Libertarianism as a Warning System
not as a cause
Note: Tuesday, July 11, at noon New York time, I will discuss Jean Twenge’s Generations on Zoom. Free for all, but registration required.
For the WSJ, Barton Swaim reviewed The Individualists, by John Tomasi and Matt Zwolinski, which I have not read. Swaim wrote,
In the absence of any easy formulation for what all libertarians think, Messrs. Tomasi and Zwolinski propose six “markers”: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Libertarians, the authors contend, keep all six principles in view at the same time.
Swaim winds up saying,
The book confirmed my belief, though, that modern libertarianism suffers from two intrinsic deficiencies.
The first: Libertarians’ unswerving concern for individual rights and loathing of coercion cause them to ignore the rights of communities to govern themselves. “They care about the freedom of individual human beings, not of collective entities,” as Messrs. Tomasi and Zwolinski plainly put it. But a world in which groups of people—neighborhoods, cities, states—can’t set their own rules without one or two individuals crying foul and denying them that authority is not a world defined by liberty.
The second is an outgrowth of the first. A polity, if it’s to function and endure, must offer its members a reason to remain attached, in their loyalties and affections, to the collective. That requires some engagement with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on. Modern libertarians are allergic to all such topics.
I think that libertarianism works best as a warning system. Libertarians are often correct in out intuition that government intervention is going to work poorly.
We warn people to beware of using the instrument of government to achieve your ends. Consider industrial policy. It is likely to stifle experimentation, by forcing society down a single path. It will distort the evaluation metrics provided by the market in a profit-and-loss system. And malfunctioning government subsidies, unlike failed businesses, are not automatically discarded.
On foreign policy, libertarians warn about foreign adventures. Interventionists are asking the same government that is clumsy at home to be adept abroad.
I think that libertarianism is less likely to be constructive as a cause, marching under the banner of individual rights. Not every fight for individual rights is worth pursuing. If you win on drug legalization, and the social order deteriorates, what have you accomplished?
I recently spent a couple of days in New York City, for the first time since the pandemic. I happened to bring a mask because of the Canadian wildfires. It turns out I also needed it to filter out all the marijuana smoke on the street. I’m not the only one complaining. Liel Leibovitz writes,
If you want a true taste of New York, just walk down the street. Smell the sour stench of weed emanating from too many loosely regulated dispensaries and see the deadened gaze on the faces of too many who medicate the pain away.
Libertarians are still proud of legalization, and progressives will tell you that drug laws are racist. But when all the data are in, my guess is that marijuana legalization will be evaluated as a huge step backwards.
This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.
I'll preface this by saying I'm a near-daily marijuana user, who resides in a state where it is legal recreationally.
I think the issue with legalizing drugs, gambling, pornography, etc. is that the movements to legalize and/or keep these vices from heavy regulation adopts and pushes a false binary. Either the thing is evil or it is "good, actually."
In the case of marijuana, too many legalization advocates have long treated weed as some sort of miracle drug, with anyone pointing out tradeoffs or downsides being branded a moralistic scold. So, I don't think the problem is legalizing or decriminalizing vices. It's the cultural narrative that not only should these things be left to personal choice (which I 100% agree with), its that these things aren't even vices, and to label them as "vices" is to be some sort of backwards cultural luddite. I think its the nature of activism - to get what you want freed from the shackles of government, a winning argument is that its harms have been overstated or are nonexistent. Once the freedom is granted, society has to some degree swallowed the activist argument - forever changing the perceived morality of exercising that freedom. These are separate streams, but I'm not sure how you untangle them, to be honest, besides society 1) prioritizing and emphasizing personal agency, and 2) redrawing a bright line between "illegal" and "immoral", and 3) embracing the world as it truly is - full of tradeoffs and nuance.
People often confuse libertarians with libertines. That's a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but there *is* distance between believing things should not be prohibited and promoting the use of the those same things. Libertarianism is a commentary on what ought to and ought not to be restricted to the individual's discretion, not necessarily the implicit moral endorsement of "whatever choice the individual makes."
In other words, it's possible to believe in drug legalization or decriminalization, while still believing these things are *morally* wrong, or should be used in moderation. But it puts the onus on the individual and not the government to enforce. You can believe I'm ruining my life by using marijuana daily while still believing I should have the freedom to make that choice for myself.
There is a distinct lack of sense of proportion here: a freedom does not have to be downside-free to be worth allowing on net. And the smell of pot smoke on the street, while indeed an unpleasant nuisance, is not reasonably described as "social breakdown". It is not as if NYC smelled like roses before!