The Volokh Conspiracy

Young, a libertarian herself, explains why she is very uncomfortable with Ron Paul’s views on foreign policy. I suspect the column reflects the views of many other libertarians who appreciate Ron Paul’s long record of defending individual freedom, but wouldn’t want him anywhere near the Oval Office because of his foreign policy positions, among other things.

What I think many libertarians of my acquaintance, including Young, would like is for the U.S. to adopt a less interventionist foreign policy more cognizant of the limits of government competence and the dangers of unintended consequences, without coming anywhere near adopting the sort of Chomskyite critique of U.S. foreign policy that sometimes emanates from Paul, and even more so some of his “left”-libertarian supporters.  Unfortunately, save poor Gary Johnson, who couldn’t even get into the debates, the GOP field this year has offered a choice between an even more bellicose and interventionist foreign policy, and Ron Paul. (George W. Bush’s opposition to “nation-building” sounded pretty good to many libertarian ears in 2000, but the follow-through, shall we say, left something to be desired).

Earlier today, the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins visited the White House. But playoff MVP goaltender Tim Thomas chose not to attend. He issued a very libertarian-seeming statement explaining his reasons:

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT

For reasons I described here, I don’t think we should attach much weight to the political views of sports and entertainment celebrities. That holds true even in the rare cases like this one where a celebrity makes a political statement I agree with. Still, I thought Thomas’ decision was interesting, if only because there are so few libertarian celebrities out there. I don’t know if I would have rejected the invitation to the White House were I in Thomas’ position. But I certainly sympathize with his reasons for doing so, including the point about both parties bearing responsibility for today’s overgrown federal government.

UPDATE: Various media reports indicate that Thomas is a fan of Glenn Beck, who is far from uniformly libertarian, and occasionally endorses ridiculous conservative conspiracy theories. So Thomas may well be more of a conservative himself. That said, the reasons he gave in his statement are ones that most libertarians would agree with.

It’s arguable that Thomas should have gone to the White House anyway, on the grounds that events like this are really about paying tribute to the office of the presidency rather than the policies of the present occupant of it. On the other hand, presidents of both parties do these sorts of events in part because they see a political advantage in it. On balance, if I were Thomas, I would probably have gone to the event anyway, since it doesn’t imply endorsement of the president’s agenda or of the general course of federal policy over the last few years. But I can certainly understand Thomas’ reasons for making the opposite decision.

The Politico website recently asked its contributors for commentary on the controversy over Ron Paul’s racist newsletters. Here is an excerpt from my response:

Ron Paul clearly deserves substantial blame for publishing racist and anti-Semitic material in his newsletters in the early 1990s. Although he almost certainly did not write those articles himself, it is difficult to believe that he was completely unaware of their contents. Moreover, there is no disputing the fact that, in the early 1990s, Paul was part of a small group of libertarians led by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard who sought to forge an alliance with “paleoconservative” elements by adopting a political strategy of appealing to white racial resentment…..

Paul is not a racist himself. But at least for a time, he was clearly willing to get into bed with political allies who sought to exploit racist sentiments. In some ways, Paul’s situation is similar to that of other politicians with dubious past associations. Indeed, there are parallels between Paul today and Barack Obama in 2008, when he was attacked for his past relationships with anti-American and anti-Semitic minister Jeremiah Wright and ex-terrorist and self-described communist Bill Ayers….

Despite their respective efforts at damage control, it is entirely legitimate to hold these past associations against Obama and Paul. While they were not bigots or terrorists themselves, they clearly were willing to ally themselves with people who are…..
I am not a Paul supporter myself – both because of the newsletter issue, and because I think he is badly misguided on some other issues. But I can understand why a reasonable person might reach the conclusion that Paul’s strong libertarian stance on a number of issues today outweighs his earlier sins.

One of my concerns about Paul’s candidacy is that it could end up tarring libertarianism by association with his past misdeeds. It is important to recognize that the Rothbard-Rockwell strategy was opposed by most libertarian intellectuals and movement organizations when they and Paul pursued it in the early 1990s…..

[N]umerous libertarian commentators have denounced Paul’s equivocations about the newsletters during the 2008 campaign and this year. We have neither excused nor ignored his very real flaws. Rothbard and Rockwell’s “paleo” strategy was widely opposed in libertarian circles long before it became a major public controversy during Paul’s most recent presidential campaigns.

Paul’s relative success this year shows that the libertarian message has considerable appeal even when the messenger is deeply flawed. It remains to be seen how much the messenger’s sins will tarnish the libertarian cause in the long run.

For my earlier commentary on Paul, see here and here, and this series of posts written during the 2008 campaign.

James Kirchick of the New Republic has an article taking libertarians to task because they allegedly don’t “care about Ron Paul’s bigoted newsletters,” which have reentered the limelight since Paul’s recent rise in the GOP primary polls:

Ultimately, Paul’s following is closely linked with the peculiar attractions of the libertarian creed that he promotes. Libertarianism is an ideology rather than a philosophy of government—its main selling point is not its pragmatic usefulness, but its inviolable consistency. In that way, Paul’s indulgence of bigotry—he says he did not write the newsletters but rather allowed others to do so in his name—isn’t an incidental departure from his libertarianism, but a tidy expression of its priorities: First principles of market economics gain credence over all considerations of social empathy and historical acuity. His fans are guilty of donning the same ideological blinders, giving their support to a political candidate on account of the theories he declaims, rather than the judgment he shows in applying those theories, or the character he has evinced in living them. Voters for Ron Paul are privileging logical consistency at the expense of moral fitness.

But it’s not simply that Paul’s supporters are ignoring the manifest evidence of his moral failings. More fundamentally, their very awareness of such failings is crowded out by the atmosphere of outright fervor that pervades Paul’s candidacy.

Kirchick’s argument is based on a false premise. Numerous prominent libertarian commentators have in fact denounced Paul for the newsletters and his other unsavory associations, going back to when the issue first became prominent in 2008. I did so myself, as did co-blogger David Bernstein. So did David Boaz of the Cato Institute (the most prominent libertarian think thank), Virginia Postrel, and various writers at Reason, the most prominent libertarian magazine. Kirchick cites three supposedly libertarian “professional political commentators” who he claims have chosen to ignore Paul’s transgressions.

One of those three is Andrew Sullivan, who is pretty obviously not a libertarian and does not consider himself to be such. Another is Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic. Friedersdorf is indeed a libertarian Paul supporter [Update: or at least sympathetic to Paul's candidacy; I'm not actually sure whether he advocates voting for Paul or not]. But, far from ignoring the newsletters or giving Paul a pass on them, he has described them as “awful” and recognized that Paul deserves substantial blame for them.

Many other examples of libertarians who have denounced the newsletters could be cited. But these should be enough to make the point.

Kirchick also asks why libertarians didn’t choose to support Gary Johnson over Paul, given the former’s lack of damning associations. Well, I advocated precisely that, in part for precisely that reason, as did many other libertarian commentators. Unfortunately, Johnson’s candidacy failed to gain traction, in large part because he lacked Paul’s superior name recognition and financial resources.

Kirchick argues that support for Ron Paul indicates some sort of special “ideological” blinders by libertarians. I am no Paul supporter myself for reasons I summarized here and here. But I can understand supporting Paul despite the newsletters if you believe that, on balance, his policies are likely to be better for the nation than those of the other candidates.

Indeed, there is a parallel between supporting Paul in spite of his dubious associations and those who supported Barack Obama in 2008 despite his own dubious associations with anti-American and anti-Semitic minister Jeremiah Wright and ex-terrorist/self-described communist Bill Ayers. Paul’s defense is strikingly similar to Obama’s. Just as Obama claims he didn’t know about Wright and Ayers’ despicable views and doesn’t agree with them, Paul claims he didn’t know about the newsletters and doesn’t endorse their content. When the issue became a public controversy, Obama distanced himself from Ayers and Wright, and Paul has similarly denounced the newsletters. If I had to choose between the two cases, I would say that association with a person who has actually done evil deeds (Ayers’ terrorism) is more reprehensible than association with people who have merely said evil words (Wright, the authors of the Paul newsletters).

The evidence suggests that neither Paul nor Obama actually agree with the more despicable views of their past associates. There is no proof that Paul is actually a racist or that Obama is actually an anti-American, communist, or supporter of terrorism. Their fault, rather, was a failure to recognize that such views are reprehensible and beyond the pale of respectable discourse. Such errors of moral judgment can and should be held against a candidate. But one can reach that conclusion while still believing that the candidate is sufficiently superior to his opponents on other grounds to outweigh this defect.

UPDATE: The blame legitimately due Obama and Paul for these past associations diminishes if one believes their claims that they were unaware of their associates’ beliefs. I am skeptical, however. I do not believe that Obama could have maintained a close association with Wright for years without knowing about his beliefs, and the same goes for Ayers, especially given that his terrorist background was well-known and widely publicized (including in the New York Times). In the case of Paul, I highly doubt that a professional politician would, for years, publish newsletters named after himself without checking their content, or at least having his staff do so.

UPDATE #2: Tim Carney, the third commentator cited by Kirchick as an example of a libertarian inclined to ignore the newsletters, also seems to agree that Paul deserves blame for them. Conor Friedersdorf responds to Kirchick here:

Libertarian journalists very much care about the newsletters, as do the institutions of the movement. For now, I’ll refrain from speculating about the inner thoughts of libertarian voters except to say that Kirchick presents no evidence about them, and that not all Paul supporters are libertarians. To the Paul supporters who don’t think the newsletters are fair game for inquiry: you’re wrong.

In critiquing Paul supporters, Kirchick does get some things right. The candidate does inspire fervent, sycophantic support from some backers. It’s off-putting at times. But so was Hope and Change. And the exaggerated praise of Bush’s leadership after 9/11. Welcome to politics.

Friedersdorf also states, as I did, that he would have preferred that Gary Johnson had emerged as the most prominent libertarian-leaning candidate rather than Paul.

UPDATE #3: Some commenters doubt that Obama had any real association with Ayers. I don’t claim that the two were close or that Obama shared Ayers’ ideology. However, they did have a longstanding association, and Ayers and his wife (also a former terrorist) even held a key event for Obama’s first run for political office at his house, back in 1995. If Ron Paul had held a key campaign event at the home of an unrepentant former KKK terrorist, he would surely be blamed for it, and rightly so.

It’s no secret that the potential GOP presidential candidates with the greatest appeal for libertarians either stayed out of the race or haven’t done very well. Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan fall in the former category. Gary Johnson, whom I praised here, has failed to gain traction and looks like he may drop out soon. Ron Paul, of course, is still in the race. But it seems unlikely that he will improve much on his 2008 performance, when he failed to win even a single primary. And, for reasons I explained at length during the 2008 campaign, Paul has many shortcomings as a libertarian protest candidate (see also here).

Given this state of affairs, some libertarians and pro-limited government conservatives are taking another look at Jon Huntsman. Here is George Will praising Huntsman in a recent column criticizing the GOP front-runners. Athough Will is a conservative, his reasons for preferring Huntsman are all based on libertarian issues:

Jon Huntsman inexplicably chose to debut as the Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative. He endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures — food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.) Huntsman considers No Child Left Behind, the semi-nationalization of primary and secondary education, “an unmitigated disaster.” (Romney and Gingrich support it. Gingrich has endorsed a national curriculum.) Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.

Eduardo J. Lopez-Reyes of the Republican Liberty Caucus recently wrote his own “Libertarian Case for Jon Huntsman.” Libertarian political scientist Jason Sorens put in a plug for Huntsman back in May.

What do I think? I am not sure. Huntsman is nowhere near as libertarian as I am, and probably also significantly less libertarian than Gary Johnson. On the other hand, Huntsman is clearly much more libertarian than Mitt Romney and New Gingrich, the current Republican front-runners. And unlike several of the other candidates he seems knowledgeable and competent. I think it’s also pretty obvious that he’s more libertarian than President Obama. It’s unrealistic for libertarians to expect a viable presidential candidate who agrees with us down the line. What is realistic is seeking one who will make federal policy significantly more libertarian than it is today.

Should Huntsman reach the general election, he should also be able to well. He’s less likely to scare moderate voters than Gingrich, Rick Perry, or Michele Bachmann, and as far as I know he doesn’t have any embarrassing scandals on his record. A candidate who is scandal-free, seems knowledgeable, and doesn’t scare moderates, would have a good shot against an unpopular incumbent saddled with a bad economy.

The key question about Huntsman is whether he has any real chance of winning the GOP nomination. So far, he hasn’t done well in the polls. His big problem is that people perceive him as a liberal or moderate Republican similar to Mitt Romney, even though on most fiscal and economic issues he’s well to the right of Romney and sometimes Gingrich too. To date, Bachmann, Perry, and Herman Cain have all foundered in their efforts to emerge as the conservative alternative to Romney. If Gingrich, the current anti-Romney of the month, falters as well, perhaps Huntsman will get a shot at the spotlight. Obviously, however, time is running short for him.

Would defeating the individual mandate today lead to something worse tomorrow?  I don’t know.  I don’t have a crystal ball, but neither does Orin.  We can’t answer this question, but we can identify reasons why mandate-style approaches to health care reform can increase the threat to individual liberty and undermine democratic accountability.  My point below was not that a single-payer plan is necessarily preferable to the individual mandate on libertarian grounds, as it would depend on how such a system was designed and implemented.  But I would argue that upholding the mandate risks greater threats to liberty insofar as a) mandate-style measures help hide the real costs of health care reforms, thereby undermining democratic accountability, and b) it would set the precedent that the federal government’s regulatory power could be used to mandate the purchase of a good or service from private firms.  Direct government provision or subsidization of health care services does not suffer from the first problem as the costs are readily identifiable through the budget process (which is precisely why we got the mandate in the first place).  And direct government provision or subsidization of health  care services does not suffer from the second problem as the relevant precedent has already been set.

Orin seems to equate the financial cost of government programs with the extent to which they impair individual liberty.  The cost of a government program may be a rough proxy for the extent to which liberty is impaired, but it is just that.  Freedom is about more than the size of one’s tax bill.  Zeroing out government expenditures altogether might reduce the tax burden, but insofar as some governmental functions (such as national defense, police, a judicial system, etc.) it would not maximize individual liberty.

In any event, the individual mandate and other measures constraining health care markets may not increase the tax burden, but that does not mean they are “free.”  Health insurance must be paid for either way; the mandate just keeps more of it off the federal government’s ledger.  Indeed, the individual mandate was expressly designed to facilitate redistributive policies that could not be adopted directly — and this is so precisely because the mandate and associated insurance reforms are less transparent than taxes and direct expenditures.  If the American people want a given degree of economic distribution, so be it, but neither liberty nor accountability are furthered by allowing such redistribution to occur off-budget through the imposition of regulatory dictates.

I will admit I am a bit perplexed by Orin’s reference to school vouchers, as vouchers have far more in common with traditional government programs than does the mandate.  The “thinking behind school vouchers” is that a given good –education, health care, whatever — should be funded out of tax revenues, but that control over how the benefit is used remains with the recipient.  This sounds more like a traditional benefit program than the recent reforms.  Indeed, there are quite a few mandate opponents who support reforms that would “voucherize” existing and proposed benefit programs.  The reason entitlement programs are so hard to control is not tax withholding, but that the budgets for such programs are on auto-pilot, and not limited by appropriations, and so are more difficult to restrain than discretionary expenditures.

Insofar as Orin’s concern is that opposition to the individual mandate cannot produce a relatively stable political outcome unless and until its opponents find some other way to satisfy the demand for health care “reform,” I would agree with him.  However much I dislike much of the recent health care reforms, it was responding to some real (and some perceived) needs and deficiencies of the current system.  It is also true that many conservatives and libertarians (and even more Republicans) devote far more time and effort to tearing down proposed reforms than proposing positive solutions of their own.  (I’ve made similar complaints about the Right’s approach to environmental policy for years.)  So I share the concern that defeating the mandate could be a Pyrrhic policy victory if there are not serious efforts made to improve the health care system and (in particular) expand access to care.  But I don’t see why such concerns counsel against opposing the mandate, let alone why such concerns should be relevant to the constitutional debate.

Orin Kerr’s post below suggesting that the individual mandate is less of a threat to liberty than some of the available alternatives has drawn quite a response.  See, for instance, these posts by Timothy Sandefur at PLF and Trevor Burrus at Cato@Liberty.  They make some important points, but I wanted to add a few of my own.

First, I think there’s too much attention paid to whether the individual mandate is or is not “unprecedented,” and what conclusions we should draw from that observation.  As a simple factual matter, it is true that the federal government has never sought to use the commerce power to mandate the purchase of a good or service from private firms.  But this fact, by itself, does not establish that the mandate is unconstitutional.  At most, it requires greater analysis as there is no clear analog from prior cases or government actions to which one can turn, and may justify some resort to constitutional first principles (as in Lopez) to answer the question.  (As a related matter, whether one program or another is more or less of a threat to individual liberty may or may not be relevant to the constitutional question.)

Second, many of the prior, government-run programs adopted in the past are actually far more market oriented than the individual mandate, let alone the entire health care reform law.  Traditional welfare programs, for instance, involve the direct provision of cash or vouchers that the recipients decide how to spend.  Even though there are sometimes restrictions placed on how such assistance may be used, this approach remains far more market-oriented — and “libertarian” — than a mandate.  Indeed, individual providers of eligible goods and services are compete against each other more in this context than insurance companies will under the individual mandate and the health care reforms other measures.  Indeed, even Medicare, despite all of its problems, is more market-oriented in many ways than the current reforms, in that recipients still get to choose among providers, and does less to distort health care markets than regulatory mandates.  Further, as the example of Medicare shows, direct government provision of a benefit does not necessarily become “monopoly” provision.  Medicare is a “mandatory” program, but recipients are free to decide whether tehy will partake in the program and may supplement it as they choose.  Of course, that one program is more “market-oriented” than another is a different question from whether one is more or less constitutionally suspect.

Third, it is generally accepted that the primary constraints on the federal government’s exercise of its taxing and spending are political, not judicial.  That is, we let the political process discipline the federal government’s excesses when it taxes or spends too much, or on the wrong things.  Judicial intervention is generally reserved for ensuring that the government does not subvert political accountability or use these powers to achieve otherwise unconstitutional ends (as with the unconstitutional conditions doctrine).  The “political safeguards” approach to federalism advocated by Herbert Wechsler and Justice Blackmun has been decisively rejected because it is too easy for the federal government to subvert political accountability when it is using other powers.

Fourth, there are many areas in which it is recognized that allowing the federal government to compel activity by others is a greater threat to liberty and does more to undermine political accountability than to allow the government to act directly.  I’ll give just two quick examples.

1. Commandeering: Under cases like New York v. U.S. and Printz v. United States, the federal government may not compel state governments or state officials to implement a federal program.  Part of the rationale is that it is better to force the federal government to implement such measures itself, and that the risk of the federal government over-reaching as a result is less than the threat to political accountability of letting the federal government be the states’ puppet-master.
2. Compelled vs. Government Speech: Current doctrine concerning compelled commercial speech (marketing orders and the like) subject government mandates that private parties speak to a greater level of scrutiny than the government’s use of taxes or special assessments to fund the same message.  In other words, current doctrine is more suspicious of efforts by the government to force, say, fruit growers to espouse the government’s message than it is of efforts by the government to tax the very same fruit growers so that the federal government can itself promulgate the same message.  As with commandeering, part of the concern here is political accountability.  It is easier to hold the government accountable when it must openly raise revenues and act itself than when it can dictate that others devote their resources in a manner the government prefers.

Finally, Orin’s post suggests a false dichotomy insofar as it implies that the only relevant options for health-care reform are something like the individual mandate and government monopoly provision.  In reality, there are many ways to expand health care coverage or otherwise reform health care.  Not only are there less intrusive ways of subsidizing health care for those in need, there are less intrusive (and more effective) ways of enhancing competition within health care markets.  So invalidating the mandate does not necessarily mean that we’d eventually get something worse — but even if it did, that would not resolve the constitutional question.

The audio of my debate with economist Bryan Caplan on libertarianism and foreign policy is now available here. Thanks to Chris Baylor for organizing and producing the audio, and to Bryan for posting it.

Note that I had trouble downloading the file from Mozilla Firefox, but was able to download it easily using Internet Explorer.

UPDATE: I should note that Bryan’s debate page includes a copy of the outline for my opening speech. This outline was intended for my use during the speech, rather than for publication. So some of it may not be very clear to readers. But we thought it might interest some people anyway, so I gave him permission to post it.

On July 13 at 7 PM, I will be debating George Mason University economist and prominent blogger Bryan Caplan on libertarianism and foreign policy. The debate will take place at George Mason Law School, 3301 Fairfax Dr., Arlington, VA, in Room 221.

Bryan summarized his case for “pacifism” (by which he means opposition to all warfare, but not all violence of any kind) in this post. I outlined my own far less dovish view here.

Bryan and I agree on the vast majority of other issues – not only in terms of bottom-line policy preferences, but in the way we get to those conclusions. Bryan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter even made my list of fifteen books that influenced me the most. So it’s both interesting and thought-provoking that we disagree so much about this question, one that tends to divide libertarians among themselves, just as it also often divides liberals and conservatives. It should be a fun debate, and hopefully an enlightening one.

Reactions to my attempt to take Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing test by simulating liberal arguments varied widely. But, on the whole, more people thought I missed the mark than that I hit it. What caused this relative failure?

Part of the problem was that it wasn’t a true Turing test at all. In the original version of the test, a computer tries to fool people into thinking that it’s actually human. The test audience doesn’t know ahead of time that they’re dealing with a computer. In this case, the audience did know ahead of time that I’m a libertarian, and so were more on their guard. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions that do allow a true Turing test.

Second, I did not employ much of the aggressive rhetoric against libertarians and conservatives that many actual liberals use. For example, I didn’t say that free market advocates are mostly just apologists for corporate interests, or that the market itself is just a tool for the rich to exploit the poor. Instead, I tried to outline standard, moderately sophisticated, liberal arguments for why government intervention is needed to solve major social problems such as market failures, poverty, and injustices against women and minority groups. The rhetorical style I employed was pretty similar to that which I use in my posts defending my own views. My approach to defending libertarianism is closer to David Friedman’s than Murray Rothbard’s. Aggressive rhetoric mostly appeals to those who already agree with your argument, and tends to turn off those who don’t. The degree of rhetorical aggressiveness that bloggers use varies within ideologies more than across them. Some liberal bloggers are relatively restrained in their rhetoric; others are not. The same goes for conservatives and libertarians.

For similar reasons, I spent a significant part of my post forestalling standard objections to the position I was defending. I do the same thing in most of my pro-libertarian posts. You can’t defend a position effectively if you don’t deal with obvious objections. And since part of the goal of the exercise was to demonstrate my understanding of liberal arguments, I needed to also demonstrate my understanding of their responses to opposing views.

Be that as it may, willingness to use tough rhetoric against opponents is one of the hallmarks of a true believer in any ideology. A writer who avoids it is less likely to be viewed as authentic. Not everyone with strong views is also rhetorically aggressive. But, on average, the stronger and more deeply felt your ideological commitments, the more likely you are to engage in rhetorical attacks – or even to see these attacks as reflections of a deeper truth rather than rhetorical excesses.

Third, one can certainly question whether I made the right choice of issues. I chose market failure, poverty, and discrimination in large part because of the importance of these questions, and their centrality to modern left-wing thought. But I admit that I also chose them in part because I think they are issues where the left has a relatively strong case, though still one I largely disagree with. For example, I focused on absolute poverty rather than income inequality in part because I think the liberal argument on the former issue is a lot stronger. Obviously, many liberals might disagree with my judgment on what issues are most important, and where the liberal case is at its strongest. Indeed, they disagree about these matters among themselves as well as with me.

Finally, my post did not do justice to the different varieties of liberal thought. In framing my arguments, I implicitly channeled a liberal with a significant utilitarian streak, and one who is knowledgeable about and receptive to mainstream economics. In other words, a liberal who is in many respects similar to economist Paul Krugman, who kicked off this discussion. Utilitarian consequentialism and mainstream economics are important elements of modern liberal thought. But they’re not the only elements, and there are many liberals who reject them in whole or in part.

It’s also fair to observe, as some commenters did, that my implicit liberal is also the type most similar to me. I too have a significant utilitarian streak, and draw a lot on mainstream economics. I could have tried to simulate a liberal with radically different values and methodological assumptions (e.g. -a left-wing communitarian who thinks that mainstream economics is vastly overrated). But I admit it would have been a tougher task. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that the liberal I simulated was just a slightly more left-wing version of me. Although we may share some common values and methodological assumptions, he still favors a vastly larger role for government than I do. It’s roughly the difference between a society where government spending and regulation accounts for about 10% of GDP and one where the state spends 50% or more and regulates a much wider range of activities.

Notice that a liberal or conservative trying to simulate a libertarian would face similar challenges. Should he model a deontological natural rights advocate like Robert Nozick or a consequentialist who thinks that free markets are better than government at maximizing utility (e.g. David Friedman)? Should he choose an Austrian economist who rejects mainstream economics or a neoclassical scholar who accepts it? Whichever decision the simulator makes, there will be some libertarians who can argue that he didn’t represent their views correctly.

For all of the above reasons, and perhaps others, my attempt at the ideological Turing test wasn’t especially successful. But I think it was still a useful exercise. Future attempts can avoid the mistakes I made by doing a true Turing test, and by specifying more precisely what kind of ideological opponent they are trying to simulate.

In this post, I’m going to take Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test, which requires me to “simulate” an advocate of an ideology I oppose. In this case, I’m going to simulate an advocate of liberalism and focus on issues where liberals and libertarians disagree. And I’m going to try simulate an advocate who is reasonably intelligent and reasonably knowledgeable about the relevant issues. Anyone can caricature an opponent who is ignorant or stupid.

Here goes:

The free market is well and good in its proper place. But libertarians and many conservatives are wrong to advocate total laissez-faire. They indefensibly ignore or downplay market failures, the plight of the poor, and historic injustices against women and minorities. Let’s take each of these points in turn.

I. Market Failures.

A pure free market might work well in a world where there was perfect competition, perfect information, and zero transaction costs. In the real world, however, we have market failures such as public goods problems, externalities, asymmetric information and monopoly. Contrary to what some libertarians and conservatives seem to think, we progressives don’t claim that government can correct all such market failures. But it’s foolish to deny that it can correct some of them, perhaps a great many. For example, the evidence clearly shows that the Clean Air Act has greatly reduced air pollution, which the market could not have done on its own because clean air is a classic example of a public good. There are many similar cases.

It’s true that government will sometimes do a poor job of addressing market failures, or even make the situation worse. But that’s why we have the democratic process. If political leaders are failing at correcting market failure, the voters can “throw the bums out.” That’s what they did to the Republicans in 2008, after the GOP allowed market failures to cause a terrible financial crisis. Sometimes, the voters make mistakes out of ignorance (e.g. – in 2010). But in the long run, they are fairly effective at incentivizing political leaders to do a good job of correcting the deficiencies of the market. And democracy would work even better if we had stronger campaign finance laws to prevent the will of the people from being overriden by corporate lobbying and campaign contributions.

Where necessary, we can rely on judicial review to correct some of the flaws of the democratic process, and ensure that everyone has a right to participate. We need some structural safeguards to keep the “tyranny of the majority” from oppressing unpopular minority groups and violating basic rights. In general, however, democratic government is the best answer to market failure.

II. The Problem of Poverty.

In a free market, your ability to acquire goods and services is ultimately determined by your wealth. Money talks. This puts the poor at a serious disadvantage. They don’t have nearly as much purchasing power as the rich. The very poorest often have trouble even acquiring basic necessities. Private charity helps matters somewhat. But there’s far too many poor people for it to even come close to solving the problem. If we want to give the poor a minimally decent life, government-imposed redistribution is the only way to do it.

It may be true that a poorly designed welfare system will incentivize able-bodied people to stay on the dole rather than work. But the right is wrong to assume that we can only solve this problem by abolishing the welfare state or severely limiting it. We should instead make work attractive by subsidizing the working poor through policies such as the earned income tax credit, the minimum wage, and government-provided health insurance. That way, those able to work will still have incentives to get a job, even with generous welfare provision for the unemployed. Ultimately, however, it’s more important to save the poor from misery and starvation than to have a perfectly efficient labor market for low-income workers. A society as wealthy as ours can easily afford this trade-off.

III. Addressing Historic Injustices.

The case for the free market would be stronger if we did not live in a world where some groups are handicapped by massive historic injustices such as the legacy of slavery, segregation, and centuries of sexism that reduced women to the status of second-class citizens. As Lyndon Johnson put it, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Programs like affirmative action are needed to compensate women and minority groups for the effects of centuries of oppression and discrimination.

Moreover, sometimes we need large-scale government intervention simply to stop the oppression in the first place. Very little progress was made in ending discrimination against African-Americans until the federal government passed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and began to enforce it aggressively. Similarly, extensive federal regulation such as Title VII and Title IX was needed to begin to curb discrimination against women. Today, we need continued regulation to guard against the racism and sexism that still remains, and to eliminate the harm caused by homophobia.

OK, I think that’s enough channeling of my inner liberal for one post. How did I do on the Turing Test?

UPDATE: Some of the commenters seem to be misunderstanding what I was doing here. I was trying to outline the arguments of a reasonably knowledgeable and intelligent liberal on several key issues. I was not trying to simply imitate liberal political talking points or sound bites. That’s why I tried to make substantive arguments and respond to opposing views, instead of simply repeat slogans. Krugman’s original point, after all, was that opponents of liberalism don’t understand liberal arguments, not that they can’t repeat liberal rhetoric. Other commenters object to the use of terminology from economics, such as “market failure,” which they see as somehow biased towards libertarianism. In reality, however, the majority of economists are liberal Democrats, and terms such as “market failure” were introduced by left of center economists to explain why various forms of government intervention are needed. Finally, some people complain that I omitted various issues and arguments (e.g. – income inequality in addition to absolute poverty). That’s true enough. I could have written a much longer post that covered many more points. However, turning a blog post into a lengthy article is rarely a good idea.

In a recent interview, Paul Krugman argued that liberals generally understand conservative arguments better than vice versa:

A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.

Bryan Caplan responds:

In a Turing Test, a computer tries to pass for human….

According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals….

It’s not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views. But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests – to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents – is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom….

There are important caveats….. we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck….

If we limit our sample to Ph.D.s from top-10 social science programs, I don’t see how Krugman could be right. You can’t get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without acquiring basic familiarity with market failure arguments and Keynesian macro. At least you couldn’t when I was a student there in the 90s. In contrast, it’s easy to get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without even learning the key differences between conservatism and libertarianism, much less their main arguments… And frankly, it shows….

Indeed, I’ll happily bet that any libertarian with a Ph.D. from a top-10 social science program can fool more voters than Krugman. We learn his worldview as part of the curriculum. He learns ours in his spare time – if he chooses to spare it.

I tend to agree with Bryan. On average, non-liberal scholars and intellectuals know more about liberalism than their liberal counterparts know about libertarianism and conservatism. That’s because the non-liberals are usually surrounded by people with liberal views, and those views are extensively covered in the curriculum of nearly all top colleges and graduate schools. By contrast, it’s easier for liberal intellectuals to ignore non-liberal arguments or at least devote little time and effort to understanding them.

Outside the intellectual world, both liberals and non-liberals often have little knowledge of their opponents’ arguments. But that’s just part of the more general problem of widespread political ignorance. Indeed, a close-minded attitude to opposing views is a general facet of the way most people approach politics. It’s not a problem unique to either liberals or their adversaries.

But, as Bryan says, the proof is in the pudding. In my next post, I will take the ideological Turing test myself, and readers can judge how I do.

New York Times polling expert Nate Silver (who is no libertarian himself) summarizes some recent data suggesting that the public is becoming more libertarian:

Libertarianism has been touted as the wave of America’s political future for many years, generally with more enthusiasm than evidence. But there are some tangible signs that Americans’ attitudes are in fact moving in that direction.

Since 1993, CNN has regularly asked a pair of questions that touch on libertarian views of the economy and society:

Some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your own view?

Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?

A libertarian, someone who believes that the government is best when it governs least, would typically choose the first view in the first question and the second view in the second.

In the polls, the responses to both questions had been fairly steady for many years…..

But in CNN’s latest version of the poll, conducted earlier this month, the libertarian response to both questions reached all-time highs. Some 63 percent of respondents said government was doing too much — up from 61 percent in 2010 and 52 percent in 2008 — while 50 percent said government should not favor any particular set of values, up from 44 percent in 2010 and 41 percent in 2008. (It was the first time that answer won a plurality in CNN’s poll.)

Whether people are as libertarian-minded in practice as they might believe themselves to be when they answer survey questions is another matter. Still, there have been visible shifts in public opinion on a number of issues, ranging from increasing tolerance for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization on the one hand, to the skepticism over stimulus packages and the health-care overhaul on the other hand, that can be interpreted as a move toward more libertarian views.

Obviously, the vast majority of the public is not nearly as libertarian as most libertarian activists and intellectuals are. But it does seem to be more libertarian than the median voter of the recent past. Silver also cites the rise of the Tea Party movement as some indication of increasing libertarianism. While the movement undoubtedly includes numerous social conservatives, it has mostly focused on economic issues where libertarians and conservatives agree. Moreover, some survey data suggests that the libertarian contingent in the Tea Party is larger than usually supposed. I discuss some of the evidence in this article:

Although the majority of Tea Party supporters are self-described conservatives, the focus of the movement has so far been primarily on what may be seen as libertarian concerns. An April 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll found that seventy-eight percent of self-described Tea Party supporters believed that “economic issues” are the more important issues facing the country, compared to only fourteen percent who said “social issues” are more important.

Moreover, survey data suggests that many Tea Party supporters are more socially tolerant than expected. An exit poll conducted by Politico at a major April 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C. found that fifty-one percent of those surveyed believe that “Government should not promote any particular set of values,” while forty-six percent endorsed the more socially
conservative view that “Government should promote traditional family values in our society….”

The New York Times/CBS News survey of Tea Party supporters found that forty percent believe that Supreme Court’s decision protecting abortion rights in Roe v. Wade was a “good thing” and fifty-seven percent support either marriage rights (sixteen percent) or civil unions (forty-one percent) for gay couples.

I would be the last to claim that the public’s increasing libertarianism somehow “proves” that libertarianism is right. After all, I’ve often argued that widespread political ignorance is a serious problem (though increasing political knowledge does seem to make people relatively more libertarian on most issues than they would be otherwise). Public opinion polls are, at best, very weak evidence on the truth or falsehood of any ideology. They are, however, relevant to assessing its political prospects.

Libertarians, economists, and my fellow constitutional theorists are all known for arguing that the conventional wisdom overstates the importance of individual political leaders. Instead, we emphasize the the constraining impact of institutions, public opinion, and political incentives. The structure of the system matters a lot more than the individual leader. Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, however, recently argued that a great leader could do a lot more good than most libertarians believe:

I maintain that an intelligent, wise, brave president could do enormous good. How? For starters, he could give full presidential pardons to everyone serving time for (federal) drug-related offenses. The president can’t end the drug war on his own, but he could free hordes of innocent people before his term (singular, no doubt) ran out.* And needless to say, there are plenty of other unjust laws a president could negate with blanket pardons.

The lesson: Libertarians should stop insisting that our problems are too complex for any human being to solve. Many of our problems can literally be solved with the stroke of a pen. Any intelligent, wise, brave leader who wants to solve problems faces vast orchards of low-hanging fruit. The only reason the orchards are so bountiful, unfortunately, is that people who are intelligent, wise, and brave rarely make it to the top.

Bryan’s main point is well taken. An “intelligent, wise, brave president” unconcerned about reelection could do a lot of good that conventional politicians avoid for fear that it would hurt their electoral prospects. By the same token, such a leader could also do a lot of harm, if his unpopular policies turn out to be worse than those preferred by the electorate. At the same time, as Bryan recognizes, it’s no accident that such leaders “rarely make it to the top.” The political process systematically advantages those candidates who prioritize seizing and holding on to power over those who are willing to sacrifice office for the sake of principle.

In addition, Bryan somewhat overstates the good that even a president totally indifferent to his political fate can do in the unlikely event that he could get elected in the first place. Such a leader would still have to trim his sails somewhat in order to avoid a political backlash that makes things worse than they were before. Consider Bryan’s example of a president who decides to pardon everyone serving time for federal drug-related offenses. That policy would be extremely unpopular. It will be even more so if even one or two of the pardoned drug dealers goes on to commit a highly publicized murder or other serious crime.

In response, Congress might well enact broader and more punitive anti-drug laws; even if the incumbent vetoes them, his successor would not. The next president would sweep into office on a pro-drug war platform; quite possibly, he would order federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to pursue the War on Drugs more aggressively than before. There might be a similar backlash at the state level (the states imprison many more drug offenders than the feds do). The cause of drug legalization, which has been slowly gaining ground over the last several decades, would suffer a significant political setback. The net result could well be a long-term increase in the number of people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. Other principled but highly unpopular policies could backfire in similar ways.

That said, there is much that a politically brave president opposed to the War on Drugs could do to make things better without generating a massive backlash. He could order federal prosecutors to deemphasize drug prosecutions relative to other priorities (without actually banning such prosecutions entirely). He could issue pardons or commutations in some of the more egregious drug cases (ones involving police abuses or extremely long sentences for minor offenses). He could keep President Obama’s broken campaign promise and genuinely end medical marijuana prosecutions in states where medical marijuana is legal. Many of these measures would carry a political price, which is one reason why Obama hasn’t done any of them. On the other hand, they probably are not large-scale enough to make drugs a major issue in the next presidential election or generate a backlash large enough to undue the good they would do at the margin. These changes are small enough that the majority of rationally ignorant voters wouldn’t even notice them, thereby reducing the likelihood of a major backlash.

The bottom line: A good, wise, and politically fearless president could do a lot more good than many suppose. But even the best and bravest leader would still have to make substantial concessions to political reality, lest all his good works be undone.

My article, “The Tea Party Movement and Popular Constitutionalism,” is now available on SSRN. It is part of a recent Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy symposium on the Constitutional Politics of the Tea Party Movement. Here is the abstract:

The rise of the Tea Party movement follows a period during which many scholars have focused on “popular constitutionalism”: the involvement of public opinion and popular movements in influencing constitutional interpretation. Most of the previous scholarship on popular constitutionalism analyzed movements identified with the political left. Although the Tea Party movement is primarily composed of conservatives and libertarians, it has much in common with previous popular constitutional movements.

Part I of this Essay describes some of these similarities, focusing on the ways in which popular constitutional movements have arisen in response to social or economic crises, or major policy initiatives instituted by their opponents. Part II explains how the Tea Party movement shares key strengths and weaknesses of other popular movements. Public opinion on constitutional and policy issues is often influenced by widespread political ignorance and irrationality. The Tea Party is no exception to these trends. The evidence suggests, however, that Tea Party supporters are no more likely to be ignorant than public opinion generally, or their opponents on the political left.

Part III explains two possible advantages of one unusual feature of the Tea Party: the fact that it is the first popular constitutionalist movement in many years whose main focus is the need to limit federal power. The enormous size and scope of modern government undercuts meaningful democratic control over government policy because “rationally ignorant” voters cannot keep track of more than a small fraction of government activity. Strengthening democratic accountability is one of the main objectives of advocates of popular constitutionalism. The imposition of stricter limits on government power might make that goal easier to achieve. The Tea Party’s focus on limiting government also makes it less likely that we will see the emergence of a right-wing populist movement that is primarily focused on intolerance and xenophobia, of the kind that often arose during previous economic downturns.

Will Wilkinson of the Economist has written a thoughtful response to my argument that Gary Johnson is both more libertarian and more politically viable than Ron Paul. Will seems to agree with me that Johnson is preferable to Paul on the issues, and he also praises Johnson’s record as governor of New Mexico. But he argues that Johnson is less politically viable than Paul precisely because of the very things that I see as his political negatives:

[N]either full-blooded libertarians nor allegedly liberty-loving tea-party enthusiasts really care much about governing. Libertarians, accustomed to dwelling on the margins of American politics, participate in elections without hope of electoral success, if they participate at all. For them, presidential campaigns offer at best an occasion to preach the libertarian gospel to the wary public, and the more table-pounding the better. As for the tea partiers, they seem less interested in practical policy solutions to America’s problems and rather more interested in fighting a culture war over what it means to be authentically American…..

The elements of Mr Paul’s past and creed that Mr Somin, Ms [Shikha] Dalmia, and I find objectionable are not really liabilities. They are an important part of what makes “Dr No” a candidate capable of generating surprising amounts of enthusiasm and campaign cash, if not votes. Mr Paul and the tea-party movement are each in their separate ways creatures of Cold War-era conservative-libertarian “fusionism”, which remains a powerful ideological and institutional force on the right. In contrast, Mr Johnson comes off as a post-fusionist, libertarian-leaning fiscal conservative. The very existence of such a creature heartens me, but it remains that there exists in our culture no popular, pre-packaged political identity that celebrates and defines itself in terms of these laudable tendencies.

If the issue is “table-pounding,” it’s hard to deny that Johnson is more than willing to pound the table in denouncing big government and statist politicians in both parties. The question is whether libertarian-leaning voters will find the table-pounding more appealing if it comes from a candidate who can’t easily be portrayed as a conspiracy-monger tainted by past associations with racism (both political weaknesses of Paul’s that I discussed in my earlier post). The data suggest that roughly ten percent of Americans are libertarian in the sense that they generally want to reduce government intervention in both the economic and social realms. Overall, these people have significantly higher education and income levels than the average citizen (see here and here). People with that profile are likely to be repulsed by racism and conspiracy-mongering rather than attracted to it.

It is true, of course, that conservative voters whose main objective is to fight a “culture war” are unlikely to support Johnson and would probably prefer Paul over him. But, realistically, such voters probably won’t support any candidate whose main cache is being known as a libertarian. Conservative culture warriors will have lots of options in the Republican primary that look more attractive to them than either Paul or Johnson (Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin if she runs, etc.). Yet Will is wrong to assume that all or most Tea Partiers (a group distinct from libertarian-leaning voters, though there is important overlap) are primarily culture warriors. Such people certainly are well-represented in the movement. However, survey data that I compiled in this article show that some 51% of Tea Party activists endorse the view that “Government should not promote any particular set of values,” compared to 46% who say that “Government should promote traditional family values in our society.” Other polls I cited in the same piece show that a surprising 40% of self-identified Tea Party supporters agree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, and 57% endorse either gay marriage (16%) or civil unions (41%) for gays. Thus, there is a large minority, by some measures even a slight majority, of Tea Partiers who are more libertarian than conservative. Given the choice, these people could well prefer Johnson to Paul for some of the same reasons as I do. Those Tea Party activists who are primarily conservative culture warriors, by contrast, are unlikely to choose any libertarian-seeming candidate over a conservative one.

Why then, Will asks, haven’t libertarian-leaning voters flocked to Johnson’s standard? The obvious answer is that most of them don’t know who he is. This March Gallup poll shows that only 11% of Republicans say they recognize Gary Johnson’s name, while 76% recognize Paul. The 11% figure probably overstates Johnson’s true name recognition because some survey respondents are loathe to admit ignorance to pollsters. Even many of those who have heard of Johnson may not be familiar with the differences between him and Paul. Given widespread rational political ignorance, Johnson’s low level of recognition is not surprising. Paul has the advantage of a previous presidential run in 2008 that got a lot of media coverage and he has been a fixture on the national political scene for over twenty years (albeit a relatively minor one). By contrast, Johnson is still little-known outside New Mexico.

As I admitted in my original post, it’s quite possible that Johnson’s candidacy will wither on the vine simply because most of his natural constituency will remain ignorant about him. On the other hand, the comparatively high education and political knowledge levels of libertarian-leaning voters makes it easier to reach them than many other groups. For that reason, I continue to believe that Johnson has a real chance to surpass Paul if, as I said in my earlier post, “libertarian activists, donors, and intellectuals become aware of the ways in which [he] is the superior candidate.” If these opinion leaders spread the word, libertarian-leaning voters might well follow. As a well-known libertarian writer himself, Will can potentially help solve the the very problem that he laments.

With Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels choosing not to run, there are now two libertarian-leaning presidential candidates in the GOP field for 2012: Ron Paul and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. Which is a better standard-bearer for libertarianism? I think it’s Johnson by a wide margin. He’s both more libertarian than Paul on the issues and likely to be a more effective candidate.

I. The Issues.

Turning to the issues first, the difference between the two is strikingly large. As I explained back when Paul ran in 2008, he has very nonlibertarian positions on free trade, school choice, and especially immigration. He also believes that Kelo v. City of New London was correctly decided because he thinks the Bill of Rights does not apply to the states. The latter is theoretically compatible with being a libertarian; one can believe that the Constitution should protect us against various forms of oppression by state governments, but simply fails to do so. But Paul’s position is at odds with most modern research on the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and with the views of virtually all libertarian constitutional law scholars. It also bodes ill for the nature of his judicial appointments in the unlikely event that he actually wins the presidency.

On all of these issues, Johnson is clearly superior to Paul from a libertarian point of view. He supports school choice and free trade agreements, he’s as pro-immigration as any successful politician can be, and he believes that the Bill of Rights constrains the states as well as the federal government. On the other hand, I can’t think of a single issue where Paul is more libertarian than Johnson, though I’m open to correction by people who know more about their records than I do.

I don’t agree with Johnson on everything. For example, I’m significantly more hawkish than he is on foreign policy. But as a political standard-bearer for libertarianism, Johnson is about as good on the issues as any remotely mainstream politician is likely to be at this point in time.

II. Political Viability.

Johnson is also probably more politically effective than Paul. That’s because he doesn’t carry any of the negative baggage that Paul does. Unlike Paul, Johnson never published a newsletter with racist and anti-Semitic content, or signed on to a political strategy of appealing to white racial resentment against minorities, as Paul did in the early 1990s. As I said during the 2008 campaign, I don’t believe that Paul is a racist. But his record of insensitivity on racial issues dogged him in 2008, and is likely to resurface in 2012 if his candidacy becomes at all successful. Paul also has a record of endorsing weird right-wing conspiracy theories, such as the mythical “North American Union.” This too was seized on by the media in 2008, and could be a problem again. If Paul becomes the public face of libertarianism in 2012, there is a risk that the movement as a whole could be tainted by association with these dubious elements of his record. By contrast, Johnson has no comparable problems, as far as I know.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Johnson, whom I saw speak at the Students for Liberty conference, is much more articulate and charismatic than Paul, who isn’t especially impressive in either department. I would not say that Johnson is a truly great public speaker. But he’s pretty good, which is more than can be said for Paul.

The big advantages that Paul has over Johnson are that he has more money and greater name recognition. But if libertarian activists, donors, and intellectuals become aware of the ways in which Johnson is the superior candidate, they might rally around him and possibly give his campaign the boost it needs to take off and surpass Paul.

Realistically, neither Johnson nor Paul has a strong chance of actually winning the GOP nomination. But if his campaign gets off the ground, Johnson will have better odds than Paul does because he’s more appealing to voters and the media, and less hated by the GOP establishment. More importantly, he’s certainly a far superior libertarian protest candidate and public face for the movement. The chance that either candidate can win the presidency in 2012 is remote. But Johnson is the one more likely to serve as an effective spokesman for libertarianism, adding new supporters without unnecessarily alienating people.

Many times in politics, we face a choice between a candidate with better political skills and one who is better on the issues. Johnson trumps Paul on both counts.

In a recent widely-cited Washington Post column, conservative commentator Michael Gerson claims that libertarians promote “a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness.” The accusation that libertarians are really advocates of selfishness is a very common one. Googling “libertarianism + selfishness” yields 1.9 million hits, the majority of which are attacks on libertarianism similar to Gerson’s.

In reality, however, libertarianism often requires unselfish behavior. Libertarians routinely condemn politicians who advocate statist policies in order to expand their power or ensure their reelection, bureaucrats who seek to increase the authority and funding of their agencies, businessmen who lobby for government subsidies and handouts, politically influential developers who use the power of eminent domain to acquire property that they covet, law enforcement officials who support the War on Drugs because it increases their funding, public employees unions who support big government in part because it increases their pay, and much other self-interested behavior. The fact that all of these groups are motivated, at least in part, by self-interest doesn’t prevent libertarians from denouncing them. That’s because libertarianism is a theory of the appropriate role of government in society, not a theory that judges the morality of human behavior based on whether or not people are acting out of self-interest.

To be sure, libertarianism does appeal to self-interest in the sense that libertarians believe that the vast majority of people would be better off in a libertarian society than under any realistically feasible alternative. In this, however, libertarianism is no different from most other ideologies. Advocates of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism also contend that their preferred policies would benefit the majority of society.

Obviously, some people may support libertarianism because they think it will promote their self-interest to do so. But that too does not differentiate it from many other ideologies. Plenty of people support liberalism or conservatism for similar reasons. Consider the aforementioned politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, drug warriors, and rent-seeking businessmen. Are all of them purely altruistic? Self-interested advocacy of government intervention is no less selfish than self-interested support for libertarianism.

Another common formulation of the “libertarianism is selfishness” argument is the claim that libertarians are narrow “individualists” who deny the importance of social cooperation. In reality, however, libertarian thinkers from John Locke to F.A. Hayek and beyond have repeatedly stressed the importance of voluntary social cooperation, which they argue is superior to state-mandated coercion. As Hayek (probably the most influential libertarian thinker of the last 100 years) put it:

[T]rue individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group . . . [and] believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations . . [I]ndeed, its case rest largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration.

Perhaps Gerson and other critics mean to suggest not that libertarianism justifies any and all selfish behavior but merely that its supporters are disproportionately selfish people. Even if that is true, it says nothing about the validity of libertarianism. Selfish people can make good arguments and altruistic people can make bad ones. Lots of people endorsed communism and Nazism out of altruistic motivations, for example. Moreover, the fact that selfish people disproportionately believe in a given ideology does not prove that the ideology itself is just a justification for selfishness.

In reality, however, the available evidence does not support the view that libertarians are, on average, more selfish than advocates of other ideologies. For example, Arthur Brooks’ research shows that supporters of free markets donate a higher percentage of their income to charity, even after controlling for both income levels and a wide range of demographic background variables. Brooks’ study doesn’t differentiate libertarian advocates of free markets from conservative ones. However, accusations of libertarian selfishness (especially from the left) are usually directed primarily at their support for economic freedom rather than social liberties. If support for free markets isn’t correlated with selfishness, libertarianism probably isn’t either. More generally, research on voter behavior consistently finds that opposition to government intervention in the economy has little or no correlation with financial self-interest.

Some leftists claim that opposition to taxation or other forms of government intervention necessarily implies selfishness and indifference to the welfare of others. But that assumption simply ignores the possibility that anyone might sincerely believe that imposing tight limits on government power actually benefits the poor.

In sum, libertarianism cannot be equated with advocacy of selfishness because libertarians condemn a wide range of self-interested behavior and are well aware of the importance of social cooperation. They simply believe that cooperation should be voluntary rather than coerced by government. In addition, there is no good evidence showing that people attracted to libertarianism are disproportionately selfish relative to supporters of other ideologies. And even if the latter were true, it still would not prove either that libertarianism is reducible to selfishness or that its claims are wrong.

In a recent post, co-blogger David Bernstein urges libertarians to abandon the Libertarian Party and work within the two major parties. He points out that there are several serious libertarian-leaning candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination, which gives libertarians an important opportunity to increase their influence within the GOP. Ron Paul’s announcement of his candidacy for the Republican nomination today underscores David’s point. In my view, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who announced his candidacy last month, is both more libertarian than Paul and a stronger candidate, a point I intend to elaborate in more detail in future posts. Mitch Daniels, who has not yet declared his candidacy, is also probably superior to Paul for similar reasons.

Whatever one’s opinion of specific candidates, I emphatically agree with David’s general point that the Libertarian Party is a poor vehicle for promoting libertarianism, and that libertarian activists should concentrate their time and money elsewhere. I elaborated on this in several previous posts, most recently in my post-mortem on the LP’s dismal failure in the 2008 election, which was consistent with its generally terrible record over the previous 35 years:

For reasons that I explained in this post, the truth is that third party politics simply is not an effective way of promoting libertarianism in the “first past the post” American political system. That system makes it almost impossible for a third party to win any important elected offices. And such a party also can’t be an effective tool for public education because the media isn’t likely to devote much attention to a campaign with no chance of success.

Libertarians have had some genuine successes over the last 35 years. These include abolition of the draft (heavily influenced by Milton Friedman’s ideas), deregulation of large portions of the economy (of which libertarians were the leading intellectual advocates), major reductions in tax rates (facilitated by libertarian economists, libertarian activists, and the legislative efforts of libertarian-leaning Republicans), the increasing popularity of school choice programs, increases in judicial protection for property rights, gun rights, and economic liberties (thanks in large part to advocacy by libertarian legal activists), and heightened respect for privacy and freedom of speech (promoted by libertarians in cooperation with other groups). Libertarian academics and intellectuals have also done much to make libertarian ideas more respectable and less marginal than they were in the 1960s and early 70s.

What all these successes have in common is that they were achieved either by working within the two major parties or by efforts outside the context of party politics altogether. The Libertarian Party didn’t play a significant role in any of them.

Libertarians often emphasize that failed enterprises should be liquidated rather than kept going on artificial life support. That enables their resources to be reinvested in other, more successful firms. The point is well taken, and it applies to the Libertarian Party itself. For 35 years, the Party has consumed valuable resources, both financial and human. The money spent on the LP and the time donated by its committed activists could do a lot more to promote libertarianism if used in other ways.

Libertarians have a substantial presence in the intellectual world, academia, and, of course, the blogosphere. In the population at large, about 10 to 15 percent of the voting population holds generally libertarian views, a conclusion reinforced by this recent Pew survey, which finds that about 10 percent of registered voters are libertarian. Both Pew and previous studies find that libertarians have, on average, higher levels of education and income than the general population, which should increase their potential political leverage.

Libertarians therefore have some valuable political assets. But in order to maximize our impact, we must focus our efforts effectively. And that means learning the lesson that the LP is a poor vehicle for libertarianism. It is much more effective to pursue some combination of major party politics and advocacy efforts that operate outside the party system entirely.

With no less than three (!) likely or declared Republican presidential candidates who are broadly speaking in the libertarian camp–Mitch Daniels, Gary Johnson, and Ron Paul–libertarian political activists should pick their favorite of the three and work for his nomination, rather than waste their time on energy on pursuing ballot access for an inevitably marginal Libertarian Party candidate. Even if none of those three candidates gets the nominations (Daniels seems to have the best chance), libertarians seem to have their best opportunity to influence the Republican Party’s direction since at least the Barry Goldwater campaign. Time for the Libertarian Party to fold shop?

UPDATE: Note that even if none of the three candidates noted above gets the nomination, or even comes close, the eventual nominee typically absorbs activists from competing campaigns into his. Let’s imagine that candidate Romney winds up with a campaign staff with 20% of so libertarians, who in turn get 20% or so of the plum political appointments in his administration. That would certain be an improvement over the Bush and Obama years, no?

FURTHER UPDATE: Ilya assessed Daniels’ libertarian bona fides here. And Daniels outs himself as a libertarian (at least by Charles Murray’s definition in What it Means to be a Libertarian) here.

On Friday night, I went to see the new Atlas Shrugged movie, which recounts Part I of Ayn Rand’s classic novel. My wife (who first became a libertarian after reading Rand, though she is not a Randian today), expected to either love the movie or hate it. In the end, we both came away with the impression that the film was neither very good nor terrible. On the plus side, it does a fairly good job of conveying Rand’s message, the visuals are often impressive, and the actors playing Rand’s villains are often quite effective. Unfortunately, the actress playing the key role of Dagny Taggart doesn’t seem quite up to the challenge, which is a problem given that she is the main character in the first part of the book. There are also several scenes that flop for various reasons.

The decision to set the movie in the near future (2016) was, in my view, a mistake. Even with a measure of suspension of disbelief, it’s hard to buy into the premise that railroads would be as vital to the US economy in this day and age as they are portrayed in the the movie (the book was, of course, written in the 1950s). The film tries to plug this plot hole by positing that unrest in the Middle East has cut off all oil imports to the United States, thereby grounding most planes and making railroads more important. Unfortunately, trains run on oil too. Any increase in the price of oil would affect them as well. Moreover, even a complete cessation of imports from the Middle East wouldn’t come close to cutting off all oil imports to the US. Countries like Canada, Mexico, Norway, Russia, and Nigeria have lots of oil too. The filmmakers would have been wiser to set the film in a kind of “alternate history” 1950s.

That said, I’m still going to watch the second and third movies in the series, which I hope will be better.

For widely differing reviews of the movie by various libertarian commentators, see here, here, here, here, and here.

For my overall assessments of Ayn Rand and her legacy, see here and here.

UPDATE: For my wife’s far more detailed review of the movie (including a few minor spoilers), see here. Alison is far more knowledgeable about Rand and her work than I am.

Passover is perhaps the ultimate holiday for people like me who celebrate the freedom-enhancing potential of voting with your feet. After all, it’s about people who voted with with their feet to escape slavery. Economist Arnold Kling, however, is more skeptical. He poses the following “libertarian seder questions”:

1. Why did the Egyptians not attempt to escape to freedom with Moses?

2. Why did the Hebrews not escape much sooner?

One answer to (1) might be that Egyptians were not as desperate to leave. They were not as brutally enslaved as the Hebrews.

One answer to (2) might be that the Hebrews were not so badly off under previous Pharoahs. The story reads that there arose a cruel Pharoah who made life unbearable for the Hebrews. That implies that previous Pharoahs were not so unbearable.

Both of these answers pose problems for libertarians. They suggest that for most people, freedom is relative, not absolute. Moreover, it is bound up with other issues, such as economic well-being and relative status. Perhaps the Egyptians did not feel unfree, because others were even more clearly enslaved. Perhaps the Hebrews tolerated the rule of Pharaohs as long as the dictatorship was relatively benevolent. Perhaps there are many conditions under which large numbers of people will not choose freedom.

I am a bit more optimistic than Kling. I think the Passover story suggests that both the Egyptians and the Hebrews chose the option that gave them greater freedom than the available alternatives.

The answer to Kling’s question 1 is that running away with Moses would not have made the Egyptians more free than they were before. After all, the Israelite polity led by Moses and Aaron was no libertarian or even liberal paradise. It was a repressive theocratic oligarchy. Any Egyptians who fled with Moses would not, for example, have been allowed to continue worshiping their pagan gods. If they persisted in their traditional religious ceremonies, they might have suffered the same grisly fate as those Jews who worshiped the golden calf. Given that the Egyptians, unlike the Hebrews, were not enslaved and that Pharaoh was willing to let them worship their own gods freely, I’d say that the Egyptians were more free as a result of choosing to stay than they would have been had they gone with Moses.

As for why the Hebrews did not leave under the previous, less oppressive pharaohs, the answer is that there was nowhere to go that was better. At that time, virtually any area that the Hebrews could have realistically moved to was under the control of rulers similar to the pharaohs in respect to the amount of freedom they granted their subjects. Indeed, thanks to Joseph’s influence, the Hebrews probably got a better deal from the earlier pharaohs than they could have gotten elsewhere.

Only when the new, more cruel pharaoh enslaved the Hebrews did the Egyptian government become more repressive than the available alternatives. When that happened, the Hebrews acted accordingly and voted with their feet for greater freedom. Moses was no Frederick Douglass when it came to promoting liberty for former slaves. But he was a big improvement over the new pharaoh.

Ultimately, both the Egyptians and the Hebrews chose the lesser evil among severely flawed alternatives. That isn’t the traditional interpretation of Passover. But it captures the real world experience of voting with your feet well. There is no perfect promised land out there. But being able to choose where you live is still tremendously empowering because it can greatly increase your freedom relative to where it would be otherwise.

That’s not to deny that people, including libertarians, weigh considerations other than freedom in deciding where to live. However, extensive evidence from both international and domestic migration patterns suggests that people routinely choose freer jurisdictions over less free ones, often in large numbers.

Why is this holiday different from all other holidays?

Because it’s the only one that celebrates voting with your feet for greater freedom!

UPDATE: A commenter refers me to Exodus 12:38, which states that “a mixed multitude” of other people fled along with the Hebrews. That actually reinforces my argument. After all, some Egyptians were more oppressed by Pharaoh than others, and there were surely many non-Jewish slaves in Egypt. Some of these people had it so bad under Pharaoh that living under Moses’ rule would increase their freedom, even if that were not true for the majority of Egyptians.

As part of his plan to address California’s fiscal crisis, liberal Democratic Governor Jerry Brown has proposed abolishing California’s 400 local “redevelopment agencies,” which would save the state some $1.7 billion per year, an important step towards closing the state’s $25 billion annual deficit. Unfortunately, his plan has so far been stymied by opposition from California Republicans, all but one of whom voted against it in the California Assembly. Under the California state constitution, passage of the bill requires a two thirds majority in the state Assembly, and Brown fell one vote short.

The GOP’s stance on this issue is extremely unfortunate, and at odds with the Party’s supposed devotion to free markets and property rights. As Steven Greenhut, an expert on California property rights issues points out in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed, the redevelopment agencies are notorious for their abuses of the power of eminent domain for the benefit of powerful private interest groups:

[I]n the last 60-some years, redevelopment agencies have become fiefdoms that run up enormous debt and abuse eminent domain by transferring private property to large developers promising to build tax-generating bonanzas. Today, there are 749 such projects. In the late 1950s, there were only nine. According to the state controller, redevelopment agencies consume about 12% of all state-wide property taxes—money that would otherwise go to critical public services….

Palm Desert’s redevelopment agency proposed to eliminate so-called blight by spending nearly $17 million on revamping a municipal golf club that remains one of the nation’s premier golfing locales.

In the 12 years I’ve spent reporting on this issue, I’ve seen an agency attempt to bulldoze an entire residential neighborhood and transfer the land to a theme-park developer. I’ve witnessed agencies declare eminent domain against churches—which pay few taxes—in order to sell the property at a deep discount to big-box stores that promise to keep city coffers flush. Working-class people and ethnic minorities often are the victims of this process since they often live in the vulnerable neighborhoods, and they have less muscle than big business developers.

The trouble is that blight is an amorphous concept, easily abused by government officials and redevelopment agencies. Once “blight” is found, the agency creates a project area and can then begins selling bonds (incurring debt) without a public vote. In 1995, one area of the city of Diamond Bar, where I lived, was declared blighted because there was chipped paint on some buildings….

While economic development and local control are crucial issues, it’s hard to understand why any Republican would believe that a regime of government planning and subsidy is the best way to achieve those goals. They should be standing up against the abuses of property rights and the fiscal irresponsibility inherent in the redevelopment process and championing market-based alternatives to urban improvement—even if it means defending a proposal from a Democratic governor they often disagree with.

As I have often pointed out in previously, dubious “blight” condemnations are one of the most serious threats to property rights in the United States today. They are especially likely to be used to victimize the poor, ethnic minorities, and the politically weak.
For these reasons, among others, Jerry Brown’s proposal should be supported not only because it will save the state money, but because it will protect vulnerable property owners against abusive takings. It’s also worth noting that these kinds of blight condemnations not only cause great harm to their victims, but also generally fail to produce the economic growth that supposedly justified them in the first place.

Overall, I have been skeptical about the prospects for “liberaltarianism,” the proposed political coalition between liberals and libertarians. On this issue, however, the two groups have an obvious common interest. The libertarian goal of protecting property rights overlaps here with several liberal objectives, including helping ethnic minorities and supporting one of the nation’s most prominent liberal governors.

Following up my post on what might happen if liberals and libertarians agreed on empirical issues, this post addresses the question of what might happen if libertarians came to agree on empirical issues with conservatives.

Unfortunately, answering this question is a lot tougher than the previous one about liberals. Libertarianism and liberalism are fairly coherent ideological movements. By contrast, “conservatism” is a hodgepodge of different ideologies united mainly by their opposition to the political left. George Will, Pat Buchanan, Bill Kristol, and Mike Huckabee are all considered conservatives. But they differ greatly from each other on both empirical issues and values. So too with neoconservatives, religious right social conservatives, and Burkean conservatives. Moreover, some conservatives are quite close to libertarians on most issues because they have a assimilated a great many libertarian ideas.

To make the question more tractable, I’m going to focus primarily on social conservatives who generally support free market policies on “economic” issues, while also supporting a high degree of “social” regulation. I recognize that this is far from the only type of conservatism out there. But it’s probably the most common one in the United States, especially among conservative intellectuals.

As with some libertarians and liberals, some social conservatives are purely utilitarian in their values. They support conservative policies because they think that will maximize human happiness. If a utilitarian libertarian and a utilitarian conservative could agree on empirical issues, their policy differences would disappear. They would then agree on both values and the best way to implement them. But pure utilitarianism is even less common among conservatives than among liberals and libertarians, possibly because many social conservatives are strongly religious and the major religions all incorporate many non-utilitarian values. Here are some issues where non-utilitarian conservatives will continue to disagree with libertarians even if the two groups could come to a consensus on empirics:

I. Nationalism.

Many, though not all, conservatives are nationalistic. By contrast, most libertarians are hostile to nationalism, usually for the kinds of reasons I outlined here. Some of these differences are traceable to disagreements over the empirical effects of nationalism. But not all of them. At the level of fundamental values, many nationalistic conservatives are willing to impose severe costs on foreigners for the purpose of securing significantly smaller benefits for members of their own polity.

This has important implications for issues like trade and immigration. Let’s assume that greatly expanded immigration creates huge net benefits for immigrants, but inflicts much smaller net costs on native-born Americans. Most libertarians would accept that tradeoff. After all, the freedom and utility of immigrants is, in their view, no less valuable than that of natives. And the majority of libertarians see immigration restrictions as infringements on liberty, not just utilitarian harms.

Not so with nationalistic conservatives. For example, conservative Harvard economist George Borjas wants to greatly reduce immigration in order to prevent what he estimates to be fairly modest wage reductions for low-skilled Americans, even though he realizes the enormous harm that would inflict on potential migrants. In a recent book, conservative scholar Edgar Browning explicitly states that immigration policy should be determined entirely without reference to the welfare of the immigrants themselves (which he views as an uncontroversial premise). Views like Borjas’ and Browning’s are quite common among nationalistic conservatives, though admittedly not universal.

What is true for immigration also holds for trade. The only difference is that fewer conservatives believe that free trade inflicts net harms on Americans than believe the same of immigration. Those who do believe that trade inflicts net harm on Americans tend to support protectionism entirely without reference to the impact on foreigners (Pat Buchanan is a good example).

Agreement on empirical issues surrounding immigration, trade and other such issues would eliminate libertarian-conservative differences only if conservatives came to believe that fully laissez-faire policies in these fields create net benefits for current American citizens.

II. Social Regulation.

Much of the libertarian-conservative disagreement over social and “morals” regulation comes down to disagreement over the empirical effects of such regulations. Elsewhere, I have criticized conservatives such as Robert Bork for ignoring the ways in which their empirical critiques of economic regulation apply to social regulation as well.

But empirical disagreements are not the only source of the conflict. Many conservatives believe that some forms of “immoral” behavior are intrinsically wrong even if legalizing them would increase happiness on net. For example, some argue that it is intrinsically wrong to gamble, take mind-altering drugs, engage in “unnatural” sex, or consume pornography. Conservatives who believe this might still be willing to support legalization if the harms of prohibition are great enough. That accounts for William F. Buckley’s and now Pat Robertson’s opposition to the War on Drugs. But the threshold level of harm needed to persuade social conservatives to support legalization is a lot higher than for libertarians.

The flip side is that many libertarians might still oppose social regulation even in cases where they agree that it creates net utilitarian benefits. They, after all, value social freedom for its own sake, not just because they think it increases happiness. Most libertarians might be willing to support regulation if they thought the utilitarian benefits were extremely large. If banning pornography were the only way to prevent a massive epidemic of rape, I would be in favor of it. But the threshold level of benefit would, for most libertarians, have to be pretty high. Certainly much higher than for most social conservatives.

III. Retribution.

Conservatives generally favor harsher punishments for criminals than libertarians do. This difference reflects various empirical disagreements between the two groups. But there’s also a difference in values. Conservatives are, on average, much more committed to the value of retribution than libertarians are. That’s a key reason why many libertarians, but almost no conservatives, favor moving the criminal justice system towards a model based on restitution rather than punishment (see this article by co-blogger Randy Barnett). Personally, I’m much more of a retributivist than most of my fellow libertarians. But my view is definitely in the minority among libertarian intellectuals.

I have not mentioned war and foreign policy in this post, largely because the issue deeply divides libertarians among themselves. I think that the internal division among libertarians (people who mostly share the same values) suggests that the divide between dovish libertarians and hawkish conservatives on these issues is also largely about empirics rather than values. However, it’s possible that the conservative commitment to nationalism also plays a role here.

Overall, a social conservative who came to agree with libertarians on empirical issues but not values would be more supportive of free trade and immigration and more skeptical of social regulation. But she might still differ with libertarians on these issues because of the conservative commitment to nationalism and nonutilitarian justifications for social regulation. Full convergence with libertarian policy positions would only occur if the conservative came to believe that social regulation inflicts very great harm and that free migration is a net benefit to Americans. Even then, we would still have the disagreement over retribution.

A libertarian who came to agree with social conservatives on empirical issues would endorse higher levels of social regulation and lower levels of immigration. But we would only see full convergence if the libertarian came to believe that the harm caused by laissez-faire was great enough to outweigh the nonutilitarian value he assigns to freedom.

UPDATE: For readers who may be interested, here’s a post I wrote about F.A. Hayek’s classic libertarian critique of conservatism that focuses on some of the same issues as this one, though it does not try to distinguish empirical issues from differences in values.

At the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, libertarian lawprof Fernando Teson writes that “The remarkable truth of this conversation between bleeding heart libertarians and progressives is that our disagreement is exclusively empirical. If we all agree that political institutions should be arranged to alleviate poverty, then the only remaining question is which policies actually do this. Why is it then that we cannot agree, or at least converge, by just looking at reliable data, studies, and empirical theories?”

Fernando suggests that disagreement between liberals and libertarians would largely disappear if the two sides could agree on empirical facts. I think there is a lot of truth to this, but it’s not the whole truth. Agreement on empirics would greatly narrow the range of disagreement between libertarians and liberals, but some important differences would remain.

As I explained in this post, some libertarians are actually utilitarians: they support libertarianism purely because they believe that libertarian policies maximize happiness. Some liberals are utilitarians as well. If a utilitarian liberal and a utilitarian libertarian came to a consensus on empirical issues, they could also come to agreement on policy as well. The only thing that separates them is a disagreement over how best to achieve a common goal: maximizing happiness (I set aside, for the moment, the fact that there are different schools of utilitarianism that disagree over the definition of happiness).

Most libertarians and most liberals are not pure utilitarians. Similarly, few if any care only about alleviating poverty, the issue Fernando focuses on in his post. Here are some issues that would continue to divide libertarians and liberals who aren’t pure utilitarians even if they overcame their empirical disagreements:

I. Economic Liberties.

Most libertarians assign at least some intrinsic value to economic freedom over and above its instrumental benefits. Thus, they would be willing to sacrifice at least some utilitarian gains in order to preserve it. For example, I would oppose mandatory national service even if I were convinced that it would create substantial utilitarian benefits. Economic freedom is valuable enough to sacrifice some happiness for. Obviously, there are limits to the tradeoffs I and most other libertarians would accept in this regard. If a draft were the only way to prevent the conquest of the United States by a totalitarian dictatorship, I would (reluctantly) support it. However, most liberals assign little or no intrinsic value to economic liberty, and therefore would be reluctant to sacrifice even small utilitarian benefits to preserve it.

II. Income Inequality.

Just as most libertarians assign intrinsic value to economic liberty, many liberals assign intrinsic value to restrictions on income inequality. And they are willing to sacrifice at least some utilitarian benefits to achieve it. If, for example, we could greatly reduce income inequality at the price of a 1% reduction in average income for the middle class, many liberals would take the deal. Virtually no libertarians would, since they assign no intrinsic value to income equality at all.

III. Dignitary Wrongs.

Much liberal opposition to libertarian ideas such as organ markets and abolition of the minimum wage and minimum housing standards is due to disagreement over empirics. But not all of it. In discussing such issues with liberals, I often hear arguments such as the following: “Even if organ markets would make the poor better off, I still oppose them because it’s morally wrong for anyone to have to sell parts of their body in order to avoid poverty. It’s wrong to exploit the poor in that way.” Or this: “Even if abolishing minimum housing standards would improve the situation of poor tenants by enabling them to rent cheaper apartments, we as a society shouldn’t do it because such inadequate housing is morally unacceptable.” Liberals who reason in this way believe that some mutually beneficial economic exchanges should be forbidden because they create some sort of dignitary harm that outweighs their utilitarian benefits. Libertarians either discount such considerations entirely or at least believe they aren’t important enough to justify restricting individual freedom.

IV. Multiculturalism and Group Solidarity.

On average, both libertarians and liberals are much less nationalistic than conservatives. This is one of the points that unites the two groups. Nonetheless, many liberals do believe that membership in an ethnic or racial group can create some moral obligations, especially if that group has been the victim of oppression or discrimination. Liberal political philosophers such as Will Kymlicka argue that government should subsidize and otherwise promote minority cultures. Not all liberals assign intrinsic value to such group membership, but many do. To the extent that this is true, it’s a point of disagreement with libertarians that would persist even if the two groups agreed on empirics.

In sum, a liberal who came to agree with libertarians on empirical issues would favor a major reduction in the role of government in society. But he would still probably support more taxation and redistribution than libertarians do. He might also still favor banning some mutually beneficial economic transactions that create dignitary wrongs and support some government subsidization of minority cultures.

A libertarian who accepted the liberal view on empirical questions would come to endorse a lot more taxation and regulation. But he or she still would not support as much regulation as liberals do because of the countervailing intrinsic value of economic freedom. He also would still oppose government intervention in cases where the goal is purely to alleviate dignitary wrongs or subsidize some ethnic group’s culture for its own sake.

We could probably add a few other items to the above list. But I doubt that there would be many more that are of great importance. If so, this suggests that empirical disagreements are by far the most important points of dispute between liberals and libertarians, even if not the only ones. I would be thrilled to form a political coalition with the hypothetical liberal who retained his left-wing values but came to agree with libertarians on empirics. And I bet most liberals would be happy to ally with his libertarian analogue (the libertarian who adopts liberal positions on empirical questions while retaining his or her libertarian values). Empirical disputes, not values, are the main obstacle to a liberaltarianism.

That, however, does not mean that a liberaltarian alliance will be easy to forge. The empirical disagreements in question are extensive and deeply held. Moreover, most people don’t evaluate evidence on political issues with anything approaching unbiased objectivity. Worse, many have a tendency to believe that those who oppose them on empirical issues are actually motivated by abhorrent values or narrow self-interest. That makes agreement even more difficult to achieve than it would be otherwise.

UPDATE: Some of what I say about economic liberties in Point I above also applies to property rights. However, as I noted in this essay, many liberals do attach at least some intrinsic value to property rights, so the disagreement here is more focused on empirical questions than that over economic liberties. Liberals support more restrictions on property rights than libertarians do in large part because they disagree over the empirical effects of such restrictions.