Blogger BK Drinkwater has a reaction to my post yesterday analogizing libertarianism first principles to a cheat sheet for a multiple choice exam:
I’ve always found libertarianism to be an attractive political philosophy. But since I’m a pretty bad political philosopher—in fact, I suck at philosophy generally—the libertarian perspective has a couple of traps. The trap Barnett describes is a particularly tough one to get out of: once seduced by a libertarian idea, like “goods and services are produced & distributed more effectively when markets are not interfered with by coercive agents like government”, it’s apparently obvious correctness turns it into a sort of semantic stop sign.
I went through a phase where if, say, education or healthcare policy came up in conversation, I’d say “Markets! Markets markets markets! MARKETS!” I found these conversations astonishingly unproductive, but I didn’t think to blame myself.
Truth is, I didn’t know much about education or healthcare policy. The semantic stop sign—“Markets!”—shut down my own investigations into these matters. I was frustrated that I couldn’t convince conservatives, social democrats, and socialists to come round to my view. To myself, I blamed their intransigence. In terms of Barnett’s analogy, I had the “right answer”, but I couldn’t explain why it was right, and so I didn’t truly understand the subject being tested.
I’m slowly maturing. I’ve learned more about education & healthcare policy. What I’ve learned has moderated my beliefs a little, but I still claim that our schools and healthcare would benefit from a policy that lets markets do more of the heavy lifting than they’re currently able. I’m just better able to argue it now.
I still don’t argue it well—I still don’t know enough. But I’ve run the stop sign, and I’m no longer stalled. On this issue.
Where are your stop signs? Be honest.
You can comment on his blog post here.
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