Can Capitalism Survive?

Part II, Chapter 2

The Libertarian Philosophy

I intend to spend the next seventeen minutes answering a question that a disappointingly small number of people even bother to ask. The question is this: Just what
is Ben Rogge’s social philosophy? or to put it the way a few who have heard me speak have put it: “Rogge, just what kind of a nut are you?” This way of putting it, although accurate perhaps, is distressing to me because I am essentially a button-down-collar, Kiwanis Club-type conformist. My only attention-drawing eccentricity has been a tendency to give myself all putts under five feet.But I suppose that any man must expect to create both suspicion and confusion when he demands, at one and the same time, that prostitution be legalized, that the social security system be abolished, that the laws making it a crime to use marijuana be repealed, along with the laws against child labor, and that we sell Yellowstone Park to the people who operate Disneyland. This is indeed a mixed bag, but it is my very own bag and to me these apparently diverse elements represent simply different applications of a single guiding principle. To anticipate, this principle is that each man and each woman should be permitted to do his or her thing, singly or in pairs or in groups as large as the Mormon Church or General Motors, so long as it’s peaceful.Now, to the heart of the matter. First, is my social philosophy properly described as one of the competing ideologies of our day? To this the answer is no. In the first place, it is so far out of fashion that it can hardly be said to be competing; second, it is thought by many to be not of our day, but of the last century; and third, I see it as not an ideology at all but rather the negation of ideology. I quote now from Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: ”
ideology—the integrated assertions, theories and aims constituting a politico-social program.” To me, this identifies the ideologue as someone, be he Christian or Moslem or Marxist or Fascist or Liberal Reformer or Monarchist, who has a clear vision of what man is or should be or could become and who has some kind of socio-political program for bringing about the desired state of affairs. To the ideologue, the ideal social system is to be defined in terms of certain ends or goals to be attained, such as the elimination of poverty or the elimination of racial prejudice or the maximizing of the growth rate or the establishment of one true religion or the dominance of the master race or the implementation of the General Will or the eternal glory of the American or the French nation. Usually, but not always, there are certain restraints placed on the means to be used, but the emphasis is upon the vision of the proper goal of man’s existence here on earth, as revealed by voices from burning bushes or by prophets or by the magnificently objective results of science or in the massive and blind forces of history or in the dark and mysterious processes of the human mind or what-have-you.To the libertarian, in a certain sense,
it is not the ends of man’s actions that count but only the means used in serving those ends. To each of the ideologues he says: “You may be right and you may keep on trying to convince me and others that you are right,
but the only means you may use are those of persuasion. You may not impose your vision
by force on anyone. This means not only that you are not to stone the prostitute or the hippie or the college dean or the Jew or the businessman or even the policeman; it means as well, and most importantly, that you are not to get the policeman or the sheriff to do your stoning for you.”In saying this, the libertarian is not necessarily declaring himself to be agnostic in his attitude toward any and all ideologies. He may in fact have some clear preferences as among ideologies. At the same time, men who feel deeply about something are rarely tolerant with respect to that something. I, Ben Rogge, do not use marijuana nor do I approve of its use, but I am afraid that if I support laws against its use, some fool will insist as well on denying me my noble and useful gin and tonic. I believe that the typical Episcopal Church is somewhat higher on the scale of civilization than the snake-handling cults of West Virginia. Frankly I wouldn’t touch even a consecrated reptile with a ten-foot pole, or even a nine-iron, but as far as the Anglican Church is concerned, I am still an anti-anti-disestablishmentarian, if you know what I mean.Well, so what? How does all this set the libertarian apart (whether for better or for worse) from all others? Let us take first the traditionalist or conservative, with whom the libertarian is often linked, largely erroneously. True, together they sing the chorus of damn the unions, damn the minimum wage laws, and damn the progressive income tax. But when the libertarian starts a chorus of damn the Sunday blue laws, he ends up singing a solo.Let me be careful about this. What I am asking for is precisely what men like Albert Jay Nock have asked for in the past—that
the society be distinguished from
the state and that the society not be absorbed by the state. Society, with its full network of restraints on individual conduct, based on custom, tradition, religion, personal morality, a sense of style, and with all of its indeed powerful sanctions, is what makes the civilized life possible and meaningful. I am not proposing an anarchic society; on the contrary
I am essentially a conservative on most questions of social organization and social process. I do believe in continuity, in the important role of tradition and custom, in standards for personal conduct, in the great importance of the elites (imperfect though they may be).But unlike the political conservative, I do not wish to see these influences on individual behavior institutionalized in the hands of the state. As I read history, I see that everywhere the generally accepted social processes have been made into law, civilization has ceased to advance. For one, the penalty to be paid by the innovator, which is severe even
without the law, and perhaps properly so, is made so severe (even including death) as to stop that healthy and necessary and slow process of change through which civilizations move to higher levels of achievement.For another, the elites, if given the power to implement their views with the use of force, are almost certain to be corrupted by that power and to cease playing their essential and beneficial role in society. The pages of history are strewn with the wreckages of superior men who have been undone by the corrupting influence of possession of the power to coerce.Now to the modern liberal. How does the libertarian differ from the modern liberal? Well, he cuts in where the conservative cuts out and cuts out where the conservative cuts in. Like the libertarian, the modern liberal is all for sin, so long as it’s peaceful. But unlike the libertarian, the modern liberal is perfectly willing to use the sheriff to attempt to bring about whatever outcomes he desires in economic life. Should there be a Pure Books, Plays and Films administration? Never, says the modern liberal. Should there be a Pure Food and Drug Administration? Of course, says the modern liberal. If two consenting adults engage in an unnatural act in private, should the law intervene? Never, says the modern liberal. If two consenting adults arrive at a wage contract calling for the payment of $1.00 an hour to the one, should the state intervene and require that the payment must be no less than $1.60 per hour (even if, by the very act, that leads to no contract; to no job at all)? Of course, says the modern liberal. These examples could be multiplied indefinitely.Now perhaps there are real differences in circumstances that make these differences in evaluation consistent. Perhaps the modern liberal is right and the libertarian is wrong. What I am trying to point out is that the libertarian is opposed to intervention by the state in
any of the peaceful actions of individuals or groups, whether the relationship involves sex, games, or the marketplace, and this sets him apart from both the modern conservative and the modern liberal.Now what of the New Left? Here too there are some family resemblances, and some of my libertarian friends are now involved in a love affair with the New Left, such as writing for
Ramparts magazine and lecturing at the Free University in New York. In some ways this makes sense. The New Left and the libertarians share a common suspicion of concentrated power, and particularly of the power to coerce; they join in not wishing to be ruled by any establishment, even of the elite. But there the love affair comes to an abrupt end.To the libertarian, private property is an extension of the human personality and an absolutely necessary element in the structure of a society of free men; to the New Lefter, private property is largely an invention of the establishment to suppress the free human spirit and is a barrier to the full expression of human concern and relatedness. To the libertarian, or at least to Ben Rogge, the “politics of confrontation” is neither peaceful as a means nor acceptable as an end, if the end is what it so often seems to be, the imposing of a minority view on the majority by what amounts to blackmail. “Give in to my demands and I’ll leave your office; throw me off your property and you are guilty of breaking the peace. Call in the cops to protect that which is yours and you are a fascist.” To the libertarian this is nonsense and very dangerous nonsense indeed. The goal of the victory of persuasion over force in human affairs can hardly be well served by what amounts to the use of force.But of course the goal of the New Left is not the goal of the libertarian—the right choice of means. In fact the goals of the New Left are difficult to identify, particularly in terms of the kind of social arrangements they wish to see brought into being out of the ashes of that which we now have. There seem to be three main possibilities: (1) an essentially anarchist arrangement, with no government; (2) a syndicalist-communalist arrangement, with minimal government; or (3) an out-and-out Marxist-socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. To the libertarian, the first would soon become the tyranny of the strong, and life would indeed be mean, nasty, brutish and short; the second would mean economic chaos and starvation for most; the third would mean tyranny, bold and bloody and bright.To all of these—the conservative, the modern liberal, and the New Left—the libertarian says, with Huckleberry Finn, “No thank you, I have been there before.” He insists that what marks the civilized society is not so much
what goals its people are seeking as what
means are used and accepted in the seeking of goals. He insists that to the opinions and ideas and revelations of even the best of men must still cling the mortal, the human uncertainty. If even those who come to be least imperfect in knowing and acting cannot be identified in advance (or even clearly identified after the fact), surely it follows that each imperfect man must be given (indeed,
has) the right to follow his own imperfectly selected star in his own imperfect way, to march to the music that
he hears and not to the music that you and I hear.The libertarian is in no sense a utopian. He argues only that in a world in which each individual, imperfect man was left free to make his own imperfect decisions and to act on them in any way that is peaceful, enjoying the fruits of his successes and suffering the agony of his mistakes, man could at least fully attain to the dignity and tragedy and comedy that comes with being a man. And here, somewhere east of Eden, there is little more that we can expect out of life.