Holbo on Libertarianism and Propertarianism
Bleeding Heart Libertarians has an interesting symposium going about left-libertarianism, mainly of the Roderick Long/Gary Chartier variety. I’ve been following closely… …and it’s verified my hypothesis that Steve Horwitz is just about exactly right on everything:
Left-libertarians often seem to argue that even just a little bit of statism so distorts markets that the results produced by the mixed economy bear little relationship to what a freed economy would produce. Just as putting one drop of a liquid one owns into an unowned lake does not make the whole thing yours, neither does one drop of statism suddenly mean that the results of a mixed economy are vastly different from the results produced by a freed market. Overstating the transformation that freed markets would bring can lead left-libertarianism to both a dangerous utopianism about freed markets and a reluctance to challenge bad criticisms of really existing markets for fear of engaging in vulgar libertarianism. Neither vulgar libertarianism nor the more utopian moments of left-libertarianism are sufficiently nuanced to do the job. To use a phrase I used in an earlier discussion of left-libertarianism, we must carefully untangle the corporatist knot.
Steve’s carefulness weighs strongly against radicalism, and that is only the beginning of the implications one might draw from his idea-rich post. The letting-go of government power, insofar as we can do it, isn’t something we can implement, or even fully understand in outline, overnight. Yet some things are very clearly abuses that we can and should abolish immediately, and we can at times draw from libertarian political theory some justification for doing so.
But Steve’s post isn’t the one I’d like to talk about the most. That honor might go to John Holbo’s contribution, if only I were confident I knew what the hell he was getting at. Here’s a much more helpful summary, also by him:
Summary of the post. 1) autonomy has to be the goal. 2) But many libertarians are substituting propertarianism that does not plausibly optimize autonomy. 3) This is obviously no accident. There will always be those who are made uncomfortable by groups that previously did not enjoy autonomy coming to acquire it. 4) Paradoxically, libertarianism will be attractive to this lot. 5) This is such a systemic problem that it deserves address at the level of ideal theory. 6) Chartier and Johnson should be more concerned about libertarianism as a Trojan Horse for ‘vulgar libertarianism’ in their terms. They treat it as an accident, but its more essential than that.
Briefly, and in order:
I think (1) is entirely true. The goal of libertarianism, understood as a variety of liberalism, has got to be individual autonomy, and not a particular set of laws or rules to which we are a priori wedded. Yes, that means some of our political conclusions might be falsified. Bring it on!
I think (2) is not really correct. Many forms of propertarianism get summary dismissal from the left, when in fact we libertarians have reason to believe that they definitely would increase autonomy, often in ways that the left is too quick to dismiss. The clearest examples in this area are zoning, professional licensing, and small business regulations.
I think the first sentence of (3), in light of my views on (2), approaches being simply a smear. Listening to libertarians and taking them seriously would require taking seriously our claim that many (though certainly not all) forms of propertarianism do lead to greater autonomy. If you don’t want to listen to these arguments, that’s okay too, but you won’t get very far with us. We libertarians care about property a good deal. That much is baked in the libertarian cake. And it always has been, even at the very highest of theoretical levels: Take it or leave it.
I think the second sentence of (3) is manifestly true, and troubling. Rather obviously, we ought to love it when groups that previously did not enjoy very much autonomy come to acquire a whole lot of it. Nothing about individualism prohibits us from celebrating the newly acquired autonomy of a whole bunch of individuals, all at once. If absolutely necessary with a bunch of individual celebrations. But you get the idea.
I find (4) at times correct, sort of. And sort of not. One of my duties at the Cato Institute is to review unsolicited manuscripts that we receive from outside authors. Off the top of my head, we have lately gotten submissions that advocate closing the border with Mexico, getting tough on marijuana dealers, reinstating sodomy laws, and sharply curtailing the religious liberty of Muslims in the United States.
At times like these, it’s pretty clear that we need to set aside the intricate questions of political theory that tend to fascinate people like me or John Holbo. These authors just don’t have a clue about what libertarianism is.
Propertarianism versus autonomy isn’t the problem, because you could open virtually any introductory text about libertarianism and find it full of arguments that run directly counter to these submissions. We are simply being mistaken for conservatives. It’s nothing more sinister, or more theoretically interesting, than that.
Granted, with an audience that lists so hard to the right, the temptation for a libertarian to go conservative will always be strong. Rugged individualists or no, it’s super nice to be applauded. That may be why libertarians really do seem at times to decay into conservatives as they get older. (And, yeah, I do think “decay” is the right word here.)
I hardly need to mention that none of these submissions will see the light of day as Cato publications. But would it have killed their authors to look into the sorts of things we’ve published in the past? Would it have killed them to Google the altogether distinctive name of the submissions editor, and not suggest, to me, that I ought to be imprisoned?
My view is that a good deal of libertarianism’s apparent status as an appendage of the political right is an artifact of the right-fusionism that predominated during the Cold War. But if I’m right, then that’s a matter of historical contingency and thus, yes, of accident, at least as regards ideal theory, so I’d say no to (5). The Cold War ended when I was just a kid, and what I want now is a libertarianism that stands on its own two feet, and that says to both the left and the right that individuals are generally more competent to run their own lives, in almost every relevant way, than American politics has typically supposed. Particularly when the alternative is to put the government in charge, and usually then to say goodbye to personal autonomy.
Now, up to a point, I’m okay with Cato scholars being more socially liberal than their audience. After all, someone should probably make the case to the economic conservatives that social liberalism is the way to go, and we’re definitely doing that. What troubles me is that I might like to see the message get through a lot more clearly.
And as to (6), every other ideology has also become a vehicle for people who merely seek privilege and power. It should not surprise anyone that libertarianism has often done likewise. The right remedy is a healthy skepticism all around, of all of our ideological friends and enemies alike. That’s also just good mental discipline, and not terribly surprising as a conclusion. I would prescribe it for everyone if I could.
Nobody ever tries to explain libertarianism at this blog.Report
I almost didn’t post this, for fear it was getting tiresome. I scuttled a dialogue on what “markets” are after reading your explanation, which was better than anything I could have done.
I swear after this I’m writing about ketchup again.Report
As someone who’s closer, ideologically, to Holbo, I had to stop reading him because he is such a horrible writer. I mean, one of the worst I’ve encountered on a major blog (or even most minor ones. He’s pathologically ambiguous and often incomprehensible. So when I read, “if only I were confident I knew what the hell he was getting at,” my first thought, “is anyone ever?”Report
Don’t get me wrong. I did laugh out loud at several passages.Report
No, seriously, Jason, libertarians never take the time to explain libertarianism. I have it on good authority from some of my fellow commenters, and you know we’re a reliable bunch.Report
Don’t let those commentors sour your mood Prof. Remember, it’s your entire audience you’re addressing; not just them. Even in the event that they remain intransigent you may be swaying others who read the conversation.
North’s third rule of the internet: if you let commentors make you crabby for longer then fifteen minutes away from the conversation in question then you’re giving them too much power over you.Report
Too late, I’ve already done proved your rule.
I want to emphasize, though, that every time I bitch about “those” liberals, you and Kazzy are at the top of the list of liberals that aren’t included.Report
This is probably putting several carts before the horse, but here’s something I wonder about:
How would one fairly transition from current Reality to a libertarian future? To your idealized future Reality? Or fairly close to it.
Who benefits and by how much from that transition? How do you choose who benefits and by how much? Is it with our current tools of government? Does the desire for change come from the people? How do you convince those who have it better now to accept a lesser future?
Yeah, “fairly” needs to be defined. Lots of it does. Ok. Don’t really care to put that much time into this. I just wonder about it every time there is one of these posts.
These discussions are interesting to me, but I always end up wondering: “Ok, let’s say we do it your way. How do we get there? It doesn’t just happen one night while we’re all sleeping.”
I always end up realizing that there is a level of coercion necessary, that libertarians would reject, in any solution.
Feel free to return to discussing the horse and ignoring this cart.Report
Alpha Centauri seems like a good possible launch point. Mebbe Titan.Report
You mean like “gay marriage”?
You mean like “legal pot”?
There are kinds of coercion that Libertarians are quite content with: specificially, the government involving itself to protect the rights of its citizens against people who would violate those rights.
Just because we’re opposed to SWAT teams shooting dogs, doesn’t mean that we’re opposed to the use of SWAT teams shooting someone who is firing a gun into a crowded theater.
It’s just that when we look and see that SWAT teams keep going in and killing dogs *BUT* when someone is shooting up a theater, the idea is that SWAT says “we’ll wait for him to run out of bullets” that we start saying things like “why are we paying protection, again?”Report
Hey, gay marriage and legal pot are happening without some grand vision of a libertarian future. Seems like more people than libertarians are on board with those ideas. Myself included.
I’m talking about all of it. These discussions of libertarianism always focus on the theories, not the actual implementation. Or, they focus on general dislikes (your “police bad!” example), without dealing with the struggle of specific implementation in a chaotic world of conflicting priorities.
I mean, how do you get from here, to where you want the country to be? Incremental change is a fine short answer. But, it doesn’t grapple with the dirtiness of how it actually happens in each area of conflict. Is your goal to try to convince enough people that SWAT teams should attack armed gunmen and kill them more often? Does the desire for change come from the people, and, if so, how does a majority of people get action on the stated goal? I’m not really clear on the goal stated in your comment. This is what I’m talking about. I don’t even understand what you’re advocating for, because it is so general. This frustrates me about libertarians on this site (those I read, and those comments I read, anyway. Please do not assume that I have read anyone’s entire body of LOOG writing. I have much less free time than most of you seem to.).
To complete my thought, I could elocute my vision of how we get from here to my liberal future Reality. In fact, the Democrats actually *implement* some of it. Very, very rarely, the Republicans *do* some of it, as well, though they usually screw it up by trying to make money off it.
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” (good old Al)
***Please feel free to ignore this entire comment. I’m not sure I have the time for getting into a huge discussion that just goes in circles, so I’ll stop circling if it goes that way. All the libertarians seem to spend most of their time pissed off at everyone for not understanding them on this site. Everyone else spends most of their time pissed off at everyone for not understanding them on this site. Got more important things to do.Report
Hey, gay marriage and legal pot are happening without some grand vision of a libertarian future.
I’m not one of those “Libertopia” Libertarians. Never have been. The stuff I want to see happen is stuff like “gay marriage” and “legal pot”.
I mean, how do you get from here, to where you want the country to be?
I try to put my memes out there. If I can get you to pick up one or two and argue them to your friends, maybe some of them will argue these memes to their friends. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Is your goal to try to convince enough people that SWAT teams should attack armed gunmen and kill them more often?
My goal is to convince people that if SWAT does not attack armed gunmen and, presumably, kill them, I’d like to convince them to think about whether we should have them at all… and doubly so if they look at what SWAT teams actually do in practice (e.g., kill dogs).
I’d like them to look at stuff like “this is what the government *ACTUALLY* *DOES*.”
If they want to hold up examples of “but, in theory, shouldn’t we have SWAT teams for if a crazed gunman shoots up a crowded theater?”, I can then hold up examples of a crazed gunman shooting up a crowded theater and showing what SWAT did in response.
Much of “Libertopia”, if you want to call it that, looks pretty much like what we have today except gay people can get married, people can smoke weed if they want, and SWAT teams don’t kick down doors and kill dogs.
It involves giving people more freedom from meddling… and how I try to get that out there is by getting people to think thoughts like “the government shouldn’t be enabling/preventing this particular thing on my behalf.”Report
Hey, if that’s what you’re looking for Jaybird, then just wait a few years and we’ll be 2/3rds of the way there. I’m all for less stupidity all around, SWAT included. I’ll celebrate with you once we get 2 out of 3 of those things.
From my perspective, shouting about what the government ACTUALLY DOES!!!1!!1! is only going to convince most for more control, which isn’t going to solve what (I think) you want solved. “There are mistakes made, therefor…” what? This is the specifics, the dirtiness of actual implementation, that is always missing. SWAT kill dogs, you don’t like that, because they don’t also kill gunmen. What do you want to change? Less police? More police? More bureaucracy? Less? More control? Less?
My guess is that you want less police. How? What’s the policy that creates less police involvement? More regulations? More rules? More laws? Policework is based on a maze-like legal framework of what can and cannot be followed, investigated, charged, prosecuted, etc.
And, this is where I get to. You yell about SWAT, and I end up realizing that the only solution to your problem is more government or more government coercion.
End of circling.Report
Well, there’s also one more thing that is going to eventually happen.
There will be a bill that will come due. I imagine that the people who are paying the bill will say “I am not getting enough value for my money.”
At which point “extras” will be cut. An “extra” will be pretty much anything that we agree we shouldn’t have to pay for. I submit to you: if we get enough people to say “the government shouldn’t be enabling/preventing this particular thing on my behalf” (instead of “SOMEONE SHOULD DO SOMETHING!!!”), we’ll have a bigger/better/*MORE ACCURATE* list of things that, seriously, we can do without.
And, in response to people saying “but what if? What about?”, we can point to what actually happened.Report
No, actually, what will happen is those with power will keep the things they want and those without power will get screwed. Why do I know this? Because it’s happening over un Europe and it’s not as if there are careful decisions about what or what shouldn’t be paid for.Report
Perhaps another reason to point to “what actually happens”.
Who is analogous to Germany? Who is analogous to Greece?Report
Outside the ivory tower I find that most libertarians define liberty in terms of property rights. Trying to explain to them the difference between personal autonomy and their particular rights based system is like explaining to a fish what water is.
And then, if you go to a Libertarian Party convention, you will find a further conflation: a complete denial that their could be an negative utilitarian impacts to applying Rothbardian ideal strictly. Mary Ruwart epitomizes this form of delusion.Report
?”The Cold War ended when I was just a kid, and what I want now is a libertarianism that stands on its own two feet, and that says to both the left and the right that individuals are generally more competent to run their own lives, in almost every relevant way, than American politics has typically supposed.”
I like this from Jason Kuznicki. There are two many “libertarians” who think we ought to be allied with the Right as a holdover from the Cold War. This is why so many of them were terrified Gary Johnson would take votes from their candidate, Romney. That Romney was “their” candidate tells you how incapable they are of seeing things strategically.
Libertarian or classical liberal parties only have power when they are NOT the lap dog of another party. Once they are seen as faithful lap dogs two things happen: the party that has their support doesn’t feel it necessary to make concessions to them, while the party that they oppose feels such concessions are useless. When classical liberals became an appendage to one political party they cease to have much influence, if any.Report
Personally, what really blocks me from libertarianism is, well — there’s a certain sort of people who identify as “libertarian”, vote Republican, and seem solely concerned with the freedom of their wallet.
Maybe the ability to smoke pot too, but generally not.
Now, Ive met the other sort of libertarians. (And then the other other sort, the kind a libertarian friend of mine called “Privatize the Sidewalks” libertarians and then mocked). You know, the sort around here for the most part.
But deep down, when I hear Libertarian, I mentally assign three groups. Republicans voters who don’t say things like “taxation is theft” and whose libertarian rhetoric reaches as far as their pocketbook — these are the most common, and frankly the amount of daylight between them and Mitt Romney is about zero. They care about taxes, property rights, and maybe guns — that’s it.
The second is nut-case privatize the sidewalks sort — they’re the loudest and easiest to remember, and also crazy for the most part.
The last? The rare sort that seem to want to, you know, think about it, put it into practice, make it work. I like those the most, but electorally speaking, there aren’t enough to fill a bathtub.Report
I agree totally. I mean there are people on this site who were writing pieces that at least seemed to imply that if I were a “real” Liberal I would vote for Johnson, because… you know, he’s so awesome and stuff about these things that I (libertarian) believe that you (liberal) should prioritize.
There were two self-professed libertarian candidates this time around. Both of them initially entered the race as Republicans vying for the Republican nomination. It was only after reality gob-smacked him in the head that Johnson switched to the LP. Paul’s too thick to even get that memo.
Dude, I’m a liberal Democrat. Why precisely is it again, that you think I should vote for a Republican? Why do you think I ever would?
Here’s the thing I don’t get about libertarians. In general, they tend to align themselves politically with the right under the assumption that Republicans are actually interested in economic liberty. But as Jason noted at the end of his previous post, it’s not at all clear that the Republican and libertarian definitions of economic liberty are really all that congruent. So… it’s like show up for the deregulation; stick around for the drug war.
When you look around at what’s actually happening, where progress is being made in the areas that libertarians say are important to them, such progress is actually being driven by liberal, progressive, Democrats. Not by libertarians caucusing with the Republicans. Which isn’t to say that the mainstream Democrats are really closeted libertarians, but right now there actually exists a caucus of liberal Democrats who forthrightly espouse many of the positions that you claim to care about, while on the other side the movement along the social dimension has been even farther in the other direction, and the purported economic liberty they offer is usually just favors and subsidies for big business.
Has it never occurred to you libbies that you might have more luck influencing Dems in the economic realm? Cuz there’s a lot of granola crunchy Liberals (like me) that actually agree with much of what you say, though admittedly not all. But at least we can have an honest discussion while working together to accomplish some peace-and-love stuff.
Bottom line for me is that I’ll consider electorally supporting Libertarians when a) they stop caucusing with the Republicans, b) stop effectively prioritizing economic issues over social issues, and c) fer cris-sakes get your noses out of the butt-cheeks of evil, billionaire, bastards like the Koch brothers. And don’t tell me how the Koch boys “aren’t so bad.” They’ve turned my state, Kansas where they’re empire is based, into a Tea-bagger paradise where starting next year, I will actually pay more state income tax than they will. Roll that around in your head for a minute. That’s because they will pay zero state income taxes. Business-owners and investors will pay zero state taxes. The entire tax burden will rest on people like me that get W2’s in January.Report
You sound like you are part of the true politically homeless niche I identify on my site. Instead of the Nolan Chart’s Personal Freedom-Economic Freedom axes, consider amount of government as the vertical axis with less being up. Now make equality the horizontal axis with left being more equality. The Democratic Party occupies mainly the lower left. The Republican Party has both upper right and lower right. The LP is WAY WAY up center. The upper left is mostly unoccupied.
That is the true opportunity for a third party.Report
Agreed. But I think it’s important to remember Holbo’s appears to be an insider’s critique, or at least a critique addressed to insiders (i.e., here: self-identified libertarians). While we all must guard against this tendency common to all ideologies, it’s worth some introspection as to how libertarians in particular will, just as I’m compelled to do when it comes to the type of liberalism I endorse.
I think your response here potentially misconstrues what Holbo meant (although I admit that like you, after reading the linked post, I found it hard to figure out exactly what he was saying). I don’t think Holbo is saying that proprietarianism “never” plausibly optimizes autonomy, just that it, or some forms of it, sometimes doesn’t/don’t.Report