Hal, Who Lives in a Mansion

Libertarianism and American Morality

Hal, my uncle, is a libertarian. When news of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision to uphold Obamacare hit the internet, he was visiting the United Kingdom—not exactly a bastion of libertarianism. I was a lowly graduate student, poor enough to be satisfied with the Supreme Court and smart enough to know not to discuss this with Uncle Hal, despite a track record of respectful, if not entirely persuasive, political dialogue. On our last night together, I said only one remotely relevant thing: “It’s pretty easy to be a libertarian if you’re rich.” He didn’t argue with me because, hey, it’s pretty easy to be many things if you’re rich.

But it’s particularly easy to be a libertarian.

There’s nothing wrong with being a libertarian, and though the previous paragraph glosses over it, there’s at least one libertarian I love a whole lot. To be honest, I don’t know a whole lot of libertarians, and sometimes I wonder why that is.

In a vacuum, it’s a political philosophy that argues for minimal government interference and largely unbridled capitalism. With political gridlock being what it is, I can understand a libertarian-style enthusiasm for less government. It sounds good. It feels good. It strips power from Washington political professionals.

All I can say to that is: It’s pretty easy to be a libertarian if you’re rich.

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The association of libertarianism with the GOP (thanks in large part to the Ron Paul bandwagon) is misleading because true libertarians do not claim a moral agenda (unless you consider deregulation a moral issue). If you can’t quite make out the difference between a neoconservative Republican and a libertarian, look no further than drug legalization: Republicans have a social agenda as well as a fiscal one, and legalizing weed stretches freedom a bit too freely for their tastes.

The message is certainly intriguing. Libertarianism, taken at its word, allows for a purer capitalism. I am all aboard the capitalism train—it has made the United States the enterprising nation that it is—but those with money naturally have greater access to what it can buy, namely better opportunities to make more money. In theory, there isn’t something definitively wrong with this idea; talent and perseverance are worthy of compensation.

But there are many people who possess unique talents and demonstrate unflappable perseverance. Most of them aren’t wealthy. And there are plenty of people with wealth who exhibit neither.

This is a cyclical issue. We can assume the more money I have, the less reliant I am upon certain government programs (and the reverse). This is not universally true across the whole of the class spectrum, but it is especially profound at the ends—for the categorically rich and the categorically poor. It makes sense that the wealthy might want less government; other than law and order, they don’t feel like they need it.

Within reasonable parameters of a libertarian fantasy, let’s consider schools (which in this scenario would clearly be private). If I am wealthy, this is no problem. I will send my kids to the best school money can buy, and because that is my choice I am prepared to pay a hefty fee. I can choose the school that I believe will best cultivate their individual talents and care for their unique struggles. Maybe if I liked my kids less I could save some money, but in this example I like them a lot. If I am less wealthy, I will send my kids to the best school I can reasonably afford. This school is more affordable for a reason. And if I am poor, I will select a school based almost entirely on affordability. If there is an opportunity to choose based on other merits, I will do so, but I can’t be picky. The more expensive or cheap a school is, the more obvious the reasons. These almost caste-like restrictions already exist in modern America, passed down fairly predictably from one generation to the next.

Where the libertarian fantasy falls short of present reality is in addressing the next question: how to fix an underperforming school. The underperforming school will remain that way without many things, but certainly without money. So where can the money come from? Libertarians would say it should come from the individual.

Which individual?

• Am I the individual who sends his kid to the most affordable school? If so, I probably can’t give beyond what I’m already paying, and if I could it would not be enough. If the whole street, or the whole neighborhood, or the whole district could give more, the money raised still would not be enough.

• Am I a wealthy philanthropist who gives money to individual families in need? That’s charity. That’s noble. But it will never be enough to fix a school or lead to innovation.

• Am I a wealthy philanthropist who gives money to schools in need? That’s charity. It’s also privately-run public welfare, but unlike the scale of federal, state, and local government, it lacks the potential to ever come close to being enough.

• Am I Bill Gates? If I am, I can bankroll a lot of good schools without breaking a sweat. I can’t bankroll all the schools across America.

The clear counterargument here is that we haven’t figured out how to universalize quality public education within our current system. That’s true. All I will say is that at least in our current system we have, in absolute terms, significant financial resources, albeit insufficient ones. From what other point is it possible to start?

One of the great philosophical misconceptions is that individuals will buy what we need for the community as well as or better than the community can buy what we need for individuals. I’m an open-minded fellow, but of this I am fairly sure: We can buy more together. Much more.

Public money pays for those things we utilize collectively but can’t afford individually. It’s not my system of roads, but I can drive from Maine to California tomorrow using the interstate highways we collectively purchased. And in that sense, it is my system of roads (which I share). If we minimize taxes, the funding for infrastructure, schools, vaccinations, small business loans, national parks, or whatever our priorities are has to come from somewhere else. How do we fill in the gap? With individuals, of course. But it is not in the individual interest of members of any society to philanthropically part with their money, and certainly not in the quantities necessary to reflect the look and feel of American society.

A libertarian American government would eventually have to intervene in a big way, pouring vast sums of money into entities either in disrepair or headed that way. Not only does this undermine the values of non-interference, but where is the government getting the money to step in? You guessed it: increased taxation.

As Tony Judt writes in Ill Fares the Land:

“We would all like a nice playing field, just as we would all like a good rail service to the nearest town, a range of shops carrying the goods we need, a conveniently-sited post office and so forth. But the only way we can be made to pay for such things—including the free riders among us—is by general taxation. No one has come up with a better way of aggregating individual desires to collective advantage… There are too many areas of life where we cannot be relied upon to advance our collective interests merely by doing what we think is best for each of us.”*

We could, after all is said and done, wind up just about where we already are.

It is our historical practice to ebb and flow between greater and lesser governmental involvement. The following is from a paper I produced in 2012:

“The United States was originally established to veer away from the tyrannical power that is often the result of centralized control. This emphasis on decentralization reached a head in the form of the American Civil War, as states disagreed with national government and each other in determining the dominant source of power. By the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, the United States was fairly centralized, largely due to President Abraham Lincoln’s assertiveness during the Civil War, the courts, industrial progress, and America’s emerging position on the international stage.”**

In the three decades following World War II, the Greatest Generation forged a social state the likes of which had never before been attempted. Their children (my parents) and their grandchildren (me), however, were born into the luxury of these accomplishments, accomplishments which had turned the United States into the most open, profitable, and powerful nation in the history of ever. Politics became personal for the Baby Boomers, and this sense of individualism has driven the last thirty years of political discourse toward lesser governmental involvement. I, along with a majority of living Americans, never knew the country before Social Security and Medicare and thus identify these kinds of programs as part of the establishment. The establishment, whatever it may be, is the place from which every new generation flees, which presents this historical moment as a kind of mating season for deregulation (i.e. favorable to libertarianism).

Nobel laureate in Economics Amartya Sen has argued for much of his adult life that government and society must do more than simply get out of the way. His “capabilities approach” essentially says that many of us are not in positions to capitalize on freedom if freedom means little more than a government that stands aside. For instance, if you and I live in a rural community, we are both perfectly free to get a higher-paying job in the nearby town. But while I have a place where my child can be watched after school, you do not. Or perhaps you can’t afford the gas. Or the car. Either way, Sen would argue that even though we are both perfectly free to do so, we are not equally capable to seek this new kind of employment. Sen might argue for teaching a man to fish; a classical liberal economist may only point the man in the direction of water (if it isn’t inconvenient).

Whether the reader will find this persuasive is not for me to say, but just know it’s hard to grab what is yours to take if you don’t have, say, opposable thumbs. The myriad ways we might be able to provide “opposable thumbs” to those who need them are all worthy of debate in a social democracy. But we shouldn’t pretend that opportunities to achieve equality are necessarily equal-opportunity.

At least for the foreseeable future, American libertarians are going to have to settle for small victories, holding all of us accountable for our failings and overindulgences. And I hope they do just that. I’m not saying libertarianism could never work in some unrecognizable reality, but it can’t work within the United States as currently constituted. Libertarianism would either undermine itself or the rich would collapse upon the poor in such a way as to make present-day economic inequality look like a community picnic. And then it would undermine itself.

Social democracy and libertarianism are two ideas that simply don’t coexist—the town just ain’t big enough.

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This is all based on the premise that a libertarian America would try, as I mentioned before, to reflect the look and feel of current American society. That’s an assumption on my part. Bear that in mind, because the libertarian fantasy discussed earlier only works in two situations:

1. If each of us gives more freely of our money than there is any precedent to suggest we would; or

2. If helping each other isn’t as much of a priority.***

History does not suggest that we can make a good, just, and socially mobile society without heavy governmental involvement. And it’s not as though heavy governmental involvement is some newfangled idea that the old folks just wouldn’t understand. It’s been here. Regardless of the election rhetoric, Democrats and Republicans both abide by big government (with gusto). But any conversation about the merits of libertarianism must eventually take a stance on whether the have-nots are worthy of some brotherly and sisterly love, and that’s where this political philosophy ceases to be about money or civil liberties, but about morality.

The past generation and the current economic recession have reshaped the way we understand national prosperity, which is routinely distilled down to GDP. If that’s all success is, then we really don’t have to bother with the social state or even with democracy. We could just channel mid-century China or the USSR—accrue power and neglect to feed everybody.

But we are a democracy. And we have a social state. Libertarianism doesn’t oppose democracy, but it would—were it applied to its ends—alter not just what the United States does, but what it is. For good and for bad, the United States always incorporates a moral agenda. Morality was as much the basis for freeing the slaves as it was for maintaining slavery. The same thing could be said now about either side of the gay rights movement. All of our efforts—women’s suffrage, the forced relocation of Native Americans, the New Deal, Vietnam—are moral. And this morality almost exclusively comes down to that old leave-a-better-world-for-your-children chestnut. Why do you think we call them the Founding Fathers?

Uncle Hal’s opposition to paying taxes is, shall we say, colorful. He loathes it for the obvious reason—losing money sucks—but he also hates paying taxes for a number of principled reasons that express a provocative logic. Hal doesn’t like that Democrats refuse to raise the retirement age. He really doesn’t like that Republicans refuse to cut the defense budget.

Democrats and Republicans, unlike libertarians, actually agree on the value of government expenditures (at least off the record). Although the motivations of some of our political leaders are dubious (and others criminal), many would not endure the scrutiny, vitriol, and infamy that come with their visibility if they were not trying to take care of their children. That’s usually what morality, for good and ill, is about.

Everybody—from the Tea Party to the Occupy movement to this guy—seems to despise government right now. Yet the Libertarian Party is hardly a force to be reckoned with, and libertarian ideals have only made relatively minor dents in the platforms of the two major political parties. No doubt some of the problem is the entrenched Democratic and Republican monopolies, but the only other explanation I can muster is that we still believe participating in an active government will give us the greatest chance to make a better future. What walking clichés we Americans are.

I don’t think libertarianism is a morality-killer, nor do I think libertarians are necessarily indifferent to others. Subscribing to libertarian ideology, should anyone desire, is fine by me. My uncle has no children—also totally fine. But I wonder if Uncle Hal would still be a libertarian if he were “Dad” to someone else.