As one
of the folks (along with Matt Welch, natch), who started the whole
“Libertarian
Moment” meme way back in 2008, it’s been interesting to
see all the ways in which folks on the right and left get into such
a lather at the very notion of expanding freedom and choice in many
(though sadly not all) aspects of human activity.
Indeed, the brain freeze can get so intense that it turns
occasionally smart people into mental defectives.
To wit,
Damon Linker’s recent essay in The Week (a great
magazine, by the way), which argues that the outcomes of U.S.
military intervention in Iraq and Libya disprove libertarianism, in
particular, the Hayekian principle of “spontaneous order.”
No shit. Linker is being super-cereal here, kids:
Now it just so happens that within the past decade or so the
United States has, in effect, run two experiments — one in Iraq,
the other in Libya — to test whether the theory of spontaneous
order works out as the libertarian tradition would predict.
In both cases, spontaneity brought the opposite of order. It
produced anarchy and civil war, mass death and human suffering.
You got that? An archetypal effort in what Hayek
would call “constructivism,” neocon hawks would call “nation
building,” and what virtually all libertarians (well, me anyways)
called a
“non sequitur” in the war on terror that
was doomed to failure from the moment of conception is proof
positive that libertarianism is, in Linker’s eyes, “a
particularly bad idea” whose “pernicious consequences” are plain to
see.
In the sort of junior-high-school rhetorical move to which
desperate debaters cling, Linker even plays a variation on the
reductio ad Hitlerum in building case:
Some bad ideas inspire world-historical acts of evil. “The Jews
are subhuman parasites that deserve to be exterminated” may be the
worst idea ever conceived. Compared with such a grotesquely awful
idea, other bad ideas may appear trivial. But that doesn’t mean we
should ignore them and their pernicious consequences.
Into this category I would place the extraordinarily influential
libertarian idea of “spontaneous order.”
What nuance: Exterminating Jews
may be the worst idea…! When a person travels down such
a rhetorical path, it’s best to back away quickly, with a wave of
the hand and best wishes for the rest of his journey. Who can
seriously engage somebody who starts a discussion by saying,
“You’re not as bad as the Nazis, I’ll grant you that”…? I’d love
to read his movie review of the recent Teenage Mutant
Ninjas movie: “Not as bad as Triumph of the Will, but
still a bad movie…”
But in fact Linker attributes to Hayek and other libertarians a
definition of spontaneous order (sometimes called the “extended
order,” as in Hayek’s Fatal Conceit) that is made of the
finest straw. In Hayek’s writing—and that of most libertarians and
classical liberals who preceded them—the term is essentially a
modern vision of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”
That is, it helps to explain how goods and services and all
sorts of social organization form absent centralized planning (or
how alternatives crop up in the face of centralized planning).
Especially in the context of the 18th and even the 20th century,
the idea that markets and people could function autonomously from
rulers dictating virtually ever aspect of life wasn’t take for
granted. Explaining how complicated social and economic activity
could happen was one of the main projects of liberal
thought.
Like Smith, Hayek was no anarchist, and spontaneous order
is precisely about how rules, customs, and traditions inherited
from the past inform current arrangements and how we evolve and add
to them, sometimes displacing them altogether. An obvious example
of spontaneous order from the contemporary moment isn’t Iraq or
Libya but something like the way Uber operates vis a vis
traditional taxi cartels. The system of taxis is heavily regulated
and all the participants are subject to varying levels of state
coercion. By contrast, Uber started as an experimental service that
built rules, customs, and norms that continue to be tweaked based
on feedback from everyone involved.
The central insight of Hayek—and most libertarian thinkers—is
simply this (I’m quoting from the very page Linker links
to in his Week piece) is that things generally work better (not
perfectly, but better) when people are given more space to choose
among options or to create new options for themselves. That’s as
true in the social and cultural spheres as it is in the economic
sphere.
As Hayek wrote,
The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought
indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which
should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal
striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a
tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer
of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown
from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
That’s from Hayek’s Nobel prize
lecture, which was titled “The Pretense of Knowledge.”
Though sometimes
terrible in his personal political commitments, Hayek’s
first instinct was always to combat constructivism, or the idea
that a few smart, violent, or powerful people have all the answers
and can direct the rest of us toward some form of human
perfection.
Hayek’s emphasis on the limits of human knowledge helps explain
both the tyranny of people such as Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein in
Libya and Iraq, Islamists who want to control every aspect of human
life, and the Nazis whom Linker feels a need to insert into random
conversation about contemporary politics. They all sought to do the
impossible (control all aspects of human life) and the immoral (use
other people as means to their ends). It’s a shame that defenders
of the invasion of Iraq didn’t read more Hayek before settling on
their plan, and it seems as if the brilliant minds who bombed Libya
into chaos (and are doing so in Syria as we speak) skipped any and
all classes on the Austrian School of economics.
It takes real chutzpah to pretend that self-evidently stupid
foreign policy disasters based on
the worst sort of hubris undermine a contemporary libertarian
agenda focused on reduced government spending on defense (among
other things), a general deregulation of economic activity (recall
the housing and fiscal crises, which were caused and intensified
not by lack of government involvement but a surfeit of it), and a
push for tolerance in the social sphere.
At
least Linker’s colleague at The Week, Matt Lewis (who also
blogs at The Daily Caller), is more forthright in his
response to creeping libertarianism. Rather than construct a bad
argument against libertarianism, Lewis simply points out that, to
quote his piece’s headline, it’s “bad for traditional
conservatives.” Indeed, Lewis can’t be bothered to generate new
arguments for his piece and instead cites
a 2011 column he wrote quoting a Catholic thinker who says
“libertarianism is parasitic upon Christian civilization.” Which
would be news to
Roger Williams, among other Christian thinkers who stress the
indivdual’s right of conscience as central to legitimate
government. It’s actually more accurate to say the classical
liberal project that started in 17th-century England is in many
ways based upon a Christian respect for the individual. In making
the first case in the English language for a fully secular temporal
government, Williams argued that forced prayer or worship “stinks
in God’s nostrils.”
Lewis’ anxiety clearly stems from the partisan political fallout
of the Libertarian Moment (which
of course is more a general direction than a brief moment in
time…). If libertarians continue to grow in power and
influence, the contemporary Republican Party will have to change
from the policies that gave rise to the Bush years, a
spend-and-regulate debacle that also saw the United States
enter two unwinnable wars. Social conservatives, along with crony
capitalists and those invested in the military-industrial complex
will all need to adjust.
Change is tough, Republicans, but sometimes it’s necessary.
Especially when it leads to not to chaos but to a freer, more
peaceful, and innovative society.
Protests that began last week in Hong Kong over
Fast-forward to the 1980s, when
Last week the U.S. began
The newly inaugurated president of Afghanistan,