Is Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism Evil?

The occasional unfriendly phrase can be useful for rapping the noses of people a bit too in love with their own endless conversation, though. And it seems as if the Ron Paulites’ anti-government rage is winning far, far more converts than the liberal-tarians have, though I’d love to see stats as much the liberal-tarians would.

Much as I hate to place myself at odds with Aristotle, who advised always starting with rhetorical common ground, I think whether to go the diplomatic route depends on the audience. I find that there’s little to be gained, for instance, from giving religious people a rhetorical inch because they’ll take the tiniest crumb as affirmation that “even the atheist is starting to get it and come around.” Better to tell them frankly, up front, “There is no God,” or you will simply never get their full mental attention.

I fear the endlessly-ornate, centuries-long dialogue in which the liberal-tarians wish to remain enmeshed is a comparably deceptively-cozy fog. As with liberals in general, the last thing they need is to be reassured that in some sense they really do hold the moral and intellectual high ground.

And it’s worth stepping back for a moment and asking why, in a world already morbidly government-run, we would _want_ to make libertarianism sound more compatible with governmental and welfarist modes of thought. It strikes me as being as insane a tactic as ditching atheism in favor of becoming very, very deeply enmeshed in whatever the hottest topics in Catholic theology have been in the last two centuries, in hopes of subtly steering the church toward a 2% increase in secularism.

If there are things the liberal-tarians think government does well, I’d suggest they’re wrong, and if they don’t think there are things government does well, they’d be wise to underscore the inviolability of property rights at every possible turn.

How seriously, I wonder, would the liberal-tarians take people who claimed they were going to “improve” the philosophy of unrestricted free speech by reminding everyone that speech has a long history of being “weighed against other values” and that as well-informed sophisticates, we should re-immerse ourselves in that multi-variable understanding of speech. Would anyone in his right mind suggest that was likely to foster _less_ censorship?

So it is, obviously, with efforts to convince people to leaven property rights with countless other humanitarian concerns and values — for each of which the state has already proven it is more than happy to try some non-property solution. Stop speaking the master’s language and encourage more chain-breaking.

@David/@Bryan

RE: “they insist that social justice ought to be part of libertarianism but are unwilling to tell us what it means.”

Thats right. They have no program, no argument, no artifice. Only a sentiment. This is why they’ll fail.

But libertarianism, or at least propertarian reasoning, provides the solution to ‘social justice’ — if that term has any meaning other than ‘redistribution’. But it requires institutional means of implementing that solution: The insight is that the ethic of voluntary exchange does not require unanimity of belief in anything. Only that government is a means by which we can construct exchanges between groups that are not possible to construct by alternative means due to pervasive ‘cheating’. Cheating which is beneficial in a market for consumer goods, but a form of privatization or corruption when applied to infrastructure or services (commons). Institutions are necessary.

The problem is constructing institutions that allow exchanges between groups. Even assuming representative government is a good, if for no other purpose than to divide the labor of decision making, the classical liberal model of multi-class government should have been expanded and reinforced so that classes could conduct exchanges, most of which are inter-temporal borrowings from one another. Instead we undermined that feature of the classical liberal government.

Anarchism has stolen libertarianism. We don’t need to give up on institutions. We need to give up on creating institutions that depend on a unanimity of belief in ends, means and virtues. A requirement that does not pass the most casual scrutiny.

Most ‘justice’ is simply accounting for and settlement of differences in production cycles. There is no reason we cannot bring forward to the disadvantaged the benefits of the difference in production cycles, in the same way we bring forward productivity through borrowing and interest.

There is no reason that is, other than we lack the political institutions to accomplish in politics what we accomplish daily in banking as a matter of course.

That’s the answer to bleeding heart libertarianism: institutions.

Always funny to hear someone talking about how a group is “destroying society” toss around accusations of being condescending. Thanks for the laugh, Todd. I enjoyed it.

Here-here, Bryan. I don’t typically agree with the BHLs, but what kind of civilization do we live in if ideologies can’t be compared and contrasted via civil dialogue? Socrates is spinning in his grave.

I’m more in line with Seavey and David Friedman, above. I take the point about being friendlier and more conversable and all, but at its core, bleeding heart libertarianism strikes me as an ideology consisting of a healthy respect for markets (good!), too little respect for public choice theory (bad!), and some white guilt and economic egalitarianism in the mold of ’60’s and ’70’s leftist academia (really bad!).

To me, this represents an improvement over modern liberalism and probably neo-liberalism, at least, so to the extent they win converts from the left, I wish them success. To the extent they win converts from other parts of the ideological spectrum…well, that’s a much different story, now isn’t it?

Great post Brian. I agree wholeheartedly.

David Friedman wrote:
My complaint about the BHL, as may be obvious from the exchanges now going on, is that they insist that social justice ought to be part of libertarianism but are unwilling to tell us what it means. As far as I can judge by observations of usage, “social justice” means “ideas of justice that appeal to left wingers,” and its practical implication is the rule that, with regard to any issue at all, the first question to ask is how it affects the poor.

I think you can define “social justice” better by defining a social injustice. It seems that a social injustice occurs when an anticipated outcome does not come about and social justice is a means to correct that outcome. As a result it tends to be arbitrary and depends on the interpreter.

Why, o’why do such intelligent people keep writing about “The Government” doing or not doing things, when all are perfectlly aware that humans are doing and not doing those things through the mechanisms of government.

Governments don’t do anything; people do.

When you talk otherwise you are back at Rouseau’s general “will.”

Why get all hung up in the rhetorical use of a phrase (which Father Coughlin was using back in my youth)?

Why not concentrate on an understanding of Justice (without modifiers)in a social order. “What is Justice in Thebes is not Justice in Athens.”

Let us assume that Justice in any particular social order is the performance of those obligations (individual and in the aggregate)that are recognized, understood and accepted with sufficient commonality to provide cohesion in that social order.

We then come to the issues of how those obligations are to be performed, and by whom. If we decide that there is an (or several) obligation(s) of entitlements for some (mitigations of suffering and misery, education, water …)others have obligations to provide them. There may be some logic to determining (how??) that performance shall be joint (social) rather than several. Which brings into issue how shall the determinations be made, who shall make them and how the imposition of obligations through social (including governmental) instrumentalities impacts individual “Liberty.”

What lies behind the rhetorical use of phrases is the desire and intent to structure obligations in a particular way to attain a particular concept of a “proper” social order.

It is those ongoing attempts at such structuring to replace the natural evolution of human interactions, that among their evil (even if not intended) effects, suppress liberty.

David Friedman,

Sir, I admire your work and your blog. One question though: Not to be impertinent, but didn’t your father also hold a view roughly that capitalism should be seen as socially just precisely because it in fact did more than any other system in history to help the poor? Wasn’t this Friedrich Hayek’s view as well?

Jeff, My most glaring objection to BHL is it’s refusal to acknowledge that the left-wing account of exploitation is a simple fallacy. I even commented on their blog saying this, somewhere.

Todd wrote:

How seriously, I wonder, would the liberal-tarians take people who claimed they were going to “improve” the philosophy of unrestricted free speech by reminding everyone that speech has a long history of being “weighed against other values” and that as well-informed sophisticates, we should re-immerse ourselves in that multi-variable understanding of speech.

If the status quo was one where people were already doing this “weighing against other values”, and the speech liberaltarian merely tried to steer that weighing in favor of more freedom as opposed to simply declaring point blank that the right to speech is inviolable and then going off and sulking in a corner when everyone else ignores him; then why yes, Todd, I do think that could lead to marginal improvements in the direction of liberty. (There is a reason why hardcore libertarians have often been referred to as “Marxists of the Right”.)

Philosophy as a process of inquiry and discovery, anyone?

I also tend to agree with Seavey/Friedman as above.

Some additional thoughts:

1) I didn’t think Todd Seavey’s piece was particularly aggressive – certainly nothing like the anger directed at libertarians by the left and right generally. Also, it seemed a good deal milder than what the BHLs and their ilk direct against Ron Paul et al. Perhaps that doesn’t count. Perhaps I’m just used to more rough and tumble in debate. Seavey called them out on what he perceived to be an element of self-indulgence or moral vanity, which, particularly if they are going to be critical of others, seems not out of line. I tend to be suspicious of “he’s hurt my feelings” or “he’s been condescending” as a response to an argument – it sounds like an excuse to ignore the substance/divert attention or an attempt to narrow the scope of debate.

2) As far as I can tell, the BHLs seem to be yet another group that wants a small state except in those “special” cases in which it does not. The special cases where intervention is favored vary by group. In the case of neocons, for example, even though they claim a preference for free markets and liberty, they want a large state for war and “security”. This “small-state-except-for-where-I-want-it-to-be-big” approach seems to me to be self-defeating from a libertarian perspective because it grants legitimacy to the state. “Matter of degree” arguments lose because they have already conceded the moral high ground to one’s adversaries.

3) Calling people “evil” appears to have worked out very well indeed for the Left over the last 50 years.

I consider myself a bleeding heart libertarian. In fact, I came to libertarianism because I realized that almost all of the transfer of wealth attributable to government programs moved wealth from the poor (well, actually the low end middle class) to the wealthy either directly on indirectly.

@ Richard Schweitzer

“Why, o’why do such intelligent people keep writing about “The Government” doing or not doing things, when all are perfectlly aware that humans are doing and not doing those things through the mechanisms of government.”

By that same token “Walmart” doesn’t do anything. However when I say “Walmart is building a store in my area” people still know what I am talking about.

@ David P –

The effect of reification of “Government” is easily distinguished from the custom of referring to the actions of persons operating as a”firm” under the label of a private corporation.

The problem with that reification is exactly because there is not a common understanding of what is being “talked about.”

We encounter this constantly: “The County has decided to . . .” which can be a cover for the actions of specific interests effected through that agency, or the expression of views limited to few or extending to many, etc.

The use of “Government” as a meaningful term in the discussions of “society,” must be more than a label. Usually, when we are talking about what the mechanisms of government are or are not to be used for, we need to know how and why and by whom, and to what ends chosen by whom; otherwise just saying “government” will not explain anything.

[Comment removed for policy violations.–Econlib Ed.]

@Dan Klein, I think it’s exceedingly rare for non-commutative justice to override commutative justice. Don’t you?

@Saturos: I don’t disagree, but what you suggest is something to be argued. A suitable larger scheme of justices is useful in addressing it — It would be from beyond-CJ senses of justice that you consider and perhaps acknowledge exceptions, and it would be from beyond-CJ senses that you judge that the upshot is the strong presumption of liberty. The warrants for CJ come from beyond CJ.

@Saturos: Absolutely, that is how we do things justice.