Where I stand on libertarianism

where I am libertarian, where I am conservative

What are the big wins that organized libertarianism (the Cato institute, for example) can point to in recent years? They will brag about drug legalization and gay marriage. While I am not out to persecute drug users and non-heterosexuals, I am conservative enough to not be excited by these “wins.” When libertarians point to progress on school choice, I can be more supportive. But on other issues where I agree with libertarians, they have been losing.

My favorite libertarian policies:

1. School choice. Teachers’ unions are the root of all evil. Tressa Pankovitz of the Progressive Policy Institute writes,

   A survey from the Current Project found that 87% of low- and middle-income black women believe the “one-size-fits-all school system of the past often doesn’t meet students’ needs.” Six in 10 black mothers strongly agreed that they were more likely to vote for a candidate who supported giving parents more choice over where to send their kids to school. Those findings are consistent with a 2023 study by Democrats for Education Reform, which found that 77% of parents viewed public charters favorably, including 80% of black and 71% of Latino parents.

   The president is reluctant to sell the idea, and it isn’t hard to understand why. Teachers unions detest charters because most aren’t unionized and many outperform traditional schools. They’re threatened by the competition and hostile to any politician that disagrees.

   A while ago, I used the term “rent-seeking.” It is a term that economists use in a way that throws off non-economists. To economists, it means special interests using government to take resources from everyone else. It means the teachers’ unions.

2. Free trade. Specialization and trade are civilization. Work is drudgery. A job is not something you should want to save. And even if you did want to save jobs, trade restrictions do not do the trick. An employment subsidy (or just cutting the payroll tax) is more effective.

3. Small government. The bigger government gets, the clumsier it becomes. It is not just at the national level that government has gotten out of hand. School districts and urban jurisdictions ought to be much smaller and have much narrower scope.

4. Deregulation. We have what I would term regulatory socialism. Just as classic socialism suffers from a calculation problem, so does regulation. The regulators do not really know enough to achieve what people hope or to avoid unintended consequences.

5. Women’s choice on abortion. Reversing Rowe V Wade is not the big win that conservatives think it was. The public is not buying the view that life begins at conception and therefore abortion at any point is murder. So now the politicians are arguing about when it should be ok to terminate a pregnancy. Twelve weeks? Twenty weeks? I do not see legislators having the wisdom to make that decision. Leave it to the woman.

And here are the issues where I get off the libertarian train.

1. I do not agree with total passivity in foreign policy, and I do not agree with libertarians who take the progressive view that America and Israel are bad actors. I do take a libertarian view that nation-building is way outside the competence of government. But I don’t like watching the Houthis sink ships. We should protect freedom of the seas, and if that means killing a lot of Houthis, so be it. I also trust the average American’s instinct about who is right and wrong in the world more than I trust “elite opinion.”

2. I do not agree with open borders. I understand the libertarian argument for the principle, but I understand the conservative case for looking at the damage that high rates of immigration can do to social order in practice. I have long been in favor of making legal immigration much simpler: let people pay to immigrate, with a price set high enough to keep the pace of immigration “reasonable” (admitting I do not define that term). No bureaucratic hoops to jump through, no categories of immigrants with different priorities. My view is actually quite libertarian, just not taken to the extreme.

3. I do not believe that security can be entirely privatized. We need a government court to settle disputes. Again, this only differs from extreme versions of libertarianism.

4. I do not think that drug legalization achieves what it is supposed to achieve. When we ended alcohol prohibition, illegal alcohol mostly went away. When we legalize drugs, the criminals and the black markets stick around. The supply side stays ugly, and the demand goes up.

5. I do not believe that order should be taken for granted. When looking at government, religion, and tradition, libertarians should be curious about what these institutions achieve rather than contemptuous. That is why I question the wisdom of siding with the left on issues of drugs, policing, and celebrating alternative sexual identity.

Two other issues, where I am not sure whether I am libertarian or conservative, in part because it is not clear where they stand on the issues: non-profits; and discrimination.

Many libertarians and conservatives praise non-profits as part of civil society. I distrust non-profits. I think that non-profits are a mechanism for evading accountability. Profit-seeking firms have to satisfy customers. Non-profits have to satisfy the vanity of donors. Also, many non-profits exist primarily to serve and enlarge government. I think that old-fashioned charities, especially when organized as mutual aid societies, can be good. But they should be local and focused on directly helping people in need. Most of the big non-profits nowadays have missions that deviate from helping people in need. The tax exemption for donations to non-profits is something I would either end or significantly narrow.

The libertarian position on discrimination is that only the government should be restricted from discrimination based on race, religion, or other categories. Private individuals and groups should be free to decide with whom to associate.

I would prefer to see people treated as individuals. I am willing to have government enforce my preference on that against private organizations that discriminate based on race. Unfortunately, government in practice is very active in categorizing people by race and requiring discriminatory policies. So I think that I end up with the libertarian view that government should stay out of the issue of discrimination altogether.