Reason has been hosting a debate on “how to think about liberty,” between Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, David Friedman, and James Pinkerton. Some in the blogosphere think this is amusing. Belle just thinks the Barnett/Friedman varieties of anarcho-capitalism are loopy, which is fair enough; but she also thinks there’s something objectionable about even looking that far ahead:
The flavor of this discussion is indescribable. In its total estrangement from our political and social life today, its wilfull disregard of all known facts about human nature, it resembles nothing so much as a debate over some fine procedural point of end-stage communism, after the state has withered away.
Similarly, Will Baude remarks:
We’re so far from Libertarianism, so far from even moderate government-rollbacks, that practical-minded folks don’t need to argue about this stuff at all.
Let me go out on a limb, though, and argue in favor of utopianism. First, let me quote Randy:
Of course, to some extent this debate is moot. If we ever get to a libertarian world in which these are the only forms of coercion still existing beyond self-defense, etc.,we will know a lot more about how liberty actually works and how to achieve it politically than we do now. We will be in a much better position to decide whether to abolish these practices along with all the other vestiges of the welfare state. I should live so long.
Why then debate them now? For the same reason Epstein has been harping on these points for decades. We debate the form of the ideal end stage as part of the debate over whether to take any further steps in its direction. Epstein clearly believes that a more sympathetic and defensible end state is one in which these additional exceptions for free riders and holdouts exist. On this, I have always had my doubts. . . .
The main argument for utopianism is similar to the argument in favor of thought experiments and hypotheticals in philosophy, along the lines of what do you do if you have no food in a lifeboat, or what if you sell yourself into slavery, or what if you find yourself on a runaway train that’s about to run over five people but you can switch the tracks and only run over one person. These hypotheticals are totally unrealistic, but if you don’t have an answer for them, it’s unclear how coherent your answers are going to be in all the realistic cases. Thought experiments and hypotheticals are unrealistic because they strip away all the realistic elements which are, in fact, irrelevant to the case at hand.
Similarly, why worry about whether there’s going to be taxation in the ideal libertarian society? Because in our day-to-day life, we have to make judgments about whether moderate step A is better than moderate step B. If moderate step A involves more of some sort of freedom but also involves more taxation, it would be helpful for a libertarian to know the moral status of taxation. Some libertarians think that any tax increase is an unqualified bad; other libertarians wouldn’t object to some government-provided services as long as they were funded by user fees; and so on. Some of the questions in the debate — is some eminent domain O.K.? — even happens to be important today, since some libertarians are against any eminent domain, regardless of how useful the service is.
There’s also an anti-libertarian argument in favor of libertarian utopianism. Many people spout slogans of any stripe because slogans sound good. “Taxation is theft” sounds great, and so does “A man’s home is his castle.” Also, “property is theft” and “from each according to his ability . . .” sound good on the surface. A lot of people will break down and embrace some sort of moderate politics if you push them hard enough and make them commit to their ideal world. Most utopias are pretty ugly if you force people to not just wish for a pony but also confront the real-world consequences of their utopianism.
O.K., you might now say, so the problem with the Reason debate isn’t that it’s utopian, but that some of the utopians there don’t seem to have thought through real-world consequences. (This is, I think, the problem with much of the communist end-state utopianism that Belle refers to.) If so, it’s clearly not Richard Epstein, who actually endorses taxation and eminent domain. It’s not Randy Barnett, whose argument is explicitly “not so fast, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.” James Pinkerton seems to entirely sidestep the utopian debate, focusing instead on foreign policy and other matters. David Friedman seems most vulnerable to the charge that his utopianism is out of touch with reality, because his vision of a stateless world of private rights enforcement seems implausible on the face of it; but read his work and you’ll find a ton of real-world historical examples, and get him in a room and he’ll give you a lot of good arguments.
In any case, that seems like hardly enough evidence to bash libertarian utopianism as a genre. Sure, don’t spend too much time arguing about the libertarian end-state. Spend more time trying to prove the virtues of specific reforms and establishing alliances with non-libertarian groups that agree on those issues. And make sure your utopianism is grounded in reality — not necessarily in the sense of whether your proposal can realistically be enacted, but in the sense of whether your predictions of what the world will look like are realistic. (I’ve had arguments with libertarians who believe that the U.S. won’t be attacked if it unilaterally disarms, and that there won’t be any crime in the ideal libertarian state. Now this is wishing for a pony.)
But some amount of theory is good, especially within a theory-based system like communism or libertarianism or Catholicism or Objectivism or what have you. And Reason already spends very little time on such debates — you need to read Liberty to get them more often. If anyone has any more specific anti-utopian arguments, I’d be glad to hear them.
UPDATE: Clayton Cramer writes, a while ago (February 17) on why libertarian ideas haven’t been that popular: (1) the unpopularity of theoretical systems in light of other, failed theoretical systems; (2) libertarian hostility toward religion (in my view, not an inherent critique, though one that tends to be true in practice); (3) various social conditions that need to be there for libertarian ideas to “work in a society” (a problematic claim); and (4) various substantive disagreements with the libertarian program. Point (1) is relevant to the merits of utopianism. Note that this is just an argument about why utopianism is unpopular — not an argument about why utopianism is intellectually a good or bad idea.
UPDATE 2: Will Wilkinson has a good post on pony-talking. Will’s discussion is similar in spirit to a comment I got from John Nye, who says the problem with much utopianism is that it ignores the problem of the second best, i.e. just because something is a step in the direction of the ideal doesn’t mean it actually improves the world, so you should evaluate the small steps on their own mer
its. Nothing I disagree with in all this, and I think it’s all roughly consistent with what I’ve said above.
I’ll just add: imagining an ideal world doesn’t necessarily mean that you actively judge small steps according to whether they get closer to the ideal world.
Imagining an ideal world serves various functions. One of these is testing your moral ideas (that is, your ideas of what “better” means) to see whether they’re really so hot. (Take an ideal world I, a status quo Q, and a proposed slightly changed world B. You want to know whether I – B > I – Q (is B closer to the ideal than the status quo?), but this is the same as asking whether B < Q (is B better than the status quo?), which seems to moot the "ideal world" question. But what I'm saying is: you need to come up with, and refine, your concept of the what the "greater than" symbol means.) Another function is (as Randy points out above) showing people that, if left to your own devices as czar, you would in fact address their concerns in some way (i.e., “how would you provide for X under libertarianism?”).
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