Were libertarians to ungrudgingly accept the case for a more adequate social safety net (a case, after all, accepted to some extent by libertarian heroes F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman) and give up on their blanket, dogmatic opposition to all regulation and market intervention (a perfect example is their remarkable hostility to mainstream climate science), they’d find a ticket to intellectual respectability. They would also find a ticket to political relevancy — something that is being well demonstrated by the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Read the whole thing. It is a concise, erudite post.
I think, however, that it is not a good idea for libertarians to try to get on board with Bernie Sanders. That is like a woman becoming a married man’s mistress in the hope that he will divorce his wife to marry the mistress. It’s a recipe for becoming used.
In general, my view of politicians is that even when they espouse some libertarian positions, those tend to be the first positions that they abandon once in office. To the extent that they implement parts of their agenda, it tends to be those parts that are anti-libertarian.
Erudite? More like polemical.
“they’d find a ticket to intellectual respectability”
Apparently Jerry Taylor is totally ignorant of the work of Buchanan, Coase, Demsetz, etc. Of course Mr. Taylor seems to think that the only people who are respectable are those whose views fit on a 3×5 card.
That isn’t what he meant. What he meant was if we started agreeing with progressives, then we’d be respected by progressives for having the accepted progressive views. Maybe they’d even let us keep the libertarian name after we became progressives. He was talking about politics, not actual thinkers.
The word you’re looking for is “submit”
“remarkable hostility to mainstream climate science”
It never ends. Wasn’t it the Greenpeace apostate guy who said they chose to focus on this precisely because it was unactionable? If “we” ever accepted whatever their weird assumptions about science are, they’d change them just to keep the argument that they are the party of science, even though they have no idea that what they really mean by thst is that they are the party of centralized academia.
What, btw, is the EXACT mechanism by which we give a little that we would get a little?
Probably has something to do with think tanks getting a seat at the respectable table and I’m guessing they’ll need a little more money once they are respectable.
I didn’t like it either. Same basic argument I’ve heard a half a bajillion times and there was nothing particularly persuasive about this particular version of it. It’s not even really internally consistent. He criticizes libertarianism for it’s “lazy, unpersuasive utilitarian arguments for laissez faire capitalism” and then a few paragraphs that a new libertarian agenda that supposedly would be persuasive should include “a proper respect for the wealth creation produced by free markets.” That sounds like a pretty utilitiarian perspective, and by free markets, I assume he means a version of laissez faire, so what kind of economic policy is he really advocating here and how would it substantively differ from his old Cato colleagues’ policy prescriptions, other than being less “lazy” and more “persuasive?”
Respectability is another word for conformity. The group respects groupthink.
The problem is that the definition of the bounds of ‘respectability’, intellectual or otherwise, does not derive from any kind of objective standard, and is instead a social construct that is more like a fashion and, in the present context, is mostly influenced and controlled by the progressives. Even yesterday’s progressives find it hard to keep up with today’s progressives.
And it is mostly because one has to chase after respectability to remain politically relevant that everything is ratcheting in their direction.
And if any non-progressive doesn’t understand what is going on and is willing to compromise on anything and everything so long as it is necessary to keep hitting this moving target of ‘respectability’, then that is not libertarianism but another variant of contemporary ‘conservatism’ (i.e. progressivism with a lag; yesterday’s progressivism’s recalcitrant – but inevitably yielding – objection to today’s progressivism.)
I’m having trouble with the logic. We are told to believe the following things:
1. Libertarians reject any form of social safety net.
2. Hayek and Friedman are representative libertarians.
3. Hayek and Friedman are happy about social safety nets.
These seem inconsistent. How could all three possibly be true? FWIW, I think #1 is the incorrect claim of the trio; the other two I could believe, though have not checked carefully.
There are many other logical issues with the piece, including:
– “Blanket, dogmatic opposition to all regulation and market intervention” — how is this related to the social safety net argument? Most people who oppose things like the minimum wage, labor law, and discrimination law don’t believe they are providing any kind of real safety net at all. It’s not because we are against safety nets in general.
– What opposition to climate science is being spoken of? Define your terms. The latest IPCC document has accepted the lukewarmer position, and it seems pretty mainstream to me.
– Why is the second an example of the former? The first part is about marke regulations, and the second par is about scientific claims about the natural world. They’re completely different kinds of things that are not suitable as examples of each other.
This whole piece is basically every polemic catch phrase about libertarians, strung together in a crazy wild ride of a paragraph. It makes no sense if you parse the pagraph as English and interpret it as conventional claims. This is more, libertarians baaaad, Berny gooood. See, I called him by his first name. We’re practically pals.
What’s even stupider is that he complains about libertarians being “utilitarian” and simultaneously complains about libertarians being dogmatically opposed to all regulation and intervention.
Libertarians consistently give both utilitarian AND deontological justifications for their positions. The author is uninformed and obviously writing pure polemical BS.
Translation:
If libertarians were to abandon their principles and try to fit in, they’d fit in.
This is entirely true, and yet meaningless. People who are interested in fitting in are unlikely to become libertarians in the first place.
You get used no matter who you choose, the joke being you have a choice.
Do extremist liberals, for example the ones who don’t understand that the only solution to global warming is not economic regulation but nuclear and solar accomplished through regulatory reform and fundamental research perhaps but not necessarily paid for by revenue neutral carbon taxes, have to constantly deal with this kind of crap from their mushy moderate wing?
For the record I’m down with coal carbon sequestration as well, perhaps most of all because it is one technology we would love China to steal from us.
They would also find a ticket to political relevancy
I doubt that. I thing that Gary Johnson is reasonable on those issues but is getting nowhere. People do not like freedom as defined by Libertarians, look at the success of Trump. Look at how few people want to legalize drugs beyond Marijuana (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-poll_n_5162357.html).