Myths
Libertarianism is the
fastest growing political creed in America today. Before judging and evaluating
libertarianism, it is vitally important to find out precisely what that
doctrine is, and, more particularly, what it is not. It is especially important
to clear up a number of misconceptions about libertarianism that are held by
most people, and particularly by conservatives. In this essay I shall enumerate
and critically analyze the most common myths that are held about
libertarianism. When these are cleared away, people will then be able to
discuss libertarianism free of egregious myths and misconceptions, and to deal
with it as it should be on its very own merits or demerits.
Myth #1: Libertarians believe that each
individual is an isolated, hermetically sealed atom, acting in a vacuum without
influencing each other.
This is a common
charge, but a highly puzzling one. In a lifetime of reading libertarian and
classical liberal literature, I have not come across a single theorist or
writer who holds anything like this position.
The only possible
exception is the fanatical Max Stirner, a mid-19th-century German individualist
who, however, has had minimal influence upon libertarianism in his time and
since. Moreover, Stirner's explicit "Might Makes Right" philosophy
and his repudiation of all moral principles including individual rights as
"spooks in the head," scarcely qualifies him as a libertarian in any
sense. Apart from Stirner, however, there is no body of opinion even remotely
resembling this common indictment.
Libertarians are
methodological and political individualists, to be sure. They believe that only
individuals think, value, act, and choose. They believe that each individual
has the right to own his own body, free of coercive interference. But no
individualist denies that people are influencing each other all the time in
their goals, values, pursuits and occupations.
As F.A. Hayek
pointed out in his notable article, "The Non-Sequitur of the 'Dependence
Effect,'" John Kenneth Galbraith's assault upon free-market economics in
his best-selling The Affluent Society rested on this
proposition: economics assumes that every individual arrives at his scale of
values totally on his own, without being subject to influence by anyone else.
On the contrary, as Hayek replied, everyone knows that most people do not
originate their own values, but are influenced to adopt them by other people.[1]
No individualist
or libertarian denies that people influence each other all the time, and surely
there is nothing wrong with this inevitable process. What libertarians are
opposed to is not voluntary persuasion, but the coercive imposition of values
by the use of force and police power. Libertarians are in no way opposed to the
voluntary cooperation and collaboration between individuals: only to the
compulsory pseudo-"cooperation" imposed by the state.
This myth has
recently been propounded by Irving Kristol, who identifies the libertarian
ethic with the "hedonistic" and asserts that libertarians
"worship the Sears Roebuck catalogue and all the 'alternative life styles'
that capitalist affluence permits the individual to choose from."[2]
The fact is that
libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic
theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important
subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social
life.
Political theory
deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is
distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of
organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper
role of violence is to defend person and property against violence,
that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself
aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which
states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do
as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with
his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to
libertarianism.
It should not be
surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and
devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who
are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or religious morality.
There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly
to the disciplines of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians
who have no moral theory at all apart from the imperative of non-violation of
rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no general
or personal moral theory.
Libertarianism
does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to
adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with
Lord Acton that "liberty is the highest political end" – not
necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values.
There is no
question about the fact, however, that the subset of libertarians who are
free-market economists tends to be delighted when the free market leads to a
wider range of choices for consumers, and thereby raises their standard of
living. Unquestionably, the idea that prosperity is better than grinding
poverty is a moral proposition, and it ventures into the realm of general moral
theory, but it is still not a proposition for which I should wish to apologize.
Myth #3: Libertarians do not believe in moral
principles; they limit themselves to cost-benefit analysis on the assumption
that man is always rational.
This myth is of
course related to the preceding charge of hedonism, and some of it can be
answered in the same way. There are indeed libertarians, particularly
Chicago-school economists, who refuse to believe that liberty and individual
rights are moral principles, and instead attempt to arrive at public policy by
weighing alleged social costs and benefits.
In the first
place, most libertarians are "subjectivists" in economics, that is,
they believe that the utilities and costs of different individuals cannot be
added or measured. Hence, the very concept of social costs and benefits is
illegitimate. But, more importantly, most libertarians rest their case on moral
principles, on a belief in the natural rights of every individual to his person
or property. They therefore believe in the absolute immorality of aggressive
violence, of invasion of those rights to person or property, regardless of
which person or group commits such violence.
Far from being
immoral, libertarians simply apply a universal human ethic to government in
the same way as almost everyone would apply such an ethic to every other person
or institution in society. In particular, as I have noted earlier,
libertarianism as a political philosophy dealing with the proper role of
violence takes the universal ethic that most of us hold toward violence and
applies it fearlessly to government.
Libertarians make no
exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral loophole, no double
standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe that murder is murder
and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if committed by the
government. We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated
because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We believe
that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act
calls it "conscription." In short, the key to libertarian theory is
that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.
Hence, far from
being indifferent or hostile to moral principles, libertarians fulfill them by
being the only group willing to extend those principles across the board to
government itself.[3]
It is true that
libertarians would allow each individual to choose his values and to act upon
them, and would in short accord every person the right to be either moral or
immoral as he saw fit. Libertarianism is strongly opposed to enforcing any
moral creed on any person or group by the use of violence – except, of course,
the moral prohibition against aggressive violence itself. But we must realize
that no action can be considered virtuous unless it is
undertaken freely, by a person's voluntary consent.
As Frank Meyer
pointed out:
Men cannot be forced to be free, nor can they even be forced to be virtuous. To a certain extent, it is true, they can be forced to act as though they were virtuous. But virtue is the fruit of well-used freedom. And no act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue – or of vice.[4]
If a person is forced by violence or the threat thereof to perform a certain action, then it can no longer be a moral choice on his part. The morality of an action can stem only from its being freely adopted; an action can scarcely be called moral if someone is compelled to perform it at gunpoint.
Compelling moral
actions or outlawing immoral actions, therefore, cannot be said to foster the
spread of morality or virtue. On the contrary, coercion atrophies morality for
it takes away from the individual the freedom to be either moral or immoral,
and therefore forcibly deprives people of the chance to be moral. Paradoxically,
then, a compulsory morality robs us of the very opportunity to be moral.
It is furthermore
particularly grotesque to place the guardianship of morality in the hands of
the state apparatus – that is, none other than the organization of policemen,
guards, and soldiers. Placing the state in charge of moral principles is
equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Whatever else we
may say about them, the wielders of organized violence in society have never
been distinguished by their high moral tone or by the precision with which they
uphold moral principle.
There is no
necessary connection between being for or against libertarianism and one's
position on religion. It is true that many if not most libertarians at the
present time are atheists, but this correlates with the fact that most
intellectuals, of most political persuasions, are atheists as well.
There are many
libertarians who are theists, Jewish or Christian. Among the classical liberal
forebears of modern libertarianism in a more religious age there were a myriad
of Christians: from John Lilburne, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and John
Locke in the seventeenth century, down to Cobden and Bright, Frédéric Bastiat
and the French laissez-faire liberals, and the great Lord Acton.
Libertarians
believe that liberty is a natural right embedded in a natural law of what is
proper for mankind, in accordance with man's nature. Where this
set of natural laws comes from, whether it is purely natural or originated by a
creator, is an important ontological question but is irrelevant to social or
political philosophy.
As Father Thomas
Davitt declares: "If the word 'natural' means anything at all, it refers
to the nature of a man, and when used with 'law,' 'natural' must refer to an
ordering that is manifested in the inclinations of a man's nature and to
nothing else. Hence, taken in itself, there is nothing religious or theological
in the 'Natural Law' of Aquinas."[5]
Or, as D'Entrèves
writes of the seventeenth century Dutch Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius:
[Grotius's]
definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary. When he maintains that
natural law is that body of rule which Man is able to discover by the use of
his reason, he does nothing but restate the Scholastic notion of a rational
foundation of ethics. Indeed, his aim is rather to restore that notion which
had been shaken by the extreme Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents of
thought. When he declares that these rules are valid in themselves,
independently of the fact that God willed them, he repeats an assertion which
had already been made by some of the schoolmen…[6]
Libertarianism has
been accused of ignoring man's spiritual nature. But one can easily arrive at
libertarianism from a religious or Christian position: emphasizing the
importance of the individual, of his freedom of will, of natural rights and
private property. Yet one can also arrive at all these self-same positions by a
secular, natural-law approach, through a belief that man can arrive at a
rational apprehension of the natural law.
Historically,
furthermore, it is not at all clear that religion is a firmer footing than
secular natural law for libertarian conclusions. As Karl Wittfogel reminded us
in his Oriental Despotism, the union of throne and
altar has been used for centuries to fasten a reign of despotism on society.[7]
Historically, the
union of church and state has been in many instances a mutually reinforcing
coalition for tyranny. The state used the church to sanctify and preach
obedience to its supposedly divinely sanctioned rule; the church used the state
to gain income and privilege.
And, closer to our
century, Christian socialism and the social gospel have played a major role in
the drive toward statism, and the apologetic role of the Orthodox Church in
Soviet Russia has been all too clear. Some Catholic bishops in Latin America have
even proclaimed that the only route to the kingdom of heaven is through
Marxism, and if I wished to be nasty, I could point out that the Reverend Jim
Jones, in addition to being a Leninist, also proclaimed himself the
reincarnation of Jesus.
Moreover, now that
socialism has manifestly failed, politically and economically, socialists have
fallen back on the "moral" and the "spiritual" as the final
argument for their cause. Socialist Robert Heilbroner, in arguing that
socialism will have to be coercive and will have to impose a "collective
morality" upon the public, opines that: "Bourgeois culture is focused
on the material achievementof the individual. Socialist culture
must focus on his or her moral or spiritual achievement."
The intriguing
point is that this position of Heilbroner's was hailed by the conservative
religious writer for National Review, Dale Vree. He writes:
Heilbroner is …
saying what many contributors to NR have said over the last
quarter-century: you can't have both freedom and virtue. Take note,
traditionalists. Despite his dissonant terminology, Heilbroner is interested in
the same thing you're interested in: virtue.[9]
Vree is also
fascinated with the Heilbroner view that a socialist culture must "foster
the primacy of the collectivity" rather than the "primacy of the
individual." He quotes Heilbroner's contrasting "moral or spiritual"
achievement under socialism as against bourgeois "material"
achievement, and adds correctly: "There is a traditional ring to that
statement."
Vree goes on to
applaud Heilbroner's attack on capitalism because it has "no sense of 'the
good'" and permits "consenting adults" to do anything they
please. In contrast to this picture of freedom and permitted diversity, Vree
writes that "Heilbroner says alluringly, because a socialist society must
have a sense of 'the good,' not everything will be permitted." To Vree, it
is impossible "to have economic collectivism along with cultural
individualism," and so he is inclined to lean toward a new
"socialist-traditionalist fusionism" – toward collectivism across the
board.
We may note here
that socialism becomes especially despotic when it replaces
"economic" or "material" incentives by allegedly
"moral" or "spiritual" ones, when it affects to promoting
an indefinable "quality of life" rather than economic prosperity.
When payment is
adjusted to productivity there is considerably more freedom as well as higher
standards of living. For when reliance is placed solely on altruistic devotion
to the socialist motherland, the devotion has to be regularly reinforced by the
knout. An increasing stress on individual material incentive means ineluctably
a greater stress on private property and keeping what one earns, and brings
with it considerably more personal freedom, as witness Yugoslavia in the last
three decades in contrast to Soviet Russia.
The most
horrifying despotism on the face of the earth in recent years was undoubtedly
Pol Pot's Cambodia, in which "materialism" was so far obliterated
that money was abolished by the regime. With money and private property
abolished, each individual was totally dependent on handouts of rationed
subsistence from the state, and life was a sheer hell. We should be careful
before we sneer at "merely material" goals or incentives.
The charge of
"materialism" directed against the free market ignores the fact that every human
action whatsoever involves the transformation of material objects by the use of
human energy and in accordance with ideas and purposes held by the actors. It
is impermissible to separate the "mental" or "spiritual"
from the "material."
All great works of
art, great emanations of the human spirit, have had to employ material objects:
whether they be canvasses, brushes and paint, paper and musical instruments, or
building blocks and raw materials for churches. There is no real rift between
the "spiritual" and the "material" and hence any despotism
over and crippling of the material will cripple the spiritual as well.
Myth #5: Libertarians are utopians who believe
that all people are good, and that therefore state control is not necessary.
Conservatives tend
to add that since human nature is either partially or wholly evil, strong state
regulation is therefore necessary for society.
This is a very
common belief about libertarians, yet it is difficult to know the source of
this misconception. Rousseau, the locus classicus of the idea
that man is good but is corrupted by his institutions, was scarcely a
libertarian. Apart from the romantic writings of a few anarcho-communists, whom
I would not consider libertarians in any case, I know of no libertarian or
classical liberal writers who have held this view.
On the contrary,
most libertarian writers hold that man is a mixture of good and evil and
therefore that it is important for social institutions to encourage the good
and discourage the bad. The state is the only social institution which is able
to extract its income and wealth by coercion; all others must obtain revenue
either by selling a product or service to customers or by receiving voluntary
gifts. And the state is the only institution which can use the revenue from
this organized theft to presume to control and regulate people's lives and
property. Hence, the institution of the state establishes a socially
legitimatized and sanctified channel for bad people to do bad things, to commit
regularized theft and to wield dictatorial power.
Statism therefore
encourages the bad, or at least the criminal elements of human nature. As Frank
H. Knight trenchantly put it: "The probability of the people in power
being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on
a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get
the job of whipping master in a slave plantation."[10]
A free society, by
not establishing such a legitimated channel for theft and tyranny, discourages
the criminal tendencies of human nature and encourages the peaceful and the
voluntary. Liberty and the free market discourage aggression and compulsion,
and encourage the harmony and mutual benefit of voluntary interpersonal
exchanges, economic, social, and cultural.
Since a system of
liberty would encourage the voluntary and discourage the criminal, and would
remove the only legitimated channel for crime and aggression, we could expect
that a free society would indeed suffer less from violent crime and aggression
than we do now, though there is no warrant for assuming that they would
disappear completely. That is not utopianism, but a common-sense implication of
the change in what is considered socially legitimate, and in the
reward-and-penalty structure in society.
We can approach
our thesis from another angle. If all men were good and none had criminal
tendencies, then there would indeed be no need for a state, as conservatives
concede. But if on the other hand all men were evil, then the case for the
state is just as shaky, since why should anyone assume that those men who form
the government and obtain all the guns and the power to coerce others, should
be magically exempt from the badness of all the other persons outside the
government?
Tom Paine, a
classical libertarian often considered to be naïvely optimistic about human
nature, rebutted the conservative evil-human-nature argument for a strong state
as follows: "If all human nature be corrupt, it is needless to strengthen
the corruption by establishing a succession of kings, who be they ever so base,
are still to be obeyed…" Paine added that "NO man since the fall hath
ever been equal to the trust of being given power over all."[11]
And as the
libertarian F.A. Harper once wrote:
Still using the
same principle that political rulership should be employed to the extent of the
evil in man, we would then have a society in which complete political rulership
of all the affairs of everybody would be called for…. One man would rule all.
But who would serve as the dictator? However he were to be selected and affixed
to the political throne, he would surely be a totally evil person, since all
men are evil. And this society would then be ruled by a totally evil dictator
possessed of total political power. And how, in the name of logic, could
anything short of total evil be its consequence? How could it be better than
having no political rulership at all in that society?[12]
Finally, since, as
we have seen, men are actually a mixture of good and evil, a regime of liberty
serves to encourage the good and discourage the bad, at least in the sense that
the voluntary and mutually beneficial are good and the criminal is bad. In no
theory of human nature, then, whether it be goodness, badness, or a mixture of
the two, can statism be justified.
In the course of
denying the notion that he is a conservative, the classical liberal F.A. Hayek
pointed out: "The main merit of individualism [which Adam Smith and his
contemporaries advocated] is that it is a system under which bad men can do
least harm. It is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on
our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they
now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and
complexity…"[13]
It is important to
note what differentiates libertarians from utopians in the pejorative sense.
Libertarianism does not set out to remold human nature. One of socialism's
major goals is to create, which in practice means by totalitarian methods, a
New Socialist Man, an individual whose major goal will be to work diligently
and altruistically for the collective.
Libertarianism is
a political philosophy which says: Given any existent human nature, liberty is
the only moral and the most effective political system.
Obviously,
libertarianism – as well as any other social system – will work better the more
individuals are peaceful and the less they are criminal or aggressive. And
libertarians, along with most other people, would like to attain a world where
more individuals are "good" and fewer are criminals. But this is not
the doctrine of libertarianism per se, which says that whatever the
mix of man's nature may be at any given time, liberty is best.
Just as the
preceding charge holds that libertarians believe all men to be perfectly good,
so this myth charges them with believing that everyone is perfectly wise. Yet, it
is then maintained, this is not true of many people, and therefore the state
must intervene.
But the
libertarian no more assumes perfect wisdom than he postulates perfect goodness.
There is a certain common sense in holding that most men are better apprised of
their own needs and goals then is anyone else. But there is no assumption that
everyone always knows his own interest best. Libertarianism rather asserts that
everyone should have the right to pursue his own interest as
he deems best. What is being asserted is the right to act with one's own person
and property, and not the necessary wisdom of such action.
It is also true,
however, that the free market – in contrast to government – has built-in
mechanisms to enable people to turn freely to experts who can give sound advice
on how to pursue one's interests best. As we have seen earlier, free
individuals are not hermetically sealed from one another. For on the free
market, any individual, if in doubt about what his own true interests may be,
is free to hire or consult experts to give him advice based on their possibly
superior knowledge. The individual may hire such experts and, on the free
market, can continuously test their soundness and helpfulness.
Individuals on the
market, therefore, tend to patronize those experts whose
advice will prove most successful. Good doctors, lawyers, or architects will
reap rewards on the free market, while poor ones will tend to fare badly. But
when government intervenes, the government expert acquires his revenue by
compulsory levy upon the taxpayers. There is no market test of his success in
advising people of their own true interests. He only need have ability in
acquiring the political support of the state's machinery of coercion.
Thus, the
privately hired expert will tend to flourish in proportion to his ability,
whereas the government expert will flourish in proportion to his success in
currying political favor. Moreover, the government expert will be no more
virtuous than the private one; his only superiority will be in gaining the
favor of those who wield political force. But a crucial difference between the
two is that the privately hired expert has every pecuniary incentive to care
about his clients or patients, and to do his best by them. But the government
expert has no such incentive; he obtains his revenue in any case. Hence, the
individual consumer will tend to fare better on the free market.
I hope that this
essay has contributed to clearing away the rubble of myth and misconception
about libertarianism. Conservatives and everyone else should politely be put on
notice that libertarians do not believe that everyone is good,
nor that everyone is an all-wise expert on his own interest, nor that every
individual is an isolated and hermetically sealed atom. Libertarians are not
necessarily libertines or hedonists, nor are they necessarily atheists; and
libertarians emphatically do believe in moral principles.
Let each of us now
proceed to an examination of libertarianism as it really is, unencumbered by
myth or legend. Let us look at liberty plain, without fear or favor. I am
confident that, were this to be done, libertarianism would enjoy an impressive
rise in the number of its followers.
[1] John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1958); F.A. Hayek, "The Non-Sequitur of the 'Dependence
Effect,'" Southern Economic Journal (April, 1961), pp.
346–48.
[3] For a call for applying
universal ethical standards to government, see Pitirim A. Sorokin and Walter A.
Lunden, Power and Morality: Who Shall Guard the Guardians? (Boston: Porter Sargent,
1959), pp. 16–30.
[4] Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1962), p. 66.
[5] Thomas E. Davitt, S.J.,
"St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law," in Arthur L. Harding, ed., Origins of the Natural Law Tradition (Dallas, Tex.: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1954), p. 39.
[8] On this and other
totalitarian Christian sects, see Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, N.J.:
Essential Books, 1957).
[9] Dale Vree, "Against
Socialist Fusionism," National Review (December 8, 1978),
p. 1547. Heilbroner's article was in Dissent,Summer 1978. For more
on the Vree article, see Murray N. Rothbard, "Statism, Left, Right, and
Center," Libertarian Review(January 1979), pp. 14–15.
[10] Journal of Politica1
Economy (December 1938), p. 869. Quoted in Friedrich A.
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1944), p. 152.
[11] "The Forester's
Letters, III" (orig. in Pennsylvania Journal, Apr. 24,
1776), in The Writings of Thomas Paine (ed. M. D. Conway, New
York: G. E Putnam's Sons, 1906), I, 149–150.
[13] F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1948), reemphasized in the course of his "Why I am Not a
Conservative," The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1960), p. 529.
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