Up From Liberaltarianism
Peel away the condescension in David Boaz’s column criticizing Jacob Hornberger and other libertarians for failing to talk enough about slavery and there is, under all the score-settling, a point worth arguing. While disclaiming any belief in a historical “Golden Age” of liberty — but who does believe in such a thing? — Boaz nevertheless makes clear that Americans have won important new freedoms since the Founding, in part because freedom now applies to racial and sexual minorities who were discriminated against, and worse, in the past. The government in Washington may have more departments, but Boaz argues that “the number of federal agencies” is less important a measure of freedom than is the amount of personal autonomy that everyone enjoys.
Boaz still opposes high taxes and the “alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, drug laws, and so on.” But a few questions need to be asked: aren’t high taxes worth it, if they are the price to be paid for a federal government large enough and powerful enough to guarantee individual rights to unpopular minorities? Indeed, wouldn’t it be worth paying even higher taxes and increasing the scope of the federal government even more in order to reduce discrimination still further? And if, as Boaz says at the end of his column, more police in a small town might help reduce crime, which is of course good for liberty, then should we complain about the TSA, no-fly lists, body scanners, etc.?
Presumably part of the answer to these questions is that Boaz believes rights of minorities can be sufficiently protected, and crime prevented, detected, and punished, without an indefinitely large government — the things he likes about our vast tutelary state can be preserved and made more efficient, and the things he dislikes can be discarded without damaging the framework. I’d say his vision is close to what Ed Clark proudly called “low-tax liberalism.”
If that’s what Boaz and liberaltarians like Will Wilkinson want, what about people like Jacob Hornberger? They are not indifferent to or unaware of the evils of slavery and bigotry, rather they want to purge the older American model of government, with its emphasis on states’ rights and decentralization, of its defects — racial injustice, etc. — just as Boaz wants to purge the present tutelary state of its defects. Hornberger is no more forgetful of the evils of past forms of government than Boaz is unaware of modern government’s infringements of liberty. If Hornberger doesn’t reiterate those old evils at every opportunity, it’s because in the year 2010 everyone recognizes those evils for what they are.
Which model provides a better starting point? Should a libertarian prefer a decentralized republic along broadly Jeffersonian lines, but without slavery and government discrimination (though this may mean tolerating private discrimination) or a large and centralized rights-enforcing government akin to the New Deal state but with an emphasis on personal liberties instead of redistribution? And of these two models, is one more inclined than the other to decay into its illiberal form? That is, would slavery or segregation re-emerge in a restored Jeffersonian republic more readily than redistribution and other evils would arise in a purified New Deal state?
It seems to me that the tutelary ambit of the modern progressive state logically inclines toward providing for the basic material necessities of its wards as well as for the protection of their rights, and to ensure provision of needs and protection of rights a great educational apparatus may be desirable. The freedom of the tutelary state is the freedom of a free-range dairy cow: in exchange for care and protection, you pay your taxes and may frolic in the fields as much as you please. It’s a timid sort of freedom, but it is freedom of a kind.
An alternative based on the older American tradition, by contrast, need not logically lead to a slave-state; indeed, most of the Founders recognized that slavery was inconsistent with the principles of their system. That system, even in its most benign form, would not be purely libertarian, of course: there too state schools would be desired to inculcate proper values into republican citizens. Private discrimination would be permissible, and if states or localities adopted unfair or unjust laws, one would have little recourse to federal remedies. But you could move to a different jurisdiction more in keeping with your ideas of liberty. It’s an uneven but robust freedom.
This is what libertarians who laud the old America have in mind. Why slander them as being ignorant of slavery, when liberaltarians do not want to be slandered as social democrats? If the socio-political order that libertarians like Hornberger desire really does naturally incline toward the sorts of injustices Boaz names, then make that case and argue against the model on those grounds. But I don’t think Boaz even believes that, let alone that he can present a convincing argument for it. On the other hand, those who believe that the modern state naturally tilts toward social democracy or worse have frequently and cogently made their case –not least in that “great book” Boaz mentions in his first paragraph, The Road to Serfdom.
Today is Thursday…did you make sure to denounce slavery and Nazism today?
Sad to say, garbage like Boaz’s article (and the hit piece on Ron Paul after CPAC) is why I don’t brother with Reason anymore. They’ve shown time and again they’d rather engage Cosmoland and the Orange Line Mafia than the mass of those “out there” who would sympathize with certain or quite a few libertarian ideas.
They don’t want a mass movement. They want to be part of the cool kids club. Fine, let them.
I agree as far as this goes, but this is what gets me about a lot of the libertarian rhetoric on current civil liberties rhetoric – do we honestly believe that under similar circumstances recent outrages would not be tolerated and even promoted by most of the founding generation, the exception of a Luther Martin or even on a good day a George Mason notwithstanding?
Impo, Jacob Hornberger is a far, far better friend of liberty than the likes of Boaz, and a man of greater wisdom, to judge from their writings. But then again Boaz’s comments are primarily aimed at point-scoring in a political feud between left- and right-libertarians, so shouldn’t be taken too seriously as analysis.
On the broader point, here is the British equivalent of Mr Hornberger’s conservative/libertarian argument, from a quite well known piece by UK libertarian Sean Gabb (How to Destroy the Enemy Class: A Manifesto for the Right):
“What we on the right want England to become can be summarised in the opening words of A.J.P. Taylor’s English History: 1914-1945:
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card…. [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.”
We want this back.. Of course, it will be different next time. There will be the Internet and space travel and life extension, and – without prejudice to any moral code that may be accepted in public – there will be none of those laws about sex that our ancestors wasted so much time on passing and trying to enforce. There will be other changes as the circumstances may require. But we want the past back in the sense that we want to be free again—free to live as we please without having to explain ourselves to the authorities, and without having to seek permission from them, and without having to hand over much of our income in taxes and fees to pay for the enlarged, supervisory state under which we are now compelled to live. We also want back the sense of place and unforced pride in community that is inseparable from living in a free society.”
“It seems to me that the tutelary ambit of the modern progressive state logically inclines toward providing for the basic material necessities of its wards as well as for the protection of their rights, and to ensure provision of needs and protection of rights a great educational apparatus may be desirable.” Well, perhaps if you’d had a bit of education you wouldn’t write such a silly statement. Why do you take as your basic premise the modern progressive state provides for its wards? It seems to me the citizens, (wards is pretty aggressively paternalistic and as an old man I don’t need that crap) having elected a liberal, progressive, conservative or libertarian government to act on their concerns have the right to expect what the citizens elected their representatives to do. If, as a citizen, I look at the state of corporate controlled health care run according to the dictates of Wall Street and compare what I see to how well the government runs Medicare and the VA health system, and then choose to vote for the government plan, it might very well be that I vote that way because experience has taught me to fear the corporations. It is people like (apparently) yourself who claim to know not only what is best for me but how I should think, all the while denying the validity of my knowledge gained over a long life time that I wonder about. Just how did you get to know what is best for me?
And btw, just so you don’t force yourself into too tight a corner you might think to balance your reading list, with all due respect to A.J. P Taylor, with a little Charles Dicken’s, D. H. Lawrence, or George Orwell.
[...] response to the “left-libertarians” Here: Boaz still opposes high taxes and the “alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, [...]
Actually, you and Hayek have not “cogently” made your case. The “Road to Serfdom” is based on a false premise. I cannot think of a single example over the last 100 hundred years of a democratic socialist country with a liberal tradition and culture descending into tryanny, or even authoritarian state, with the possible exception of Chile. Weimar Germany, although ostensibly a democracy and originally dominated by socialists, was a national culture dominated by Nationalism and revanchism for WWI. Its Goverment drifted to the right, first the Catholic Centre and Nationalists and then of course that ultimate Nationalist, Adolph Hitler when Brueing applied Hayekian and classical economics to Germany”s depression and got 25% unemployment. The great left wing dictatorships, Russia and China, were born of a disastrous defeats in war and the chaos of war, not some evolution of social democracy. Eastern Europe did not go communist because of “social democracy,” but because Stalin’s Red Army occupied them. Socialists and social democrats who were not shot, fled. The left wing regimes in the third world were also born out wars of decolonization, the collapse of kleptocratic regimes, or both (think Cuba), and the economic disruptions the swing of the oil price (Chavez gained power in Venezuela is the result of the economic problems that country faced in the late nineties when oil prices collapsed).
Finally, state rights and local control have always been bad news for minorities, and the examples that we have historically is that the can evolve into mini-police states with plenty of authoritarian oppression for those who object to the policies of the ruling elite. This is what happen in the U.S. and the South during the period of 1789 to 1860. See “Dominion of Memories” and William Freehling’s “Seccessionists at Bay: 1789-l855.
Rickster, congragulations on getting history wrong.
Hitler was a Keynesian, he never enacted any Austrian economics ideas. See Maynard Keynes introduction to the 1930s German reprint of the General Theory (reprinted in
Revisionist Viewpoints by James J. Martin) wherein he writes
that Germany was a much better soil for interventionist economics than the UK precisely because of the German state socialist tradition going back to Bismarck.
If anything Hayek understated his case as a look at the
increasing statism in the US proves and the EU has become
a police state where people go to prison for politically incorrect views and the EU bureaucrats in Brussels now
control all aspects of the European economy.
A mini-world government led by statists who mostly disavow the socialist label but who are just as statist nonetheless.
Czechoslovakia’s own socialists betrayed that country to the
USSR and that was true throughout eastern Europe.
The Red Army never could have occupied that vast territory
without plenty of local socialist collaborators.
Chiang Kai-Chek was a socialist, see his 1943 work, China’s
Destiny, and his government was even more Communist infiltrated than Harry Truman’s, as hard as that may be to believe. Cuba and Venezuela were never wars against colonialism, they were disguised Communist takeovers.
In 1958 Cuba had the largest middle class and highest standard of living in Latin America.
If states rights and local control are better for the majority then that should be the major consideration. Don’t try to feed
us this Foner-style Marxist whitewash of Reconstruction.
Slavery ended 150 years ago, it’s beating a dead horse.
Legal segregation only existed in the south and that ended almost half a century. It would have been possible to abolish
forced segregation without installing forced integration if we had been led by libertarians instead of mindless statist liberals and corrupt, compromised conservatives.
I think blacks who still use the slavery and Jim Crow crutches ought to take a long, hard look in the mirror to discover the source of their problem and that goes triple for the white leftists who encourage them.
Hayek was also opposed to the warfare state every bit as much as the welfare (so-called) state. War has been the main instrument for increasing statism throughout the last century. Fascism itself is a form of socialism as A. James Gregor and others have noted. The New Deal was influenced
by Italian fascism and national socialism in Germany was very much influenced by the USSR and Marxism.
I responded to Boaz on Reason Online, he’s obsessed with
so-called “gay” rights and the whole CATO-Reason crowd should be totally ignored from now on.
If people think we are ever going to get back to something approaching the late 19th/early 20th century relationship between the state and the individual, they are utterly delusional. There is almost no constituency for it. It is fine in principle for many people, but if you actually tried to undo the social legislation and various other laws (child labor, unrestricted ownership of machine guns, repeal laws on civil rights in employment, housing, accommodations, etc., and on and on), you will crash and burn spectacularly as a political proposition.
There is no point trying to convince true believers that their beliefs will amount to nothing, but the rest of the us are just trying to do battle with the beast as best we can day to day.
Mark,
If you would have told me a couple years ago that the topics of nullification and secession would be widely discussed today (at least relative to the past), I may have called you delusional.
If you would have told me 3-4 years ago that the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve would be widely discussed today , I may have called you delusional.
The more the current system unravels and people get fed up with it, the greater the possibility there is for fundamental change.
There is one thing we can know for sure. Those who have been trying to tweak things ever so slightly, with the hope that things go to hell in a handbasket at a bit slower pace, have done little or nothing to check Leviathan’s onslaught.
Mark, you have to advocate what is right, otherwise you stand for nothing. Ideas are what matters in the long run and only by the advocacy of the right ideas and right philosophy are you going to change anything. We need to get over this focusing on the next election syndrome. You keep settling for less and the less becomes lesser all the time.
[...] Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative: Which model provides a better starting point? Should a libertarian prefer a decentralized republic along broadly Jeffersonian lines, but without slavery and government discrimination (though this may mean tolerating private discrimination) or a large and centralized rights-enforcing government akin to the New Deal state but with an emphasis on personal liberties instead of redistribution? And of these two models, is one more inclined than the other to decay into its illiberal form? That is, would slavery or segregation re-emerge in a restored Jeffersonian republic more readily than redistribution and other evils would arise in a purified New Deal state? [...]