Why George Monbiot is wrong about libertarianism

In his article on libertarianism today, George Monbiot makes a common argument. Disregarding his worn-out (and, sadly for my bank manager, untrue) claim that libertarians are in the pocket of big business, the main claim Monbiot makes is that libertarians have misappropriated or miscontrued the word freedom, and so are advocating something different to “true” freedom.

Invoking Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, Monbiot distinguishes between negative freedom – being left alone – and positive freedom – which might best be thought of as individual autonomy. From this, he tries to argue that freedom includes claims over other people’s property (such as the freedom to enjoy a tree owned by one's landlord). Monbiot’s assumption that the government should promote freedom whatever freedom is reduces him to a semantic consideration of what the word means, rather than over the real question: what the state should be doing to promote the best outcomes.

As Berlin pointed out, the word freedom may be rhetorically useful, but it means different things to different people. So, instead of painstakingly trying to show that my idea of freedom is “true” and Monbiot’s is “false” (a silly endeavour), we could use completely different words that avoid confusion. As long as we can separate the idea of “not interfering with other people’s stuff” from Monbiot’s “positive” idea of freedom that involved interfering with other people’s stuff to increase people’s welfare, we can use those to think about the concepts we’re discussing. There is no need to debate over the meaning of a lofty-sounding word as Monbiot does – the only thing we need is clarity over the terms so that we can start discussing their real-world impact.

As FA Hayek, Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and other liberals and libertarians argue, the system with the best outcomes for nearly everybody is, by and large, the one in which nobody interferes with other people’s stuff (including their bodies). This doesn’t mean that not interfering in other people’s stuff is the only thing that’s valuable in the world. Far from it – it means that a state that upholds this rule and little else is most likely to prompt the emergence of the other good things. Monbiot will disagree with arguments made by Mises that a laissez-faire free market is, by-and-large, the best system for all involved including the poor. Monbiot appears to think that most libertarians view “not interfering with people’s stuff” as an end; but for me, Mises and most libertarians I know it is a means.

What might sound to Monbiot like a profound philosophical question – “what is freedom?” – is actually a relatively trivial question of coming to a mutual agreement over what terms mean, so we can debate clearly without making the mistakes that Monbiot does in his piece.

The rest of the piece is largely a hodgepodge of common attacks on libertarianism. Bizarrely, he uses Claire Fox, the Marxist director of the Institute of Ideas, as his example of a right-wing libertarian. The question that he claims confounded Fox, “Do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?”, is indeed quite simple: grounded in the principle of “not interfering with other people’s stuff”, the only times this intrusion can take place is when who owns what isn’t well defined. But that’s a practical challenge, not a conceptual one.

Monbiot claims that libertarians are in favour of people’s right to pollute, apparently ignorant of the work classical liberals like Mark Pennington, who has worked on how to create effective market institutions to curb pollution. In short, Pennington argues that the only way to efficiently balance the need for some pollution (as an unavoidable by-product of much important economic activity) with the interests of those affected by pollution is by assigning property rights to those affected. That way, they can compromise with each other in a mutually beneficial way that takes account of the preferences of those involved. Monbiot seems to think that, because libertarians don’t favour state-centric approaches to problems, they don’t think those problems exist at all.

At times he does not seem even to understand his positive/negative liberty distinction, claiming that “The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.” Does he think that libertarians are against this freedom? If so, I can understand why he objects so strongly to libertarianism, but I wish he would do the basic research required of an undergraduate student before he tries to criticise the idea.

Despite all the mischaracterizations, it’s encouraging that George Monbiot has begun to write about libertarians so frequently. We are on the rise – in politics, in economics and in academia – and this understandably threatens people like Monbiot whose world centres on the state.

I’ve quoted it before, but pieces like this always remind me of a saying I like: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. And then you win.”

The Condensed Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is one of the most important books ever written. Smith recognised that economic specialization and cooperation was the key to improving living standards. He shattered old ways of thinking about trade, commerce and public policy, and led to the foundation of a new field of study: economics. And yet, his book is rarely read today. It is written in a dense and archaic style that is inaccessible to many modern readers. The Condensed Wealth of Nations, by Dr Eamonn Butler, condenses Smith’s work and explains the key concepts in The Wealth of Nations clearly. It is accessible and readable to any intelligent layman. This book also contains a primer on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith’s other great work that explores the nature of ethics.

When ideas have sex

Matt Ridley on the rise and rise of humanity.

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Do libertarians apologise for autocracy?

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An article claiming that libertarians support autocracy has made ripples online. In this article, Sam Bowman rebuts that article and argues that its author fundamentally misunderstands – and misrepresents – his topic.

Michael Lind has a long post on Salon.com on “Why Libertarians Apologise for Autocracy”. The piece is rather long, and has been getting some attention online. In my view it is a rather bad piece. In this post I want to reply to some of the most important claims that it makes. His post is a little incoherent, so forgive me if my reply doesn’t work well as a standalone piece. I encourage readers to take a look at Lind's piece before reading this.

Lind’s thesis is that libertarian objectives are incompatible with the democratic system of governance that most people value. This is a valid argument, and indeed one that has been made by some libertarians. Where Lind gets it wrong is in his seemingly-wilful misreading of key libertarian thinkers (like Mises and Hayek) and his shallow understanding of the libertarian movement in general.

Lind opens by quoting Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism. This book, written in 1929, contains a discussion of fascism in which Mises appears to praise this system. Lind quotes Mises:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

It's a pity that Lind’s article links to the Amazon page for Liberalism, rather than the free download from Mises.org. If he had linked to the full version, the meaning of this strange statement would have become clear. Cato at Liberty have the full quote: [Continue reading...]

Are libertarians heartless corporate shills?

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The leftist reaction to libertarian ideas is fairly predictable – they tend to assume that assume anyone advocating them is either (a) in the pay of big corporations or (b) utterly indifferent to human suffering. Or both.

The big corporations point is, of course, completely fatuous. Big corporations generally like big government. They like the ways taxes and regulations insulate them from competition. They like they having politicians and diplomats promote their interests overseas. And they like the way taxpayer-funded infrastructure increases their economies of scale. Trust me: if you follow big corporate money through the political process, you’ll find that almost none of it goes to libertarians.

The compassion point is similarly baseless. Quite honestly, I don’t think that, on an individual level, libertarians are any more or less empathic than the population at large. Indeed, many libertarians are motivated precisely by a deep concern for the disadvantaged, and the myriad ways state failure diminishes their lives. Others are driven by a deeply held belief that freedom is an essential precondition for human dignity and individual flourishing. To accuse libertarians of atomistic nihilism is to misunderstand what their philosophy is all about.

That said, I do think there are three distinctions you can draw between the left’s idea of empathy and that of libertarians. Firstly, libertarians do not believe empathy justifies any policy, regardless of the consequences. The left, by contrast, often uses policy to display its social conscience – it doesn’t seem to matter what the outcomes of various government programmes are, so long as the motivation is to help people.

Secondly, libertarians think compassion is something which individuals display and act on in relation to other individuals. They don’t want compassion to be nationalized or institutionalized. If you care, it’s your job to do something. Leftists typically prefer to force their feelings on everyone through the redistributive state.

Thirdly, most libertarians think that their compassion is something to be earned. It is not something you owe to everyone irrespective of their qualities or virtues: there are those who deserve your sympathy, and those that don’t. Leftists tend to think that compassion should be indiscriminate: after all, we’re all just victims of societal circumstance, aren’t we? The libertarian worldview, by contrast, emphasizes individual responsibility.

Hayek famously refused to accuse his opponents of anything other than intellectual error: “we ought to remain aware that our opponents are often high-minded idealists whose harmful teachings are inspired by very noble ideals.” Leftists ought to come to a similar realization: libertarians are not bad people, just because they disagree with them.

Looters

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I was glad to be out of London while the rioting and looting was going on. It may have been chilly and damp in the Lake District, but it was also peaceful and quiet. Nevertheless, watching the footage on the news, I couldn’t help thinking that most of those responsible were ‘looters’ long before they started smashing up JD Sports and setting shops on fire. I wonder what percentage of the looters live off the product of other people’s labour? I wonder how many of them rely on the forced confiscation of money earned by others to fund their delinquent lifestyles? In a sense, the recent outbreak of criminality in England merely gave full, violent expression to the principle by which so many people live their lives.

Perhaps I’ve just been reading too much Ayn Rand. Here’s Francisco d’Anconia making a similar point in Atlas Shrugged:

Then you will see the rise of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Discuss.

What is freedom?

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An interesting article by Stephen Metcalf, on Robert Nozick and libertarianism, appeared recently in Slate. The piece, entitled “The Liberty Scam,” claims that Nozick’s chief failure was to confuse capital with human capital. Editorialising on the man’s life and the era, Metcalf explains that this came from being a post-war arriviste on the tenure track at Harvard, who arrogantly thought his success the consequence of endeavour rather than the Keynesian welfare state. Nozick finally came to his senses in 1989 after realising that his star shone but faintly “in a world gone gaga for Gordon Gekko and Esprit.”

The pseudo-biography may be a bit suss. The article is sharpest when it challenges Nozick on his definition of liberty. “Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar as there are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework in support of private property.” Metcalf contends that economic freedom means a minimum of economic opportunity, rather than complete private property rights, and thus requires a social welfare state and progressive taxation. Second, he claims political rights and civil liberties are components of liberty. “When I think with my own brain and look with my own eyes, it's obvious to me that some combination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational capital, social trust, consumer choice, and economic opportunity make me free.”

This seems to get to the heart of the divide between classical and social liberals. Does freedom mean maximising opportunity or maximising one’s range of action within a given set of opportunities? That is, is freedom feeding one’s children according to the Department of Health food pyramid or buying whatever food one wants with an income untaxed but also unsupplemented by government? Moreover, can we apply utilitarianism to liberty? Let us leave aside trickle-down economics. Assuming that all this laissez-fair, privatisation, poll tax business really does leave the poorest worse off – according to whatever measurement you choose – does that justify stripping other people of their property?

The case for yes relies upon the logic that denying Mr. Gates another hot tub is better than leaving Mr. Bloggs’s children wearing tatty sneakers. This makes some moral sense, but social liberals should note two uncomfortable adjuncts. First, social justice usually means the loss of liberty in some sense. Taxation is coercive; there are no two ways about it. Second, it is impossible to measure utiles. Social liberals have decided that guaranteeing one kind of liberty is worth limiting another. Libertarians have decided that the only freedom is of unfettered individual action. The dichotomy is coarse, but worth chewing over. What is liberty? What can it mean to grant one freedom by restricting another?

Two cheers for property rights

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Yesterday's blog on copyright raised interesting questions about the very nature of property itself. Many convinced free-marketeers and libertarians seem to believe that 'property rights' are undeniable, permanent and immutable, and endow them with an almost mystical quality. I see the crucial importance of property rights as well: you can't expect people to work hard and build up capital if it can simply be stolen by others, including politicians. Property is one of the foundations of a liberal social order.

But as Milton Friedman (no leftie, he) pointed out in Capitalism and Freedom, defining what constitutes property is problematic, and often controversial. Should my ownership of a piece of land, he asks, deny others the right to fly over it in an aircraft? Precisely what rights should the shareholders of a company have? And, indeed, what should be the rules on patents or copyright? Terence Kealey, another robust liberal, argues that there should be no patents (most inventions are hard to replicate and the financial reward tends to come early), but that there should be copyright (since words are almost costless for others to replicate).

Plainly, these things are matters of judgement. They are decided in a social context. It might be a kind of natural evolution, as Hayek suggests, in which particular property rules come to be adopted, almost without thinking, because they work and support the smooth functioning of a society. It may be that the rules evolve through the common law process. (The most wonderful examples here are those regarding property disputes between neighbours, which have left us with rules such as, yes, you can cut down the branches of a neighbour's tree that spreads over your garden, but you have to offer them back the wood!). Sometimes the rights are defined in statute, as with shareholders' rights – thought that can be more hit and miss in terms of getting the balances just right.

Hume argued that it did not much matter what the property rights were, as long as they were known and certain. Indeed, that certainty, like the certainty that you are not going to be expropriated by some political majority, is important. Yet content is surely important too: different property rules could make large differences to the economic and social outcome. With such outcomes in mind, property rights fans can argue for particular arrangements, citing the evidence for their general benefit; but that does not put any such rule beyond dispute. We do need to be robust, though: the 'Red Tory' argument is that all market arrangements are the product of social bargaining, meaning there is no seam between politics and economics. That way lies the increasing politicisation and control of economic life.

The pursuit of happiness

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Libertarians talk a good game about freedom and the state, but not about the deeper needs that people have. That’s a common criticism I hear, and not entirely unwarranted – it’s easy to mistake an argument that something should be allowed for an argument that that thing is morally good. This is incorrect: the law should be ethical – not necessarily moral – allowing people to act as they want inasmuch as it doesn’t impinge on other people’s ability to do so. (An example of the distinction here is adultery, which is usually immoral but should not be illegal since it doesn’t infringe on anybody else’s private property rights.)

Last night, the ASI hosted a lecture by Professor Tara Smith, who holds the BB&T professorship for the study of Objectivism at the University of Texas. Prof Smith argued that to lead a good life, selfishness (properly understood) was key. This doesn’t mean throwing everybody around you under a bus, but the realization that happiness isn’t transferable. You can’t make somebody else happy – according to Prof Smith, making yourself happy is the noblest goal that people can strive for.

The question of what happiness is is more difficult, to my mind. Smith talked a lot about the importance of “rationality” in finding true happiness. about the problems with hedonism being that it tends to sacrifice long-term happiness for short-term pleasure. I wonder how meaningful this dichotomy is: does a smoker sacrifice long-term happiness (given, say, an increased risk of disease) for the short-term pleasure of a cigarette? Probably not – the overall “short-term” pleasure may outweigh the “long-term” happiness. Hedonism can be a perfectly rational decision: a hangover doesn’t mean that the previous night’s drinking was irrational.

She argued that pride and productiveness are important in the pursuit of happiness. Aristotle said that pride “seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them”. Properly understood, she said, pride was the self-respect needed to think yourself worthy of happiness, and fundamental to its pursuit. Productiveness was another key point: seeing work not as a necessary evil, but as a good in and of itself. This attitude is in stark contrast to the old fashioned (and distinctly statist) idea that work is a gruelling evil to be suffered – a sort of penance for being alive – rather than a valuable part of one’s life. There's no need for a split between work and happiness, and the idea that both should be cherished as virtues is, to me, deeply appealing.

Fukuyama vs Hayek

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The legendary international relations theorist Francis Fukuyama has turned his attention to the evolution of governments, and therefore to Hayek in his new book "The Origins of Political Order". In a piece for the New York Times, he defends Hayek's status as a great intellectual, but criticises his ideas.

Firstly, he points out that freedom can be threatened by the powerful. He argues that central government has sometimes defended the liberty of the weak from the coercion of the strong. However, while it may be true that government can defend the liberty of the weak, the concentration of power in an institution able to use force makes that institution more attractive to capture by the strong. After all, the strong have the greater means, so what is to stop them furthering their own aims at the expense of the weak?

Secondly, he argues that Hayek's 'slipperiest of slippery slope arguments' in "The Road to Serfdom" does not automatically occur. He cites historical examples showing that moves toward greater government interference have stalled. But I don't think Hayek would dispute this, as he himself worked to reverse the trend. "The Road to Serfdom" was a warning so that we could recognise statism and attempt to stop it, rather than a description demonstrating the futility of fighting for liberty.

Thirdly, Fukuyama claims that Hayek contradicts his own 'knowledge problem' by being so certain that governments will fail at planning on others' behalf. However, this is not the case. Hayek simply points out that governments are more likely to fail. Firstly, if people have imperfect knowledge about themselves, then other people are likely to have even less knowledge about those they try to govern. Secondly, government does not experiment in the same way as people do, as it uses force to prevent failure, forces people to choose the same things, and uses force to prevent people from opting out. The state may occasionally get things right, but its use of force makes this very unlikely.

Lastly, Fukuyama complains that state and society must be divided according to empirical adaptation rather than the 'strict abstract principle' of freedom. But then, who decides?

Anton Howes is Director of the Liberty League.