My previous academic engagement with critical literature came in the form of an all-encompassing criticism of government action as practically impossible and wrong, nearly always and everywhere. This viewpoint, while in my eyes not entirely false, is way too simplistic. Particularly in the case of my article, The Raging Leviathan, the argument was at times convoluted and necessitates a rearticulation.
The principal problem with my original article was that it was unclear whether the article represented a poor attempt at defending capitalism or a specific defense of liberty as the core principle for governance. I hope to rectify that confusion in this article.
The purpose of this entry is two-fold:
- To A. clarify what I believe to be the most clear, concise, and specific philosophical defense of libertarian ideals in the context of growing sentiment in American politics that believes the government must be the one to solve our problems
- and, B. to respond to some common critiques of libertarianism as it has developed into the ideological niche it occupies today.
The Primacy of Liberty
This section can never be comprehensive and a simple attempt at establishing the primacy of liberty in one article will certainly not be sufficient. There are whole books on the concept of liberty as a crucial and central good for society, yet there is still a rather large gap in the literature. Despite the seemingly daunting task of placing liberty before all other goods in a philosophical sense, I will do my best to present a justification for the efficacy of liberty.
Beforehand, I want to clarify something. When libertarians say “liberty is supreme,” or something along those lines, they don’t mean that liberty is the only value that matters. Liberty is a political good. Liberty in policy and statecraft is a key link between all other values in society. Without liberty, life becomes impossible, in a double sense (both that you may actually die absent of the free capacity to better your conditions, and you may spiritually die, in a sense, because the absence of liberty is the allowance of slavery). Liberty should be the central political good for a couple reasons. Now I delve into the argument.
It’s important to establish the capacity of humans to reason. Independent of theological claims, humans are rational. Kant made this argument the best but it’s important to remember that humans have capacity for logical reason and can, thus, tap into natural law and make moral decisions. This implies that natural law is discoverable by the utilization of reason in a scientific and physical sense, not a theological one. No matter your religious beliefs, it is important to understand that you have the capacity to utilize you creativity, free will, and independence to make decisions, and to be to a moral agent.
According to Murray Rothbard, this should be a sufficiently radical claim to dethrone the state. If humans have capacity to act in their own best interest alone, the state should not be necessary to enforce it. However, a statement about property rights is first necessary.
Calling back to the Lockean notion of rights, it is clear that Earthly resources are communal and global in nature. However, most of what is useful about these resources cannot be discovered absent of human intervention. Humans impose their labor of the Earthly commons and thus infuse a part of themselves into the Earth, making it their own. Though Locke embedded this argument in a theological conception, namely the existence of God and his provision for humanity, this is not necessary. Even violently secular communists acknowledge that there is a commons for all humans to access, they just don’t believe in the system of government that upholds property.
You may now be wondering why it is that I take such care to make this ethical system seem secular. I do so to make the libertarian political framework a truly universal one, one whereby all people can accept that liberty is good, the state should be limited, and libertarianism is thus wholly good, regardless of their religious conviction.
Now, it is also true that Locke is riddled with inconsistencies that each could warrant their own chapter, so we will not cover them here. Numerous following philosophers, such as the nineteenth-century German-American theorist Francis Lieber, the nineteenth-century American Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and Theodore Woolsey, a nineteenth-century natural rights philosopher, have all defended humans as necessarily equal in their capacity to access natural law, despite some mental conditions, for despite medical capacity humans are still humans. This means that all humans should be afforded certain natural, inherent, inalienable rights regardless of what the government desires.
These rights have evolved to implicate political considerations – for example, the American and French revolutions – and reasonably so. While I have argued that these rights are a result of natural principles, that is not sufficient to enforce them. For example, even if you have the right to self-defense, that’s irrelevant if someone kills you and then robs you. You can’t defend yourself. This points to the need for a legal institution to enforce these rights.
The question then becomes one of political philosophy. If the state must uphold moral values, it only makes sense for it to do so for the sake of liberty. Placing any value before liberty is always and everywhere unsuccessful. For further reading on this point, see Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick and The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard.
State Action as a Minimal yet Necessary Evil
There is an interesting debate in libertarian circles about whether or not the state itself is actually justified. While I won’t get into the whole debate here, I’ll summarize the dispute. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argued that the state is justified in its existence because it is a naturally occurring structure. He claimed that one could imagine a free state of humanity whereby a government, the minimal state to be specific, emerges freely. The argument goes like this: A stateless society where people rob each other and whatnot, so some companies offer insurance and protection, they then gradually grow in power, they begin to oversee certain large spaces of land, and next thing you know, you have a state. This was unconvincing to Murray Rothbard and the Anarcho-capitalists who claim that there are no empirical examples of such
Despite this ongoing debate, the rest of this article will continue with the notion that a state is likely necessary and justified because, if it was so inherently evil to mandate protections, why haven’t any modern day anarchist communities done anything but descend into chaos. In my opinion, citing a medieval Icelandic community that existed with guilds rather than government is not sufficient to convince me that the whole nation should rid itself of all political institutions, but I digress.
The state’s role in society, given the framework of liberty, is three-pronged. It provides a way to enforce property rights and liberty dometically, ie. a police system to prevent interpersonal coercion. It also provides a protection mechanisms for the nation as a whole in the form of a military. It also requires a court or legislative system, principally so that citizens may hash out their disputes. This framework is generally referred to as “minarchism.”
Beyond this role, this government could conceivably provide a welfare scheme, however, only if it’s one that functions not to limit civil liberties and genuinely yet definitively promotes well being. Libertarians are skeptical of all government action but policies like the negative income tax can be useful for providing equality of opportunity in the ideal libertarian society.
Libertarian society would also entail a relatively familiar concept amongst libertarians, however, in a more specific form. Voluntary and free-associating individuals within the libertarian minimal state could organize themselves into small polities, what I call “private societies.” The freedom rendered possible by the minimal state in no way prohibits these from forming. They can include institutions, perhaps democratic ones, and function like city states or like upscale neighborhoods where you get the services nearby (like schooling, location, public facilities, proximity to places like work or shopping) so long as you opt into it by paying taxes for example. This is an idea that requires more developing, but it conceptually is allowed in a libertarian society.
Democracy and Libertarianism
A sizable portion of this article will be dedicated to a clarification of the position my libertarian perspective takes on democracy. It has commonly been stated that, given libertarianism’s disavowal of unnecessary government action and stalwart defense of absolute property rights in all instances, it is impossible for democracy to function. Even Robert Nozick, a forefather of the modern libertarian movement, relinquished his libertarian position at the end of his life, stating it is too hostile to democracy.
This view, that libertarianism and democracy are incompatible, is a commonly repeated criticism by defenders of the status quo and is also dead wrong. There are several reasons this argument is flawed which warrant fleshing out. It’s been a long time since academic literature surrounding libertarianism has clarified its stance on democracy and the minimal state so this defense is crucial.
First, a critical analysis of why democracy is held on such a high pedestal is warranted. The USAID, the government agency in charge of foreign aid, states “Democracies deliver. They deliver stronger, more resilient economies. They deliver better opportunities for citizens and outcomes for communities. And they deliver freer, more inclusive, more just societies.” This isn’t always the case.
While it’s true that, at least in principal, democracies give voice to the marginalized, it doesn’t always work out that way. Democracies are prone to inefficiencies, failures and corruption that render the achievement of these benefits very difficult. There are a couple of ways this manifests.
A. The Tyranny of the Majority. Something that seems beneficial to one large, majority group, may be detrimental to others. Policies that hurt a minority are permitted and even encouraged under a democracy, and that’s obvious in today’s society. From the war on terror to the crisis at the Southern border to even historical instances like the institution of slavery, democracy has failed to sustain its alleged ideals of “freedom” for everyone. Take an extreme example, if 51% of the population of the United States thought that 49% should be murdered, in a society that places democracy on the absolute highest pedestal, this would be okay. Of course, modern democracies attempt to find a way to balance this with certain unbreakable rights, but it’s a slippery slope from one acceptable violation of liberty to the next and, eventually, to atrocity. This is called the tyranny of the majority and it is a real threat, for the electorate can even become the very downfall of this purportedly free system itself. As is stated by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, American political scientists, in their 2019 book How Democracies Die, “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
B. Corruption. It doesn’t take much for one to look around and see the rampant corruption inherent to democratic societies. It’s a necessary part of democratic societies that all entities, even the hyper rich, influence the government. The problem with the notion that they all have equal representation, one no more than the other, is that it’s efficacy presumes a “Ship of State” functioning of government, whereby the leaders in charge are perfect, trained agents who know how to run a government. While its argued that the people know better, all arguments for democracy fall apart when it becomes clear that people still manage to elect foolish leaders who can be influenced, bribed, and corrupted by the wealthy and affluent special interest groups of our day.
Democracies are not necessarily better for freedom than the totalitarian political systems they claim to replace. Monarchies discriminated against people based on visible race, subjugated certain peoples and groups like women. Democracies of our age have done the same. Segregation and women’s rights, while progress has been made, were long lasting results of democratic solutions to monarchical and feudal problems. These qualms are no more acceptable under democracies than they are under any other system.
Second, however less importantly than simply arguing libertarianism is better than democracy, is rectifying the libertarian minimal state with the more laudable justification for democracy: its dedication to freedom and equality. There are a couple ways of conceiving of this analysis. Of course, the above mentioned “private societies” could be employed here in the form of democratic institutions to ensure a democracy is inherently limited in its corruptible nature. This, I think, would be the most likely result of the deployment of a libertarian society because of how similar it would seem to the ideal form of the governmental structure we have now – the one most people likely favor – where the federal government simply upholds certain laws for the whole union, but states and counties are responsible for more contingent actions like welfare, education, and so on. Additionally, even if that’s not possible, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nozick endorsed what he called the zig-zag nature of democratic politics in his final work, The Examined Life: politics are always in an oscillating state to balance the different needs and wants of the electorate. This is not better for liberty than the above stated framework. It again falls victim to influence by special interest groups and the majority.
Conclusion
In conclusion, liberty should be viewed as the prime goal in society. It’s not necessarily theological and can, thus, be applied universally. Once accepted and applied to the state, no matter which value you claim to hold to an equal measure, it’s always captured by the primacy of liberty as the sole political goal for society. In addition to the then provided philosophical framework for libertarian society, I clarify the dispute between libertarianism and democracy. I argue that they are not necessarily incompatible, but if they are, it’s likely for the best.
But, regardless of what you think about libertarianism, natural rights, or even philosophy’s importance in society, it is important to remember that there are real, changing events daily that affect us in ways beyond what is described in newspapers, which themselves represent the views of the 2 major political parties. Inform yourself and educate yourself; these are the real defenses of free society.
