Virginia Postrel on libertarianism

>Might be more compelling if it wasn’t coming out of the mouth of someone who (IIRC) supported the Administration post-Padilla. But, hey, maybe Postrel’s got a different definition of “liberty.”

Got any links for this. Ten minutes of googling turns up nothing whatsoever written by Postrel about Padilla or Hamdi.

SCMT,

Even for propertarians I thought torturing a suspect without charge was a no-no. Reading through Postrel she is simply delusional about what Democrats advocate.

Another interesting point is the annoyance at being labeled a Libertarian, a small tent if ever there was one, and then turning around and using non-representative examples from the huge coalition of people that fall under the Democratic tent – it is frankly just weird.

You’re saying she shouldn’t be making tradeoffs among feasible alternatives when deciding who to back.

No, I’m saying you need an excellent justification to make the trade-off she made, if she wants to call herself a libertarian, and if we want the word “libertarian” to mean anything remotely sensible. I’m not a libertarian. Maybe it’s considered a fine and reasonable libertarian position to say, “I’d like [libertarian package of rights X] or free cable. Whichever.” In which case, it seems fair to treat “libertarian” as a nonsense word, and people who ascribe any specific political positions to the the word as nonsense people.

Education. Entitlements. Trade. Fiscal responsibility. Foreign policy (for those values of libertarian that aren’t sorry we fought the Cold War).

There has to be some attempt to order the liberties, or else “libertarian” seems to mean “I like markets, and I’m for the good stuff.” If libertarians now think it’s OK for the government to imprison indefinitely, and without reference to any fair hearing, an American citizen captured on American soil, then I don’t know what they think they could mean by “liberty.” When people contrast Hussein’s tyranny to US liberty, they aren’t generally talking about property confiscation.

You would think a group of people committed to the primacy of markets would be in favor of a little truth in advertising in the marketplace of political ideas. If you don’t like propertarian (though, seriously, many of the compelling arguments libertarians make appear to be based around this subject area), choose “Randian.” My knowledge of her thinking comes only from a couple of novels, but she seemed more concerned with property rights than–well, I’d call it “liberty,” but that’s what’s at issue.

I suppose my voting for Badnarik during the last Presidential election was just as coldly calculating as VP’s voting for Bush.

I live in Massachusetts. There was no way Kerry was going to lose or Bush going to win there, so I voted for a third party candidate. Even though Bush won big in Texas, I suppose there was the slim chance Kerry could have won that state.

brava

The point being, I think, is that if you morph libertarianism into a philosophy about empiricism rather than individual rights, then its philosphy is really US liberalism with a slight weighting towards individual liberties — one of the types of differences that are common within any large tent.

VP,

Nice CATO article. I agree with basically all of it.

Without scrolling up for names, I have a hard time seeing how anyone can’t see that there is a huge difference between the threat of socialism and the threat of the minimum wage, just to take one part of that quote.

I also think that it is important to realize that libertarians are coming from different perspectives as VP extensively outlined. Noting these differences, one would think that these differences, along with their respective policy differences, are relatively minor compared to our differences with those who are allergic to the whole libertarian or “classical liberal” framework. As such, we ought to try harder to find common cause instead of fighting eachother, and to also figure out which approaches are most likely to win converts if possible, or win votes in election at least.

The question of the relation between socialism and libertarianism
is even more complicated than what one gets from going back a mere
half century, or the oddities of thinking of James Buchanan and
Noam Chomsky in the same box (“libertarian socialism,” whatever the
heck may be the significance of the relatively new “libertarian social
democracy”).

Thus, the origin of the term “libertarianism” came out of the far left
in France in the late 19th century. In the 1920s, there were actually
people, mostly in France, but in some other countries as well, including
the US in the 1940s, who actually called themselves “libertarian communists,”
(“communism” also being originally a French term, derived from the word for
a local unit of government in France, a “commune”). There was even briefly
a “Libertarian International” that was very far left.

It was the 1950s that saw the nearly complete transformation of the term
from being a “leftist” term to a “rightist” term. Hayek did not like this,
preferring “classical liberal” in his famous essay, “Why I am not a Conservative,”
written at the end of the 1950s (and followed up on recently by James Buchanan’s
“Why I am Also not a Conservative”). Of course, “right” and “left” are also
political terms of French origin, dating to the early period of the French
Revolution when in the Estates General, the monarchists sat on the right and
the anti-monarchists, the Republicans, sat on the left.

So, there may be a left wing and a right wing libertarianism. This may not
be all that surprising as we have long had both a left wing and a right wing
anarchism, with the two wings not all that far apart in what they support,
despite very different styles and rhetorics. Of course right wing anarchism
is probably just the proper name for what is sometimes labeled “anarcho-capitalist
liberarianism,” the radical wing of that label. As for left wing anarchism, well,
that was the opposition to Karl Marx in the First International, led by Bukanin,
although the British William Godwin is usually credited as being the first anarchist,
not clearly right or left wing, although he did at least initially support the
anti-monarchism of the original “leftists” in the French Revolution.