Confessions of a Maturing Libertarian

[RunInRed 16,454]

I began teaching an undergraduate economics course this week. A few minutes into a discussion on health care, I recognized a familiar persona at the back of the room: the libertarian. Every class has one, and it's usually one of the brightest, most engaged, most strident students.

Blast from the Past

I always appreciate the input from such students for three reasons. First, it's healthy for discussion. The essence of public policy is deciding what government should and should not do. The libertarian point of view, which basically argues for minimal government authority, helps to anchor that debate. Government has certainly caused plenty of problems, and the "law of unintended consequences" -- the notion that implementing a policy to fix one problem often creates another -- is one of the most important concepts for any policymaker to understand.

Second, I'm in New Hampshire for the summer, and when you're in a state where the motto (stamped on every license plate) is "Live Free or Die," some of that individualist spirit is bound to rub off.

Last, and perhaps most significant, I used to be that libertarian student at the back of the room. When I was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, home of Milton Friedman and his intellectual peers, I was smitten with the wonders of the market. Like Alan Greenspan, I was enamored with the powerful and provocative writings of Ayn Rand. (Unlike Alan Greenspan, I never hung out with Ayn Rand, nor did I date Barbara Walters, regardless of what her new autobiography may claim.)

Stop Me if You've Heard This

I've discovered just one problem with my elegant libertarian philosophy after spending two decades in public policy: It's terribly impractical for actually governing society. My whole quibble with libertarians can be boiled down to one banal question: What's the libertarian point of view on stoplights?

I like stoplights. More to the point, they're a simple and tangible example of how government can make us better off: They enable complete strangers to interact more safely and efficiently. Given a choice between the freedom to speed through an intersection at any time and the coercive red light, I'll tolerate the red light.

That's kind of silly, so consider a more significant example, like counterterrorism. In a world of libertarians, who finds Osama bin Laden?

Better Regulate Than Never

True, most libertarians aren't absolutists; they would concede that defense, including counterterrorism, is a legitimate function of a small, focused government. But would that include stopping genocide? The sad reality is that millions of people can kill each other in the rest of the world and it doesn't directly threaten our well-being. I'm not comfortable with that. Would the protagonists in Ayn Rand's novels have paid taxes to stop the Holocaust?

Or consider something that's likely to affect us directly: climate change. The stampede of evidence suggests that our carbon-based activities are changing the planet in ways that will have some nasty consequences in the long run. Reducing our carbon emissions is going to require global cooperation that's a heck of a lot more complicated than a stoplight -- but it's the same basic idea.

I wrote my dissertation on how government regulation can often be politically motivated and counterproductive. But I still think there's a place for regulation -- for lots of it, actually. The more complicated products become, including sophisticated financial instruments, the more difficult it is to live by the aphorism "buyer beware." How can a consumer reasonably be expected to know that a household cleaning product causes cancer in kids?

Flipping on Libertarianism

I'm comfortable with the government making that kind of determination for me -- in part because I learned the hard way. I flipped over in a Ford Explorer during the stretch when Ford was still insisting that such rollovers were caused by shoddy Firestone tires. The first federal rollover rating system for cars and trucks was released three days after my accident.

Of course, the libertarian in me never goes away entirely, nor should it. One of my disappointments with the Republican party is that the small-government wing has been pummeled by the more activist social conservatives, who are far from libertarian. (The Democrats have never really had a libertarian streak.)

The libertarians have two powerful intellectual arguments that have an important place in public policy: 1) Government should not regulate private behavior that has no negative spillover effects on the rest of society; and 2) We should always be wary of unchecked government authority -- the whole "absolute power corrupts absolutely" thing.

Policy Tweaks

Given that, here are a few areas where our current policies could use a dose of libertarian thinking:

• Illegal Drugs: What we're doing now isn't working. Milton Friedman once observed that most of the problems associated with illegal drugs arise from the fact that they're illegal.

He makes a darn good point. We're trying to stop a voluntary exchange between individuals who really want to use a product and the "firms" who can make a lot of money providing it. These people are going to find each other no matter what we throw at them. (I read recently that Mexican drug dealers have designed special submarines to move drugs thousands of miles by sea so that they can be smuggled into the United States in coastal areas with less legal scrutiny.)

What we're doing now empowers ruthless criminals. Remember Prohibition? Somehow we need to formulate a drug policy that recognizes the distinction between private behaviors that have social costs and those that don't. If you want to smoke pot in your apartment, I don't really care. But if you rob a bank to buy that marijuana, then you should go to jail -- for bank robbery. We've done a decent job in that respect with alcohol. Your drinking is your business; your drinking and driving will land you behind bars.

• Gay Marriage: Is your life really affected if two guys or two girls you've never met before get married in San Francisco? Think of it as a contract between two people that bestows certain unique mutual rights (such as inheritance and medical visitation), and then move on.

• Gun Control: If someone is carrying a gun on the street, it's my business. If they're keeping it in their home, it's not. It seems like the acrimonious debate over guns in this country would benefit from that basic distinction.

• Guantanamo Bay: Here's a case where we could all use a dose of libertarian wariness toward unchecked government authority.

Libertarians don't like government in large part because they don't trust government. They don't like electronic tolling because it can be used by the government to track a driver's whereabouts. They don't like gun registration because the government would know where all the guns are and might someday swoop in and take them all away. I understand these points, even if I don't necessarily agree with them.

We all have some appreciation that government doesn't always get things right, and that unmonitored bureaucrats can wreak havoc. Given that general distrust of formal authority, where is the outrage over torture and unlimited detention? Our government has been holding people at Guantanamo Bay, and clearly torturing some of them, for years now with no formal charges. Isn't this exactly what we're supposed to be afraid of? Two decades from now, we'll be ashamed that it happened on our watch.

Creeping Libertarianism

The libertarian perspective enriches any policy debate. I'm sympathetic to the core philosophy. Someday, I may even have one of those "Live Free or Die" license plates. But for now, I'm not ready to give up stoplights.

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/economist/89955

[AFTiger 282]

We all have some appreciation that government doesn't always get things right, and that unmonitored bureaucrats can wreak havoc. Given that general distrust of formal authority, where is the outrage over torture and unlimited detention? Our government has been holding people at Guantanamo Bay, and clearly torturing some of them, for years now with no formal charges. Isn't this exactly what we're supposed to be afraid of? Two decades from now, we'll be ashamed that it happened on our watch.

Most of us think we are at war with someone other than George Bush. The prisoners at Gitmo do not have Geneva Convention rights but we gave it to them anyway. In past wars, prisoners were detained without trial and subjected to military tribunals when appropriate. Under the recent SCOTUS ruling, the vermin at Gitmo have more rights than the Marines guarding them.

[jared52 4,354]

Yep, another narrow-minded view of the Libertarian party. For every government program that "works" there's 10 more that are poorly run, over funded and could be replaced by a more efficient free market solution. Unfortunately free market solutions require people to do some of their on leg work, ie.e. find health care, get a job, etc and that's just not the American way any more.

I wonder if the pilgrams came here looking for handouts?