Turning up the Volume on Freedom: Our First 30 Days
by Derek Elliott, Leader, Libertarian Party of Canada
Friends, in just thirty days, we completely shattered expectations and built historic momentum for Canadian freedom.
It has been nearly a month since Michael Harris and I officially took the reins as Leader and Deputy Leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada. And let me tell you, the energy we are seeing right now is something this party hasn't experienced in a very long time.
For years, critics have claimed that libertarians just can't get on the same page. They thought we were too independent to pull in the same direction. Well, we just wrapped up our very first board meeting, and we proved them completely wrong. Under this new leadership, the entire board didn't just find common ground… we agreed on every single item unanimously. No gridlock, no endless debates, just total alignment on our mission to bring real choice back to Canadians.
That single, productive meeting set the stage for major action. In less than a month, we have officially established our party's very first youth wing, LYNX. This is a massive milestone. We are finally building a solid foundation for the future, engaging young people across the country, and giving them a real voice to stand up for personal liberty and economic freedom.
That alone would be reason to celebrate, but to top off an incredible first month, I travelled down to represent our party at the US Libertarian National Convention. Speaking in front of those people and being part of that massive crowd was an incredible honour. It gave us a fantastic platform to strengthen our international ties, share our vision for a free Canada, and bring a wave of fresh energy back home with us.
What we have accomplished in thirty days is just a small taste of what is coming. We are moving this party forward, we are turning up the volume on liberty, and we are showing Canadians that there is a professional, focused, and united alternative ready to stand up for them.
The momentum is on our side, but we need your help to keep it rolling. Drop a comment below to let us know what you think, smash that like button, and subscribe so you don't miss a single update. Share this video with a friend who is tired of the status quo, and let's get to work.
June 7, 2024 - "David Boaz (/ˈboʊ.æz/; born August 29, 1953 - June 7, 2024, Mayfield, Kentucky) was Distinguished Senior Fellow and the former executive vice president of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank. He is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997 by the Free Press and described in the Los Angeles Times as 'a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.' He is also the editor of The Libertarian Reader and co-editor of the Cato Handbook for Congress (2003) and the Cato Handbook on Policy (2005).
"He frequently discusse[d] such topics as education choice, the growth of government, the ownership society, his support of drug legalization as a consequence of the individual right to self-determination, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and the rise of libertarianism on national television and radio shows.... Boaz, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, is the former editor of The New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981."
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boaz Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0; additional terms may apply.
David Boaz at Young Americans for Liberty conference, 2019. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
June 7, 2024 - "Our inestimable colleague, David Boaz, passed away on June 7, after a year‐long battle with cancer. It’s impossible to express how deeply his friends, colleagues, and all libertarians will miss him. David was the longest‐tenured staff member in the history of the Cato Institute, serving the organization and its mission for forty‐three‐and‐a‐half years. He was the executive vice president of the Institute for decades until 2022, when he ascended to the title of distinguished senior fellow of Cato....
"David made an incalculable contribution to building Cato into the respected institution and voice it is today, as well as to the “mainstreaming” of libertarianism as a legitimate political philosophy worthy of a seat at the table in all of the nation’s policy debates. Few did more than he did to earn it that seat.
"David was the first person from Cato whom I ever met. I was a new contributor in 2001 when he visited my office in New York to thank me.... I learned from David during that 2001 meeting and would never stop learning from him over the next 23 years. The visit took place about two weeks after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The building was across the street from Ground Zero.... We went up to the top‐floor cafeteria to look over the devastation of what used to be the World Trade Center. David remarked, 'After this, I’m very concerned about terrorism. But I’m equally concerned about what this will mean for our civil liberties.'
"This was a lesson. Because at that time, I only shared David’s first concern — of terrorism. Barely a month later the PATRIOT Act was passed into law, and we would soon see the national security surveillance state mushroom in ways few might have imagined. Later came revelations of extralegal and unconstitutional spying programs. This confirmed that, in the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy, authorities’ respect for civil liberties were at a low ebb and these rights indeed had been degraded. David’s fears back in September 2001 were well‐founded and prescient.
"I recall this story because it epitomizes the most important thing I learned from David: all our liberties matter. In defending individual rights we can’t pick and choose, or somehow prioritize the ones that are most important to us. First, because they are interconnected. If we allow some to be threatened or diluted, others will soon be. Second, the ones we deem 'less important' may be crucial to us in ways we can’t foresee. And even if not, they are undoubtedly critical to other fellow citizens.
"David did much to imbue Cato with a similarly holistic view of individual liberty. He also never ceased to stress the Institute’s need to be truly independent, to be truly nonpartisan, and to adhere faithfully to libertarian principles. It’s now the duty of the Cato staff of today, and of the future, to honor David by upholding all of these values as faithfully and as capably as he did."
"Welcome to the Libertarian Party of New Brunswick, where we stand firmly on our principles to ensure all individuals have the freedom to live their lives and pursue their interests as they see fit, as long as they do no harm to another. Our core beliefs revolve around significantly reducing the size and intrusiveness of government, cutting and eliminating taxes at every opportunity, and allowing peaceful, honest people to offer their goods and services without inappropriate interference from the government.
"We believe in a society where peaceful, honest individuals can make their own decisions about how to live their lives, free from the fear of criminal or civil penalties. Founded in 2024, our party has been a consistent advocate for these principles, running many hundreds of candidates every election cycle to promote our vision of a freer, more prosperous New Brunswick.
"As part of the broader Libertarian movement, we are dedicated to expanding individual freedom to its furthest limits. We affirm the principles of no person or institution having the right to initiate the use of force or fraud against another, and that the only moral purpose of government is the preservation of individual rights. We also recognize the voluntary exchange of goods and services as essential for a free and prosperous society.
"By joining the Libertarian Party of New Brunswick, you’re not just becoming a member of a political party; you’re joining a community of like-minded individuals committed to making New Brunswick a better place for all. Together, we can work towards a future where individuals are empowered to make their own choices and live their lives to the fullest, without undue interference from government or other institutions."
November 26, 2023 - "There’s an elephant in the room, the speaker declared. He was right. I was at a gathering, as I often am, of people who aspire to rescue their countries from descending into woke, collectivist hell. But the attendees were not of one mind. Instead, there were two kinds of people in attendance. The elephant in the room was the tension between them.
"Across the West, Virtue People and Freedom People have been working together. At conferences, in think tanks, at school boards, on email lists, in living rooms, on X, and sometimes marching in the streets, they coalesce. These two groups constitute the rebel alliance against authoritarian woke globalism. But their political philosophies conflict.
"Virtue People believe that virtue is the most important thing. Tradition, faith, family, responsibility, dignity, patriotism, community, and spiritual or religious conviction are the pillars upon which the West must be built. Virtue People are often, but not always, people of faith, especially of the Christian variety. Laws, governments, and society, they believe, should promote the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
"Freedom People don’t share this view. They believe that freedom is the most important thing. Virtues, they believe, are for individuals to work out for themselves. The primary accomplishment of the West, they would say, is individual autonomy. The purpose of government is to secure individual rights to liberty. Freedom means the absence of coercion. You may decide your values, actions, and groups for yourself. Freedom means 'freedom from.'
"Virtue People believe in freedom too, especially in this era of illiberal progressivism. But freedom means a different thing to them. Freedom is essential, they would say, but the decline of the West is due to an excessive emphasis on individuality. (If that makes perfect sense to you, you may be a Virtue Person. If it sounds like a contradiction, you are probably a Freedom Person.)
"Freedom, they would say, means the disciplining of desire, which requires limits. Freedom is the liberation to act responsibly, to be transcendent, and to flourish virtuously. We become free, they would say, to the extent that our will becomes coherent with objective Good. Freedom means 'freedom to.'
"In the political sphere, these two kinds of freedom are incompatible. Freedom People expect their governments to keep the peace and protect the individual – and otherwise to not interfere. Virtue People expect their governments to promote the Good with laws and policies. Virtue People support laws that prohibit behavior that is, in their view, immoral, damaging to human flourishing, or inconsistent with common good. Assisted suicide, prostitution, divorce, pornography, even heresy, just to start, shall not be permitted.
"To achieve their ends, Virtue People rely on force. At least, that’s what Freedom People would say. Virtue People use laws to achieve their ends, and laws depend on force. Every legal rule identifies a circumstance in which the state will bend the will of its citizens. Without the monopolistic violence of the state, laws cannot be enforced. Virtue People are willing to use that force to achieve their virtuous ends. Therefore, allege the Freedom People, they are willing to use force to have their way.
"Freedom People are decadent. At least, that’s what Virtue People would say. If morality crimes do not exist and individuals are free to decide their own values, depravity ensues. Libertarians and libertines are cousins, Virtue People would declare. Excessive individualism causes indulgence, narcissism, and social decay.
"But Freedom People can be virtuous too. They can embrace faith, family, and community. They can disapprove of behavior, such as prostitution, that Virtue People would ban. However, Freedom People make a distinction that Virtue People are unable or unwilling to make. Freedom People see two different questions where Virtue People see only one. How should people behave? How must they behave? For Freedom People, the first is philosophical and personal. The second is legal and coercive. The answer to the first does not answer the second. Freedom People do not impose their moral judgments on others. They will not have others impose upon them.
|Paradoxically, Freedom People have faith that Virtue People lack. They have faith in spontaneous order. If we leave people alone, they say, things will turn out fine. Individual decisions will coalesce into peace and prosperity. Virtue People do not believe in spontaneous order. They want their hands on the wheel, so that they can manage people to virtuous ends.
"Freedom People will not be managed. They believe that the West’s problem is too little liberty. Virtue People believe that the problem is too much. Freedom People oppose the administrative state. Virtue People embrace it if it directs people to proper ends. Neither will sign on to the other’s project. Although they cooperate to resist the tyranny of the woke, they are not likely to succeed unless they reconcile.
"At the gathering, most people were Virtue People. The few Freedom People present slowly realized that they had attended a kind of church to which they did not belong. The Virtue People who filled the room, steadfast in their conviction that they knew best what is Right and Good, did not seem to be aware of them. Or for that matter, that they existed at all.
"Near the end, I spoke with an earnest, soft-spoken gentleman in horn-rimmed glasses. In his ideal world, the law would prohibit behavior that conflicted with the Good, as he perceived it. When I pointed out that some people in the room would oppose that enterprise with all their might, his mouth fell open and his eyes grew wide behind his thick lenses. That possibility had not occurred to him. Not everyone sees the elephant in the room."
"What sets Andrew Koppelman’s book apart from most critiques of libertarianism," says reviewer Marco den Ouden, "is that he actually knows what he’s talking about."
A review of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed by Andrew Koppelman, 320 pages, Macmillan (Oct 2022)
September 12, 2023 - "Andrew Koppelman ... is a Professor of Law and of Political Science at Northwestern University, a civil libertarian, and the author of books on antidiscrimination law, gay rights, same-sex marriage, healthcare reform, and religious liberty. He declares himself to be 'a pro-capitalist leftist' and acknowledges that his 'embrace of that position here will make many of my friends on the left feel betrayed.' The thing that turns Koppelman’s crank is what he regards as a heartless, narrow, and blinkered understanding of liberty on the part of many libertarians....
"What sets Koppelman’s book apart from most critiques of libertarianism is that he actually knows what he’s talking about. He’s clearly read and researched libertarianism in considerable detail. And while he is sometimes harsh in his criticism, he clearly sees the value in many libertarian positions. His background in law and political science, as well as his writing on civil liberties, allows him to bring some fascinating insights to bear in his analysis. And he sometimes turns libertarian ideas on their head, using libertarian ideas to argue against what he sees as a perversion of libertarian ideas in the works of Rothbard, Nozick, and Rand. 'You ought to be a libertarian—of a certain kind, and only up to a point,' he writes. 'This book is not only a critical description of libertarianism. It aims to marry what is best about libertarianism with the agenda of the left'....
"Koppelman notes that the modern political Left is often more concerned with identity politics than with alleviating poverty. 'A right to be different,' he continues, 'pushes toward localization of power and away from central planning.' The people on the Left, who continue to malign capitalism, 'don’t grasp the anti-socialist logic of their present views.' And because Hayek was not a doctrinaire absolutist in his opposition to a role for the state in the economy, he 'thought redistribution to provide basic needs was an appropriate supplement to a free market. Such a supplement was not central planning, because it left the recipients free to make their own decisions'.... Ronald Reagan, Koppelman suggests, 'succeeded in shifting American politics—and American understandings of liberty—in a Hayekian direction.' Bill Clinton’s Democrats adopted these views and implemented some of the things Reagan could not....
"But while Democrats since Clinton have adopted a Hayekian approach to markets and regulation, Republicans have moved steadily in a more radical and fundamentalist libertarian direction, distilled from the later views of Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. Before considering those views, Koppelman digresses with a chapter on the Lockean theory of natural rights. Hayek was lukewarm at best on rights theory, but it is the centerpiece of the Rothbard/Nozick/Rand approach. And of course, it holds a key place in the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The fundamentalist view of property rights holds that people work and the fruits of their labor is their property. They have a right to it. Such rights are absolute. And, as per the Declaration of Independence, 'to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' This does not give government carte blanche to do what it wants.... 'You must not spend money that’s not yours.' But, Koppelman notes, if this view is correct, 'it straightaway entails that most of what government does is illegitimate.' This, he continues, 'is the moral core of much modern libertarianism'....
"Koppelman identifies Rothbard’s 'core moral principle' as nonaggression, as expressed in For a New Liberty: 'No man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.' Koppelman says that Rothbard adopts this principle because 'each man may only live and prosper as he exercises his natural freedom of choice,' thus 'if someone aggresses against him to change his freely-selected course, this violates his nature; it violates the way he must function.' Koppelman agrees that this 'axiom entails anarchism'. So how will justice be administered in an anarchist world? By private contractors—“multiple private police forces, with no central authority over them.” Koppelman compares this to a society of warlords, each trying to gain dominance. 'What actually emerges from networks of protective associations, all over the world, is some variety of hereditary aristocracy.' In other words, feudalism.... .
"Koppelman brushes Nozick off in a few paragraphs and moves on to consider the influence of Ayn Rand.... Koppelman seems to have mixed feelings about Rand. He clearly admires some of her writing and philosophy, and he appreciates her support for charity as expressed in her essay 'The Ethics of Emergencies'.... Elsewhere, he writes that, 'the most attractive aspiration in Rand is the independence of judgment, and faith in oneself, displayed by Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead. The book has surely helped many young people with its message that they should pursue their own deepest aspirations, and not care about impressing others'.... But in Atlas Shrugged, Rand 'offers a far cruder picture.' She argued that under capitalism, 'it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward.'This leads to the view that 'markets give people exactly what they deserve and any redistribution is unjust'....
"In Rand’s opposition to any relief by the state, she shared Rothbard’s position. But while she did argue in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that 'without property rights, no other rights are possible,” Koppelman suggests that “at Rand’s core is, not a theory of property rights, but an ideal of reciprocity. That ideal is attractive. It is, I suspect, the source of her rhetorical power.” According to the Oxford dictionary, reciprocity is 'the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit'.... 'She has in fact captured an important ethical ideal,' Koppelman continues, 'the value of interpersonal respect between "men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value"'....
"Koppelman concludes with chapters on paternalism, discrimination, and how the lack of appropriate regulation has led to the aggrandizement of modern day moochers and looters....
|I was a doctrinaire libertarian/Objectivist from 1969 to 2000, and I came to my libertarianism through Ayn Rand. The first libertarian book I ever read was Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I was hooked and read everything Rand ever published during her lifetime and much of what was published posthumously. My drift away from orthodox libertarianism accelerated after I retired in 2014, started blogging, and returned to university. I became an admirer of Isaiah Berlin's value-pluralism—the view that genuine values can conflict, which is anathema to libertarians. Although I have read very little of Hayek, Koppelman's book makes me want to explore his thought in more detail. Koppelman presents a good case for taking the Hayekian approach with a work that is rich in detail and full of thought-provoking ideas. It is well worth the read, whether you ultimately agree with him or not."
Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95
March 2023 - "With Freedom's Furies, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.
"Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio's literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis' books 'expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience and cravenness.' Each joined Lewis in rejecting conformity, but they resisted his dismissal of all bourgeois virtue—and Rand also rejected his pessimism.
"The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was 'almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets.' The furies realized they would have to produce their own.
"And so Paterson's The God of the Machine (a philosophical treatise), Lane's The Discovery of Freedom (a pop history crossed with a manifesto), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a didactic novel) were published in 1943. All three writers believed that the morality of self-sacrifice should be rejected. Rand and Paterson both argued for a form of ethical egoism, and they would long debate who influenced whom. But the two differed greatly in their style: Rand was deeply influenced by 19th-century Romanticism while Paterson was committed to naturalism. For her part, Lane argued that human energy produced human flourishing and that 'every human being, by his nature, is free.' Humanity simply needed to discover this truth; hence her book's title.
"All three authors independently developed some of the most important insights of classical liberal academics. Paterson's criticism of the New Deal, for instance, included the argument that central planning was impossible because bureaucrats 'would have to know "absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made."' These arguments capture some of the insights of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, who were not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Likewise, The God of the Machine anticipated Karl Popper's critique of 'the arrested society,' which he wrote two years later. Paterson recognized that all utopias 'are final…they are static societies'; as such, she suggested, they could not adapt, because 'creative processes do not function to order.' In short, 'To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.'
"Lane anticipated Hayek's critique of government planning in a short 1936 book titled Give Me Liberty. She argued, in Sandefur's words, that 'to truly organize an economy…government bureaucrats would, in principle, need infinite knowledge.' Lane also hit on some important insights later associated with the economics of public choice. The idea that bureaucrats could better manage the economy than individuals was, she wrote, the 'dominant fallacy' of the 1930s. Instead, Lane insisted that 'there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.'
"Sandefur also details the trio's views on religion and how those related to their defense of liberty. While all three believed that natural rights existed independently of government, they arrived at this conclusion in different ways. Lane and Paterson both argued that the existence of a deity was necessary. Rand, an atheist, disagreed; she believed that human beings could reason our way to a justification of natural rights.
"Lane irritated the other two women with her insistence that Christian ethics could be reconciled with a robust defense of individual liberty. Her argument that people have a moral sense that leads us, by nature, to care for our neighbor annoyed Rand and Paterson, who felt that man should look after his own happiness and had no moral obligation to others. Paterson took umbrage at the vagueness of Lane's 'all men are brothers' thesis and retorted, 'Stalin is no brother of mine.' This helped end Lane and Paterson's friendship. Lane's religious views and Rand's atheism likewise made any deep friendship between the two women difficult, and they met in person just once....
"Although this is an exceptional book, it is not flawless. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of attention to the ways the furies applied their individualism to minorities. Sandefur does note that 'on matters of race relations, freedom of speech, and sexual autonomy, they were decades ahead of their time in embracing views later classified as "liberal"' [but] ... it is frustrating that the book doesn't delve into that point in more detail. Sandefur mentions, for instance, that Lane was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the largest black newspapers in the country) in 1942, but he doesn't detail any of the arguments she made in her essays there.... For more than two years at the Courier, Lane applied the ideals of individual liberty and her unique conception of human energy to black Americans and their struggle....
"Still, this book's flaws are small compared to its contributions. Freedom's Furies offers hope to a new generation of classical liberals and libertarians living through the threat of authoritarianism abroad and illiberalism at home. Compared with the domestic overreach of the 1930s and '40s and the rise of fascism and communism abroad, our own troubles don't seem quite as bad.... Individual liberty and self-reliance are still the keystones, and the furies' successors will surely continue to promote liberty in the face of the darkness today.'
August 25, 2021 - "The recent surge of academic interest in 20th century conservatism, libertarianism, and associated developments in free-market economic thought also carries with it a curious historiographical implication. Encompassing contributions by authors such as Kim Phillips-Fein, Quinn Slobodian, Bethany Moreton, Kevin Kruse, and Nancy MacLean, the genre varies widely in scholarly quality. Its contributors nonetheless share a pronounced ideological hostility to their subject matter, which in turn shapes how they select and construe their source materials....
"The approach taken in these works essentially conspiracizes ... routine historical records from disliked conservative, libertarian, or free-market sources as if they were evidence of a collective will to politically transform the mechanism of history in ways that disrupt a specific course of progressive political development desired by the author. A predictable assortment of problematic consequences in the present allegedly follows from the decades-long designs they claim to have identified: the 2007-2008 financial crisis, environmental degradation, rising inequality, the political ascendance of the religious right, and Trump.
"Lawrence Glickman’s Free Enterprise: An American History offers the latest contribution to this booming yet peculiar subfield. Styled as an intellectual history of the concept, his thesis holds that 'free enterprise' is essentially a constructed mythology that arose from political opposition to the New Deal. Over the course of the 20th century, this version of 'free enterprise' recast economic interventionism as an aberration from an artificially constructed history of the pre-Roosevelt American economy.... In his telling, the myth’s expositors — mostly a group of business interests and associated free-market intellectuals — set out to morally 'delegitimize' the New Deal order and with it 'the most basic functions of government,' namely taxation, regulation, and public expenditures....
"In Glickman’s telling, that attack amounted to a 'one-sided war' upon the New Deal by business interests and other defenders of 'free enterprise,' all rooted in the aforementioned myth-making. While he offers a moderately interesting etymology of the phrase ... dating back to the nineteenth century, the core of his myth-making narrative suffers deeply from the epistemic distortions of the book’s ideological hostility to its subject. In particular, Glickman’s own political commitments to the New Deal (and progressivism more broadly) effectively render him unable to even fathom the existence of valid economic criticisms for Roosevelt’s policies, or their long-term effects on the United States’ fiscal picture to the present day. Rather, the New Deal is simply 'an outgrowth of democratic processes' and unassailable as such. Its critics, past and present, are ,,, casually brushed aside as expositors of a near-religious devotion to the artificially constructed 'free enterprise' concept. This rhetorical move allows the author to sidestep any engagement with salient criticisms of New Deal policies and political actors. It’s much easier to recast the critics as fanatics under the 'talismanic' trance of a dismissed concept.
"Glickman accordingly bristles at the suggestion that the New Deal unintentionally “prolonged and deepened rather than ameliorated the Depression,” even as modern empirical scholarship has lent strong support to that exact contention.... He discounts any concern with the deficit-inducing budget strains of Social Security and similar programs on account of their popularity.... He similarly sees only fear-mongering over the specters of European communism and fascism in contemporary business complaints about Roosevelt’s affinity for economic central planning.... One need not speculate that the early New Dealers drew inspiration from Europe’s totalitarian regimes in the decade before the world descended into war with those very same powers. They openly boasted of doing so themselves....
"An unfortunate result is an ostensible history of 'free enterprise' that almost completely omits the concept’s historical use as a philosophical foil to the Soviet Union and central planning. In fact, Glickman consciously excludes this dimension from his study at the outset by little more than a wave of the hand: 'Although what we might call "the age of free enterprise" … coincided almost precisely with the Cold War battle against Soviet communism, proponents described the dire threats to the system as primarily domestic, not foreign.' The severity of the error in this assessment may be readily ascertained by looking no further than mainstream mid-century political discourse.
"As Dwight Eisenhower contended in a celebrated 1950 speech that helped to propel him into the presidency, the communist world had 'embarked upon an aggressive campaign to destroy free government… because regimentation cannot face the peaceful competition of free enterprise.' Or consider Harry Truman’s 1953 State of the Union Address, recounting that the Soviets had predicted an American reversion into the Great Depression after the end of World War II: 'We answered that question—answered it with a resounding "no".... Free enterprise has flourished as never fore.' John F. Kennedy’s never-delivered Trade Mart Address from the day of his assassination planned to contrast the military ambitions of international communism with 'the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and the American free enterprise system.' Or as Lyndon Johnson succinctly put it in a 1964 interview, 'we have one thing [the Soviets] don’t have, and that is our system of private enterprise, free enterprise.' By attempting to pigeonhole the term to its domestic political uses, Glickman has somewhat astonishingly managed to completely miss its central place in mid-twentieth century geopolitics."
March 25, 2020 - In recent days, there has been snark from some quarters about the current crisis somehow catching libertarians flat‐footed. The argument goes that the need for a big government response disproves a political ideology that is often, though in somewhat oversimplified fashion, summarized as favoring 'small government." A better description would be a government limited in scope but sufficient to meet that scope.
Libertarianism, properly understood, encompasses certain core functions as the proper role of government. It is not the libertarian view that government should be ineffective at protecting individual rights or dysfunctionally paralyzed in the face of a massive threat to people’s lives. Government has a role to play in responding to the pandemic in much the same way it is the government’s job to prosecute murderers or defend the country from invasion.
At the same time, libertarian principles and insights can provide some guideposts for how to respond in this unprecedented global emergency.
One thing to keep in mind is that some limits on government power are even more crucial now. Emergency powers should be limited in duration and limited to directly addressing the present situation based on the facts as best we know them. Such policy responses shouldn’t be larded up with a pre‐existing wish list of unrelated concerns. It is essential to preserve constitutional liberal democracy and resist excessive long‐term concentration of power in the executive.
Social distancing measures should rely on voluntary compliance to the greatest degree possible, and most people have been voluntarily complying. Even when enforcement is necessary, simply breaking up gatherings without citation or prosecution is possible and preferable in many cases. A heavy‐handed reliance on coercive enforcement might not only be unnecessary in some regards, it can also backfire by sparking protest non‐compliance, and it might also be redundant to all the other measures already in place.... For that reason, some states have so far rejected compulsory "stay at home" or "shelter in place" orders. There is no need to fuel further panic or distract police from their more important duties to worry about safe and benign activities like taking the family dog for a walk.
At the same time, many jurisdictions have moved to suspend petty arrests altogether, mostly for victimless crimes, in an effort to reduce jail populations. Also under consideration are proposals to release many of those individuals currently in jail awaiting trial for minor offenses. This is a welcome shift that should prompt us to reconsider the necessity of some of these laws, many of which have long been the target of libertarian ire.
Another insight comes from Nobel laureate, libertarian icon, and Cato Distinguished Senior Fellow, the late F.A. Hayek. In works such as The Constitution of Liberty, he wrote that good laws should be general, equal, and certain. That is a principle that is relevant even in something as far removed from the libertarian ideal as the emergency economic responses currently under consideration. Rather than targeted industry bailouts and micro‐managed interventions, policy responses should be clear, simple, system‐wide, and with a defined end date as soon as possible. Simple universal payments to individuals are also preferable to corporate bailouts. It is not feasible for the government to abruptly order massive shutdowns of so much economic activity without some kind of compensation, in much the same way we require just compensation for eminent domain. It is proper for the government to own the consequences of its orders and to soften the shock of this sudden disruption....
Libertarian criticisms of bad regulations have proven especially prescient. A crucial government failure has been the FDA’s [Food and Drug Administration's] inflexible and heavy‐handed bureaucracy, which has held up tests and prevented thousands of private and academic labs from quickly increasing testing capacity. For most of February, the FDA required everybody to rely solely on tests produced by the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and refused to grant permission to other labs. This proved to be catastrophically flawed when the first round of tests produced by the CDC didn’t work and had to be replaced. This failure is a large part of why America’s coronavirus testing response to date compares so unfavorably with South Korea’s.
Another example of a libertarian response to the pandemic has been the quick need to suspend many occupational licensing restrictions, such as by letting doctors practice interstate and upgrading the permissions of nurse practitioners and doctors’ assistants. Even mundane and trivial regulations of the sort that only libertarians would have worried about before have suddenly been cast aside. Two months ago, who would have thought it an urgent concern to suspend alcohol regulations so that restaurants can serve beverages to go for home delivery by rideshare drivers?
While we can welcome these wins, there is no doubt that we have also seen extreme impositions on personal freedom. Libertarians can find that loss especially painful. Even when these new rules are sadly necessary and justified by the facts, it is a cost we should carefully weigh as we eventually move to unwind restrictions and return to some kind of normalcy. In the name of saving lives from the immediate threat, governments around the world have suspended most international travel and heavily curtailed consumer freedoms and freedom of association. The acute loss of freedoms we’ve long taken for granted underscores how valuable they truly are. And some freedoms, like freedom of speech and the right to privacy, should remain sacrosanct and defended tenaciously even in the face of an emergency.
While much of the policy response so far has been in good faith (if often inept), the propensity for power grabs by authoritarian populists should not be discounted. Preserving the rule of law, checks and balances, and constitutional liberal democracy is essential. Elections should proceed on time and with whatever accommodations prove necessary. Legislatures and courts should be kept open for essential business, including by remote participation if necessary, and foundational constitutional structures should remain in place. We have no need of a dictator in the United States nor in other countries around the world.
And perhaps most importantly: emergency rules and powers should extend only for the duration of the emergency, and be repealed at the earliest feasible opportunity. We should be wary of the ratchet effect, where governments tend to retain powers and keep open programs long after their original justification has disappeared.
Freedom is precious, and in the grand sweep of human history it has often been fleeting and tenuous. Right now we are facing the greatest threat to a free and open society that most of us have ever witnessed, at least in the United States, if not in many other nations that have been through worse scourges of totalitarianism and major wars. So libertarians will continue as they always have, ready to defend the principles of human freedom at every turn."
It is no exaggeration to call the coronavirus pandemic a crisis. While the virus itself has turned out to be less dangerous than Covid Cultists believe – not one country has experienced the millions of deaths they have been prophesying since March – governments' responses to it throughout the democratic world have spawned numerous other crises, from mass unemployment to civil unrest, that have been progressively tearing away at the social fabric. The very idea of a democratic state, as a viable form of government, is being called into serious question.
"Democracy" (rule by all the people) has always been not one concept, but a bundle of coexisting ones. Two of those concepts of democracy have always been in conflict. The coronavirus crisis has exposed those hidden conflicts as never before.
One vision of democracy, which we can call liberal or libertarian democracy, was summed up by economist (and armchair sociologist) Ludwig von Mises this way:
For the sake of domestic peace liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary; it is the very means of preventing revolutions and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. When the men in office and their policies no longer please the majority of the nation, they will – in the next election – be eliminated and replaced by other men espousing different policies.
Democracy, in other words, served a libertarian end: as a means of eliminating force from politics, it was a major step toward the libertarian ideal of eliminating force from social relations. So it was good in itself. As well, as many libertarian ideas do, it brought other significant benefits.
One benefit was to instantiate what sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called the "circulation of elites". Every human society of record has been divided into an elite, which lives the good life and calls the shots, and the riffraff underneath; perhaps, given how humans live in groups, that division is a necessary part of society. In precapitalist societies, that division was fixed: if you were born a lord you could expect to be a lord all your life; if you were born a peasant, you could expect to always be a peasant. The rise of capitalism, though, abolished that fixed order, making it possible for individuals to move into and out of the elite; the lowest floor sweeper in a factory could theoretically become a factory owner, and vice versa. Democracy extended the 'circulation' principle into government: in America any native-born child could grow up to be President.
As a further benefit of adopting the 'circulation' principle, members of the governing elite now had to consider the point of view of the non-elite as well. A Prime Minister might be able to pile high taxes on the private citizens; but now he had to face the real possibility of becoming a private citizen and having to pay those taxes himself. That brought about a common interest, on the part of governors and citizens alike, in limiting what government could do to its citizens. Thus democracy led to the idea of limiting government power constitutionally, through formal checks and balances that restricted how governments could make law – the Rule of Law not men – and through bills of human rights, which limited what governments were allowed to make laws about.
To libertarians, then, democracy was seen as a good because it was a means to achieving good ends. However, there were other democratic thinkers, to whom "pleas[ing] the majority of the nation" was not a means to an end, but the very end itself. In their view, a democratic government was the expression and will of the people – achieving the will of the people was the supreme political good –and therefore whatever a democratic government did (unless, of course, it were taken over by bad people) was always good. It followed that restrictions on government like bills of rights were bad things, encumbrances that prevented governments from doing as much good as possible.
This second view can be called the totalitarian view of democracy. The word 'totalitarian' is no stretch; at the limit, it implies that government may do whatever it wants to any individual it wants, so long as a majority wants it to; in short, it contradicts the very idea of human rights. Novelist (and armchair philosopher) Ayn Rand called it:
a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose....
If we discard morality and substitute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule [Rand also wrote], if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it’s done by a majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) – how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies; each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered.
Those two visions of democracy have always co-existed in precarious balance in democratic states; but the Covid pandemic has utterly destroyed that balance.
Democratic governments' interventions in the pandemic have been paradigm examples of totalitarian democracy. Contrary to what some may believe, lockdowns (and their component measures) are enormously popular. The Covid Cult that swept the world convinced millions that they were going to die of this new plague, and that only governments could save them. Since then, massive majoritiesthroughout the world have been demanding that their governments save them, rewarding those who acted quickly to close down society, and punishing those who held back. It is wrong for libertarians to call the result 'tyranny,' for it is the very opposite: it is the government carrying out the popular will.
Even the Rule of Law has vanished; for this Covid totalitarianism has been happening, for the most part without any opposition, as if the constitution and the normal laws do not exist. Those have not been amended but are simply ignored, with the executive branch of government dictating whatever it wants done by executive order. Opposition parties, with their eyes on the same polls the government is reading, simply play along. A few courts have stood up for the Rule of Law by striking down some government actions; but those too have been demonized by the Covid Cult as "endanger[ing] thousands of lives," and in some cases their decisions have been ignored and the laws they struck down have still been enforced.
In short, totalitarian democracy has become the official program of most democratic nations, while libertarian democracy has been discarded. This is an example of 'spontaneous order': No one planned for their country to become totalitarian; democratic governments have simply stumbled into totalitarianism, or been pushed into it by their citizens.
The silver lining to that cloud is that, while democratic majorities still support Covid totalitarianism, they have never approved of totalitarian democracy. As they gain experience of life in a totalitarian state, they cannot be counted on to support its continuance. Its tenets are being challenged by a growing number of scientists, philosophers, thinkers and even politicians. Official protests against Covid totalitarianism, though small and sporadic, are each week growing in number; while noncompliance (euphemistically referred to by governments as 'pandemic fatigue') is soaring, as the soaring case rates of Covid in America and Europe make clear. The liberal or libertarian ideal of people running their own lives, including assessing their own risks, may be down but it is certainly not out.
I believe that in a straightforward conflict between totalitarian democracy versus liberal or libertarian democracy, the latter would win. However, that can and will happen only if enough people understand the nature of the underlying conflict.
In October, just as in March, a wave of coronavirus swept through Europe, followed predictably by a new wave of media and public panic leading to lockdowns. One by one, like dominoes, democratic governments in Europe – Ireland, Czechia, Spain, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, and finally the UK –fell to the latter wave, with only a few (notably Norway and Sweden) managing to resist being swept under by it.
Unlike March, though, when the voice of panic was all that one heard, this time some dissenting voices managed to make themselves heard as well. This time, even the mainstream media has had to take note of:
an increasingly heated [public] debate between two unlikely groupings of scientists, columnists, campaigners and politicians. On one side there are the lockdowners. They think the only hope of triumphing over Covid-19 is shutdowns to bring numbers of cases back under control. Pubs and restaurants may have to close and households once again may be told not to mix. On the other are the libertarians. They say we cannot return to those days because it would trigger an economic collapse and allow thousands of untreated cases of cancer, heart ailments and other diseases to mount. Tens of thousands might die, they say. (stress added).
"Each side points to different nations that have had greater success than Britain in fighting Covid-19, albeit with very different policies," the news story continues. "Each has attracted its own set of cheerleaders, politicians and journalists, as well as scientists who have also adopted strong contrasting stances." Some of the scientists have even produced duelling manifestos: for the libertarians, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which advocates for "allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally;" for the lockdowners the John Snow Memorandum, which calls that very idea "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence."
Some people dislike those terms. On the lockdowner side, for instance, economist Tyler Cowen insists that "the emphasis on lockdowns is a strawman," on the grounds that current U.S. lockdowns "are not severe," with relatively few activities on the prohibited list (though he quickly adds that "that list should be expanded"). On the libertarian side, epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta (a co-author of GBD) objects that her politics are Left-leaning, and that she disagrees with libertarians "about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries."
Since Prof. Gupta has been vilified as a "right wing libertarian extremist" (and even a minion of Charles Koch), one must emphasize the point she is making. Many if not most lockdown opponents are not libertarians on other issues, and philosophically many are not libertarians at all. (Perhaps 'Covid libertarians' would be a better term.) Still, the key recommendation of GBD – "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal" while "People who are more at risk may participate if they wish" – is the libertarian position on lockdowns, and its supporters (like it or not) are libertarians on this particular issue.
Libertarians believe in individual human rights, which limit what any person or group (including a government) may do to a person. Though 'liberty' gets most of the attention, those human rights include rights to life, liberty, and property. Calling those 'rights' simply means that harming another's life (by killing, maiming, or raping), liberty (by enslaving or confining) or property (by taking or vandalizing) is a wrongful act that should be prohibited.
Lockdowns involve various measures to restrict people's movements and actions: by preventing them crossing a city or state boundary, or travelling only a few miles, or even leaving their own homes; from using the public streets or sidewalks; from working or shopping, by closing businesses; and from meeting with small groups of people (in the extreme case, from meeting with any people). All of those measures are compulsory mandates, enforced by coercion – by the police power. They violate rights to property (ask the bankrupt businessmen) and liberty (our normal rights to work, travel, shop, dine out, visit friends) – and, as GBD emphasizes, they do not respect our right to life, either. Lockdowns kill.
Libertarians cannot reject lockdowns merely because they are coercive, though, because libertarians do not reject coercion per se. Almost all libertarians (pacifists being the major exception) would allow coercion to prevent people from violating others' rights; which justifies some use of police power in a pandemic. As libertarian philosophy professor Jeffrey Huemer (quoted by Amitai Etzioni in the National Interest) puts it, "“Preventing the spread of infectious disease is within the legitimate functions of the minimal state, which most libertarians accept.”
Some libertarians try to argue in good faith from that position to lockdowns. A typical argument goes like something like this:
Governments may use coercion to stop any person from violating another person's rights.
For person A to give another person B a potentially deadly disease is a violation of person B's right to life.
Therefore, a government may use coercion to prevent person A from giving Covid-19 to person B.
The argument is sound. But it is not an argument for lockdowns. It is an argument for quarantining someone who is known to be (or at least can be reasonably suspected of) giving others Covid; that is, for quarantining the contagious. Quarantine is a power that can be misused; but as per the above argument a libertarian can accept that there is a police power to quarantine. Like all government powers, it should be used as a last resort, if consent cannot be procured, and the quarantined person should have full procedural rights (to testing and a medical examination, for instance).
The argument's conclusion, though, cannot be stretched into an argument for 'quarantining' the entire 'non-essential' population, because most of that population is not contagious. As many as 90% of Americans have never had Covid-19. 60% of those who have had the disease no longer have it. And 90% of those who do test positive for it play virtually no role in spreading it. None of these people poses a danger to anyone's right to life. The comparative few who do pose a danger, on the other hand, can just as easily be among the 'essential,' still active in the community, as among the segregated 'non-essential.' As uses of the police power to quarantine, lockdowns are both overly broad – as they are used to coerce contagious and non-contagious, innocent and culpable, alike – and also not broad enough, as they fail to quarantine all the culpable.
Another libertarian philosophy professor quoted by Etzioni, Dan Moller, argues that "What's weird about a pandemic is that our everyday behavior suddenly puts others at risk – just showing up to work can have huge negative externalities. So libertarians see restrictions on individual liberty in a pandemic as akin to restrictions on pollution." It is instructive to examine the analogy. Governments can and will restrict a known polluter, if they have clear evidence that the company is polluting, and that the pollution is harming someone's health (and therefore violating that person's right to life). They have never claimed the power to shut down all the 'non-essential' businesses, on the grounds that some of them are polluting and they cannot tell which ones are and which ones are not. Yet that is the power being claimed to justify lockdowns.
Etzioni also quotes the old libertarian chestnut, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins," variants of which he tells us were famously said by Abraham Lincoln, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (The above quote is Lincoln's version.) That is indeed a good libertarian statement, which draws the boundary between competing rights quite well. But, once again, it is not a statement that justifies lockdowns. The latter would be something like:
In order to save noses, everyone must be handcuffed in the back so they cannot swing their fists (except, of course, when we think it is essential that you be allowed to swing your fist). What, you don't want to wear the handcuffs? Why do you want to give your Granny a bloody nose?
Now, that sounds like what a lockdowner would say. As for me, though, I'll stick with how Lincoln and Mill put it.
Libertarians are not against people social distancing, wearing facemasks, or vaccinating their kids. They are against people trying to bully or force other people to do those things.
October 10, 2020 = "As the Libertarian Party has established itself as the most electorally successful third party in the United States, voters have grown accustomed to the group's radical messaging against taxation, prohibition and war.... Less broadly known, though on full display in a streamed interview I conducted last night with presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen, is the party's antipathy toward international institutions, pandemic restrictions, and vaccine mandates.
"Jorgensen last night volunteered the latter as an example of the type of 'personal decision' best left to individuals, rather than determined via the political process. So I asked her whether, philosophically, she considered it wise for public schools to require children be vaccinated as a condition for enrollment. 'I think it is immoral,' she responded. Then, after noting that she personally has chosen to vaccinate her family, Jorgensen contrasted vaccination policy with the types of prohibitions Libertarians have long opposed — on drugs, gambling, vaping, consensual sex transactions, and so on.
"'All of these are laws that the government is telling you what not to do,' she said. 'Vaccinations, on the other hand — we're talking about somebody forcibly putting a substance into your body. I am just shocked that that's even a question in our country that is supposed to be free. And even though I have chosen vaccinations, and I've chosen vaccinations for my children, I would never use the excuse of herd immunity to force other people to put something into their bodies that they don't want to.'
"This is not a majority opinion – 82 percent of American adults favored school-based vaccines in 2016 ... [and] the vaccine mandate issue divides libertarians, too, as illustrated by Reason's 2014 debate "Should Vaccines Be Mandatory?" [Still] the COVID-19 pandemic has not only put such once-esoteric philosophical discussions on the political front-burner; it has given what many Libertarian candidates see as their opening.
"The Libertarian gubernatorial candidate making the biggest splash in 2020 is Indiana's Donald Rainwater, who has polled between 6 percent and 24 percent in a three-way race. 'Indiana Libertarian candidate for governor targets voters upset by COVID-19 mandates,' went the headline this week in The Indianapolis Star. 'I don't think it's the government's responsibility to tell people how to take care of themselves," Rainwater told the paper. "I think this all goes back to the idea that I get to choose what I do to keep myself safe. I am against mandating vaccines, too.'
"The other Libertarian gubernatorial candidate likely to make Election Day waves — Montana's Lyman Bishop, who is polling within shouting distance of the Republican-Democratic margin — is also campaigning against pandemic mandates.
"'I have said from the beginning, asking people to stay home is one thing. Telling people they have to stay home is something else altogether,' Bishop recently told Montana Public Radio. 'The same logic applies to any other precautionary measure. In the face of any threat, our liberties and individual rights must come first.... The pending collapse of our economy and the steady growth of tyranny and authoritarianism in our country is of the utmost importance and supersedes all other issues. If we cannot address these issues there will be nothing left for us to discuss'....
"As we approach the finish line, the radical limited-government party is reacting more and more to big-government pandemic policies. The politics of face masks, it turns out, is not a strictly bipartisan affair."
May 1, 2020 - "University of Dayton political scientist Christopher Devine has written the definitive academic study of the Libertarian Party — America’s third largest political party. He documents a growing disconnect between the party’s radical platform and the more mainstream, 'fiscally conservative and socially liberal' policy preferences of its rank-and-file supporters....
'Devine examines the Libertarian Party’s history, electoral performance and prospects for growth in the future. In addition, he conducts the first-ever survey-based analysis of party voters’ and members’ policy views for Beyond Donkeys and Elephants: Minor Political Parties in Contemporary American Politics. The book, released this spring, is the 'most comprehensive account ever written of contemporary minor political parties in the United States,' according to publisher University Press of Kansas.
"The Libertarian Party 'portrays itself as the third choice for Americans who find themselves dissatisfied with the two-party system — not a fringe group of small-government radicals but a mainstream alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties with broad electoral appeal and the potential to emerge as a major party in its own right,' Devine writes.
"Devine’s analysis shows that Libertarian Party voters and members are fiscally conservative and socially liberal — but not radically so. Essentially, they agree with Republicans on economic policy and Democrats on social policy. However, Libertarians are less likely than Democrats or Republicans to support the use of military force. 'Yet they hardly qualify as extreme in this regard — or even "noninterventionist," really,' Devine writes.
“'Libertarians, it would seem, are not nearly as radical as their party platform,' he writes. For instance, only 12% of Libertarian Party voters agree that taxes should never be increased....
"[I]n 2016, ... presidential candidate Gary Johnson appeared on all 50 state ballots and won 3.3% of the national popular vote — three times more than the nearest competitor ... and more than any other minor-party candidate since 1996. Devine also notes that in 2016, the Libertarian Party had more registered voters (approximately 500,000) than any other minor party, and won a higher percentage of the vote in U.S. Senate races than at any other point in party history.
"To succeed in 2020 and beyond, Devine argues, the Libertarian Party must focus less on ideological purity and more on appealing to the broader electorate with its 'fiscally conservative and socially liberal' message. It could do so by moderating the party’s radical platform, and by nominating a credible presidential candidate, such as Congressman [Justin] Amash -- even if doing so may upset the party’s ideological base."
As a political junkie, I eagerly turned to the news this morning to see the New Hampshire primary results. Not for the winners: I expected Trump and Sanders to win. (They both had won the earlier Iowa caucuses.) I was looking further down, to see how the 'soft libertarian' candidates in the major parties would perform.
What is a 'soft libertarian'?, I hear you ask. I can best explain that term by pointing to the Nolan Chart [pictured at right], that classifies voters into four quadrants: liberal (or progressive), conservative, libertarian, and statist (authoritarian or, at the very bottom point, totalitarian). A 'hard' voter is totally committed to one of those four ideologies; a 'hard libertarian,' for example, is someone whose political beliefs put them up at the top point of the diamond. A 'soft libertarian' would be anyone else, whose political beliefs are less extreme (or less consistent, or more independent) but still land them inside the libertarian quadrant.
Depending on how they are measured, soft libertarians make up as much as 25% of voters. Traditionally the Republican Party has owned that vote: since the 1970s at least, soft libertarians have been voting GOP, by margins as high as 75%. However, Ross Perot's candidacies cracked that party's hold on many of those voters; and while George W. Bush brought them back, he didn't hold them long. A large number of soft libertarians voted Democratic in 2006 - I don't know the number, but it was a big factor in the Dems taking both houses of Congress that year. Obama's two terms, and the Tea Party movement, brought many back to the GOP, but whether they'll stay with it this time is frankly questionable.
In 2012 and 2016, the only candidate appealing to soft libertarians was Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. And, to the extent he was heard, they responded. Johnson got the LP its two highest vote totals, over 1 million in 2012 and over 4 million in 2016. After that, one would think, the larger parties would have tried to capture those voters by offering them something. Instead, both parties have tacked toward one or another variety of statism: Democrats have flirted with socialism, the Sanders wins being enough said. Meanwhile, the GOP is shedding its libertarianism, replacing the Reaganist ideology of fusionism (which specifically included and appealed to libertarians) with corporatism, or as some call it, "economic nationalism".
As this month's featured post (from the London School of Economics' US Centre) explains, soft libertarians could be kingmakers this year. However, rather than attract soft libertarians, both Democrats and Republicans seem intent on driving them away.
Hence the importance of the New Hampshire results, as the first test of where the soft libertarian vote would go. Because of the Free State Project, that state has an outsize proportion of libertarians both hard and soft. New Hampshire also has an open primary, where anyone - Democrat, Republican, other party, independent, or even a habitual non-voter - can vote in either the Democratic or the GOP primary.
There was a soft libertarian, Bill Weld and Tulsi Gabbard, running in either party. Both are strong opponents of interventionism, the surveillance state, the drug war, and the imperial presidency; while both also have held non-libertarian positions, most notably on gun control. Both were counting on soft libertarian support in New Hampshire. So how did they do?
Gabbard's campaign, with its strong opposition to an interventist foreign policy, was endorsed by libertarians from Ron Paul to Gary Johnson. She ended up with under 4% of the vote, nowhere enough to make her a contender. She will be gone from the race in a month, and with her will go most of her party's appeal to soft libertarians.
Weld's campaign is more problematic. He beat expectations, but fell short of the 10% he was hoping for. (He received 9%.) He is wealthy enough to fund his own limited campaign, so he will stay in and hope for a breakthrough somewhere else. But, so far, his campaign is not resonating with soft libertarian voters, either.
That leaves a better-than-ever opportunity for the Libertarian Party, if they cared to reach out to those voters with another 'soft libertarian' campaign like the Johnson ones. However, many LP members seem determined to run anything but. Libertarians didn't vote in New Hampshire yesterday; but based on last weekend's Iowa caucus vote, a plurality just shy of a majority is backing Jacob Hornberger, a thinktank founder and director, who wants to run to 'educate' Americans with a hard libertarian message.
To repeat, the soft libertarian vote could be key to deciding this election. If faced with the alternatives of statism (either the more progressive variety of socialism or the more conservative variety of corporatism) versus hard libertarianism, where will they turn?
January 25, 2020 - "For most Americans, conservatism basically means the stuff Republicans are for.... I don’t mean this as a criticism.... One of the great things about America is that politics – never mind political philosophy – isn’t a big part of most people’s lives. Associating a body of ideas with the institutions (political parties) that are directly charged with putting ideas into action is a pragmatic way to cut to the chase. Paying attention to what the eggheads and theorists of the left and right want the parties to do is only worthwhile if you’re especially interested in politics.
"The challenge for conservatives these days is that the Republican Party really doesn’t know what it’s for, beyond defending President Trump and opposing Democrats and socialism. While the fight over impeachment sucks up all of the oxygen in public, there’s a robust battle behind the scenes about what it means to be a conservative.
"Some of ithas spilled outinto public view, usually centering on nationalism – what it means, what it requires in terms of policy, how it differs from traditional conservatism or whether it differs at all. Sens. Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, for example, have offered thoughtful versions of 'economic nationalism,' pitting it against libertarianism (both real and imagined) ... a common theme is the idea that government should be more interventionist in the economy: Policymakers should be more willing to overrule the marketplace on everything from big tech to child care to trade....
"Trump has now given more aid to farmers than Obama ever gave Detroit, and if an elected Republican has complained about it, I missed it. In fairness, the farmer bailouts were necessitated by the president’s trade wars. But that just demonstrates Republicans’ willingness to substitute their judgment for the market’s....
"There’s a cultural version of the nationalist project as well. Some conservative intellectuals – mostly, but not exclusively, Catholic – believe the state has a role in imposing its judgment in the marketplace of ideas....
"[T]here are those who are anti-left and those who are anti-state. For ... illustration, some people are opposed to public schools because they don’t think education is a proper task for the state. (Milton Friedman called them 'government schools.') Others on the right think public schools are fine; they just object to how progressives operate them....
"Another fault line revolves around the question, 'Which state are we talking about?'.... I’m very libertarian at the national level, mostly libertarian at the state level and pretty communitarian at the local level. Letting people live the way they want to live where they actually live, so long as basic civil rights are respected, has always struck me as the best way to maximize happiness and democratic accountability.
"This raises a final question: Can the state actually do what you want it to do? At the core of the conservative critique of the left has always been a basic skepticism that top-down planning from Washington can work. It used to be that the champions of such planning were mostly on the left. That’s not true any longer. And it remains to be seen whether top-down planning from the right works any better than it does from the left."
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