Will Wilkinson has
written
a piece on the virtue of moderation in the pursuit of liberty.
In it, he points to the futility of
libertarians who…well, let him tell it in his own words:
Winning and keeping the allies
needed to achieve practical political success has always been hard for libertarians.
One reason it’s so hard is that the most popular brand of libertarian thought
is more a theory of the illegitimacy of the state than a theory of government,
and leaves no dignified place for political activity. Insofar as the
Locke-inspired libertarianism of Ayn Rand, Murry Rothbard or Robert Nozick is a
theory of government, it is a theory of minimal, constitutionally constrained
government that looks nothing like any regime that has ever existed.
…a lot of libertarians don’t think
this sort of minimal, constitutionally constrained government can possibly stay
minimal, and that it would be better if there’s no state at all. That leaves no
space for politics, as it is commonly understood.
My point here isn’t to criticize
this picture, though there’s a lot wrong with it. My aim is simply to point out
that there’s little room in the picture for the roiling adversarial mess of
multiparty democratic politics. Accordingly, libertarians tend to see
democratic politics as an ungodly festival of thuggery and mutual predation.
Active political participation is seen as wicked, futile, or both. It’s hard to
think of a political philosophy less likely to inspire its adherents to throw
themselves into the hard work of real politics, or to see any virtue in it. A
corollary of the standard libertarian stance is that almost every faction and
interest group active in democratic politics is pursuing something it probably
shouldn’t have through means nobody should be allowed to use. Libertarians tend
to be pretty vocal about their disdain for the process, and everyone invested
it in, which can make it hard for them to warm up to potential political
allies, and vice versa, in those cases when they manage to overcome their
contempt for politics and seek to get something done democratically.
I give Mr. Wilkinson much credit – he pretty much nails the
view of the many libertarians who find no benefit in working within the
system. There are many specific points I
might make in reply to the various statements (both these cited above and
others in his piece), however I will focus on only one aspect of his views.
Wilkinson points to the futility of this “most popular” (at
least he got this right) libertarian view.
He asks: how do you expect to move toward liberty if you aren’t willing
to work with the political tools available?
Background
Before getting to the point, first some introductions are in
order.
Who is
Will Wilkinson?
Will Wilkinson (born 1973) is an
American writer who currently serves as Vice President of Policy at the
Niskanen Center. Until August 2010, he was a research fellow at the Cato
Institute where he worked on a variety of issues including Social Security
privatization and, most notably, the policy implications of happiness research….Previously,
he was Academic Coordinator of the Social Change Project and the Global
Prosperity Initiative at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and,
before that, he ran the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students for The
Institute for Humane Studies. His political philosophy is described by The
American Conservative magazine as "Rawlsekian"; that is, a mixture of
John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods. Wilkinson formerly described his political
views as libertarian, but he now rejects that label.
Here are some
not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all,
maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and
legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity.
(See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The
institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be
justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference.
The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have
profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the
justification of those rights. I could go on.
So many things I might say, but again I do not want to
divert from the one main point I wish to make.
The Niskanen Center is a
Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for environmentalism,
immigration reform, civil liberties, and a national defense policy based on libertarian
principles. The center is named after the late William A. Niskanen, a former
economic adviser to president Ronald Reagan.
Funding for the center includes
donors who seek to counter conservative hostility to anti-global warming
measures. North Carolina businessman Jay Faison, a Republican donor, is a
funder to the Niskanen Center and views it, along with the R Street Institute,
as a route for climate action to gain a foothold within the GOP. Some
supporters of the Niskanen Center are more traditionally aligned with liberal
causes. They include the Open Philanthropies Project, which supports the
Center's work to expand legal immigration, as well as the Lawrence Linden Trust
for Conservation, which provided the Niskanen Center with a grant "to
develop and analyze a potential economy-wide carbon tax", and the Nature
Conservancy.
Established in 2014, the Niskanen
Center is a libertarian 501(c)(3) think tank that works to change public policy
through direct engagement in the policymaking process: developing and promoting
proposals to legislative and executive branch policymakers, building coalitions
to facilitate joint action, and marshaling the most convincing arguments in
support of our agenda. The Center’s main
audience is the Washington insiders – policy-oriented legislators, presidential
appointees, career civil servants in planning, evaluation and budget offices,
congressional committee staff, engaged academics, and interest group analysts –
who together decide the pace and direction of policy change.
The Center is named after William
(Bill) Niskanen. Bill was a long-time
friend whom we knew as chairman of the Cato Institute. Before his time at Cato, Bill was a defense
policy analyst at RAND, director of program analysis at the Institute for
Defense Analyses, assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget,
professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, chief
economist at the Ford Motor Company, professor of economics at UCLA, and a
member (and later, acting chairman) of the Council of Economic Advisers under
President Ronald Reagan.
The leadership of the center is made up of several
individuals formerly associated with the Cato Institute – another
libertarian-type think tank based in Washington; the Cato Institute is also
dedicated toward policy recommendations.
The Institute was founded in
1974.
The Point
Now that all the background is out of the way, what is my
point? Wilkinson offers that the way to
move toward liberty is to engage in the political process and compromise;
neither fits well with dogmatic, principled libertarians.
So I ask, where are the major successes since 1974? How have the last forty-two years (since the
birth of Cato) of working within the system worked out?
In
the years 1970 – 1974, the average annual budget deficit (on-budget and
off-budget) was $14 billion.
In the years
2010 – 2014, the same number averages $ 969 billion.
A seventy-fold
increase. The total Federal debt at
the end of 1974 was $484 billion; the comparable figure at the end of 2014 was
$17.8 trillion.
A thirty-seven fold increase.
For comparison, the
US GDP in 1974 was $1.55
trillion; in 2014 it was $17.35 trillion.
An eleven-fold increase.
What of US foreign interventions – dying and virtually dead
in 1974 with the ending of Vietnam?
Today, the United States is directly or indirectly behind hot wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Ukraine (and I am
certainly missing a few).
The 1936 Federal Register was 2,620 pages long. It has grown steadily since
then, with the 2012 edition weighing in at 78,961 pages (it has topped 60,000
pages every year for the last 20 years).
Conclusion
Taxes, spending, deficits, wars, financial intervention,
laws and regulations – all increasing dramatically during the entire period of
this moderate form of libertarianism.
Talk about futility.