorship, the draft, price controls, confiscation of property, and regulation of our personal and economic lives.

Put so starkly, the libertarian vision may sound otherworldly, like a doctrine for a universe of angels that never was and never will be. Surely, in today’s messy and often unpleasant world, government must do a great deal? But here’s the surprise: The answer is no. In fact, the more messy and modern the world, the better libertarianism works compared—for instance—with monarchy, dictatorship, and even postwar American-style welfarism. The political awakening in America today is first and foremost the realization that libertarianism is not a relic of the past. It is a philosophy—more, a pragmatic plan—for the future. In American politics it is the leading edge—not a backlash, but a vanguard.

Libertarian thought is so widespread today, and the American government has become so bloated and ludicrous, that the two funniest writers in America are both libertarians. P. J. O’Rourke summed up his political philosophy this way: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” Dave Barry understands government about as clearly as Tom Paine did: “The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people.”

Libertarianism is an old philosophy, but its framework for liberty under law and economic progress makes it especially suited for the dynamic world—call it the Information Age, or the Third Wave, or the Third Industrial Revolution—we are now entering.

The Resurgence of Libertarianism

Some readers may well wonder why people in a generally free and prosperous country like the United States need to adopt a new philosophy of government. Aren’t we doing reasonably well with our current system? We do indeed have a society that has brought unprecedented prosperity to a larger number of people than ever before. But we face problems—from high taxes to poor schools to racial tensions to environmental destruction—that our current approach is not handling adequately. Libertarianism has solutions to those problems, as I’ll try to demonstrate. For now I’ll offer three reasons that libertarianism is the right approach for America on the eve of the new millennium.

First, we are not nearly as prosperous as we could be. If our economy were growing at the rate it grew from 1945 to 1973, our gross domestic product would be 40 percent larger than it is. But that comparison doesn’t give the true picture of the economic harm that excessive government is doing to us. In a world of global markets and accelerating technological change, we shouldn’t be growing at the same pace we did forty years ago—we should be growing faster. More reliance on markets and individual enterprise would mean more wealth for all of us, which is especially important for those who have the least today.

Second, our government has become far too powerful, and it increasingly threatens our freedom—as those 52 percent of Americans told the befuddled pollsters. Government taxes too much, regulates too much, interferes too much. Politicians from Jesse Helms to Jesse Jackson seek to impose their own moral agenda on 250 million Americans. Events like the assault on the Branch Davidians, the shootings of Vicki Weaver and Donald Scott, the beating of Rodney King, and the government’s increasing attempts to take private property without judicial process make us fear an out-of-control government and remind us of the need to reestablish strict limits on power.

Third, in a fast-changing world where every individual will have unprecedented access to information, centralized bureaucracies and coercive regulations just won’t be able to keep up with the real economy. The existence of global capital markets means that investors won’t be held hostage by national governments and their confiscatory tax systems. New opportunities for telecommuting will mean that more and more workers will also have the ability to flee high taxes and other intrusive government policies. Prosperous nations in the twenty-first century will be those that attract productive people. We need a limited government to usher in an unlimited future.

The twentieth century has been the century of state power, from Hitler and Stalin to the totalitarian states behind the Iron Curtain, from dictatorships across Africa to the bureaucratic welfare states of North America and Western Europe. Many people assume that as time goes on, and the world becomes more complex, governments naturally get bigger and more powerful. In fact, however, the twentieth century was in many ways a detour from the 2,500-year history of the Western world. From the time of the Greeks, the history of the West has largely been a story of increasing freedom, with a progressively limited role for coercive and arbitrary government.

Today, at the end of the twentieth century, there are signs that we may be returning to the path of limiting government and increasing liberty. With the collapse of communism, there is hardly any support left for central planning. Third World countries are privatizing state industries and freeing up markets. Practicing capitalism, the Pacific Rim countries have moved from poverty to world economic leadership in a generation.

In the United States, the bureaucratic leviathan is threatened by a resurgence of the libertarian ideas upon which the country was founded. We are witnessing a breakdown of all the cherished beliefs of the welfare-warfare state. Americans have seen the failure of big government. They learned in the 1960s that governments wage unwinnable wars, spy on their domestic opponents, and lie about it. They learned in the 1970s that government management of the economy leads to inflation, unemployment, and stagnation. They learned in the 1980s that government’s cost and intrusiveness grew even as a succession of presidents ran against Washington and promised to change it. Now in the 1990s they are ready to apply those lessons, to make the twenty-first century not the century of the state but the century of the free individual.

These changes have two principal roots. One is the growing recognition by people around the world of the tyranny and inefficiency inherent in state planning. The other is the growth of a political movement rooted in ideas, particularly the ideas of libertarianism. As E. J. Dionne, Jr., writes in Why Americans Hate Politics, “The resurgence of libertarianism was one of the less noted but most remarkable developments of recent years. During the 1970s and 1980s, antiwar, antiauthoritarian, antigovernment, and antitax feelings came together to revive a long-stagnant political tendency.”

Why is there a libertarian revival now? The main reason is that the alternatives to libertarianism—fascism, communism, socialism, the welfare state—have all been tried in the twentieth century and have all failed to produce peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Fascism, as exemplified in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, was the first to go. Its economic centralization and racial collectivism now seem repellent to every civilized person, so we may forget that before World War II many Western intellectuals admired the “new forms of economic organization in Germany and Italy,” as the magazine the Nation put it in 1934. The world’s horror at National Socialism in Germany helped produce not only the civil rights movement but such harbingers of the libertarian renaissance as The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson and The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek.

The other great totalitarian system of the twentieth century was communism, as outlined by Karl Marx and implemented in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Communism maintained its appeal to idealists far longer than fascism. At least until the revelations of Stalin’s purges in the 1950s, many American intellectuals viewed communism as a noble if sometimes excessive attempt to eliminate the inequalities and “alienation” of capitalism. As late as the 1980s, some American economists continued to praise the Soviet Union for its supposed economic growth and efficiency—right up to the system’s collapse, in fact.

When communism suddenly imploded in 1989–91, libertarians were not surprised. Communism, they had argued for years, was not only inimical to human freedom and dignity but devastatingly inefficient, and its inefficiency would only get worse over time, while the capitalist world progressed. The collapse of communism had a profound impact on the ideological landscape of the entire world: It virtually eliminated full-blown socialism as one end point of the ideological debate. It’s obvious now that total statism is a total disaster, leading more and more people to wonder why a society would want to implement some socialism if full socialism is so catastrophic.

But what about the welfare states of the West? The remaining ideological battles may be relatively narrow, but they are still important. Shouldn’t government temper the market? Aren’t the welfare states more humane than libertarian states would be? Although Western Europe and the United States never tried complete socialism, such concerns did cause government control of people’s economic lives to increase dramatically during the twentieth century. European governments nationalized more industries and created more state monopolies than the United States did; airlines, telephone companies, coal mines, steel manufacturers, automobile producers, and radio and television broadcasters were among the major industries that were generally private in the United States but stateowned in Western Europe. European countries also established earlier and more comprehensive “cradle-to-grave” government benefits programs.

In the United States, few industries were nationalized (the railroads Conrail and Amtrak were among the few), but regulation and restriction of economic choices grew throughout the century. And while we have not quite created a European system of “social insurance,” we do have transfer payments ranging from the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program to Head Start to college loans to unemployment compensation and welfare to Social Security and Medicare—a pretty good start on cradle-to-grave government.

Yet today, all over the developed world, welfare states are faltering. The tax rates necessary to sustain the massive transfer programs are crippling Western economies. Dependence on government has devalued family, work, and thrift. From Germany to Sweden to Australia the promises of the welfare state can no longer be kept.

In the United States, Social Security will start running deficits by 2012—only fifteen years from now—and will be out of money by 2029. Official projections show that Medicare will be out of money as early as 2001 and will be running a deficit of $443 billion by 2006. Economists calculate that an American born in 1975 would have to pay 82 percent of his lifetime income in taxes to keep entitlement programs going, which is why young people are balking at the prospect of working most of their lives to pay for transfer programs that will eventually go bankrupt anyway. A 1994 poll found that 63 percent of Americans between eighteen and thirty-four don’t believe Social Security will exist by the time they retire; more of them (46 percent) believe in UFOs than in Social Security (28 percent).

Getting out of the welfare state is going to be a tricky economic and political problem, but more and more people—in the United States and elsewhere—recognize that Western-style big government is going through a slow-motion version of communism’s collapse.

Economic growth slowed down dramatically in the United States and Europe in the early 1970s. Various explanations have been offered for this phenomenon; the most compelling, I would argue, is that the burden of taxes and regulation increased substantially during the 1960s. The number of pages in the Federal Register, where new regulations are printed, doubled between 1957 and 1967, then tripled between 1970 and 1975. Great Britain, which had higher taxes and more socialism than the United States, suffered even more. It was the richest country in the world in the nineteenth century, but by the 1970s its economic stagnation and national malaise were known worldwide as the “British disease.”

These sorts of problems led to the elections of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister of Great Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in 1980. Thatcher and Reagan were unlike previous leaders of their respective parties. Rather than manage the welfare state a little more efficiently than the Labour and Democratic parties, they promised to roll back socialism in Britain and high taxes in the United States. Their programs were by no means consistently libertarian, but their elections did indicate that voters were growing uncomfortable with the economic burden of big government.

Unfortunately, neither Reagan nor Thatcher, despite the length of their tenure in office, did much to slow down the growth of the welfare state. Thatcher did privatize quite a few nationalized industries, including British Airways, the telephone company, public housing, and the Jaguar automobile company. But she made little headway against the middle-class entitlement state, and government spending as a percentage of GNP was not reduced. Reagan arguably accomplished even less in the economic arena. He cut income tax rates but then raised payroll taxes to preserve the cornerstone of the welfare state, Social Security. The percentage of national income going to government transfer payments kept on rising.

There was some evidence during the 1980s that a country actually had to run smack into welfare-state bankruptcy before reform would be possible. The greatest success story was not Thatcher’s Britain or Reagan’s America but New Zealand, whose corporatist and paternalist welfare state had run out of money. Ironically, it was the Labour Party government of Prime Minister David Lange and Finance Minister Roger Douglas that stripped away business-coddling tariffs, reduced taxes, trimmed middle-class welfare, and explored ideas like parental choice in education. According to a worldwide index of economic freedom, New Zealand soared from a dismal 4.9 out of 10 in 1985 to 9.1, the third highest rating in the world, by 1995. Chile and Argentina, two other especially profligate welfare states, also hit bottom and made major reforms in the 1990s. As in New Zealand, the reforms in Argentina came from a surprising source, President Carlos Menem of the Peronist party, which had from the 1940s to the 1970s implemented popular welfarist programs that took Argentina from one of the world’s richest countries to a poor country with a bankrupt government.

The Disillusionment with Politics

The inability of Western governments to deliver on their promises of prosperity, security, and social justice—along with the less than successful attempts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1 The Coming Libertarian Age
• Chapter 2 The Roots Of Libertarianism
• Chapter 3 What Rights Do We Have?
• Chapter 4 The Dignity Of The Individual
• Chapter 5 Pluralism And Toleration
• Chapter 6 Law And The Constitution
• Chapter 7 Civil Society
• Chapter 8 The Market Process
• Chapter 9 What Big Government Is All About
• Chapter 10 Contemporary Issues
• Chapter 11 The Obsolete State
• Chapter 12 The Libertarian Future
• Appendix Are You A Libertarian?
• For Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Index