My standing with libertarianism: I

To call the past few months historical is a severe understatement. For years, almost decades, Americans have been trained to see the world informed by America’s victory in World War II and become the dominant political and military force in the world. That mindset is in the process of being shattered.

During these tumultuous (albeit encouraging) times, it has become increasing challenging for me to apply a libertarian worldview to a political climate that is not only under severe strain, but appears to be in the process of being altered into a new paradigm. Many of the assumptions I had about how the world worked have been challenged, if not being proved incorrect. With this in mind, I thought it worthwhile to make sure my libertarianism properly mapped current and evolving political reality.

This post focuses on general and abstract concepts I need to consider when evaluating the world. While I’ve tried to discuss below these concepts by order of importance, that is nearly impossible. Many of these concepts overlap and become more or less important depending on the facts and circumstances I’m trying to analyze.

In my next post, I will attempt to apply these concepts to evolving political landscape in which we find ourselves.

The nature of man

As a Christian, there are two ideas that I keep in mind when thinking about how we mere mortals behave. First, men and women, due to original sin, are inherently sinful. Without a proper orientation to God, people will see other things (or people) as the highest good, and will commit heinous crimes in the name of those goods.

Second, connected to the first, human beings are mimetic creatures. Rene Girard taught that we desire the desires of our models. Rivalries occur when our models prevent us from achieving their desires. Mimetic desire is the mechanism through which crises occur; sometimes a crisis rise to such dramatic proportions, the mob seeks a scapegoat to blame for the crisis arising in the first place.

Religion is the foundation for society

When the scapegoat dies, and the tensions arising from the crisis are abated, the mob calms down and feels a sense of peace. The community who went through the tumult develops religious practices such as myths, rituals, and prohibitions (otherwise known as taboos) to keep the peace going for as long as possible. The community unconsciously believes that the scapegoat held the key to that peace. A priestly class arises to perform the religious functions to keep society intact. As a result, religion founds the foundation for all societies.

However, this peace lasts only so long because it is imperfect. At some point, the community’s myths, rituals, and prohibitions can no longer prevent a mimetic crisis from recurring. Once a new mob is formed and yet another scapegoat is sacrificed, a new religion, set of religious practices emerge, and a new priestly class arise to perform those duties to keep the community safe from mimetic violence.

Economic versus political action

Murray Rothbard took from Franz Oppenheimer’s work the idea that there are two types of action in the world: economic and political. Economic action is when two parties engage in an exchange of goods and/or services with the hope that the exchange will benefit both parties. Political action is when one parties takes something from another. In other words, political action is theft.

Descriptive versus normative

For many libertarians such as myself, this is where the rubber meets the road. A phrase such as “political action is theft” has a moral connotation. After all, theft is immoral, and should be wrong under all circumstances.

However, for us to properly analyze a given situation, it is important to be as value-free as possible when doing so. We need to understand the situation as it is, rather than how we would like it to be. The risk of applying our moral judgment to any given situation runs the risk of coloring our analysis of how things are, thereby leading to impaired judgements about how to act going forward.

Getting from A to ZDG.13

This is particularly challenging for libertarians in this day and age. Never in the history of the world has political power been so centralized. Notwithstanding the accumulation of such power in world capitals, there are those who want to centralize government authority even further. The Davos crowd and leading Democrats use cover stories such as global warming and structural racism to obtain even more (or at least keep) power while anarcho-tyranny reigns in cities across the West and the middle class shrinks.

Under these circumstances, the primary question for anarcho-libertarians is quite simple: how does one get from where we are today to an actual private property society? Clearly this transition cannot happen overnight. Moreover, very few people even believe that a private property society can exist, let alone seek to achieve it.

Far too many libertarians, including myself, believed that if you make cogent and rational arguments about liberty, people will accept them on their own terms and want to increase liberty themselves. That is clearly not the case. While an argument can be made that the Democrats’ hold on national institutions such as universities and the media have prevented Americans to think for themselves, that isn’t a sufficient explanation in my mind as to why libertarianism hasn’t taken off. As I alluded to above, humans tend to belong in groups. While liberty does lead to civilizational flourishing, we need to recognize that to many, libertarian arguments seem counterintuitive.

Liberty and power?

Libertarians, including myself, have also become allergic to the using power to forward liberty’s cause. Using power to pursue liberty feels counterintuitive. Why should I compel someone to be free? Isn’t that contradictory to freedom?

This perspective is in many ways informed by how libertarians have interpreted Murray Rothbard’s framing of history as the struggle between Liberty and Power. As he explained in the preface to his magnificent history of the early years of the United States, Conceived in Liberty:

My own basic perspective on the history of man, and a fortiori on the history of the United States, is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power, a conflict, by the way, which was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century. I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life. But liberty has always been threatened by the encroachments of power, power which seeks to suppress, control, cripple, tax, and exploit the fruits of liberty and production. Power, then, the enemy of liberty, is consequently the enemy of all the other goods and fruits of civilization that mankind holds dear. And power is almost always centered in and focused on that central repository of power and violence: the state. With Albert Jay Nock, the twentieth century American political philosopher, I see history as centrally a race and conflict between “social power”— the productive consequence of voluntary interactions among men—and state power. In those eras of history when liberty—social power—has managed to race ahead of state power and control, the country and even mankind have flourished. In those eras when state power has managed to catch up with or surpass social power, mankind suffers and declines.

The mistake I made in reading this passage in the past is in thinking that power in and of itself is an evil to be avoided. However, if one reads this passage carefully, Rothbard is not criticizing power per se, but how and why it is applied. Using power to enhance “voluntary interactions among men” may be acceptable, but using power to “suppress, control” and tax is not.

Libertarians, including myself, need to become more comfortable with understanding how power works, and how to use power to forward the cause of liberty.

Methodological individualism

I also wonder whether libertarians misapply otherwise appropriate intellectual tools when evaluating any given political situation. (This is perhaps my least well-thought out section of this post - if you can believe that. Please be gentle on my thoughts on this.) Take methodological individualism as an example. Through giants such as Hayek and Mises, MI has been developed to help social scientists understand social phenomena by looking at how an individual may respond to a given situation. I’ll give two examples to try to illustrate my point.

1. Government “action.” One of Mises’ great insights in Human Action is that governments do not act, people do. In other words, a government official may use his office to implement “official policy” to achieve ends of his own, rather than that of the state he represents. In many ways, I wonder if libertarians have lost sight of that insight. For far too long, we attribute government actions to that of the state rather than the actors controlling it. Further, libertarians (including many others on the right) have become increasingly lazy and attributed anyone who is close to the halls of power in the West as acting in unison, usually at the expense of the “common man.” However, as I’ll explain in my next post, we’ve seen a split among the Western elite which has led to, among other things, the re-election of Trump. While the Western elite’s increasingly pathological behavior over the past two decades has led to libertarians understandably assuming people at that level think and act only one way, recent events are a good reminder that lazy thinking can lead to poor analysis.

2. Order of operations. The past few years have seen a handful of policies libertarians should, on the surface, applaud. For example, in 2014 California voters passed a proposition that re-categorized theft of less than $900 as misdemeanors. However, the consequences of this was disastrous. During the Covid lockdowns and immediately afterwards, there was a rash of store robberies across the state; the police wouldn’t pursue these thefts because no one would go to jail. What was meant to lead to fewer criminals in jail led only to increased anarcho-tyranny. Fortunately, petty theft is back to being a crime in California. Residents want a stronger police presence and no longer have any patience with criminals. I don’t blame them. Libertarians should be more thoughtful about focusing on the most pressing matters (such as high taxation and regulation) at any particular point in time, rather than “liberalizations” that might actually lead to increased disorder.

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In this post I’ve laid out some of the concepts I’ve been struggling through as I have been reacting to the changing political environment over the past few months.

In my next post, I’ll attempt to lay out my understanding of the current political situation.