Through Thick and Thin

Simon K says:

That is indeed excellent, and I agree that the testability of Holbo’s 3rd premise, that “That … treating … everyone as their own property, necessarily will … maximize freedom” is the key difference between left- and right-libertarians.

To be fair to Bryan Caplan and co, though, I actually think there are not two binary views here, but rather a spectrum of possibilities, with the key variable being how important you think the distribution of property, and/or the rules that surround the transfer of property, is to whether this statement is true. On the very furthest right (and usually also still in undergraduate school in computer science …) there are libertarians who really believe this statement is tautological, and therefore true completely regardless of the distribution of property. Bryan Caplan almost certainly does not believe that – if faced with a world in which large numbers of people were selling themselves into slavery to survive or having to scavenge for food on other’s land, or even just a demonstration that his libertarianism would lead to that, I’m 99% certain he’d relax his propertarianism. And similarly I don’t really think he believes that marriage with coverture as it actually existed was okay.

Rather I think he probably believes that self-ownership maximizes freedom given some kind of distribution and set of rules of transfer that looks more or less like the present day but that he hasn’t really thought about it terribly hard because he doesn’t totally get that whether his formal libertarianism also functionally promotes liberty depends on this at all. For me, my main stumbling block in calling myself a libertarian is that I do think we have to make some distributist assumptions to make sure that libertarianism actually promotes liberty and those assumptions tend to pull me in a liberal direction.Report