Both major political parties in America have something of a bad name these days, and one often hears laments that there isn’t a viable “centrist” third party. One perennial candidate for the post is the Libertarian Party. A quick Facebook search shows nearly as many self-identified libertarians as conservatives at Cornell.
Unfortunately, libertarianism, at least as advocated by the Libertarian Party, is fundamentally flawed despite its philosophical attractiveness and supposed “centrism.” There are reasons why most conservatives and liberals are not libertarians. Despite frequent Libertarian implications to the contrary, neither stupidity nor malice are among them.
All too often, libertarians espouse their views with a stridency and a moralism that is frequently ludicrous and sometimes frustrating. The Libertarian Party’s website describes itself as part of the “pro-liberty community,” as though the other political parties are secretly for tyranny and oppression.
The self-assurance and sloganeering of libertarianism masks grave difficulties. It is a notable fact that Plato, Locke, Lincoln and so many other perceptive students of politics disagree profoundly with modern libertarians. Confronting this fact would mean either condemning these individuals as foolish or malicious, or else admitting that perhaps things aren’t so simple, and that there are powerful reasons not to embrace libertarianism.
Free society requires consent of the governed, and polls and election results show that large majorities don’t actually want the sort of limited government that libertarians preach. These majorities are not caused by ignorance or folly. Most people on both the right and the left really want services and benefits that big government provides, and they are prepared to make the requisite financial sacrifices. Explaining to them that “freedom is good, and government is bad” — the usual libertarian approach — is insufficient to sway most citizens. These citizens represent a powerful political force that cannot be simply ignored. Winning elections means compromising with public opinion, and libertarianism can only remain ideologically pure at the price of political impotency. Compromising with public opinion isn’t unprincipled, it is necessary.
The basic libertarian assumption that freedom is the highest good is questionable. The Declaration of Independence, after all, puts life before liberty in the list of unalienable rights. This is not the libertarian view. For instance, the Libertarian Party opposes public health regulation and building codes, on the optimistic assumption that without them, individuals will behave responsibly. This seems rather naïve. These regulations were instituted for a reason, and it wasn’t simply to make bureaucrats feel good. In both cases, individual choice can hurt bystanders caught in an epidemic or a building collapse. Suing for damages after is a poor substitute for having regular inspections to prevent the disaster. Most people, quite reasonably, would trade a little freedom for a longer and safer life.
Libertarians routinely assert that government coercion is wrong, except to prevent harm to individuals. There is a catch: That little “except to prevent harm” clause hides the fact that “harm” is not so easy to define. Most wasteful or pointless government action was originally intended to save people from harm. For instance, farm subsidies are rightly derided as among the least useful government programs. However, they were originally intended to protect farmers from real or imagined danger of debt peonage to the banks. Likewise, the elaborate financial regulations imposed by the SEC are there to prevent investors from being defrauded. Campaign finance regulation is there to prevent the wealthy from buying elections, which would gravely reduce the rights of the less well off. All these regulatory systems can be reasonably opposed, but to say, as the Libertarian Party does, that “the only purpose of government is to protect individual liberties” is to ignore conflicts between the rights of different individuals.
The Right and the Left often disagree about which individual rights are most important. The abortion dispute, for instance, pits the right of the unborn child (or fetus) to life against the right of the mother to control her own body. There is no obvious answer to which set of rights is paramount, or even to whether both underlying rights exist. These disputes are inevitable, and there is no clean way to solve them. The Libertarian party, by intoning that it is “for freedom,” not only dodges the question, but shows itself oblivious to it.
Even if direct harm can be pinned down somehow, there is still the issue of indirect harm. Conservatives and liberals alike think that government is sometimes justified in regulating speech and actions in order to prevent or induce long-term cultural shifts. On the right, this is described as protecting “traditional morality,” while on the left, this argument is usually couched in the language of “promoting tolerance.” In both cases, it’s easy to point to examples of the harm that nihilism or intolerance can cause. A large part of libertarianism is a willful disregard of this sort of long-term consequence. This disregard seems to be derived either from the assumption that culture doesn’t matter, which is false, or that government regulation cannot usefully shape it, which seems unlikely. Libertarianism, blind to long-term consequences, can often be very short-sighted.
There is nothing wrong with wanting increased individual rights, or describing one’s views as libertarian. Many libertarian proposals to replace regulation with markets and free choice are quite sensible.
However, “freedom” is not the whole story, and is not a magic incantation that solves all political problems. The Libertarian Party, unfortunately, is oblivious to many crucial issues. Doctrinaire libertarianism is not a viable governing ideology. It doesn’t deliver the government people want, it provides no insight into settling disputes about rights and it makes no provision for the sort of long-term consequences that policy makers ought to consider. Politics poses many hard questions, and “freedom is good” is seldom an adequate answer.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.