Blogger Noah Smith’s praise for libertarianism comes at an odd time but offers an opportunity to clarify the side that has contributed to human freedom and flourishing
I agree that libertarianism is owed an apology, but less so libertarians themselves. I saw too many commentators in that space throw up their hands with a "gee, both sides are just so bad, so I don't know" when one side was clearly worse. They're so obsessed with a fringe online left that is mostly limited to Ivy League college campuses that they're blind to much bigger threats on the right. We now have a guy locking people up without due process, hiking taxes via executive order, and trying to control the economy through central planning, much of it motivated by the ability of people to bribe him. Even today, you see John Stossel (a journalist I used to admire) post far more content about left-wing media activists (who hold no real political power and likely never will) than he does about Trump's tariffs (i.e., the one with actual power)
"Noah, in a previous post, had rightly criticized libertarianism for ignoring threats to liberty posed by non-state institutions ('local bullies') like corporations, churches, and schools (which was another reason I was surprised by his complimentary follow up). Each of these organizations wields an enormous amount of power over people’s lives, including the power to restrict their freedom according to any ordinary understanding of that term."
This is obviously and absurdly wrong. If you don't like what a corporation does to you, you are free to work for a different one and/or decline to purchase its products. If you don't like a church, you are free to formally renounce it or just never attend it. And thanks to the efforts of charter school and homeschooling advocates, you can freely withdraw your children from a school and send them to a different one. (There is an issue here regarding the liberty of the children themselves, which is one reason the age of majority should be lower, but that's not really the point being made.) Corporations and churches can restrict people's freedom through illegal acts of physical harm to their persons or property, or plausible-deniability encouragement of same, but preventing that is a question of enforcing laws that are entirely consistent with libertarian principles. Any other ability they have to restrict freedom is granted to them and ultimately enforced by the state, in contravention of libertarian principles.
In stark contrast, law and government is not voluntary. It is not an agreement out of which you are free to opt. The law and the coercive power of the state to enforce it is applied to you, based on where you happened to be born and where you go, and there is no escape from it. In theory, one can emigrate, but almost every country has immigration rules that give you even less liberty once there, and not one hectare of land one can scrape a living on remains unclaimed on Earth, and the technology and infrastructure to live off it does not yet exist. All humanity lives under a state.
"If you don't like what a corporation does to you, you are free to work for a different one and/or decline to purchase its products."
But if, for instance, my favourite brand of chocolate ceases to be manufactured because there are not enough buyers for it other than myself, the outcome for me is precisely the same as it would have been if the state had passed a law banning the chocolate (or if an unelected bureaucrat in some Soviet-type economy had decided to end its manufacture). In other words, voting with one's wallet too has direct negative consequences for the freedom of other people, just like voting for legislators has.
And even where what I want is in fact manufactured, economies of scale mean that it's cheaper to be conformist than to be nonconformist. Because, as the economist Tibor Scitovsky wrote in his still underrated 1976 book The Joyless Economy:
"A person finds his tastes well catered to if he is conformist enough to share them with millions of others, because the things he then wants are profitable to mass produce and to sell at prices lowered by mass production. By contrast, a person with eccentric tastes who wishes to pursue a divergent life-style will be discouraged by the high prices or unavailability of the things he wants. If he is a millionaire as well as an eccentric, he can afford both to pay the high prices and to have the unavailable things made available, which, after all, is usually just a matter of paying even higher prices. The more advanced the economy, the greater the economies of scale, and the greater the difference in price between what is mass-produced and what is not, between conformity to the established life-style and preference for a divergent one. [...] In the modern economy, therefore, wherever economies of scale lead to important reductions in cost, plutocracy is combined with mob rule: the crowd's ability to get those things on whose desirability its members agree."
I see your point and have observed this myself, but there is a major exception: goods with very inelastic supply. Land, for example, is extremely cheap in northwestern Maine. If you do want to live in northwestern Maine, you can get a great deal. Many such cases.
I get where you’re coming from on this. And I used to make basically the same argument myself. But I’ve come to think that while it still captures an important truth, it generalizes too broadly and thereby leaves us with an overly simplistic view of freedom.
Your point about corporations, for instance, is true in a wide range of cases. If my university were to fire me tomorrow, or to impose a policy that I found so objectionable that it made me want to quit, I’d be OK. I have a decent range of options to fall back on, and so the university’s ability to compel me to act as it wishes is pretty limited.
But this is a contingent fact about my own individual situation. If things were different - if I didn’t have a range of options to fall back on, things might look pretty different. Suppose that my employer told me that I had to show up for a pro-Trump rally or else I’d be fired? And suppose being fired meant that I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent, and that me and my family would be out on the street? To me, that looks a lot like a situation in which the employer really does wield coercive power over me. It might not involve physical aggression or the threat thereof, of the sort that libertarians typically view as a necessary condition for the violation of rights. But to me, that seems like an indication of the inadequacy of the standard libertarian conception of freedom.
This is the kind of thing that critics of libertarianism like Elizabeth Anderson (Private Government) and Sohrab Ahmari (Tyranny Inc.) worry about, and righty so I think. Market competition and the right to exit are incredible things, and they do a lot to promote human freedom. But even Hayek recognized that they can fall short in certain circumstances, and that when they do private actors can wield coercive powers that should trouble defenders of human liberty.
Your information about the Libertarian Party is out of date. Angela is out as LP Chair, and an officer of the Classical Liberal Caucus is in. Whether there's anything left to save remains to be seen, but the organization is returning to its roots.
Every American is at heart a libertarian. Libertarianism is not binary it is a spectrum. We all fall somewhere on that spectrum either on issues of personal freedom, or on economics. Libertarianism is not monolithic.
Ideological libertarianism shares the same weaknesses of all political ideologies.
Every so-called argument in support of libertarianism can be easily shot down in flames. Libertarianism is pathetic in it's incohesiveness, vagueness and lack of academic rigor. Unlike, say Democratic Socialism.
Empathy is an individual attribute. Care doesn't scale. The only people who consider themselves "masses" are self-serving apparatchiks claiming to speak on "the masses'" behalf.
I agree that libertarianism is owed an apology, but less so libertarians themselves. I saw too many commentators in that space throw up their hands with a "gee, both sides are just so bad, so I don't know" when one side was clearly worse. They're so obsessed with a fringe online left that is mostly limited to Ivy League college campuses that they're blind to much bigger threats on the right. We now have a guy locking people up without due process, hiking taxes via executive order, and trying to control the economy through central planning, much of it motivated by the ability of people to bribe him. Even today, you see John Stossel (a journalist I used to admire) post far more content about left-wing media activists (who hold no real political power and likely never will) than he does about Trump's tariffs (i.e., the one with actual power)
"Noah, in a previous post, had rightly criticized libertarianism for ignoring threats to liberty posed by non-state institutions ('local bullies') like corporations, churches, and schools (which was another reason I was surprised by his complimentary follow up). Each of these organizations wields an enormous amount of power over people’s lives, including the power to restrict their freedom according to any ordinary understanding of that term."
This is obviously and absurdly wrong. If you don't like what a corporation does to you, you are free to work for a different one and/or decline to purchase its products. If you don't like a church, you are free to formally renounce it or just never attend it. And thanks to the efforts of charter school and homeschooling advocates, you can freely withdraw your children from a school and send them to a different one. (There is an issue here regarding the liberty of the children themselves, which is one reason the age of majority should be lower, but that's not really the point being made.) Corporations and churches can restrict people's freedom through illegal acts of physical harm to their persons or property, or plausible-deniability encouragement of same, but preventing that is a question of enforcing laws that are entirely consistent with libertarian principles. Any other ability they have to restrict freedom is granted to them and ultimately enforced by the state, in contravention of libertarian principles.
In stark contrast, law and government is not voluntary. It is not an agreement out of which you are free to opt. The law and the coercive power of the state to enforce it is applied to you, based on where you happened to be born and where you go, and there is no escape from it. In theory, one can emigrate, but almost every country has immigration rules that give you even less liberty once there, and not one hectare of land one can scrape a living on remains unclaimed on Earth, and the technology and infrastructure to live off it does not yet exist. All humanity lives under a state.
"If you don't like what a corporation does to you, you are free to work for a different one and/or decline to purchase its products."
But if, for instance, my favourite brand of chocolate ceases to be manufactured because there are not enough buyers for it other than myself, the outcome for me is precisely the same as it would have been if the state had passed a law banning the chocolate (or if an unelected bureaucrat in some Soviet-type economy had decided to end its manufacture). In other words, voting with one's wallet too has direct negative consequences for the freedom of other people, just like voting for legislators has.
And even where what I want is in fact manufactured, economies of scale mean that it's cheaper to be conformist than to be nonconformist. Because, as the economist Tibor Scitovsky wrote in his still underrated 1976 book The Joyless Economy:
"A person finds his tastes well catered to if he is conformist enough to share them with millions of others, because the things he then wants are profitable to mass produce and to sell at prices lowered by mass production. By contrast, a person with eccentric tastes who wishes to pursue a divergent life-style will be discouraged by the high prices or unavailability of the things he wants. If he is a millionaire as well as an eccentric, he can afford both to pay the high prices and to have the unavailable things made available, which, after all, is usually just a matter of paying even higher prices. The more advanced the economy, the greater the economies of scale, and the greater the difference in price between what is mass-produced and what is not, between conformity to the established life-style and preference for a divergent one. [...] In the modern economy, therefore, wherever economies of scale lead to important reductions in cost, plutocracy is combined with mob rule: the crowd's ability to get those things on whose desirability its members agree."
I see your point and have observed this myself, but there is a major exception: goods with very inelastic supply. Land, for example, is extremely cheap in northwestern Maine. If you do want to live in northwestern Maine, you can get a great deal. Many such cases.
I get where you’re coming from on this. And I used to make basically the same argument myself. But I’ve come to think that while it still captures an important truth, it generalizes too broadly and thereby leaves us with an overly simplistic view of freedom.
Your point about corporations, for instance, is true in a wide range of cases. If my university were to fire me tomorrow, or to impose a policy that I found so objectionable that it made me want to quit, I’d be OK. I have a decent range of options to fall back on, and so the university’s ability to compel me to act as it wishes is pretty limited.
But this is a contingent fact about my own individual situation. If things were different - if I didn’t have a range of options to fall back on, things might look pretty different. Suppose that my employer told me that I had to show up for a pro-Trump rally or else I’d be fired? And suppose being fired meant that I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent, and that me and my family would be out on the street? To me, that looks a lot like a situation in which the employer really does wield coercive power over me. It might not involve physical aggression or the threat thereof, of the sort that libertarians typically view as a necessary condition for the violation of rights. But to me, that seems like an indication of the inadequacy of the standard libertarian conception of freedom.
This is the kind of thing that critics of libertarianism like Elizabeth Anderson (Private Government) and Sohrab Ahmari (Tyranny Inc.) worry about, and righty so I think. Market competition and the right to exit are incredible things, and they do a lot to promote human freedom. But even Hayek recognized that they can fall short in certain circumstances, and that when they do private actors can wield coercive powers that should trouble defenders of human liberty.
Your information about the Libertarian Party is out of date. Angela is out as LP Chair, and an officer of the Classical Liberal Caucus is in. Whether there's anything left to save remains to be seen, but the organization is returning to its roots.
The irony about Libertarians today is that 50 years ago their philosophy was much closer to the "sha-la-la-la-la live for today" drug-baked progs.
"Everyone must get stoned" has morphed into the "righteous king" knows what's best.
Every American is at heart a libertarian. Libertarianism is not binary it is a spectrum. We all fall somewhere on that spectrum either on issues of personal freedom, or on economics. Libertarianism is not monolithic.
Ideological libertarianism shares the same weaknesses of all political ideologies.
Good unpacking
Libertarianism - everyone is a Boss and there are No Workers
Except for those who work in the retail industry catering to the wants of those with the $$$$. 😉
How is a working proletariat retail laborer a Libertarian?
Every so-called argument in support of libertarianism can be easily shot down in flames. Libertarianism is pathetic in it's incohesiveness, vagueness and lack of academic rigor. Unlike, say Democratic Socialism.
This reads like a joke.
Libertarians support theft from the common wealth.
Empathy is an individual attribute. Care doesn't scale. The only people who consider themselves "masses" are self-serving apparatchiks claiming to speak on "the masses'" behalf.
Nice article, Matt Zwolinski.