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The Futility of Libertarianism

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C-SPAN's Book TV devoted three hours to a discussion with prolific libertarian author Tibor Machan earlier today (Sunday, May 1). In many ways, Machan is an archtypical libertarian. He credits Ayn Rand as an important influence on his writing but artfully drops the context of the Objectivist philosophy whenever he defends libertarianism or capitalism.

When Book TV interviews an author, they always display a list of the author's favorite books. In Machan’s case, this list was particularly interesting. Neither The Fountainhead nor Atlas Shrugged made the list. Nor were there any of Rand’s numerous nonfiction collections of philosophical essays. Of the dozen or so books listed, alongside various libertarian and fiction writers, the only work by Ayn Rand cited was Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. So are we to conclude that Machan agrees with Objectivist epistemology while holding little regard for Objectivist metaphysics , ethics or esthetics? Actually, such a conclusion, if verified, would not shock me at all.

To say that Machan's grasp of Objectivism is superficial would be like saying that Christians rarely question the source of moral values. The conclusion is too obvious to be offered as any sort of insight. And this explains why libertarianism, by itself, is so utterly futile. One example will make this clear.

A viewer referred to Obama's recent speech on the economy and asked what Machan would say in answer to the following remarks by the President: "There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There's nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know.”

In other words, the viewer asked if Machan disagreed with Obama's view that the rich were obligated to help the poor.

Did Machan respond by forcefully asserting that a rich man has a moral right to exist for his own sake? Did he state clearly that the individual who earns his money through productive work has the moral right to spend it in any way he pleases? Did he point out that a rational defense of capitalism requires that we dispense with the religious moral view that we are our brother's keeper? Did he offer a defense of rational self-interest?

Of course not. Machan merely repeated the libertarian bromide that no one should be forced to spend their money in the way the government wishes. That kind of superficial political argument is eviscerated as soon as the first dim-witted liberal trots out the latest cancer-stricken homeless victim with another pathetic sob story. Nobody is going to care about how the person is saved from destruction. If we are morally obligated to save the person, force will be used to achieve that goal. End of story. Freedom be damned.

Later in the interview, Machan discussed the issue of animal rights. He argued that animals do not have rights, but was unable to articulate the philosophical distinction that the human being’s rational, conceptual mode of consciousness requires freedom as a prerequisite for proper functioning. In other words, that the mind does not function under threat of force. He was as inept at defending the concept of human rights as he was at defending the moral basis of human rights. (Machan has a book on this topic. He has apparently written a book on just about any topic one could imagine. I have no idea if he does a better job of defending human rights in the book.)

That's the futility and intellectual bankruptcy of libertarianism. It's a shame that, when choosing authors to interview, BookTV seems to place a greater premium on how prolific an author is as opposed to how well they articulate a coherent viewpoint. Writing a lot of words is no guarantee that they are going to add up to anything important or meaningful. In this case, the viewer would have been left with the impression that Ayn Rand--like Machan--had no genuine rational defense for her radical viewpoint. Normally one would be thankful that so many C-Span viewers were exposed to the ideas of Ayn Rand. In this case, I'm not so sure it didn't do more damage than good.

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Speaking of Libertarian Futility: Fukuyama on Hayek in The Sunday Times’ Book Review

If anyone is inclined to applaud The New York Times Sunday Book Review for publishing Francis Fukuyama’s review of a new edition of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty,(Friedrich A. Hayek, Big-Government Skeptic) you might want to reconsider. Ever wonder why Ayn Rand referred to Hayek as "an example of our most pernicious enemy?” Here is a clue from Fukuyama:

A second critique of Hayek has tended to come from the right. He is necessarily a moral relativist, since he does not believe that there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends. Morality for him is more like a useful coordinating device than a categorical imperative.

Sounds a lot like that prolific 'libertarian' author I was talking about.

And where does Hayek’s “moral relativism” lead? Check out these excerpts from an article (Hayek and Rawls: An Unlikely Fusion) from the website of Australia’s pro-labor Evatt Foundation:

John Rawls has done more to promote the ideals of egalitarianism and social justice than any thinker since the Second World War. And no thinker has been more openly hostile to these ideals than Friedrich Hayek - at least this is the conventional interpretation of Hayek's work. But in their struggle against post-war philosophy's greatest egalitarian thinker, Hayek's disciples have a problem - their guru didn't leave them any arguments against Rawls. The reason he didn't was because he agreed with Rawls. In the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek explained that he saw little point in engaging with Rawls' Theory of Justice since "the differences between us seemed more verbal than substantial..." Hayek was not mistaken about this. When he disagrees with Rawls it is over economic not philosophical issues. Much of the apparent philosophical disagreement is a result of Hayek's peculiar way of using terms like egalitarianism and social justice.

Some of Rawls' critics seem to be hiding behind their own veil of ignorance - a veil that keeps them from actually reading his work. For example, Centre for Independent Studies' Peter Saunders and Kayoko Tsumori mistakenly interpret Rawls as arguing for a system based on allocative justice (Saunders & Tsumori, 2002: 76). For Rawls, achieving 'social justice' was about finding institutional arrangements that satisfied the principles of justice - a system of rules that would result in fair equality of opportunity and would be to the advantage of the least well off (Rawls, 1973: 87). Hayek understood this and explained that he had "no basic quarrel" with Rawls' reasoning. His only complaint was with Rawls' terminology. "The fact which I regret and regard as confusing is merely that in this connection he employs the term 'social justice'" (Hayek, 1976: 100).

Hayek's second objection to 'social justice' was that it would destroy the market -- the only institution capable of supporting developed nations at their current standard of living. In his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek warned that pursuing socialism's project of central planning and nationalised industry would lead to totalitarianism (Hayek, 2001). Later he argued that pursuing 'social justice' through the welfare state would lead to the same result (Hayek, 1994: 108). The reason the pursuit of 'social justice' is incompatible with the market is that market outcomes do not correspond to any principle of need or merit. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek made this clear:

Most people will object not to the bare fact of inequality but to the fact that the differences in reward to do not correspond to any recognizable differences in the merits of those who receive them. The answer commonly given to this is that a free society on the whole achieves this kind of justice. This, however, is an indefensible contention if by justice is meant proportionality of reward to moral merit. Any attempt to found the case for freedom on this argument is very damaging to it, since it concedes that material rewards ought to be made to correspond to recognizable merit and then opposes the conclusion that most people will draw from this by an assertion which is untrue(Hayek, 1960a: 93-94).

In volume two of Law, Legislation and Liberty he was even blunter:

It has of course to be admitted that the manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people (Hayek, 1976: 64).

The point Hayek is making is that, in a liberal social order, justice is about conformity with procedures. If the distribution of rewards seems unnecessarily unequal the correct response is to reconsider the structure of rules and institutions. There is no major conflict with Rawls here.

If it turned out that greater public support for child care, education and health care did improve opportunities for the least advantaged, then it seems clear that Rawlsian liberals should support them. And if Hayekian liberals acknowledged that Hayek and Rawls were making essentially the same argument about justice, then they should support them too. That is why it is so interesting that the Cato Institute's Will Wilkinson is calling for a Rawls/Hayek fusion. On the Cato institute's weblog he writes:

Rawls and Hayek were, in my estimation, the greatest social/political thinkers of the 20th Century. Rawls understood markets better than he is given credit for, but no one understood markets better than Hayek. And Hayek was a first-rate political philosopher, but Rawls was king of that hill. If you fortify Rawls' theory of justice with a Hayekian grasp of the co-ordinating function of prices, and the dynamics of spontaneous order (or fortify Hayek with Rawls' rather more intelligible normative framework), you will arrive, as Brink [Lindsey] argues in less esoteric terms, at something like a system that gives free rein to the informational and dynamically equilibrating function of market prices, while creating a framework for well-targeted and effective social insurance that mitigates counterproductive incentives (Wlkinson, 2006).

Wilkinson calls this intellectual fusion, 'Rawlsekianism'. Because of his views about how markets work, he believes the result would be more libertarian than social democratic. But what makes Wilkinson's invitation so appealing is that it shifts the focus of the debate from philosophy to social science. The argument is about the effectiveness of rival policies and the only sticking point with this is that Hayek's supporters often prefer rationalist theory to empirical evidence.

Hayek fans like Glenn Beck think that all that matters is that Hayek had some clever arguments about the impracticality of socialism. They are clueless when it comes to the "impracticality" of defending capitalism without the foundation of philosophy and ethics.

Edited by Dennis Hardin
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