Over On “League of Ordinary Gentlemen” there is a very long thread fitfully attempting to be critical of Libertarianism. It’s interesting how almost no one on the thread understands anything other than what they’ve read in the popular press about libertarianism. Which is common, because like any doctrine, people adopt it because of the appeal of it’s general sentiments, not because they actually understand it. And they propagate the sentiments very simplistically. Then, those who have adopted other doctrines because those doctrines appeal to their own sentiments, react to these simplistic statements of sentimentality, rather than to the libertarian doctrine itself –and all potential opportunity for rational discourse is lost in the chaos. A TECHNICAL, EMPIRICAL PHILOSOPHY But Libertarianism is a technical philosophy that can be rationally articulated. It is often, for historical reasons, articulated as a moral philosophy as is most western ideology. THis is because the French enlightenment philosophers ‘Catholicized’ what was an empirical Anglo philosophical system and converted it to sentimental, moral, and rational system of thought. It was this moral, rational, and sentimental French framework, not the empirical Anglo framework that was popularized by continental philosophers and through their writings, distributed to the world in printed literature — thereby removing precisely what made the Classical Liberal economic political program innovative: that it was procedural and empirical rather than rational. HISTORY The term “Libertarian” was coined by Classical Liberals because the left appropriated the term “liberal” for their Moral political program. PRINCIPLESFirst Principle: Economics Libertarianism relies on economics.
So, in any political discourse, given a multitude of possible choices, libertarians ‘err on the side of liberty’ because they believe liberty will have the most positive and the least negative side effects. Second Principle: Anti-Bureaucracy Libertarians use the term government as a synonym for bureaucracy. They use anti-authoritarian arguments. Anti authoritarian arguments are Moral and rational arguments. Anti-bureaucratic arguments are rational and empirical arguments: meaning that the evidence is that bureaucracies universally consolidate power and abuse it because of the processes and incentives necessary for humans to operate in a bureaucratic organization. (See Michels and Mises). Libertarianism then, is an anti-bureaucratic rather than anti-government philosophical framework. It suggests that people can and do organize into groups we call governments. It suggests that in almost all cases, privately owned, market-driven service providers will provide better services at lower cost with less danger of bureaucratic abuse of group members than the alternatives. Third Principle: Voluntary Transfer Libertarians use moral arguments to criticize involuntary transfer of property. However, the rational and empirical argument is that only voluntary transfer allows people to ‘calculate’ positive social ends together by making use of their collective knowledge, rather than the supposed knowledge of one or more bureaucrats – and that ‘externalities’ (the secondary effects) are beneficial when transfers are voluntary. The single moral property that defines all libertarian philosophy is that individuals have a monopoly on the use of their minds, bodies and property. LIBERTARIANISM Libertarian is a middle class (commercial) philosophy. It consists (largely) of two wings:
- Classical Liberal
- (This is the important part that is lost on everyone – libertarians included. It is an empirical system of government.)
- Anarchist
THE VALUE OF LIBERTARIANISM The libertarian research program has contributed significantly to political discourse because it has:
CONCLUSIONS In the end, the combination of poor data collection, fiat monetary policy, use of the DSGEM in economics and it’s ‘static’ limitations, undermining the constituion’s implied but unstated empirical nature, and the democratic rather than class-based process of debate, have put us in a position where it is not possible to make rational economic and political judgements. Thanks to Libertarians, we know that whether or not we have moral ambitions, we cannot currently make rational decisions in our form of government with the information at our disposal. And that is profound.
Leave a Reply