Personal Liberty? I'm Against it. Libertarianism

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I'm Still Not a Libertarian
so I guess that means I'm opposed to personal freedom
by Paul Kienitz


If there is one political movement today that is so up-and-coming that it's downright trendy, it's Libertarianism. It's become very popular in the high-tech industries, where there are a lot of people who have reaped great rewards from the operation of the free market, who are trained to an engineer's habit of reductionist problem-solving, and who tend to have less contact than the average person with the areas of human experience that don't fall within the scope of these things. Libertarianism is tremendously in evidence in places where the high-tech subculture predominates, such as in public discussion on The Net, and in the computer industry in general.

It has now become a commonplace for corporate leaders in high-tech industries to use high-toned Libertarian rhetoric to make their case for freedom from "government intervention" -- though of course, just as in traditional industry, the desire to be free of regulation tends to be highly selective. One of the types of government "intervention" that is most strongly protested is any law that holds them accountable to the public and to their own shareholders. More than one attempt has been made to get laws passed granting them, in effect, special immunity from lawsuits.

But such hypocrisy is not the issue when deciding whether one is going to personally support Libertarianism. I've had fairly extensive exposure to Libertarian beliefs and rhetoric by this time -- within the software industry, in online discussion, and elsewhere -- and believe I can say that I understand the philosophy and its arguments reasonably well. And it has not been without influence on me: as I have matured my political attitudes has definitely moved in a direction with somewhat more emphasis on individual liberty and responsibility, and less on collective action. On some issues such as gun control, I've shifted toward a more libertarian position. Nevertheless, there is no way I can be an actual Libertarian, as that term is currently understood. To me, there are many reasons to doubt that a Libertarian system is the smartest choice, and some basic fallacies underlying most arguments that doing everything according to Libertarian principles would make everything right.

The first fallacy is one I call the Fallacy of Revolution. It can be found in any movement that seeks to radically revise the underpinnings of society, whether by abolishing money, imposing a theocracy, eliminating undesirable ethnic groups, repealing all law, organizing everyone's diet according to principles of macrobiotics, or whatever other secret of a perfect society any group comes up with. In particular, it comes up in exactly equal form among communists seeking to eliminate private property and anarcho-libertarians trying to do the opposite. The fallacy can be expressed more or less as follows:

By making these radical changes, we are removing the root cause of all the failures and evils of society as it presently stands. This will eliminate all of the existing problems, and since we have no knowledge of what new problems might arise, we can assume there will be none. Everything will work right, because there are no foreseeable things that can go wrong.
In other words, since we are removing the basis by which any problems already known to us can be predicted, there is no shortcoming of the new system that can be anticipated in advance. Therefore it is within the margin of error that there might not be any at all -- that we will achieve the perfect society. Once the possibility is apparent, someone who wants to believe in the system will find every argument to show that this is not just possible but inevitable. Every counterargument that occurs to nonbelievers is met by either a tortuous chain of logic showing how people, once "freed" of money or godlessness or mongrelization or law enforcement or nonmacrobiotic misbalance of yin and yang, would spontaneously take care of the problem in the best way, or an assertion that the difficulty the nonbeliever raises is not really a problem and it's morally right that it should not be solved. The advocate of the new system simply refuses to believe in anything going wrong with it. The more radical the change from the old way, and the less we know from experience about how things would really work under the new rules, the more unshakable this belief is. He can deal with any objections by dreaming up a simple answer that's plausible enough to satisfy himself, and then just promising everyone that it's sure to work. Nobody can prove it won't. (I have heard a Libertarian answer objections from a doubting friend with nothing more than "Trust me, it will all work out.") This is why top-to-bottom revolutions can have a special appeal that evolutionary change does not: because it's easy to think that maybe all problems might be solved.
A corrolary of this fallacy is that if one believes that there is one big solution, you usually have to believe that there is only one big problem. This means that once you have identified the bad guy, he gets blamed for everything. The identified group or institution becomes a scapegoat, so that even problems that have nothing to do with it are laid at its door. What communists, anti-communists, Nazis and other ethnic nationalists, religionists, fringe feminists, and revolutionaries of every kind all have in common is that they can name the source of society's ills in one or two words. For anarchists and libertarians, the word is "government".

We can laugh now at the naive Communists of 90 years ago, with their vision of a world of peace and plenty brought about by centralized bureaucracy. (For a particularly mind-boggling example, see the polemic novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy.) The horror that came from the revolution they once viewed with starry-eyed rapture is blood-chilling to us now. But the terms it was described in before the fact are eerily reminiscent of the way the Libertarians of today foresee a revolution in the opposite direction, abolishing public property instead of private property -- and without hindsight, each argument sounds about equally credible to the listeners of its time.

This is the first reason I do not support the present Libertarian movement: because it demands that I take so much on faith. It is too clearly an article of faith that one must believe that certain untested actions will have beneficial outcomes. Since the real world offers no evidence whatever to back up these expectations as certainties, but only offers the hope that it might happen if the path is cleared, any sensible person has to conclude that trying it might be quite a gamble. But a true Libertarian, in my experience, can be depended on to insist that it's no gamble at all.

I am not going to gamble my future on a movement that bases so much of its hope on such blatant wishful thinking. Especially when the fallback belief is that, should some hopes fail, it would only mean that such failure is therefore the right outcome and should be embraced.

The second fallacy is one that I personally refer to as the Libertarian Fallacy, since unlike the Revolutionary Fallacy it is specific to this branch of philosophy. It is popular with several subtypes of conservatives and most anarchists, as well as with Libertarians. It can be expressed as the idea that freedom is measured by absence of laws. Another say of stating it is that only the government can restrict your rights. (Some Libertarians strongly support this wording, saying that a law removes or restricts your rights, but a private entity can only infringe on your rights without changing them.) To me, this is an artificial double standard, which labels a restraint on your freedom by one outfit in a completely different way than the same restraint by a different outfit, because one has the label of "government" and the other does not. Indeed, much of the fabric of reasoning in Libertarianism is based on presuming that the government is uniquely unlike any other entity, and therefore must be judged by entirely different standards from how anything else is appraised.

To me, the question is how much power others have over you and how constrained your choice of actions is, not whether the constraint is by public action rather than private action. In the viewpoint of those who hold this fallacy, what matters is how free you are on paper, not how free you are in what choices are actually open to you right now in real life. According to this view, a destitute person with no public support is more free than one who gets some kind of pension or welfare, despite the fact that the latter is the one who can do many things that are closed off to the former.

I will refer to these two definitions of freedom as F1 and F2, the former being freedom on the books and the latter being freedom available in the concrete moment. Now there can be plenty of good arguments for why F1 is somehow more essentially important than F2, but I am not going to go along with a movement that dismisses F2 from consideration. The freedom that I most value day to day is F2 -- the practical opportunity to arrange my life the way I best like, not the theoretical opportunity to do things that some random legislator might want to outlaw someday. Now F1 is indeed important, make no mistake; it is only by making sure of some guarantees in this area that we preserve our rights and make sure that F2 has a stable foundation. It is the kind we like to fight for as an ideal, because we can speak of it in noble abstract terms and magnanimously promise that it will be equal for all. No such idealization is possible for F2, since it can never be equal in practice for different people. It depends on things like how much money you have and how healthy you are. So we tend to avoid confronting the question politically, and many conservatives argue that it should not be considered at all, since that's a slippery slope leading to socialistic intervention. But in disregarding it for the sake of clarity and fairness, we can easily argue ourselves into a situation where by increasing "freedom" we curtail our opportunity in practice.

The Libertarian philosophy takes this to an extreme, sometimes arguing that even the most drastic loss of F2 is right and proper and not to be worried about for an instant if it comes about by increasing F1. In this, Libertarians can readily fall back on the tried and true argument long used by capitalist conservatives of the old school: namely that once you are free1, then whatever goes wrong for you in the area of F2 is axiomatically your own fault, and therefore it would be morally wrong to do anything but leave you to get yourself out of it however you can.

There are psychological reasons outside the scope of this discussion why our culture has often promoted an attitude of "blaming the victim", of finding reasons why anyone who suffers misfortune must have somehow brought it on themselves. This attitude manifests in extreme cases as a magical belief that whatever happens to you is something that you "chose" unconsciously. Politics aside, I find this behavior repugnant and consider it a symptom of emotional unhealth, a defense mechanism that soothes fears at the expense of other people. When any political philosophy incorporates this attitude, that philosophy and I part company. This is especially true when, as has often been the case with Republican-style conservatism, this blaming attitude is put in the service of class interests and racial and sexist biases. The argument implies that the advantaged must have earned and created their advantage through merit, whereas the disadvantaged are in a worse position strictly because of their own inadequacy. The hypocrisy of this self-serving sanctimoniosity is obvious enough, I hope, to require no elaboration here.

For anyone who believes in the principle I call the Libertarian Fallacy, it is difficult not to progress from there to some form of the it's-all-your-own-fault argument, and from there to a disregard for issues of unearned advantages held by a privileged class, race, or gender. Indeed, most Libertarians regard issues of discrimination as too intangible to support in their envisioned court system, which is usually described as being based on very clear and concrete rights focused on property. Since what I want for society is the best spread of opportunity as measured by the combination of F1 and F2, rather than by just one of them, and privilege issues greatly undercut F2 in ways that, despite smooth lies to the contrary, have nothing to do with what people have brought upon themselves, I conclude that the Libertarian agenda is not the one I want to support in this area.

When taken to an extreme, this fallacy would lead to the conclusion that the ideal system is no laws at all. Libertarians do recognize that in order for people to be free in practice, there has to be some law to define and protect their individual rights. This is an implicit recognition that less law does not always mean more freedom. By granting a minimal recognition of this and giving it no further consideration, Libertarians have, in essence, tried to declare that the problem is solved simply because it is boxed in with no wiggle room. This gives a very definite answer to such questions, but that doesn't mean it's the most realistic answer. It's just the answer that is most satisfying to a mind that wants one simple set of rules to answer every question.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/pk-is-against-liberty.html

are you against the removal of legal impediments to technological innovation and capital formation?

ruveyn

Well I have to know what you're referring to before I can provide an answer.

Found this rebuttal.

I read the rebuttal. it seems pretty small compared to the length of this essay. He also seems to be half chopping arguments into bite size portions to ignore the different foundational premises of his reasoning and then he rebuts it by asserting the libertarian axioms.

It doesn't really need a long winded rebuttal. The two points are a) they want to change society and new problems may arise so we should stay with the status quo and b)a strawman that minus government any misfortune an individual may have is their own fault.

What I pasted isn't the entire thing. I just left it off at that point for the sake of brevity.

length is irrelevant if the mesage is still the same.

He moves onto different arguments.

sometimes the core concept is flawed and no further argumentation can change that,

a different scope might

Yeah he brings the scope out to different paradoxes that may emerge and he argues that rampant income equality and decreased social mobility may occur based on the history that we have seen.

the reason it doesnt work is that he actually thinks libertarianism is a singular concept, it isnt.
before changing that scope it will always be nonsense and in that scope the current essay is nonsense.


his message about extremes is perfectly valid but it had nothing to do with libertarianism as such, it can be applied to it sure but it isnt about it.
he does acknowlede that to an extent but then continues to blame libertariansism as a concept for something where he just established that it was the methodology that was the issue.
many of the other arguments bear similar fallacies and errors of argumentation.

if you have a point to argue, do so with your own words, it breeds understanding fo the subject and if one cant then one should read till one can.

It seems like you're taking issue that libertarianism has been an identity of two different schools. His meaning is to talk about the American political party and it's beliefs. Whenever someone is arguing about a party, their scope is always limited by imperfect knowledge. Argument of that since he didn't poll every Libertarian for their opinions that this is not valid is simply a wash.

I don't see the fallacy when his meaning is to explain why he isn't a Libertarian and that among these reasons is that it is a network of axiomatic principles. In other words, the methodology is the reason to doubt.

I am referring to regulations that prevent the formation and introduction of new technologies. I am talking about subsidizing corporations at taxpayer expense. I am talking about arbitrary health and safety regulations that do not in fact guard health and safety.

Anything that sucks up money from the taxpayers into the government burocracy diminishes the potential capital for new startups.

And then there is taxation.

Here is an aphorism: a fine is a tax on doing bad. A tax is a fine on doing well. Taxation should be minimal and be dedicated to only the proper functions of government, to wit: a national defense, a police force and law courts for detecting and punishing felonies and peacefully settle disputes in torts.

ruveyn

When it comes to taxes, I would like to have a system based on value added taxes instead of a traditional income tax/property tax etc system. This would be a system where consumption was taxed rather than working, saving and investing.

What? Wouldn't taxing consumption work against this consumer economy?

Lifting taxes on savings isn't really going to lift the middle class since our savings earn marginal interest.