The Paradox of Libertarianism

The desire to change with the times, to challenge assumptions in the light of new evidence, is understandable. We should be careful to avoid, though, progressivism for its own sake (or at the very least be self-aware enough to admit that we are doing so.) In many ways increases in wealth have given us more liberty, which has corresponded with an increase in the size of government; but as a good scientist knows, correlation does not imply causation and little in your article pointed to any causative mechanism in which an increase in government has led to increased wealth. If the contention is that we have become freer in part *because* of the increases in government, this is certainly a very questionable claim and requires and deserves more detailed exposition. If the argument is, on the contrary, that liberty has increased *despite* increases in government size in certain spheres of life, many will agree with your assessment and share your optimism without losing focus on the remaining areas where interventionism is positively destructive (war on drugs, universal health care, etc).

Apart from this argument, there is the seperate, very challenging argument about public goods and society’s ever dependence on government to supply various public goods, perceived or otherwise. There remain serious questions as to what extent this relationship is “addictive” or whether it is a pure public good that cooperative or local solutions cannot tackle (through prevention, local quarantines, etc); or of course whether it is some combination of the two. Few serious modern libertarians would brush off such concerns or problems dismissively, but historically the classical liberal seeks cooperative solutions over the coercive and interventionist, for a whole host of practical reasons. Your challenge is important insofar as your elucidation no doubt reflects an emerging strain of thought, but as you almost conceded, such a hodge podge solution is inherently “progressive”, with a very real chance of degenerating due to its lack of clear foundation or principle. So today’s “prudent judgment” transforms into all out progressiveness, bound by a very sophisticated sense of taxable capacity. Whatever this new view is, it is more an “enlightened progressivism” than traditional liberalism.

And this is the reason “principled” libertarians will cringe at your vague compromise. Your provacative essay attempts to shift the traditional focus of the libertarian, from the cooperative, spontaneous solution. We can forgive the stateman for such a pragmatic compromise, but the armchair economist has no excuse.

I mischaracterized the argument a bit in my original comment. Professor Cowen didn’t say that big government led to increased liberty, but that increased liberty led to big government. The judgment is the same. If the increased government were caused by increased liberty, this claim must rest on something besides correlation to escape being merely “dialectical.”

Incidentally, though the term liberal has long ago been ceded by libertarians to progressives, this is the first attempt I know of to wrest away “classical liberal” away.

But how in the age of Bush/Cheney can anyone suggest that “liberty vs. power” is irrelevant? When libertarians decry the imperial presidency, the denial of habeas corpus, torture, and warrantless wiretaps, are they “scar[ing] peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty”?

Exactly. Which is why this liberal (in the contemporary sense of the word) has moved in precisely the opposite direction as Mr. Cohen. Looks like he and I may soon be meeting in the middle ideologically, so to speak.

The problem for libertarians is that they are thinking in the long-term while everyone else is thinking in the short. While everyone screams, “The Government Must Do Something!” the libertarians scream “The Government Must Not Do Anything, except for these narrowly defined areas where the government is the best solution.”

When the government grows to “ensure” a particular liberty, it wields that “liberty” as a club. Affirmative action, regional milk-prices, farm subsidies, Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, the Drug War, the War on Terror: All these things, good in the short term, but in the long term they are all used to control the lives and livelyhoods of the citizens, remove their choices, and hinder their liberty.

This article reveals Tyler’s true self. Not a libertarian, nor a classic liberal, Tyler is a modern liberal.

Why are libertarians more concerned with eminent domain than whatever the CIA is up to? Patri Friedman explains it very well here.

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