Liberals and Libertarians | Glen Raphael's Home Page | Feedback
This FAQ presents a simplified view of some basic tenets of libertarianism.
(Based on a 1992 Usenet posting by Eric Raymond(eric@snark.thyrsus.com), reworked by Glen Raphael ,raphael@pobox.com)
last modified 2/10/97
- A. Definitions, Principles and History
- 1. What is a libertarian?
- 2. What do libertarians want to do?
- 3. Where does libertarianism come from?
- 4. How do libertarians differ from "liberals"?
- 5 . How do libertarians differ from "conservatives"?
- 6. Do libertarians want to get rid of all government?
- B. Politics and Consequences
- 7. What is the libertarian position on abortion?
- 8. What is the libertarian position on minority, gay and women's rights?
- 9. What is the libertarian position on gun control?
- 10. What is the libertarian position on art, pornography and censorship?
- 11. What is the libertarian position on the draft?
- 12. What is the libertarian position on the "drug war"?
- 13. What would libertarians do about concentrations of corporate power?
- C. Standard Criticisms
- 14. But what about the environment? Who speaks for the trees?
- 15. Don't strong property rights just favor the rich?
- 16. How would libertarianism affect the poor?
- 17. What about national defense?
- D. Prospects
- 18. How can I get involved?
- 19. Is libertarianism likely to get a practical test in my lifetime?
- 20. Where can I get more information?
There are a number of standard questions about libertarianism that have been periodically resurfacing in the politics groups for years. This posting attempts to answer some of them.The answers are not complete, nor do they reflect a (nonexistent) unanimity among libertarians; the issues touched on here are tremendously complex. However, it will serve as a starting point.
A. Definitions, Principles and History
1. What is a libertarian?
The word means roughly "believer in liberty". Libertarians believe in individual conscience and individual choice, and reject the use of force or fraud to compel others except in direct response to force or fraud. Some libertarians (the so-called Le Fevbrians) reject *all* use of force, even in self-defense.
2. What do libertarians want to do? Help individuals take more control over their own lives. Take the state (and other self-appointed representatives of "society") out of private decisions. Put both halves of the welfare/warfare bureaucracy out of business and liberate the 7/8ths of our wealth that's now soaked up by the costs of a bloated and ineffective government to make us all richer and freer. Oppose tyranny everywhere, whether it's the obvious variety driven by greed and power-lust or the subtler, "well-intentioned" kinds that coerce people "for their own good" but against their will.
3. Where does libertarianism come from?
Modern libertarianism has multiple roots. An important one is the minimal-government republicanism of the U.S.'s founding revolutionaries, especially Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the "classical liberals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were another influence. More recently, Ayn Rand's philosophy of "ethical egoism" and the "Austrian School" of free-market economics have both contributed important ideas. Libertarianism is alone among 20th-century radical movements in owing virtually nothing to Marxism.
4. How do libertarians differ from "liberals"?
Once upon a time (in the 1800s), "liberal" and "libertarian" meant the same thing; "liberals" were individualist, distrustful of state power, pro-free-market, and opposed to the entrenched privilege of the feudal and mercantilist system. After 1870, the "liberals" were gradually seduced (primarily by Marxism) into believing that the state could and should be used to guarantee "social justice". They largely forgot about individual freedom, especially economic freedom, and nowadays spend much of their time justifying higher taxes, bigger government, and more regulation. But libertarians remained distrustful of the state and therefore prefer to encourage private, voluntary solutions to social and economic problems instead of more government.
5. How do libertarians differ from "conservatives"?
For starters, by not being conservative. Most libertarians have no interest in returning to an idealized past; we've been there, and it had a lot of problems. More generally, libertarians hold no brief for the right wing's rather overt militarist, racist, sexist, and authoritarian tendencies and reject conservative attempts to "legislate morality" with censorship, drug laws, and vario us bits of Bible-thumping. Though libertarians believe in free-enterprise capitalism, we refuse to defend the military-industrial complex as conservatives tend to do; instead the military that we'd like to see would be a tiny fraction of its present size.
6. Do libertarians want to get rid of all government?
Libertarians want to replace as much government as they practically can with private, voluntary alternatives. About 3/4 are "minarchists" who favor stripping government of most of its accumulated power to meddle, leaving only the police and courts for law enforcement and a sharply reduced military for national defense (nowadays some might also leave special powers for environmental enforcement). The other 1/4 (including the authors of this FAQ) are anarcho-capitalists who believe that "limited government" is a contradiction and the free market can even provide better law, order, and security than any government monopoly.
Note: Even a completely libertarian society would still have a lot of structures that look like a modern-day government. The problem here is one of competing definitions: if by government you mean "that set of institutions in society on which we rely to defend our rights and aid us in the peaceful adjudication of disputes," then libertarians want lots of government, probably more and better government than we have now. On the other hand, if by "government" you mean "an organization which has a monopoly on initiation of force (coercion) and which is regarded as legitimate when it exercises that right," then libertarians want little or no "government." This ambiguity is inherent in the language, and results in a lot of misunderstandings on the net.
B. Politics and Consequences
7. What is the libertarian position on abortion?
Most libertarians are strongly in favor of abortion rights (the Libertarian Party often shows up at pro-rights rallies with banners that say "We're Pro-Choice on Everything!). Many libertarians are personally opposed to abortion, but reject governmental meddling in a decision that should be private between a woman and her physician. Most libertarians also oppose government funding of abortions, on the grounds that "pro-lifers" should not be forced to subsidize with their money behavior they consider to be murder. (Note to liberals: yes, we *are* consistent about this; if you say, "Hey, by that argument I shouldn't have to subsidize the military either!" you're right. You shouldn't.)
8. What is the libertarian position on minority, gay and women's rights?
Libertarians believe every human being is entitled to equality before the law and fair treatment as an *individual* responsible for his or her own actions. We oppose racism, sexism and sexual-preference bigotry, whether perpetrated by private individuals or (especially) by government. We reject discrimination, whether in its ugly traditional forms or in its newer guises as Affirmative Action quotas and "diversity" rules. A free market promotes empowerment and social mobility the best, and we trust that means to equality as much as we distrust attempts to enforce equality at the expense of individual rights.
9. What is the libertarian position on gun control?
Gun control advocates may have the best of intentions, but in actual practice gun control laws just don't work. They don't discourage crime or homicide or suicide. Sw itzerland, where every home has a weapon, has one of the lowest rates of death and suicide anywhere. On the other hand, Japan, where guns are strictly controlled, has a dismal suicide rate producing an overall violent death rate higher than the US. When Florida made it easy for private citizens to get concealed weapon permits, all categories of crime dropped.
One terrible thing about gun control laws -- especially controls on handguns -- is that they deny the poor an important means of self defense. A gun is an equalizer; most of us don't need one but there are people out there who live in really bad neighborhoods. There are people whose lives have been threatened. People who are too old or frail or small to defend themselves without a weapon. People who the police either won't or can't help.
I hope that you personally never need to use a gun in self defense. But if you do ever find yourself in a situation where you do need one, I want you to have that option. I don't have the right to take that option away from you.
10. What is the libertarian position on art, pornography and censorship?
Libertarians are opposed to any government-enforced limits on free expression whatsoever; we take an absolutist line on the First Amendment. On the other hand, we reject the "liberal" idea that refusing to subsidize a controversial artist is censorship. Thus, we would strike down all anti-pornography laws as unwarranted interference with private and voluntary acts (leaving in place laws punishing, for example, coercion of minors for the *production* of pornography). We would also end government funding of art; the label of "artist" confers no special right to a living at public expense.
11. What is the libertarian position on the draft?
The draft is slavery, pure and simple, and ought to be prohibited as "involuntary servitude" by the 13th Amendment. Any nation that cannot find anough volunteers to defend it among its citizenry does not deserve to survive.
12. What is the libertarian position on the "drug war"?
This country went through Prohibition once, and its only long-term result was to corrupt law enforcement and create a vicious and entrenched criminal class. It's happening again, and (just like last time) selective enforcement is making the "war on drugs" a war against the poor and black and downtrodden and a pretext for dangerous expansions in police power (through confiscation laws, "no-knock" warrants and a thousand other "anti-drug" measures). In any case, the government has no right to tell us what we can or cannot put in our bodies. Only the individual can decide to "say no"; the drug problem is not one of supply but of *demand*. Total legalization of everything is the only way to break the drug gangs.
13. What would libertarians do about concentrations of corporate power?
Create a more fluid economic environment in which they'd break up. This happens naturally in a free market; even in ours, with taxes and regulatory policies that encourage gigantism, it's quite rare for a company to stay in the biggest 500 for longer than twenty years. We'd abolish the limited-liability shield laws to make corporate officers and stockholders fully responsible for a corporation's actions. We'd make it impossible for corporations to grow fat on "sweetheart deals" paid for with taxpayers' money; we'd lower the cost of capital and regulatory compliance, encouraging entrepreneurship and lowering the optimum size of the business unit.
C. Standard Criticisms < /h2>
14. But what about the environment? Who speaks for the trees?
Who *owns* the trees? The disastrous state of the environment in what was formerly the Soviet Union illustrates the truism that a resource theoretically "owned" by everyone is valued by no one. Ecological awareness is a fine thing, but without strong private-property rights no one can *afford* to care enough to conserve. Libertarians believe that the only effective way to save the Earth is to show everyone economic incentives to save their little bit of it.
15. Don't strong property rights just favor the rich?
No. What favors the rich is the system we have now --- a fiction of strong property rights covering a reality of property by government fiat; the government can take away your "rights" by eminent domain, condemnation, taxation, regulation and a thousand other means. Because the rich have more money and time to spend on influencing and subverting government, they can enlarge their own turf at others' expense. A strong government *always* becomes the instrument of privilege. Stronger property rights and a weaker gov ernment would weaken the elite that inevitably controls it --- an elite far more dangerous than any ordinary criminal class.
16. How would Libertarianism affect the poor ?
As the level of "anti-poverty" spending in this country has risen, so has poverty. Government bureaucracies have no incentive to lift people out of dependency and every incentive to keep them in it; after all, more poverty means a bigger budget and more power for the bureaucrats. Libertarians want to break this cycle by replacing *all* income-transfer programs and allowing people to *keep* what they earn instead of taxing it away from them. The wealth freed up would go directly to the private sector, creating jobs for the poor, decreasing the demand on private charity, and increasing charitable giving. The results might diminish poverty or they might leave it at today's levels --- but it's hard to see how they could be any *less* effective than the present system.
17. What about national defense?
One view that has occasionally expressed is that in a libertarian society *everyone* would be heavily armed, making invasion or usurpation by a domestic tyrant excessively risky. This is what the Founding Fathers clearly intended for the U .S. (the Consitution made no provision for a standing army, entrusting defense primarily to a militia consisting of the entirety of the armed citizenry). And it does work today in Switzerland (also furnishing one of the strongest anti-gun-control arguments). Think about the Afghans, the Viet Cong, the Minutemen --- would *you* want to invade a country full of dedicated, heavily armed libertarians? :-)
On the other hand, the mainstream libertarian view is that national defense is one of the few legitimate roles that exist for government and any arguments to the contrary are still in the realm of obscure theory and speculation. So for all intents and purposes the libertarian view is that there should be a government-provided national defense, but that defense should be limited to protecting Americans in America.
Even that much-reduced military role would cost less in a libertarian society than it does today, as a non-interventionist libertarian state would over time acquire fewer enemies than we do today (again, think of Switzerland), and the improvements in living standards and technology made possible by an unencumbered free-market would greatly improve our prospects of being able to afford to defend ourselves in force when and if that became necessary. A national defense that just defended Americans in America might even be so inexpensive we could fund it solely through voluntary contributions! (Well, I can dream, can't I? :-) )
D. Prospects
18. How can I get involved?
Think about freedom, and act on your thoughts. Spend your dollars wisely. Oppose the expansion of state power. Promote "bottom-up" solutions to public problems, solutions that empower individuals rather than demanding intervention by force of government. Give to private charity. Join a libertarian organization; the Libertarian Party, or the Advocates for Self-Government, or the Reason Foundation. Start your own business; create wealth and celebrate others who create wealth. Support *voluntary* cooperation.
19. Is libertarianism likely to get a practical test in my lifetime?
No one knows. The authors think libertarianism is about where constitutional republicanism was in 1750 --- a solution waiting for its moment, a toy of political theorists and a few visionaries waiting for the people and leaders who can actualize it. The collapse of C ommunism and the triumph of capitalist economics will certainly help, by throwing central planning and the "nanny state" into a disrepute that may be permanent. Some libertarians believe we are headed for technological and economic changes so shattering that no statist ideology can possibly survive them (in particular, most of the nanotechnology "underground" is libertarian). Only time will tell.
20. Where can I get more information?
On the Web, try http://www.free-market.net/ . In the real world, call 1-800-682-1776 for a free information packet from the Libertarian Party. And check out my list of Sources.
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