Seeing It Their Way / Why I'm Not Your Kind of Libertarian
Thursday, February 26, 2009
I seldom pay attention to left wing blogs but from time to time the comments there can be eye opening. Take, for example, the following:
"It's times like this that remind me of the differences between "conservatives" and "libertarians". Conservatives are, through no fault of their own, grim social maladroits incapable of thinking or drawing outside of the lines, constricted as they are by child-like notions of "that's the way it always been", "different = wrong", and whatever religious hoodoo was drummed into their inelastic brains during their joyless and awkward adolescence.
Libertarians, on the other hand, are just assholes."
The whole thing is not much better. On the other hand, material like this is illustrative of the nature of disagreements in politics. There is a natural instinct to slur the other side, rather than to look at what the other side actually believes and show why the other side is actually wrong. If liberalism were utterly vacuous, I'd understand why liberals would resort to this kind of stuff. (Yes, I know Ann Coulter exists. It's not just liberals.) But liberalism isn't utterly vacuous. I don't agree with most of the positions that liberals hold, but even I don't think the case for liberalism is so soggy that vitriol is a better alternative. Note: If you act as if you think the best case for your political philosophy consists of vitriol and ridicule, don't be surprised if the other side appears intractable.
For the sake of practicing what I've just preached, here's what I think a thoughtful liberal would actually say about the the merits of liberalism vs. libertarianism:
Libertarians favor a world where all or nearly all decisions about how to use resources are made only by those who own them. And in some cases, this makes sense. But in plenty of situations, the decision concerning how a resource gets used has a great deal of impact on many people other than the owner of those resources.
As an example, a for-profit drug company has a much greater financial incentive to develop treatments for impotence than for a cure for diseases like AIDS. The libertarians will claim that this is a good thing on grounds of economic efficiency: "If there is more demand for impotence drugs than for AIDS drugs, that's a clear sign that the consumers value impotence drugs more than they value AIDS drugs. If a drug company were to disregard this signal from the market, they wouldn't be satisfying the desires revealed by their customers. How can anyone claim to be concerned about the welfare of the users of pharmaceutical products and then complain when a drug company responds to the preferences that those consumers reveal in the market?" Or the more philosophical libertarian will bypass the issue of consumer satisfaction entirely: "However good or bad the choice to focus on impotence drugs may be, the drug company's freedom to choose its own production plan is inviolable or nearly inviolable."
Both of these libertarian views are problematic. The first approach is mistaken in assuming that profitability is a good index of preference satisfaction. Can anyone seriously believe that people with AIDS don't value their survival more than middle aged men value sex? Impotence drugs fetch a higher price than AIDS drugs, not because they are more preferred, but because the primary consumer base for impotence drugs is wealthier than the consumer base for AIDS drugs. A Rothbardian will accuse me of making an interpersonal comparison of utility. Well, I am but (1) it's not unreasonable to assume that AIDS victims value their survival more than old men value sex and (2) libertarians are guity of interpersonal aggregation of utility when they point to consumer and producer surplus and this aggregation is weighted in favor of the wealthy.
The second approach takes it as given that freedom is a good thing, which is true enough, but the problem arises in the interpretation. Yes, freedom is a wonderful thing, but not so wonderful that it should be preserved at any cost. Indeed, there are libertarians who will claim that there is no case in which the attenuation of the freedom of others is justifiable. It's an initiation of force, no matter what the anticipated benefit. Perhaps they believe this, but if so, then they haven't fully thought through their ideas. Do they believe in self defense, defense of property, restitution, etc? No system of justice can have an error rate of exactly zero, so any attempt at securing justice will lead to the possibility that the rights of an innocent are violated.
If libertarians agree that giving up some amount of freedom is acceptable to further other ends, then we disagree only on what the marginal rate of substitution between freedom and all other goals happens to be. So what's the "right" marginal rate of substitution between one norm and all others? Once the libertarian admits that he's willing, at least in principle, to sacrifice freedom to attain other goals he can't then invoke the non-aggression principle to suggest that his marginal rate of substitution between norms is the right one. It's incoherent to appeal only to norm X to justify a particular level of willingess to exchange X for Y.
Not only do these libertarian arguments lack any real force, the most that they could prove is that liberalism and libertarianism are incompatible. We liberals don't claim to be concerned with maximizing economic efficiency or minimizing coercion, so if our preferred policies aren't compatible with economic efficiency or the non-aggression principle, that's not a serious problem. When libertarians act as if it is, it's hard to see how they are not begging the question. They are effectively assuming that their political philosophy is right in order to prove that other political philosophies are wrong.
What we liberals want is for all human beings to be as well off as possible. There are scenarios where market forces lead to that result better than any government program but in many cases, this isn't the case. At any point in time, the sum total of all resources available to a society can be used in any number of ways. Some ways make people worse off and some ways make people better off and some ways make people much better off than before. And there is no guarantee that market forces will lead to the arrangement where resources are used in ways which make people much better off. And we see the force of government as a tool that can be used to generate better outcomes than the free market can generate on its own. We believe that governments ought to act to bring about those sorts of outcomes.
At this point, libertarians will make a public choice argument to the effect that if a government has the power to intervene in markets, the people who determine policy will probably not implement the sort of policies we have in mind. We don't necessarily disagree. Libertarians should have no trouble understanding that liberalism is a position on what governments should do, not a claim that they are likely to do one thing or another. If politicians act in their self interest rather than implement liberal policies, and this leads to results incompatible with the goals of liberalism, then the results cannot be counted as evidence against liberalism. (Interpolation: Since people will absolutely and forever work for their own self interest, then Liberalism [AKA Progressiveism , Socialism etc.] is inherently self contradictory and therefore will never work in practice) This just means that liberalism cannot work where it goes untried.
To sum it up:
1. Markets don't always allocate resources in the way that makes people best off.
2. Government can, in principle, improve upon market outcomes from time to time.
3. Governments should improve upon market outcomes when they can.
4. Where governments fail to implement the welfare improving policies we favor, this is a problem with those governments, not with the policies that they failed to implement.
At least, that's my understanding of the liberal point of view.
Some of it, I even agree with. So far as I can tell, markets don't always and everywhere lead to the arrangements that make human beings best off. Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is not a perfect measure of human welfare. Freedom from coercion is not so valuable that no benefit, no matter how great, could justify even the tiniest amount of coercion. There are cases where a coercive government might make everyone better off. When politicians act as public choice theory predicts, that just shows that polticians aren't acting as statists believe they ought to, but it doesn't show that statists are wrong about what politicians ought to do.
That list of claims is also a list of reasons why I'm not a non-aggression libertarian a la Murray Rothbard, or an economic efficiency libertarian a la David Friedman. If I had to distill my libertarianism down to one sentence it would be this:
The morality of an act is not a function only of the the identity of, or the agency on whose behalf, the doer is acting.
My libertarianism (as opposed to the whole of my ethics) is silent on the question of whether or not it's moral to take from the rich to feed the starving, but if it is moral for people acting on behalf of a government to take from the rich to feed the starving, this must be so for some reason other than the fact that the doers are acting on behalf of a government. It it's immoral for anyone not acting on behalf of a government to take from the rich to feed the starving, this must be so for some other reason besides the fact that the doers are not acting on behalf of a government.
To be sure, I don't deny that the doer can matter. Only Bill may demand payments from guests at Bill's hotel, but that's not only because the doer is Bill. It's because the doer is Bill and also because Bill happens to own the hotel. I just deny that the morality of an act can depend solely on the identity of the doer. (Aside: A liberal would likely respond to this example by claiming that the government owns the country. Libertarian: Why? Liberal: Because the government has done some XYZ. Libertarian: Is it moral to take posession after doing XYZ only if the doer is a government?)
If any non-libertarians want to admit to believing that the actions of government agents are moral solely because the doers are acting on behalf of a government, I hope they will. At least then the core of the disagreement will be clear, rather than obscured by vitriol.