In a recent essay, Georgetown Law professor and libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett offered a provocative indictment of American libertarianism. The movement needs several updates, he argued, most notably regarding what he considers to be abuses of private power. Instead of evolving, libertarianism according to Barnett has been “frozen in amber since the 1970s.”
The state of libertarian thought may seem of little importance to anyone but committed libertarians (some of whom disagreed thoughtfully with Barnett’s piece). After all, libertarians are far from being a dominant force in either major political party. The Trump-era GOP has repudiated libertarian ideas it previously had some affinity for, such as promoting free trade and cutting entitlement spending. Democrats are far from libertarian as well. The idea—propounded by some conspiratorially minded people on both left and right—that libertarians secretly dominate American public policy is patently false.
Though I don’t agree with most of Barnett’s assessment, I do think he’s right that libertarianism still needs some updates—just not the ones he proposes. Its traditional core remains valid, even more so than ever in some ways. Nevertheless, libertarianism needs a better theory of the tradeoffs between natural rights and utility; it needs better strategies to address large-scale public goods problems; and it needs to recognize that nationalism is the greatest threat to liberty in most parts of the world today.
Libertarianism’s recent policy contributions.
Depending on how the question is asked, public opinion surveys suggest that 7 percent to 22 percent of the population leans libertarian (though the lower figures are probably more accurate). Nonetheless, libertarians often have influence beyond those numbers. Ideas initially developed by libertarian academics or policy analysts—from the abolition of the draft and school choice, to drug legalization and YIMBY housing deregulation—periodically go mainstream. Libertarians, in other words, can often punch above their weight.
The basic ideas of libertarianism need little updating. Government power should be tightly limited across the board, in both economic and social realms. Recent history reinforces that conclusion. The War on Drugs, for example, caused the growth of the fentanyl crisis. Government-imposed exclusionary zoning is at the heart of the housing crisis besetting many parts of the country. Out-of-control entitlement spending is the biggest cause of the federal government’s looming fiscal crisis. The list could go on.
Moreover, libertarian and libertarian-leaning thinkers have recently developed many important new policy ideas. Scholars such as Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan have made major contributions to the study of political ignorance, showing that the vast majority of voters are both ignorant of basic facts about government and thereby strengthening the case against allowing it to control vast swathes of our lives. Elinor Ostrom and others have demonstrated how the private sector—utilizing social norms and institutions such as private planned communities—can address many collective action problems and other issues most previously believed only the government could handle. Bernard Siegan and Edward Glaeser have shown that abolishing all or most exclusionary zoning would enhance economic growth and help the poor and disadvantaged the most. Economists and political philosophers like Brennan, Michael Huemer, and Michael Clemens have made a strong case for at least greatly reducing immigration restrictions.
These are just a few of the relatively recent major libertarian contributions to public policy debates, but they illustrate the basic point: Libertarian ideas have not been “frozen in amber since the 1970s.” That’s not to say, however, that they can’t be improved.
Principles and public goods.
In particular, libertarians have long argued about whether natural rights, utilitarian consequentialism, or some combination of the two is the basis of our ideology. But the issue still requires more consideration.
Pure natural rights theories and pure utilitarianism both have serious flaws. If you’re a believer in absolute natural rights then you must, as David Friedman—the famous libertarian economist and son of Milton Friedman—pointed out, refuse to violate them even to a small degree, even if it’s the only way to save thousands or millions of lives. Pure utilitarianism has similar awful implications. If a large enough number of people get a large enough amount of pleasure from watching a TV show where children are forced to fight to the death, as in the Hunger Games series, the viewers’ gain in utility outweighs the children’s loss for the pure utilitarian. This issue isn’t just theoretical, as real-world tradeoffs like this periodically arise. Consider vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a genuine but small sacrifice of liberty could potentially save many lives.
The tension between natural rights and utilitarianism isn’t unique to libertarianism, but it’s especially important for us because the rights we advocate are so wide-ranging. The way out of this dilemma is to concede that both liberty and utility matter, and that we can justifiably sacrifice small amounts of liberty when it is the only way to achieve large increases in utility, and vice versa (i.e. when sacrificing small amounts of utility is the only way to get large increases in liberty). But that principle needs far better elaboration, especially regarding relatively close cases.
A second major issue libertarians need to address better is the problem of dealing with large-scale public goods. In economics, the term refers to “nonexcludable” and “nonrivalrous” goods and services. Once the public good is produced, people who didn’t help produce it or pay for it cannot be excluded from the benefits (making it nonexcludable), and their enjoyment of it doesn’t inhibit similar enjoyment by others (which makes it nonrivalrous). As a result, markets tend to underproduce public goods, because would-be consumers have incentives to “free ride” on production, making it difficult for producers to get compensated for their services. Conventional wisdom holds that only government can produce public goods effectively.
But over the last several decades, libertarian-leaning scholars have shown that many local and regional public goods can be produced by the private sector. For example, Robert Nelson and Fred Foldvary’s work shows many public goods traditionally produced by local governments can be better provided by private planned communities. Private planned communities can, for example, provide security, trash removal, environmental amenities, and more.
Libertarians have not done as well when it comes to national and global-level public goods, such as dealing with pandemics and global warming. These types of issues should concern libertarians (and others) for two reasons. First, they can cause enormous harm. Millions of people died in the recent pandemic, and global warming could cause great harm as well. Second, if pro-free market ideologies don’t offer plausible solutions for these issues, more statist ones are likely to step into the breach. Think of the lockdowns and migration restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic, or of “Green New Deal” plans for a government takeover of much of the economy to address global warming.
Libertarian scholars have done some valuable work on these issues. For example, Alex Tabarrok has argued for increasing investment in vaccines to ensure they can be quickly deployed in the event of future pandemics—a relatively cheap way to curb the spread of disease with comparatively little infringement on liberty. Jonathan Adler, Terry Anderson, Donald Leal, and others have argued that climate change is best addressed by targeted carbon taxes, which require less government regulation and control than other approaches.
But much remains to be done on this extremely difficult set of issues. Climate change is especially hard, given its global nature. Even if a carbon tax is the best approach in principle, it’s not clear how developing nations such as India, China, and Brazil could be incentivized to go along. In some cases, it may turn out that a large-scale public good problem cannot be solved at any acceptable cost. But, if so, libertarian experts need to better explain the reasons why and outline ways that we can minimize the cost of living with the problem.
Libertarianism’s emerging chief rival.
Libertarians also need to recognize how quickly nationalism has emerged as the greatest threat to liberty in much of the world. “Nationalism” is one of those terms that has many meanings. Here, I use it to refer to the idea that government must promote the interests of a particular ethnic, racial or cultural group, usually the majority group in a given nation. Nationalists have come to dominate the political right in much of the Western world, including in France and much of Germany. It has also risen in the United States, where Donald Trump openly proclaims himself to be one and where “national conservatives” are increasingly influential on the right-wing intellectual scene.
The world’s leading authoritarian powers—China and Russia—are also promoters of nationalism. This is obvious in the case of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its growing alliance with Western right-wing nationalists. China remains ruled by the theoretically Marxist Communist Party, but that government increasingly promotes authoritarian nationalism, rather than Marxist socialism. Rarely, if ever, does it still advocate class struggle, a transition to full communism, or other traditional Marxist tropes.
Why should this worry libertarians? Because, as Alex Nowrasteh and I describe in “The Case Against Nationalism,” nationalists advocate a vast array of illiberal statist policies, including pervasive protectionism, severe immigration restrictions, government control of much of the economy through “industrial policy,” repression of cultural trends they dislike, and more. They also have a strong tendency toward strongman-worship and rejecting the legitimacy of election results that go against them. Because of its more sweeping agenda and much broader base of support, nationalism is a much bigger menace than left-wing “wokeness,” even though the latter is also a problem. And lest we forget, this nationalist agenda has much in common with socialism—including a horrific history of repression and mass murder. In our time, nationalists are far more politically powerful than socialists in most of the world.
Nationalism is not a new adversary for libertarians. Our late 19th-century European classical liberal predecessors opposed the nationalists of that era. The great libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek both fled fascist nationalism in Germany and Austria. In his 1960 essay “Why I am Not a Conservative,” Hayek warned against conservatism’s “proneness to a strident nationalism” and pointed out that “this nationalistic bias … frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism.” That warning seems prescient today.
Despite Hayek’s strictures, most libertarians today are accustomed to a world where our main adversaries are on the political left. Refocusing on the nationalist threat requires what for some will be a difficult mental adjustment. But refocusing is necessary.
That is partly a matter of political strategy. Countering nationalists will require a different set of political alliances than those of the era of conservative-libertarian “fusionism.” We still have major differences with left-liberals that cannot be ignored. But those differences must, for a time, often be less salient than those with the nationalist right.
A reorientation is also intellectually necessary. Libertarians have much to contribute to the analysis and critique of nationalism, especially when it comes to its tendency toward dangerous expansion and concentration of government power. But we can only do that if we recognize the importance of the task.
So does libertarianism need updating? Certainly. It needs to bolster its philosophical foundations and approach to public goods. It also needs to recognize that nationalism has become the greatest threat to liberty in most parts of the world.
But libertarians also should not undersell the movement’s achievements. Libertarianism has a track record of impressive policy ideas, and its traditional core remains as robust as ever. Still, the issues considered here are particularly important at this point in history, and it is imperative we address them better than we have so far. Libertarians should not shrink from the challenge.
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