Libertarianism ("do nothing") is always weaker than authoritarianism ("do something"). Where Libertarians need to step up is in making the argument against the case of "doing something". But, as we saw during Covid, many Libertarians don't actually agree on "doing nothing" or in fighting against the "do something" agenda.
In other words, there are far fewer Libertarians in practice than there are in theory - everyone is a Libertarian about what they want, few are Libertarians in defending others to do as they please.
I appreciate the true Libertarian believers - such as Don Boudreaux. For even if I don't accept all his positions, I know he is defending my liberty and I am grateful for that. Milquetoast Libertarians are a nuisance. They promote liberty for all their favorite causes - Ukraine, gays, big business, etc, but will never lift a finger to defend the liberty of the people and groups they don't like.
Being personally familiar with each of Fischer's "factions" I find each simultaneously admirable and insufferable. Ultimately I align myself politically with the "Quakers" but my empathy is for the "borderers" - the "Scottish-Irish" who just want to be left alone.
"but my empathy is for the "borderers" - the "Scottish-Irish" who just want to be left alone."
Not really. They want to be left alone in some ways, but not as regards those 'entitlements' which Arnold mentioned in the OP, and there is no better illustration of that attitude than the "keep your government hands off my Medicare" meme.
There is no profit in assigning moralistic interpretations to this sad state of affairs, whether culpability can be meaningfully assigned in terms of them having done it to themselves or the moral-dyad version of it having been "done to them", but we can still learn - yet again - the general lesson about the spiritually corrupting influence of certain "social safety net" programs and the long-term dependencies that tend to form in consequence.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you, sure, but also, watch out you don't sell your soul just so the milk-bones keep on coming. The big steps in the growth of government in the last century became irreversibly entrenched in precisely this manner.
This is in line with my comment about there now having been far too much water under the bridge and us not really living in "Albion's Seed America" much anymore.
Trump was morally and politically right to defend Social Security and government entitlements. Reason being those are the social contract. The idea that anti-government advocates must disown social welfare, or else they must accept all government is a sophistry. This argument actually supports the anti-government perspective that government doesn't just want to help, it wants control.
If we cut entitlements, what do we think is going to happen? You think they are going to pay down the debt?
I think they will turn right around and give it to our enemies.
For better or worse, my parents paid into SS & Medicare their whole lives and if it goes away I will probably end up with the same taxes but have to support them.
If some fantasy bill arrives that directly cuts SS to fund child tax credits comes round maybe I will support it, but its never going to happen.
*Trying to get medical cost trend down is a different story than mere austerity, but also much more difficult.
But when one can infect others by "just being be left alone" that's not enough. When there are externalities, "something" should be done Libertarian (Tabarrok being a sterling exception) failed us by not pushing toward the right "what," not nothing.
I don't have a "team," just an opinion, which I recognize could be mistaken. To be a bit more specific, I think the vaccine when it first came out and was still well optimized for the variants in circulation did prevent some spread as did masking and discouraging crowded poorly ventilated indoor spaces. So some measures to get people to internalize the externality they caused is legitimate. The argument ought to be given the externality what amount of incentive/disincentive is optimal. CDC never properly made this argument or produced data that would have allowed other policy makers to craft cost effective policies. Consequently we got parks being closed at some small cost and no benefit and schools being closed at some small benefit but huge costs.
THAT is the kind of intervention that I would have liked to see Libertarians make. It would have engaging with the murky changing data and cost0benefit analysis., not appeals to "liberty" of whatever variety.
I'm not on any "team" and I did not censor anyone.
My opinion is simply that I think the way to think about, discuss, and advocate for appropriate public health response, indeed, one's individual response, is cost benefit analysis taking account that some of the benefits will accrue to people that the person bearing the cost will not infect.
Clearly this is not the way the Public Health Establishment made it's recommendations and policy makers responded, but I still think it is important to think about what that response should have been.
"freedom without restraints of law or custom" sounds like "defund the police" and "what do you mean I can't groom your kids?" - very Trumpy
the problem is that you can't really expect the american coastal elites to know the difference between one tribe of americans and another
everyone who is not them is a redneck
Trumps' base is the petit bourgeoisie and the working class (they do ordered and reciprocal liberties) but Gov/media/academia types can't tell the difference between a plumber and an appalachian moonshiner
Quite good sets of freedom that are similar but different. But it's not the type of freedom that's so different as much as the abstract/ in-practice split.
"These two factions have really parted ways on issues of trade, immigration, entitlements, and foreign intervention."
It's intellectual "freedom in theory" folk splitting against practical, local "freedom in practice" folk; college educated, indoctrinated, intellectuals. The college vs non-college split today dominates the other prior type of freedom differences, but multiple axes remain hard to graph or think or talk about.
Since Vietnam, but even more relevantly since Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - those favoring fighting in foreign wars have created what looks like lousy results.*
Trump seems more right than the conservative interventionists - but in 4 years in power, he avoided "running away" in Afghanistan and losing to the Taliban, despite being against that nation-building military exercise. [Paul Ryan intellectuals were OK with endless war - and few kids of intellectuals dying.]
Trade and being trade dependent on hostile-to-freedom Communist China is a lousy idea, today. There was an argument that supporting Chinese trade & WTO would help move China to more freedom, and it certainly helped create a HUGE Chinese "middle class", including those who put life-savings into a now-failing Chinese bank that won't give the money.
Trump was correct. [not Paul Ryan]
Similarly, Europe being dependent on not-really democrat Russia for oil and especially gas is clearly a bad idea - and was a bad idea even before Trump publicly told EU intellectuals that truth, but was laughed at then. [by Germans, tho also Paul Ryan types]
Illegal immigration is lousy for "rule of law", and it's clear that such immigrants are hired to do work in America at lower wages than the company would have to pay to citizens. Legal immigrants are much better but also do push down local programmer wages in Silicon Valley as higher paid semi-indentured servants of Big tech, tho it hugely helps the individual immigrants and, over time, America. Not only Republicans, but even most Democrats pay lip-service to being against illegal aliens, tho often supporting Open Borders in practice. Rep registered but Libber supporting Milton Friedman often noted that he can't support Open Borders, nor are they practical, until gov't welfare entitlements are repealed. [Paul Ryan lip-service only against illegals?]
Entitlements repealed? Ain't gonna happen. Free money from the gov't to pay for the mistakes and bad luck, and yearly aging, of the carless, irresponsible, and elderly folk - keeping grandparents out of poverty is a hugely desired social good. Until Libertarians (or others) provide a practical way to migrate away from Social Security, few benefits will be cut.
Trump was politically correct, in terms of getting votes not merely PC/woke, to keep them or expand them. He failed to reduce them, wrongly but to popular acclaim AND in a failure less than Hillary would have done, or Biden is now doing.
On entitlement reform, Trump was the lesser failure. Paul Ryan would have been far, far better -- but that's primarily why he was so horribly, totally unpopular with voters.
Arnold and most intellectuals, both Paul Ryan supporters and NeverTrump Republicans, continue to have some TDS ticks and aren't quite honest about Trump results vs Democrat results. Instead, they compare real Trump against some unreal ideal alternative even further away from today's Democrats. (Not so different from Marxists' reasonable criticisms of capitalism becoming terrible in supporting unreal alternatives.)
A huge little discussed issue is the reality that low IQ folk, stupid folk, more often make stupid decisions. That cause problems which "somebody" has to pay for. Often such stupid folk don't have the money to pay for their own mistakes - so how much freedom should they have to make such mistakes which then must be paid for by other folk?
Even tho there are more stupid white folk than black folk (less than 85? 80? 76? IQ), the reality of lower black averages means even talking about group IQs can be called racist. And no amount nor type of education makes stupid folk good intellectuals, nor smarter. One key educational reform I'd like is an emphasis on avoiding making life choices with high probabilities of being a mistake, having a bad outcome. "Less freedom for dumb folk" is less likely to be politically possible than entitlement repeal.
Personal note:
I'm in Slovakia because of my meeting in London with the Libertarian Alliance, and joining Tim Evans in going to Slovakia, where Sean Gabb also advised the Slovak gov't for a year. Nice quick history of LA (not SK) by Sean. http://libertarian.co.uk Other LA folk continue with Samizdata.net, like this:
*I'd prefer Iraq split into Shia Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurd - but that's not quite in the cards. I'm glad South Sudan split from their Northern Muslim "masters". I used to be a mild neo-Con, but now support trade sanctions far far more than military force.
"America First patriots Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Abe Hamadeh were among the Trump-backed patriots who won on Tuesday. [AZ GOP leader Kelli] Ward backed them all and will try to push them to victory in the November general election."
The Republican Party is getting rid, slowly, of GOPe & NeverTrump folk who claim to be conservative but didn't support Trump policies.
If 2024 is an election fight between the college-indoctrinated plus welfare folk vs non-college workers, in a 100% Free and Fair election, the workers will win.
Lots of smart Reps want DeSantis 2024, I'd be fine with that but don't think it likely he beats a Trump fighting it. On the topic of Freedom, here's a new DeSantis ad:
Substack says that my response - at ... let's see here, yikes ... 2,000 words (sorry!) - is too long for a single comment. Please allow me to reply to it to serialize, thanks.
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I think Saint-Andre and Postrel are missing another key development and source of tension in the overall libertarian scene that happened mostly post-WWII and cannot fairly be traced back to Albion's Seed-era roots. It led in part to the evolution of "Orange Line Libertarianism" (a big tent term for what is in reality a small number of people), and their gradual ideological separation from the rest of the scene.
I'm not talking about the more recent trend of splinter so-called """libertarian""" groups simply selling out (literally, and cheaply, it seems) to the progressives in an incoherent and unprincipled fasion (not that they don't spill a lot of ink trying to convince themselves and other dupes otherwise). That is its own problem - and one to which Orange Liners were particularly susceptible - but one can dismiss the nonsensical shenanigans of the fake libertarians as not having any relevance to the analysis of intellectual and ideological splits among actual libertarians.
And while there is a strong correlation with the split I'll describe, I am also not talking about the genuine and intellectually serious - and more right-vs-left pattern-matching - split between the "libertarianism in one country" types flavored with nationalist realism (a kind of chauvinism) and the "libertarianism without borders" types flavored with universalist humanism (a kind of utopianism).
What I am talking about what one could call a split between the Monocentrists or Polycentrists as regards to the exclusivity of the top-level sovereign entity's roles in the legitimate use of coercion and as guarantor of personal liberties against limitation by other lower-level entities. This is more than just a matter of federalism or subsidiarity.
The libertarian polycentrists once used the terms "14th Amendment Libertarians" as an epithet to describe the monocentrists, and that is a good descriptive terminology in the American context, where federal courts can use the 14th Amendment to greatly restrict the sovereignty of the states in the name of 'liberty'. People who are familiar with how this worked out in practice will understand the scare quotes. The moncentric perspective when implemented in practice also has a way of displacing, crowding out, and hollowing out the salience of everything between the individual and the central state, which is fine and dandy from the perspective of the central state, but which tends to contribute to the general trend of alienation and atomization for those individuals.
But the larger disagreement is more general than the particular context of American Constitutional law, and the American federal government is really just a "Leviathan of Convenience" to them for the sake of this discussion, which would just as easily be the EU, any other country, or a one-world-government.
The question boils down to whether the central state should tolerate an arrangement whereby an individual can agree to pre-commit his future self to being bound to restrictions on liberties considered fundamental by the central state, and *subject to the potentially violent coercion* of some entity to which he grants the right to enforce the provisions, and in a way such that the central state recognizes and respects that the individual has relinquished his rights to the central state's monopolization of coercive violence and guarantee of those liberties.
That's a confusing mouthful, sorry, but it's what one gets by trying to be as general and precise as possible about the issue. It's related to the question of whether one can sell oneself into servitude, and before one gives a knee-jerk answer, it's worth reflecting on Nozick's "The Tale of the Slave" and perhaps rephrasing the question into one of whether someone already in servitude should be allowed to switch masters.
It just means whether the big government will allow there to be other, little governments, which would be able to do different things in non-trivial ways (unlike today), including some things the big government really doesn't like. Without rights to coercion, especially to punish premature breach, there can be no such thing. Monocentric libertarians are cool with all this for *private organizations and especially corporations*, obviously except for the hard coercion and "precommitments enforceable with tools beyond mere money damages" parts, but those are the critical parts if one wants the ability to live in a viable community operating under really different laws.
Really it is a "freedom trade", which is something most monocentric libertarians grasp effortlessly in the economic context but seem to have a tough time accepting or wrapping their heads around in other contexts. Sometimes you have to give up some freedoms in order to open up the possibility of other freedoms.
To illustrate, consider the whole "pre-commitment" part of the puzzle. One thing the progressives used to get right (while still under a shred of social pressure to want to at least look like they were trying to make sense) was that the dynamics of a marriage, for example, are to an important degree determined by the particular balance of power in terms of which moves the party could makes under the rules of the game.
"Love Is War", and just like the balance of power and the customs of international law determine in the deepest manner the way states act and regard each other, it's the same way for the behaviors and feelings of a relationship in a marriage, though of course the hard calculus is performed at a degree of separation from the self-deluded conscious awareness experiencing the emotions.
The relationship between neighboring countries, for example, is totally different in scenarios of equal power and when one has overwhelmingly greater strength than the other. Ukraine may want to have the type of relationship with Russia it would have with an equal, but that's not in the cards. It may not want its bad neighbor, but territories don't move so it's stuck with one. Likewise, much as we might like to imagine otherwise out of naive sentimentalism, the quality and character of a relationship between spouses depends to a very large extent on whether both parties really are stuck with each other, or whether one or both spouses carries the missile-command football with them at all times and can thus at any moment decide at reasonably acceptable cost to nuke the marriage. Which is, in fact, the state of modern secular marriage with no-fault divorce and the mess of contemporary family law.
And what that means is that certain potential types of marriage experiences are simply unavailable to couples, even if they want to have it and are willing to accept a reduction in their future liberty to get it. The state-imposed limitation on space of coercively-enforceable marriage rules in turn limits the space of otherwise available setups for particular visions of experiences of romance and family life. The "freedom" of no-fault divorce is actually constraining for those who want to have and experience the kind of relationship *that can only exist* when coupled with only-fault divorce.
The monocentrists would bite the bullet and say that if we are to live in a society defined by a general right of individuals to enjoy certain fundamental freedoms, then we have to let go of the freedom to choose alternative coercive arrangements - and any potential deals or circumstances requiring such arrangements - as something we must simply learn to live without and to which we must culturally adapt. Somehow. Hopefully.
The polycentrists, on the other hand, say it's better freedom when the central state allows you to trade
"the freedom to quit" for "the freedom to choose the unquittable". It's important to keep a historical perspective in mind, which helps one remember that in this respect *we* are the oddball outliers in our cultural aversion to that latter liberty, because most societies for most of time had no problem whatsoever with the concept of one exercising the freedom to choose the unquittable.
And in the big picture, this allows genuinely competitive governance and the ability to choose genuinely different mini-state communities with their own different rules, which is to say at the most fundamental level, to choose how you shall live. Monocentric freedom is a single set of freedoms handed to you by the central state and without options or alternatives. Polycentric freedom is the freedom to constrain yourself in a way that opens up the possibility of choosing among different sets of freedoms.
Ok, so we see this non-Albion-attributable recent split, and we also see that the monocentrist 14th Amendment Libertarians have pretty much 'won' in terms of status, prestige, intellectual firepower, energy, and numbers (such as they are.)
But where did the split come from? It came from the one issue that always breaks every intellectual dam in America: anti-discrimination. Later 'PC', and later 'woke'. That's why the timing is mostly within the last fifty years, and why the other libertarianisms tended to all fade away with biological turnover and replacement by Baby Boomers and later generations, who were all born after anti-discrimination triumphed as the state religion.
The issue of whether discriminatory treatment or selection can be tolerated is always the elephant in the room that as central as it is unmentionable and which is so large that the question of which arguments get made and which perspectives tend to win out over others all orbit around it like the galactic center.
A lot of the enormous pent-up demand for exit and competitive government is, in fact, not usually a manifestation of any real passionate dislike or discomfort with the bulk of what the actually existing government does or how it does it, *except* for those truly and incredibly bad consequences and pathologies deriving from its deadly-serious commitment to the most insane, unrealistic, harmful, and progressively worse versions and waves of anti-discrimination ideology, and in allowing no dissent or deviation whatsoever from its pronouncements and commands in this regard.
And so it's pretty clear that if you give people polycentric liberties to make new communities with real laws than can really bite, they are obviously and immediately going to use it to discriminate in ways that no contemporary public intellectual would dare license because, duh, immediate cancellation. At least.
Well, that's where the split came from and why it arrived when it did. But why don't most people even remember this split today? Because when the genus split into two species, one went extinct and other other is all one can find today, so there's practically no remaining living trace that there was any split at all. One has to dig into the fossil record to a time when such thoughts weren't so completely unthinkable and were - get this - actually allowed on the 'platforms' of the day and debated in earnest and safety at a high intellectual level. Yeah, it wasn't perfect back then and groups tried to disrupt talks and intimidate people into shutting up and all the rest. But compared to today it was practically some kind of free speech and intellectual diversity eden. Imagine it; it's easy if you try!
Very quickly the intellectual pressure came to be such that no one could advocate for polycentric tolerance of discrimination and furthermore they couldn't even license it by implication of their other espoused beliefs and ideas. Only a select few could navigate that swamp successfully by strategic evasions, omissions, lip service, hiding and lying, and so forth. But the social calculus modules in the brains of the rest - and especially for new younger recruits - practiced self-defense as necessary to prevent even the possibility of thinking these heretical thoughts.
Thus, polycentric libertarianism out, monocentric libertarianism in.
That's being unfair. Nearly 100% of libertarians would love to see Wickard reversed, and they have indeed contributed over the long course of its history to the waging of many valiant legal campaigns against it, alas, in vain.
I think perhaps in the aftermath of Dobbs you are "drunk on success" (to use Stalin's cautioning phrase), but even as hard as it was to finally take down Roe, Wickard poses a challenge that is an entirely different league of difficulty.
And this despite the fact that after the dust settles it wouldn't even accomplish much, except to cause an incredible amount of disruption that would mostly fall on the courts to clean up in a flood of litigation, and only Justice Thomas (PBUH, may he live to be 100!) would have enough of the NFG, "let jurisprudence be right though the heavens fall" attitude to bite that bullet.
Wickard by itself is not a good proxy for the tradition of jurisprudential obscenity that simply decided to read a whole, plainly constraining provision right out of the Constitution and abuse the power of interpretive authority to transform "interstate commerce" into what we today know was a grant of plenary regulatory power which, reaching new heights of perversion, was specifically what the founders were trying to prevent with the provision. Most of that ground had already been captured by, for example, NLRB v J&L Steel (1937), and by 1942 there was just still a little uncertainty about the precise location of the distant border way out there on the legal frontier. Well, within that fuzzy range, Wickard pushed it all the way out for sure. But if you took out Wickard, you would just go back to that fuzzy range, which is maybe just 1% of the victory people are actually looking for which is to back to 1930. At this point, what one would really need in a constitutional amendment inserting the words, "actually" as several places in the existing provision, or perhaps a whole explicit phrase to the effect of, "hey, just so you evil judges won't pull your BS again right here without at least risking serious embarrassment, we mean it absolutely has to be sold to other people and it must cross state lines and we don't mean just having some "effect" on overall markets, because duh, that's everything." Good luck with that Amendment, and anyway, let's face it, the way things are going, the shameless judges would just accept the embarrassment and do it again anyway.
Anyway, for better or worse, it seems like taking out Chevron and Auer are next as top priority on the agenda, and even those are likely a bridge too far as what we got in WV v EPA was very small beer. What Sunstein calls the "New Coke" legal strategy (Edward Coke famously fought against the legally analogous "prerogative writs") has good intentions but is a fundamentally flawed approach.
The administrative state certainly needs to be reined in even if in the grand scheme of things it's too late for such measures to "save the republic", but that approach assumes Congress can be forced to do its job, which it obviously can't. There are other ways to save the bureaucracy, which might actually have a shot of saving the republic too, and we should be gunning for those instead.
Yes, it's worth a shot. To be clear, I'm not using 'republic' in the literal, technical sense here, just using the traditional phrase for a low-messiness transition to a better order.
The people badly losing a war are always tired of the war and wish it could somehow just stop and freeze in a ceasefire. They misinterpret small and brief reversals in their favor as great victories and are naturally almost immediately demoralized by genuinely great defeats. But on the winning side "the worst are full of passionate intensity", motivated by an unshakeable faith in the righteousness of their convictions and in the inevitably of their manifest destiny, and they will press on and on, accepting noting less than total victory. Such was the American way of war, before Korea, when the rot set in.
Over the last two decades I've read hundreds of articles and posts in which the authors hoped for some kind of amiable divorce settlement (like getting the progressives to agree to 'more federalism', fat chance), or saying that the smart take was to recognize that the struggle was counterproductive and if we stopped fighting the progressives would lose interest in 'culture' and do something else presumptively less harmful (I guess?) or that all the really savvy people understood that the war was already utterly and irrevocably lost, that hope was an illusion, resistance was futile, and that mature adults had to simply face the hard choice of doing as the Romans did or going Full Masada.
In retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight, I now can see that all of these people were wrong and in ways that all stemmed from the same fundamental error of not really understanding the true nature of the thing being resisted, despite there being excellent analogous examples in the history books of, for example, the French Revolution. This is naturally due to the fact that these people were taught about the French Revolution by the same thing they are fighting, and it certainly wasn't going to let them recognize the pattern by identifying the bad guys, who were instead portrayed as good guys who had no choice but to break some eggs to make their omelets.
But if one studies what happened to and among the bad guys in the French Revolution, you can grasp the character of the force you are opposing and realize the truly abysmal depth of the problem you face. It is a kind of social process over which no one exercises command and control, running on and perpetuating a dynamic of constant escalation, conflict, and infighting that will inevitably burn itself out in some kind of miserable collapse until social order is reimposed by an external force or an internal dictatorship.
What that means is that you are dealing with a force that both cannot be fought (with a prospect of actual final victory by conventional means) but which also must be fought (to save what can be saved for as long as it can be saved, in the hope that some future unexpected change of fortune will turn the tables.)
Everyone's tired, but don't fool yourself into thinking there is some chance of peaceful rest except in death. Still a long march ahead. Fear no evil; fear none but God.
Along another axis, the Quaker/Libertarian view may be in tension with all 3 other views. Both the red and blue tribe seem to have adopted the more collectivist aspects of the Puritan and hegemonic approaches, where freedom relates to collective autonomy/control for one's tribe.
Libertarianism looks weak because illegal immigration causes problems, "free trade" with commie China (& slave labor) has lots of problems, and legal drugs hasn't led to less overall crime; plus Libber attacks against entitlements are VERY unpopular, and opposition to the US being in foreign wars is inconsistently popular.
How many Libertarians does it take to screw in a light bulb? / to stop the local gun-owning neighbor who is beating his wife?
A: 0 - the free market will take care of it.
Funny with the theoretical light bulb, but not so funny in accepting of wife-beating or Chinese slave labor in the real world today.
Speaking of hierarchy, do you know Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs? For man, it's food and shelter on the bottom, family and purpose in the middle, a very small amount of puns and word play at the very apex...
Assemble a whole nation of mankind and they have different needs in exactly the same pyramid shape! On ground level, public safety, social order, and civil infrastructure. Above that are a bunch of things not even the strongest authoritarian leader will ever see—unlike other societies that have institutions that provide public safety or infrastructure and structural support for, say, a religious or educational or economic system, a strong man has no way to build those things, and also putting them on his head would instantly break his neck.
To steel-man your claim, I'd modify it to say that when a government or institution becomes too large or top-heavy or can no longer meet those higher needs, an autocratic approach is the fastest way to tear everything down, but then needs to give way to the kind of people suited to start build foundation for a new society—like the Founders.
I think Lee Kuan Yew was a quite unusual successful strongman of Singapore, building up far more than tearing down. Lots of free market & trade & enforced responsibility, little toleration for libertine hedonism. Singapore got far more lucky with him than, say, South Africa with the charismatic but socialist Mandela.
Poor folk want both order and an end to injustice, with strongmen looking more likely to stop injustices than gridlocked democracy.
Libertarianism ("do nothing") is always weaker than authoritarianism ("do something"). Where Libertarians need to step up is in making the argument against the case of "doing something". But, as we saw during Covid, many Libertarians don't actually agree on "doing nothing" or in fighting against the "do something" agenda.
In other words, there are far fewer Libertarians in practice than there are in theory - everyone is a Libertarian about what they want, few are Libertarians in defending others to do as they please.
I appreciate the true Libertarian believers - such as Don Boudreaux. For even if I don't accept all his positions, I know he is defending my liberty and I am grateful for that. Milquetoast Libertarians are a nuisance. They promote liberty for all their favorite causes - Ukraine, gays, big business, etc, but will never lift a finger to defend the liberty of the people and groups they don't like.
Being personally familiar with each of Fischer's "factions" I find each simultaneously admirable and insufferable. Ultimately I align myself politically with the "Quakers" but my empathy is for the "borderers" - the "Scottish-Irish" who just want to be left alone.
"but my empathy is for the "borderers" - the "Scottish-Irish" who just want to be left alone."
Not really. They want to be left alone in some ways, but not as regards those 'entitlements' which Arnold mentioned in the OP, and there is no better illustration of that attitude than the "keep your government hands off my Medicare" meme.
There is no profit in assigning moralistic interpretations to this sad state of affairs, whether culpability can be meaningfully assigned in terms of them having done it to themselves or the moral-dyad version of it having been "done to them", but we can still learn - yet again - the general lesson about the spiritually corrupting influence of certain "social safety net" programs and the long-term dependencies that tend to form in consequence.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you, sure, but also, watch out you don't sell your soul just so the milk-bones keep on coming. The big steps in the growth of government in the last century became irreversibly entrenched in precisely this manner.
This is in line with my comment about there now having been far too much water under the bridge and us not really living in "Albion's Seed America" much anymore.
Trump was morally and politically right to defend Social Security and government entitlements. Reason being those are the social contract. The idea that anti-government advocates must disown social welfare, or else they must accept all government is a sophistry. This argument actually supports the anti-government perspective that government doesn't just want to help, it wants control.
If we cut entitlements, what do we think is going to happen? You think they are going to pay down the debt?
I think they will turn right around and give it to our enemies.
For better or worse, my parents paid into SS & Medicare their whole lives and if it goes away I will probably end up with the same taxes but have to support them.
If some fantasy bill arrives that directly cuts SS to fund child tax credits comes round maybe I will support it, but its never going to happen.
*Trying to get medical cost trend down is a different story than mere austerity, but also much more difficult.
But when one can infect others by "just being be left alone" that's not enough. When there are externalities, "something" should be done Libertarian (Tabarrok being a sterling exception) failed us by not pushing toward the right "what," not nothing.
I don't have a "team," just an opinion, which I recognize could be mistaken. To be a bit more specific, I think the vaccine when it first came out and was still well optimized for the variants in circulation did prevent some spread as did masking and discouraging crowded poorly ventilated indoor spaces. So some measures to get people to internalize the externality they caused is legitimate. The argument ought to be given the externality what amount of incentive/disincentive is optimal. CDC never properly made this argument or produced data that would have allowed other policy makers to craft cost effective policies. Consequently we got parks being closed at some small cost and no benefit and schools being closed at some small benefit but huge costs.
THAT is the kind of intervention that I would have liked to see Libertarians make. It would have engaging with the murky changing data and cost0benefit analysis., not appeals to "liberty" of whatever variety.
I'm not on any "team" and I did not censor anyone.
My opinion is simply that I think the way to think about, discuss, and advocate for appropriate public health response, indeed, one's individual response, is cost benefit analysis taking account that some of the benefits will accrue to people that the person bearing the cost will not infect.
Clearly this is not the way the Public Health Establishment made it's recommendations and policy makers responded, but I still think it is important to think about what that response should have been.
"freedom without restraints of law or custom" sounds like "defund the police" and "what do you mean I can't groom your kids?" - very Trumpy
the problem is that you can't really expect the american coastal elites to know the difference between one tribe of americans and another
everyone who is not them is a redneck
Trumps' base is the petit bourgeoisie and the working class (they do ordered and reciprocal liberties) but Gov/media/academia types can't tell the difference between a plumber and an appalachian moonshiner
Quite good sets of freedom that are similar but different. But it's not the type of freedom that's so different as much as the abstract/ in-practice split.
"These two factions have really parted ways on issues of trade, immigration, entitlements, and foreign intervention."
It's intellectual "freedom in theory" folk splitting against practical, local "freedom in practice" folk; college educated, indoctrinated, intellectuals. The college vs non-college split today dominates the other prior type of freedom differences, but multiple axes remain hard to graph or think or talk about.
Since Vietnam, but even more relevantly since Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - those favoring fighting in foreign wars have created what looks like lousy results.*
Trump seems more right than the conservative interventionists - but in 4 years in power, he avoided "running away" in Afghanistan and losing to the Taliban, despite being against that nation-building military exercise. [Paul Ryan intellectuals were OK with endless war - and few kids of intellectuals dying.]
Trade and being trade dependent on hostile-to-freedom Communist China is a lousy idea, today. There was an argument that supporting Chinese trade & WTO would help move China to more freedom, and it certainly helped create a HUGE Chinese "middle class", including those who put life-savings into a now-failing Chinese bank that won't give the money.
Trump was correct. [not Paul Ryan]
Similarly, Europe being dependent on not-really democrat Russia for oil and especially gas is clearly a bad idea - and was a bad idea even before Trump publicly told EU intellectuals that truth, but was laughed at then. [by Germans, tho also Paul Ryan types]
Illegal immigration is lousy for "rule of law", and it's clear that such immigrants are hired to do work in America at lower wages than the company would have to pay to citizens. Legal immigrants are much better but also do push down local programmer wages in Silicon Valley as higher paid semi-indentured servants of Big tech, tho it hugely helps the individual immigrants and, over time, America. Not only Republicans, but even most Democrats pay lip-service to being against illegal aliens, tho often supporting Open Borders in practice. Rep registered but Libber supporting Milton Friedman often noted that he can't support Open Borders, nor are they practical, until gov't welfare entitlements are repealed. [Paul Ryan lip-service only against illegals?]
Entitlements repealed? Ain't gonna happen. Free money from the gov't to pay for the mistakes and bad luck, and yearly aging, of the carless, irresponsible, and elderly folk - keeping grandparents out of poverty is a hugely desired social good. Until Libertarians (or others) provide a practical way to migrate away from Social Security, few benefits will be cut.
Trump was politically correct, in terms of getting votes not merely PC/woke, to keep them or expand them. He failed to reduce them, wrongly but to popular acclaim AND in a failure less than Hillary would have done, or Biden is now doing.
On entitlement reform, Trump was the lesser failure. Paul Ryan would have been far, far better -- but that's primarily why he was so horribly, totally unpopular with voters.
Arnold and most intellectuals, both Paul Ryan supporters and NeverTrump Republicans, continue to have some TDS ticks and aren't quite honest about Trump results vs Democrat results. Instead, they compare real Trump against some unreal ideal alternative even further away from today's Democrats. (Not so different from Marxists' reasonable criticisms of capitalism becoming terrible in supporting unreal alternatives.)
A huge little discussed issue is the reality that low IQ folk, stupid folk, more often make stupid decisions. That cause problems which "somebody" has to pay for. Often such stupid folk don't have the money to pay for their own mistakes - so how much freedom should they have to make such mistakes which then must be paid for by other folk?
Even tho there are more stupid white folk than black folk (less than 85? 80? 76? IQ), the reality of lower black averages means even talking about group IQs can be called racist. And no amount nor type of education makes stupid folk good intellectuals, nor smarter. One key educational reform I'd like is an emphasis on avoiding making life choices with high probabilities of being a mistake, having a bad outcome. "Less freedom for dumb folk" is less likely to be politically possible than entitlement repeal.
Personal note:
I'm in Slovakia because of my meeting in London with the Libertarian Alliance, and joining Tim Evans in going to Slovakia, where Sean Gabb also advised the Slovak gov't for a year. Nice quick history of LA (not SK) by Sean. http://libertarian.co.uk Other LA folk continue with Samizdata.net, like this:
https://www.samizdata.net/2022/07/thoughts-on-spheres-of-influence/
with specific disagreement of some with Sean.
*I'd prefer Iraq split into Shia Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurd - but that's not quite in the cards. I'm glad South Sudan split from their Northern Muslim "masters". I used to be a mild neo-Con, but now support trade sanctions far far more than military force.
"America First patriots Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Abe Hamadeh were among the Trump-backed patriots who won on Tuesday. [AZ GOP leader Kelli] Ward backed them all and will try to push them to victory in the November general election."
The Republican Party is getting rid, slowly, of GOPe & NeverTrump folk who claim to be conservative but didn't support Trump policies.
If 2024 is an election fight between the college-indoctrinated plus welfare folk vs non-college workers, in a 100% Free and Fair election, the workers will win.
Lots of smart Reps want DeSantis 2024, I'd be fine with that but don't think it likely he beats a Trump fighting it. On the topic of Freedom, here's a new DeSantis ad:
https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/ron-desantis-dear-governor
Substack says that my response - at ... let's see here, yikes ... 2,000 words (sorry!) - is too long for a single comment. Please allow me to reply to it to serialize, thanks.
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I think Saint-Andre and Postrel are missing another key development and source of tension in the overall libertarian scene that happened mostly post-WWII and cannot fairly be traced back to Albion's Seed-era roots. It led in part to the evolution of "Orange Line Libertarianism" (a big tent term for what is in reality a small number of people), and their gradual ideological separation from the rest of the scene.
I'm not talking about the more recent trend of splinter so-called """libertarian""" groups simply selling out (literally, and cheaply, it seems) to the progressives in an incoherent and unprincipled fasion (not that they don't spill a lot of ink trying to convince themselves and other dupes otherwise). That is its own problem - and one to which Orange Liners were particularly susceptible - but one can dismiss the nonsensical shenanigans of the fake libertarians as not having any relevance to the analysis of intellectual and ideological splits among actual libertarians.
And while there is a strong correlation with the split I'll describe, I am also not talking about the genuine and intellectually serious - and more right-vs-left pattern-matching - split between the "libertarianism in one country" types flavored with nationalist realism (a kind of chauvinism) and the "libertarianism without borders" types flavored with universalist humanism (a kind of utopianism).
What I am talking about what one could call a split between the Monocentrists or Polycentrists as regards to the exclusivity of the top-level sovereign entity's roles in the legitimate use of coercion and as guarantor of personal liberties against limitation by other lower-level entities. This is more than just a matter of federalism or subsidiarity.
The libertarian polycentrists once used the terms "14th Amendment Libertarians" as an epithet to describe the monocentrists, and that is a good descriptive terminology in the American context, where federal courts can use the 14th Amendment to greatly restrict the sovereignty of the states in the name of 'liberty'. People who are familiar with how this worked out in practice will understand the scare quotes. The moncentric perspective when implemented in practice also has a way of displacing, crowding out, and hollowing out the salience of everything between the individual and the central state, which is fine and dandy from the perspective of the central state, but which tends to contribute to the general trend of alienation and atomization for those individuals.
But the larger disagreement is more general than the particular context of American Constitutional law, and the American federal government is really just a "Leviathan of Convenience" to them for the sake of this discussion, which would just as easily be the EU, any other country, or a one-world-government.
The question boils down to whether the central state should tolerate an arrangement whereby an individual can agree to pre-commit his future self to being bound to restrictions on liberties considered fundamental by the central state, and *subject to the potentially violent coercion* of some entity to which he grants the right to enforce the provisions, and in a way such that the central state recognizes and respects that the individual has relinquished his rights to the central state's monopolization of coercive violence and guarantee of those liberties.
That's a confusing mouthful, sorry, but it's what one gets by trying to be as general and precise as possible about the issue. It's related to the question of whether one can sell oneself into servitude, and before one gives a knee-jerk answer, it's worth reflecting on Nozick's "The Tale of the Slave" and perhaps rephrasing the question into one of whether someone already in servitude should be allowed to switch masters.
It just means whether the big government will allow there to be other, little governments, which would be able to do different things in non-trivial ways (unlike today), including some things the big government really doesn't like. Without rights to coercion, especially to punish premature breach, there can be no such thing. Monocentric libertarians are cool with all this for *private organizations and especially corporations*, obviously except for the hard coercion and "precommitments enforceable with tools beyond mere money damages" parts, but those are the critical parts if one wants the ability to live in a viable community operating under really different laws.
Really it is a "freedom trade", which is something most monocentric libertarians grasp effortlessly in the economic context but seem to have a tough time accepting or wrapping their heads around in other contexts. Sometimes you have to give up some freedoms in order to open up the possibility of other freedoms.
To illustrate, consider the whole "pre-commitment" part of the puzzle. One thing the progressives used to get right (while still under a shred of social pressure to want to at least look like they were trying to make sense) was that the dynamics of a marriage, for example, are to an important degree determined by the particular balance of power in terms of which moves the party could makes under the rules of the game.
"Love Is War", and just like the balance of power and the customs of international law determine in the deepest manner the way states act and regard each other, it's the same way for the behaviors and feelings of a relationship in a marriage, though of course the hard calculus is performed at a degree of separation from the self-deluded conscious awareness experiencing the emotions.
The relationship between neighboring countries, for example, is totally different in scenarios of equal power and when one has overwhelmingly greater strength than the other. Ukraine may want to have the type of relationship with Russia it would have with an equal, but that's not in the cards. It may not want its bad neighbor, but territories don't move so it's stuck with one. Likewise, much as we might like to imagine otherwise out of naive sentimentalism, the quality and character of a relationship between spouses depends to a very large extent on whether both parties really are stuck with each other, or whether one or both spouses carries the missile-command football with them at all times and can thus at any moment decide at reasonably acceptable cost to nuke the marriage. Which is, in fact, the state of modern secular marriage with no-fault divorce and the mess of contemporary family law.
And what that means is that certain potential types of marriage experiences are simply unavailable to couples, even if they want to have it and are willing to accept a reduction in their future liberty to get it. The state-imposed limitation on space of coercively-enforceable marriage rules in turn limits the space of otherwise available setups for particular visions of experiences of romance and family life. The "freedom" of no-fault divorce is actually constraining for those who want to have and experience the kind of relationship *that can only exist* when coupled with only-fault divorce.
The monocentrists would bite the bullet and say that if we are to live in a society defined by a general right of individuals to enjoy certain fundamental freedoms, then we have to let go of the freedom to choose alternative coercive arrangements - and any potential deals or circumstances requiring such arrangements - as something we must simply learn to live without and to which we must culturally adapt. Somehow. Hopefully.
The polycentrists, on the other hand, say it's better freedom when the central state allows you to trade
"the freedom to quit" for "the freedom to choose the unquittable". It's important to keep a historical perspective in mind, which helps one remember that in this respect *we* are the oddball outliers in our cultural aversion to that latter liberty, because most societies for most of time had no problem whatsoever with the concept of one exercising the freedom to choose the unquittable.
And in the big picture, this allows genuinely competitive governance and the ability to choose genuinely different mini-state communities with their own different rules, which is to say at the most fundamental level, to choose how you shall live. Monocentric freedom is a single set of freedoms handed to you by the central state and without options or alternatives. Polycentric freedom is the freedom to constrain yourself in a way that opens up the possibility of choosing among different sets of freedoms.
Ok, so we see this non-Albion-attributable recent split, and we also see that the monocentrist 14th Amendment Libertarians have pretty much 'won' in terms of status, prestige, intellectual firepower, energy, and numbers (such as they are.)
But where did the split come from? It came from the one issue that always breaks every intellectual dam in America: anti-discrimination. Later 'PC', and later 'woke'. That's why the timing is mostly within the last fifty years, and why the other libertarianisms tended to all fade away with biological turnover and replacement by Baby Boomers and later generations, who were all born after anti-discrimination triumphed as the state religion.
The issue of whether discriminatory treatment or selection can be tolerated is always the elephant in the room that as central as it is unmentionable and which is so large that the question of which arguments get made and which perspectives tend to win out over others all orbit around it like the galactic center.
A lot of the enormous pent-up demand for exit and competitive government is, in fact, not usually a manifestation of any real passionate dislike or discomfort with the bulk of what the actually existing government does or how it does it, *except* for those truly and incredibly bad consequences and pathologies deriving from its deadly-serious commitment to the most insane, unrealistic, harmful, and progressively worse versions and waves of anti-discrimination ideology, and in allowing no dissent or deviation whatsoever from its pronouncements and commands in this regard.
And so it's pretty clear that if you give people polycentric liberties to make new communities with real laws than can really bite, they are obviously and immediately going to use it to discriminate in ways that no contemporary public intellectual would dare license because, duh, immediate cancellation. At least.
Well, that's where the split came from and why it arrived when it did. But why don't most people even remember this split today? Because when the genus split into two species, one went extinct and other other is all one can find today, so there's practically no remaining living trace that there was any split at all. One has to dig into the fossil record to a time when such thoughts weren't so completely unthinkable and were - get this - actually allowed on the 'platforms' of the day and debated in earnest and safety at a high intellectual level. Yeah, it wasn't perfect back then and groups tried to disrupt talks and intimidate people into shutting up and all the rest. But compared to today it was practically some kind of free speech and intellectual diversity eden. Imagine it; it's easy if you try!
Very quickly the intellectual pressure came to be such that no one could advocate for polycentric tolerance of discrimination and furthermore they couldn't even license it by implication of their other espoused beliefs and ideas. Only a select few could navigate that swamp successfully by strategic evasions, omissions, lip service, hiding and lying, and so forth. But the social calculus modules in the brains of the rest - and especially for new younger recruits - practiced self-defense as necessary to prevent even the possibility of thinking these heretical thoughts.
Thus, polycentric libertarianism out, monocentric libertarianism in.
For now.
That's being unfair. Nearly 100% of libertarians would love to see Wickard reversed, and they have indeed contributed over the long course of its history to the waging of many valiant legal campaigns against it, alas, in vain.
I think perhaps in the aftermath of Dobbs you are "drunk on success" (to use Stalin's cautioning phrase), but even as hard as it was to finally take down Roe, Wickard poses a challenge that is an entirely different league of difficulty.
And this despite the fact that after the dust settles it wouldn't even accomplish much, except to cause an incredible amount of disruption that would mostly fall on the courts to clean up in a flood of litigation, and only Justice Thomas (PBUH, may he live to be 100!) would have enough of the NFG, "let jurisprudence be right though the heavens fall" attitude to bite that bullet.
Wickard by itself is not a good proxy for the tradition of jurisprudential obscenity that simply decided to read a whole, plainly constraining provision right out of the Constitution and abuse the power of interpretive authority to transform "interstate commerce" into what we today know was a grant of plenary regulatory power which, reaching new heights of perversion, was specifically what the founders were trying to prevent with the provision. Most of that ground had already been captured by, for example, NLRB v J&L Steel (1937), and by 1942 there was just still a little uncertainty about the precise location of the distant border way out there on the legal frontier. Well, within that fuzzy range, Wickard pushed it all the way out for sure. But if you took out Wickard, you would just go back to that fuzzy range, which is maybe just 1% of the victory people are actually looking for which is to back to 1930. At this point, what one would really need in a constitutional amendment inserting the words, "actually" as several places in the existing provision, or perhaps a whole explicit phrase to the effect of, "hey, just so you evil judges won't pull your BS again right here without at least risking serious embarrassment, we mean it absolutely has to be sold to other people and it must cross state lines and we don't mean just having some "effect" on overall markets, because duh, that's everything." Good luck with that Amendment, and anyway, let's face it, the way things are going, the shameless judges would just accept the embarrassment and do it again anyway.
Anyway, for better or worse, it seems like taking out Chevron and Auer are next as top priority on the agenda, and even those are likely a bridge too far as what we got in WV v EPA was very small beer. What Sunstein calls the "New Coke" legal strategy (Edward Coke famously fought against the legally analogous "prerogative writs") has good intentions but is a fundamentally flawed approach.
The administrative state certainly needs to be reined in even if in the grand scheme of things it's too late for such measures to "save the republic", but that approach assumes Congress can be forced to do its job, which it obviously can't. There are other ways to save the bureaucracy, which might actually have a shot of saving the republic too, and we should be gunning for those instead.
Yes, it's worth a shot. To be clear, I'm not using 'republic' in the literal, technical sense here, just using the traditional phrase for a low-messiness transition to a better order.
The people badly losing a war are always tired of the war and wish it could somehow just stop and freeze in a ceasefire. They misinterpret small and brief reversals in their favor as great victories and are naturally almost immediately demoralized by genuinely great defeats. But on the winning side "the worst are full of passionate intensity", motivated by an unshakeable faith in the righteousness of their convictions and in the inevitably of their manifest destiny, and they will press on and on, accepting noting less than total victory. Such was the American way of war, before Korea, when the rot set in.
Over the last two decades I've read hundreds of articles and posts in which the authors hoped for some kind of amiable divorce settlement (like getting the progressives to agree to 'more federalism', fat chance), or saying that the smart take was to recognize that the struggle was counterproductive and if we stopped fighting the progressives would lose interest in 'culture' and do something else presumptively less harmful (I guess?) or that all the really savvy people understood that the war was already utterly and irrevocably lost, that hope was an illusion, resistance was futile, and that mature adults had to simply face the hard choice of doing as the Romans did or going Full Masada.
In retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight, I now can see that all of these people were wrong and in ways that all stemmed from the same fundamental error of not really understanding the true nature of the thing being resisted, despite there being excellent analogous examples in the history books of, for example, the French Revolution. This is naturally due to the fact that these people were taught about the French Revolution by the same thing they are fighting, and it certainly wasn't going to let them recognize the pattern by identifying the bad guys, who were instead portrayed as good guys who had no choice but to break some eggs to make their omelets.
But if one studies what happened to and among the bad guys in the French Revolution, you can grasp the character of the force you are opposing and realize the truly abysmal depth of the problem you face. It is a kind of social process over which no one exercises command and control, running on and perpetuating a dynamic of constant escalation, conflict, and infighting that will inevitably burn itself out in some kind of miserable collapse until social order is reimposed by an external force or an internal dictatorship.
What that means is that you are dealing with a force that both cannot be fought (with a prospect of actual final victory by conventional means) but which also must be fought (to save what can be saved for as long as it can be saved, in the hope that some future unexpected change of fortune will turn the tables.)
Everyone's tired, but don't fool yourself into thinking there is some chance of peaceful rest except in death. Still a long march ahead. Fear no evil; fear none but God.
"Thou" and "thee" are parallel to "I" and "me". So "for me and for thou" is wrong, Arnold should add a [sic] there.
Paul -- anything to reduce tax collections from high income people -- Ryan is a libertarian ideal?
Arnold voted for Paul Ryan in 2020. I voted Trump. You? (voted Biden?)
Does it matter now?
Along another axis, the Quaker/Libertarian view may be in tension with all 3 other views. Both the red and blue tribe seem to have adopted the more collectivist aspects of the Puritan and hegemonic approaches, where freedom relates to collective autonomy/control for one's tribe.
Libertarianism looks weak because illegal immigration causes problems, "free trade" with commie China (& slave labor) has lots of problems, and legal drugs hasn't led to less overall crime; plus Libber attacks against entitlements are VERY unpopular, and opposition to the US being in foreign wars is inconsistently popular.
How many Libertarians does it take to screw in a light bulb? / to stop the local gun-owning neighbor who is beating his wife?
A: 0 - the free market will take care of it.
Funny with the theoretical light bulb, but not so funny in accepting of wife-beating or Chinese slave labor in the real world today.
Speaking of hierarchy, do you know Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs? For man, it's food and shelter on the bottom, family and purpose in the middle, a very small amount of puns and word play at the very apex...
Assemble a whole nation of mankind and they have different needs in exactly the same pyramid shape! On ground level, public safety, social order, and civil infrastructure. Above that are a bunch of things not even the strongest authoritarian leader will ever see—unlike other societies that have institutions that provide public safety or infrastructure and structural support for, say, a religious or educational or economic system, a strong man has no way to build those things, and also putting them on his head would instantly break his neck.
To steel-man your claim, I'd modify it to say that when a government or institution becomes too large or top-heavy or can no longer meet those higher needs, an autocratic approach is the fastest way to tear everything down, but then needs to give way to the kind of people suited to start build foundation for a new society—like the Founders.
I think Lee Kuan Yew was a quite unusual successful strongman of Singapore, building up far more than tearing down. Lots of free market & trade & enforced responsibility, little toleration for libertine hedonism. Singapore got far more lucky with him than, say, South Africa with the charismatic but socialist Mandela.
Poor folk want both order and an end to injustice, with strongmen looking more likely to stop injustices than gridlocked democracy.