Now the good folks from FreedomFest are taking this to the next level by conducting a survey to determine the “50 Most Influential Libertarians.”
I invite everyone to participate by clicking here, especially since filling out the survey gives you a $100 discount when registering for this year’s FreedomFest (to be held in mid-July).
Having worked in libertarian circles for many decades, I’m going to look at each of the categories and take a guess on who will get the most votes and also give my two cents on which of the people are the most under-appreciated.
We’ll start with libertarian authors.
I’m guessing P.J. O’Rourke will get first place in this category, though Robert Higgs and Charles Murray also are possibilities.
The most under-appreciated choice is James Bovard. I’ve known Jim for decades and his writing is both principled and entertaining. I’ve shared several of his columns if you want to get a taste.
Now let’s move the business and finance category.
I actually know only about half of the people on this list, so take my views here with a grain of salt. For my guess on who will win, I’m torn between listing David Koch and Charles Koch, who have done so much to build libertarian institutions, and Steve Forbes, who has done so much to popularize free markets.
For the most under-appreciated libertarian, I’m going with John Aglialoro. How can you not applaud a guy who finally delivered a movie version of Atlas Shrugged?
Now let’s look at libertarian celebrities.
I have no idea who will win this category. I’m wondering if voters will pick the biggest celebrity, meaning perhaps Clint Eastwood.
It’s also hard to pick the most under-appreciated libertarian in this category. But I’ll go with Penn Jillette. I’ve seen his Las Vegas show (Penn and Teller) two times and I imagine hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans have been both entertained and enlightened by the experience.
By the way, I wonder why Howard Stern wasn’t listed.
Time now for the top libertarian in freedom organizations.
This is another hard-to-guess category. If I’m basing my choice on (deserved) celebrity status, I would have to pick between Mark Skousen, who has made FreedomFest a must-attend event, Jeffrey Tucker, the guy who is dramatically expanding FEE’s outreach, and Johan Norberg, who is famous for his short videos on freedom.
For under-appreciated libertarians, Tom Palmer deserves praise as one of the most determined and effective libertarians ever to traverse the globe (literally and figuratively). And Barbara Kolm deserves some sort of prize for her yeomanlike (yeowomanlike?) efforts to save Europe with her annual Free Market Road Show.
Let’s shift to the media category.
I would be stunned if John Stossel didn’t win this category, though Judge Napolitano and the guys from Reason may give him a tough race.
My choice for under-appreciated libertarian would be Neal Boortz or Julie Borowski.
The big oversight is that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit isn’t listed.
Here are the choices for politics.
I assume there’s not much suspense on who will win. If Ron Paul doesn’t come in first place, I’ll eat my hat. Actually, I retract that offer. Based on my less-than-impressive election predictions, I no longer feel confident about my ability to prognosticate. But I still think Ron Paul wins, perhaps followed by his son.
For under-appreciated libertarians, I’m going with Justin Amash and Thomas Massie. It is very helpful to have a couple of solid libertarians in the House of Reprehensibles. They probably should have included Congressman Brat as well.
Here’s another very difficult category, the top libertarian professors.
It’s impossible to make good selections since there are so many good choices. If you put a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell emerge in first place because they’ve both done such a great job over the decades with their books and columns.
It’s also difficult to pick the most under-appreciated libertarian. The crowd from George Mason University is superb, Richard Epstein and Randy Barnett are amazing legal minds, and the Schoollands do great work.
But I suppose I’ll go with either James Gwartney, since his work on Economic Freedom of the World is so valuable, or Deirdre McCloskey, who deserves praise for her books and other works.
By the way, it’s a terrible oversight that Robert Murphy and Ed Stringham are not on the list.
Last but not least, we have the think tank crowd.
It goes without saying that the Cato Institute (America’s most principled and effective think tank) should win this category. And you have lots of Cato people from which to choose, so pretend you’re a dead person in Chicago and vote early and vote often.
For the most under-appreciated libertarian, I’m going to pick someone who isn’t even on the list. Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center deserves lots of write-in votes. Not only did she escape France, but she’s been one of the most effective and determined policy economists in Washington. If you need any extra convincing, just watch this video.
Once again, here’s the link for those who want to take the survey.
Economists are sometimes considered to be a bit odd, and the same thing is sometimes said about libertarians.
And since I’m a libertarian economist, I realize that makes me doubly suspect.
So when I’ve written about the desirability of market-based organ transplants (see here, here, and here), I realize some people will instinctively object because selling one’s organs is somehow distasteful and icky.
Or it makes people subject to exploitation. For instance, writing for the Washington Post, Scott Carney argues that organ sales would take advantage of the poor.
What would happen if the United States legalized the sale of human organs? …Whether we like it or not, we live in the era of globalization, and if the U.S. legalizes the market for body parts, there is no reason to think that international economies won’t play a role in how a patient decides to procure transplant organs. …According to the National Foundation for Transplants, a kidney transplant costs about $260,000. In the illegal organ markets in India, Egypt and Pakistan, the same procedure rings in at just shy of $20,000 — certified organ included. …The only thing stopping the typical American transplant patient from going abroad and buying an organ is the difficulty of making contact with a broker and the threat of what might happen if they get caught. …the market for human body parts is a lot like the one for used cars: They’re only worth what someone is willing to sell them for. …hundreds of thousands of people are available and willing to sell their flesh for pennies on the dollar.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that I shouldn’t be allowed (and the government shouldn’t be allowed) to block a willing seller and a willing buyer from engaging in a mutually beneficial exchange.
But folks like Mr. Carney think that poor people will get exploited.
…it’s helpful to review what happened in the market for human surrogate babies. In the United States, it is legal to pay a woman to carry a child… Once the market was clearly defined in the United States, other countries, with looser definitions of human rights, fought for their share of the market. In 2002, India became the go-to destination for procuring a budget surrogate womb. To the surprise of no one, the Indian industry soon began to cut corners. Women were housed under lock and key in houses known to the press as “baby factories.” …Late last year, India finally outlawed surrogacy tourism after non-stop incidents and official inquiries into the surrogates’ well-being. Now the commercial surrogacy boom seems to be moving to Cambodia where regulations are still loose.
So what’s his bottom line?
We cannot solve our own organ shortage by exploiting the poor and helpless people on the other side of the world.
I don’t doubt that there are shady people willing to exploit the poor by not giving them relevant information and/or not fully compensating them, though that’s not an argument against organ sales (just as similar periodic bad behavior by car salesmen and insurance brokers isn’t an argument against markets for automobiles and life insurance).
A Wall Street Journal column by two attorneys from the Institute for Justice approaches the issue more dispassionately, noting that a market for bone marrow could save many lives.
Hemeos is aimed at one of the most pressing problems in medicine: the shortage of bone-marrow donors to combat deadly blood diseases. Thousands of Americans are waiting for a lifesaving donor, and thousands more have died waiting. Marrow donors provide blood stem cells, which reproduce continuously in the patient and restore the ability to make healthy blood. …Blood is drawn from one arm, the blood stem cells are skimmed out, and the blood is returned through the other arm. Donated marrow cells regenerate quickly and fully. Despite the ease of donating, thousands of patients with leukemia or other blood-related disorders are desperately searching for donors because a specific genetic match is required. …Hemeos plans to revolutionize donor recruitment by taking one simple step: compensating donors with a check for around $2,000. As with every other valuable thing in the world, we will get more marrow cells when we pay for them. It’s Econ 101.
Sounds great, right? A classic example of a win-win situation!
Except, well, government.
In 1984 the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) made it a federal crime to pay donors. Unlike plasma, sperm and egg donation—for which compensation is legal and common—paying marrow donors remains illegal. The result? Shortages, waiting lists and unnecessary suffering.
Fortunately, the courts have stepped in.
Ms. Flynn has three girls with Fanconi anemia, a genetic disorder that causes marrow failure. Wanting to do everything to save her girls and others, Ms. Flynn, along with several cancer patients in need of bone marrow, sued the Justice Department to end the ban on compensating marrow donors. A federal appeals court ruled in 2011 that because Congress expressly said that NOTA wouldn’t affect compensation for blood donation, …Congress couldn’t have intended the law to restrict compensation for marrow donations using modern, nonsurgical techniques.
But, still, government is government.
But a year after Ms. Flynn won her case, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it might enact a regulation effectively nullifying the court’s ruling—and thus Ms. Flynn’s victory. …And while HHS fiddles, patients die. Thousands of Americans have died awaiting a marrow transplant since HHS embarked on this needless diversion. How many could have been saved? And of those still alive, how many could have received a transplant faster and with a better-quality donor? This is a lesson in how a faceless, lumbering bureaucracy smothers innovation and optimism.
Here’s a very powerful video from IJ on this issue.
It’s hard to watch that video and think about what you would do if your children faced the risk of death.
Sally Satel of the American Enterprise Institute adds her two cents, writing on kidney sales from the unique perspective of being someone who has received two kidneys solely because of human kindness.
I am almost obscenely lucky. Within a 10-year period, two glorious women rescued me from years of grueling dialysis and a guarantee of premature death. …tremendous generosity allowed me to live many years in peace instead of constant worry. …I understood the general reluctance to donate. After all, giving a kidney is by no means risk-free (roughly a 0.02 percent, or 2 in 10,000 mortality rate, a 3–5 percent rate of serious complications, and perhaps a 25 percent chance of minor complications). Also, some people want to “save” their kidney lest, say, their own child needs it. Then, too, a lot of people are simply put off by surgery, and some handful—no one knows the extent of this group—can’t afford time off and lost wages. Of the 120,000 people waiting for organs, 101,000 are waiting for kidneys.
And for those who aren’t as lucky, Sally points out that current policy puts them in a very difficult position.
My transplants were a matter of private policy. My friends saved me—out of empathy, out of principle, out of affection. I’m beyond fortunate for them, because our public policy is failing far too many people who need organs. Twenty-two people die each day because they cannot survive the wait for an organ; 12 of those die from lack of a kidney in particular. The core of the problem is that prospective donors are legally required to relinquish an organ in the spirit of “altruism.” Despite the risk they take on, they are not allowed to benefit materially in any way. This mandate is part of the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, the law that established the national system of organ procurement and distribution. Any exchange of an organ for any sort of “valuable consideration,” is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a $50,000 fine.
Indeed, current policy is causing people to needlessly die.
The original law was intended in good faith. The point was to prevent a classic free market where only wealthier patients could afford to buy organs; it also sought to avert the scenario where poor donors were the “suppliers” for the well-off. …But more than enough time has now elapsed to conclude with certainty that an altruism-only system is sorely inadequate. And as in so many realms, it is the poor (especially poor minorities) that have suffered the most because of the deficit. They are less likely to be referred for transplant, more likely to die on dialysis, and less likely to receive an organ from the national pool even when they are referred.
One lawmaker is trying to push policy in the right direction.
In May, Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright introduced a bill called the Organ Donor Clarification Act of 2016. Its goal is to permit study of the effect of rewarding people who are willing to save the life of a stranger through living donation: Not through a free market with direct cash payments… Rather than large sums of cash, potential rewards could include a contribution to the donor’s retirement fund, an income tax credit or a tuition voucher, lifetime health insurance, a contribution to a charity of the donor’s choice, or loan forgiveness. Only the government, or a government-designated charity, would be allowed to distribute these benefits. (The funds could potentially come from the savings of stopping dialysis, which costs roughly $80,000 a year per person.) In other words, needy patients would receive kidneys regardless of their ability to reward donors out of their own pockets. …The donors’ kidneys would be distributed to people on the waiting list according to the rules now in place.
Congressman Cartwright’s proposal obviously wouldn’t create a genuine free market. But it would allow compensation to become part of the equation. So his proposal presumably would save lives compared to the current system.
Oh, by the way, it’s worth noting that criminalization of organ sales doesn’t fully stop the practice. Other nations step in, often with policies that are disgusting.
…one of the most horrific markets operating today: Communist China’s selling of organs harvested from prisoners of conscience. Ten thousand “transplant tourists” travel annually to communist China, where they pay top dollar to get organs transplanted on demand. …Free countries may not be able to stop this horrific practice, but they could reduce the demand for these organs by allowing free people to exercise the choice to sell their organs. Currently, free countries rely only on altruism, which has resulted in severe shortages of organs and black markets.
In other words, the policies advocated by Mr. Carney (the first story cited at the start of this column) would enhance the profitability of the Chinese organ-harvesting system. That doesn’t seem like a good outcome.
Here’s a map showing how the kidney trade works right now, with the underground economy playing a big role.
My bottom line is that poor people would get more money and have more legal protections if the system was fully legalized and operating above ground.
P.S. When I wasn’t busy causing trouble in college, I would sell my plasma twice weekly. The $15 I received from the medical company was sufficient to cover my food budget. They exploited me and I exploited them.
I have the same attitude about the War on Drugs. Yes, I get upset that people are mistreated and it irks me as a libertarian that people aren’t free to make their own choices (even if they are dumb choices) about what to put in their bodies.
But what really gets me angry is the absurd misallocation of law enforcement resources. Consider this info from a recent WonkBlog column in the Washington Post about the ever-expanding efforts of government to harass drug users.
Federal figures on drug arrests and drug use over the past three decades tell the story. Drug-possession arrests skyrocketed, from fewer than 200 arrests for every 100,000 people in 1979…, hovering near 400 arrests per 100,000 people. …despite the tough-on-crime push that led to the surge in arrests in recent decades, illicit drug use today is more common among Americans age 12 and older than it was in the early 1980s. Federal figures show no correlation between drug-possession arrests and rates of drug use during that time.
But here’s the part that should upset all of us, even if we don’t like drugs or even if we think they should be illegal.
Instead of focusing on the fight against crimes that actually have victims (such as robbery, murder, rape, assault, etc), the government is squandering an immense about of time, energy, resources, and money on drug arrests.
…arrests for drug possession continue to make up a significant chunk of modern-day police work. “Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime,” the report finds, citing FBI data. “More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year.” In fact, police make more arrests for marijuana possession alone than for all violent crimes combined.
That last sentence is breathtaking. Does anyone think that busting potheads is more important than fighting genuine crime?!?
Do you want an example of law enforcement resources being misallocated?
Well, this story from New Hampshire tells you everything you need to know.
…an 81-year-old grandmother had been growing…the plant as medicine, a way to ease arthritis and glaucoma and help her sleep at night. Tucked away in a raspberry patch and separated by a fence from any neighbors, the plant was nearly ready for harvest when a military-style helicopter and police descended on Sept. 21. In a joint raid, the Massachusetts National Guard and State Police entered her yard and cut down the solitary plant…authorities are using budgeted funds, prior to the end of the federal fiscal year Saturday, to gas up helicopters and do flyovers. …“Is this the way we want our taxpayer money spent, to hassle an 81-year-old and law-abiding patients?” Cutler said.
Gee, I don’t know about you, but I’ll sleep more comfortably tonight knowing that lots of taxpayer money was squandered to seize a pot plant from this dangerous granny!
Still not convinced that law enforcement resources aren’t being wasted? And still not upset that lives are being disrupted and harmed by heavy-handed government.
James Slatic, a California medical marijuana business owner, found out all his family’s bank accounts had been seized by the government one day in January when his 19-year-old daughter tried to buy lunch at the San Jose State University cafeteria and her card was declined. Slatic’s wife tried to transfer money to their daughter, figuring she had simply overdrawn her account, as teenagers are wont to do, but her account wouldn’t work, either. What the Slatics soon learned was the San Diego police had frozen all of their bank accounts: $55,258 from Slatic’s personal checking and savings account; $34,175 from his wife Annette’s account; and a combined $11,260 from the savings accounts of their two teenage daughters, Penny and Lily. …The Slatics’ crimes? None. Or at least, the San Diego District Attorney’s Office hasn’t charged them with any in the nine months since it seized their accounts.
His business also was shut down, which wasn’t good news for him or his employees that are now out on the street.
The trouble for James Slatic began five days before his family’s accounts were frozen, when around 30 San Diego police officers and DEA agents raided Slatic’s medical marijuana business, Med-West Distribution, and seized nearly $325,000 in cash from a safe. …The raid was a crushing blow to Slatic—not to mention his 35 employees, who lost their jobs and benefits without notice.
Here’s a video detailing this disgusting abuse by government.
There is some good news. Voters in several states voted last week to decriminalize pot.
And for those who worry that legalizing marijuana will be a gateway to decriminalizing harder drugs, I encourage you to read this Cato Institute study on what happened after Portugal legalized all drugs early last decade.
This isn’t an argument about whether you should use drugs, like drugs, or approve of drug use. You can be the drug equivalent of a teetotaler like me and still realize that it makes no sense for the government to squander lots of money and hurt lots of lives simply because politicians want to control what people choose to put in their own bodies.
I don’t understand why some people are hostile to libertarians.
After all, our philosophy is based on the notion that we want government to be limited so it is less likely to reach into your wallet or your bedroom.
At the risk of oversimplifying, libertarians think it’s okay for government to safeguard life, liberty, and property from force and fraud, but we’re very leery about giving additional powers to the government.
Consider this article in Slate, which makes it seem as if libertarians are hypocrites if they accept – and express appreciation for – assistance from firefighters.
…an Okanogan, Washington man named Brad Craig thanks firefighters for saving his home. It’s a nice moment, though if you look closely you’ll notice that Craig happened to be wearing a t-shirt that given the circumstances is quite ironic… The shirt says “Lower Taxes + Less Government = More Freedom.” …10 different government organizations are mentioned in the AP story about the large-scale coordinated response that worked to Craig’s benefit.
Wow. I’m not sure whether the author is malicious or clueless, but this is remarkable. He’s basically saying that if you want less government, you must be a hypocrite if you support or benefit from any government.
Which is the same as me asserting that leftists are hypocritical to buy I-Phones because their support for more government means that they therefore must favor total government and no private sector.
There are, of course, some libertarians who persuasively argue that we don’t need government fire departments. And some who even argue that we don’t need any government.
But even if Brad Craig (the guy with the t-shirt) was in one of these categories, that doesn’t make him a hypocrite. Many poor and middle-class families would like a voucherized education system so they could afford to send their kids to private schools. In the absence of such a reform, are they hypocrites for sending their kids to government-run schools?
Obviously not.
Here’s another example. The government today takes money from just about all of us to prop up a poorly designed Social Security system. Are the workers who have been coerced into that system hypocrites if they take Social Security benefits when they retire?
Of course not.
Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller also weighed in on this topic. Here’s some of what he wrote.
I can express a desire for less government interference in my life without rejecting the need for firefighters. Or police, or roads, or Stop signs, or whatever. I understand that it’s actually possible to advocate individual liberty while still admitting the need for government. People have been saying such things for hundreds of years.
I’m very depressed that my beloved Georgia Bulldogs lost to the South Carolina Gamecocks. So instead of writing about a serious topic, we’re going to enjoy some laughs today by reviewing some new anti-libertarian humor.
But I appreciate clever humor, even when I’m the target. This video about Somalia being a libertarian paradise, for instance, is an excellent example of political satire. It takes a stereotype and milks it for some great laughs.
And this image of libertarian utopia also is very amusing.
It’s misleading, of course, since libertarians either have no problem with local paramedic services or they believe in private contracting of such services. But for purposes of humor, this image is great satire since it combines the stereotype of libertarians being all about profit and the stereotype of no basic government services in a libertarian world.
If you liked the above image, here’s some additional anti-libertarian satire that is similarly amusing.
Alleged libertarian views on fire departments can be seen here and here.
Now let’s look at some anti-libertarian humor that falls flat.
As I suggested above, political humor effective is effective when it seizes on something that is true and then applies that stereotype to an absurd situation.
But this next image makes no sense. It implies that there will be more violent, drug-related crime in the absence of prohibition.
But there’s lot of violence surrounding marijuana and other drugs precisely because they are illegal and that creates lucrative opportunities for sellers in the black market.
If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why there was lots of violence during the Al Capone era in the 1920, whereas you don’t see Heineken and Anheuser-Busch engaging in shoot outs today.
Or let’s look at the issue from another perspective. What if the lifestyle fascists banned cigarettes. Right now, with cigarettes being legal, there’s no violence between Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. But imagine what would happen if cigarettes went underground and their distribution was controlled by thugs? Of course there would be violence.
I’m not trying to turn this post into a lecture on drug prohibition, so I’ll stop here. But I did want to expose the intellectual vapidity of the person who put together the second image.
By the way, some of my libertarian friends complain when I share anti-libertarian humor. I have three responses.
1. I share lots of humor mocking statists and regular readers know that advocates of bigger government are my main targets.
2. Self-confident people should have the ability to laugh at themselves and libertarians (thanks in part to Obama) have ample reason to be confident of their ideas.
3. I’m more than happy to share pro-libertarian humor. The only problem is that I’ve only found a handful of examples.
The good news is that I got a 94. Sounds like a solid A, right?
Well, the bad news is that the test wasn’t on a 0-100 scale. The maximum grade was 160, so it seems I’m just a big-government squish!
In my defense, that still ranks me above the vast majority of people in Washington.
That being said, I’m jealous that my former grad school colleague Matt Kibbe (now head of FreedomWorks) got a higher score. Here’s a summary of the test put together by Ben Domenech.
I think I belong on the former category, but I have to confess that I just took a “social attitude” test that was sent to me by a friend in London and the results are a bit disconcerting.
I was horrified to learn that I got a score of 18.75 for socialism. To be sure, I don’t know if that’s 18.75 percent, or 18.75 on a scale of 0-1000.
Regardless, I’d much prefer to get a score of zero on any measure of coercive collectivism.
And what’s the deal with the 40.625 for tenderness? Makes me sound like some sort of new-age wimp who goes around trying to instigate group hugs.
Last but not least, what’s “radicalism”? Is it simply a measure of being outside the mainstream? Without any guidance, there’s no way of interpreting that score.
Even more irritating, the accompanying analysis says that I’m a “moderate” and “a centrist with few strong opinions.”
On the other hand, it also says that I’m a “laissez-faire capitalist” and that I “would generally be described as libertarian.”
My two cents, for what it’s worth, is that the analysis part of this exercise needs some work. But feel free to take the test and add your two cents to the discussion.
The good thing about being a libertarian is that you are motivated by freedom, which is a very noble principle, and you have lots of evidence on your side, whether the issue is economics or personal liberty.
You can’t afford to be smug, of course, since it’s still a big uphill battle to convince politicians not to engage in plunder.
But at least you can sleep soundly at night knowing that you’re on the side of the angels.
And that even means you have self-confidence about your ideas and you can laugh when someone puts together some clever anti-libertarian humor.
Here’s the latest example, sent to me by a TV journalist.
What makes this funny is that libertarians are sometimes quick to defend their rights, even when nobody’s trying to take them away.
But let’s be thankful that there are some libertarians willing to raise a stink about government even if the rest of the world thinks we’re a bit odd. As we’ve seen dozens of times, most recently with the IRS and NSA, bureaucrats and politicians have a compulsive tendency to grab more power and make government more intrusive.
I started yesterday’s post with a mother-in-law joke, so I’ll end today’s post by mentioning the fable of the frog that gets put in a pot of water and doesn’t jump out because the temperature feels comfortable. But then the heat is slowly raised and the frog no longer has the energy to escape when he finally figures out he’s being cooked.
Well, libertarians are the ones who loudly complain when the government puts us into pots.
This morning my friend lucked out and was able to buy several cases of ammo.
“Libertarians are hot”
On the way home he stopped at the gas station where a drop-dead gorgeous blonde was filling up her car at the next pump.
She looked at the ammo in the back of my pickup truck and said in a very sexy voice, “I’m a big believer in barter. Would you be interested in trading sex for ammo?”
He thought a few seconds and asked, “What kinda ammo ya got?”
A month ago, I answered a question about reconciling the absence of libertarian societies with the supposed superiority of libertarian principles.
I gave an uncharacteristically optimistic response, arguing that the world in many ways has become more free thanks to libertarian policies (or, to be more accurate, a decline in statism).
This led to several follow-up questions, mostly premised on the notion that I must be smoking crack to think government has become less of a burden. My defense would be that the world is more free than it was 40 years ago, but probably less free than it was 10 years ago, so it depends on your benchmark. And I definitely agree that the world is trending toward less freedom (with these charts being a very sobering example).
But the question that caught my eye, and makes for a good follow-up, comes from a reader in Missouri: “Why aren’t libertarians more persuasive?”
To elaborate, the question assumes that libertarianism is the right approach and that the evidence supports libertarian policies, so another way of phrasing the question is: “What is wrong with libertarians that they can’t sell libertarian ideas?”
The easy and simple answer is to say the problem is that the people are too susceptible to being bribed by politicians. As illustrated by the chart, more and more Americans are getting hooked on the heroin of government dependency.
But I think the reader is really asking whether the problem with libertarianism is…well, libertarians.
This is a fair question. Having given hundreds of speeches and engaged in thousands of conversation, I can say that many people make the following assumptions about libertarians.
1. On economic policy, libertarians don’t care about the poor. Since I work on fiscal issues, this is the one I deal with all the time. I try to explain – ad nauseam – that we want smaller government and more economic freedom because faster growth is the only effective way to lower poverty and help the poor. But a lot of people think we’re defending the status quo.
2. On social policy, libertarians are libertines, embracing and endorsing hedonism. This is probably the most common stereotype, and there definitely are libertarians who are motivated by a desire to get rid of laws that impinge on their freedom to do things like smoke pot. But the libertarian position is not that pot is good, but rather that prohibition is bad.
3. On foreign policy, libertarians are oblivious to external threats such as al Qaeda. I’ve had several people, for instance, complain about Ron Paul opposing the killing of Osama bin Laden, and they assume that means libertarians are somehow the modern-day equivalent of Soviet appeasers. Yet our message is that we favor national defense, but that we think we’ll have far less need to defend ourselves if we stop intervening in ways that have nothing to do with national security.
4. And in general, libertarians are ultra-individualists who reject concepts such as community, family, and nation. While it’s true that libertarians are motivated by individual freedom, opposition to government coercion does not imply that people can’t be good neighbors or good parents. Indeed, we would argue that a free society promotes private virtue. And there’s nothing inconsistent with patriotism and libertarianism, as illustrated by this t-shirt.
Looking at what I’ve written, I realize I haven’t answered the question. All I’ve done is identified some stereotypes and explained why they’re not accurate.
So I’ll simply conclude by making a rather unremarkable observation that overcoming these perceptions is a big challenge for libertarians – assuming that we want to make greater inroads with the masses.
P.S. I got nagged by several readers for not posting a “Question of the Week” last weekend. What can I say, I’m old and forgetful. But you can always peruse previous versions if you’re somehow suffering.
I was a bit disappointed that I only scored a 94 out of a possible 160, but my excuse is that it was really a test of anarcho-capitalism. And as I explained when sharing this amusing video, I’m only in favor of getting rid of 90 percent of government.
But maybe the simplest test of libertarianism (and also the simplest test of whether you’re a decent human being) is to see whether you’re upset by the following story.
Here are some of the truly disgusting details from the OC Weekly. First we learn about the victims of this government abuse.
…he and his wife purchased the Anaheim building, which has suites for up to 12 offices, in 2003 and that her dental practice was located there. …Over the years, they’ve rented to a variety of tenants, from insurance companies to an immigration service.
This unfortunate couple rented space to a group that seemed to comply with federal and state legal requirements.
…on June 11, 2011, he began renting to a club called ReLeaf Health & Wellness. …Because of the Ogden memo, because medical marijuana was legal under state law, and because his tenants held business permits from the city, he figured he wasn’t doing anything illegal. “I am a law-abiding citizen,” he says. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”
But the city of Anaheim and the jackboots at the Drug Enforcement Administration targeted the tenant, and then decided to try and steal the property of the landlord!
…On Dec. 2, 2011, an undercover officer posing as a patient with a legitimate doctor’s recommendation for cannabis—something required of all entrants to the collective—”purchased 4.2 net grams of marijuana for $37.” The investigation ended there, but the single sale…was enough evidence for the DEA to argue that the otherwise-harmless computer engineer and dentist should lose their retirement-investment property. …The lawyer for the engineer and dentist who may be in the process of losing their nest egg is Matthew Pappas. …”The only evidence in this case is a $37 purchase of medical marijuana and an anonymous comment on a website that anybody could have written,” Pappas says. “For this, they want to take a $1.5 million building.”
You may be thinking that you missed something, that certainly the federal government wouldn’t steal an entire building simply because a tenant may have broken a silly drug law. Especially when it’s very ambiguous whether a crime actually took place.
But you didn’t miss a thing. This is pure, unadulterated, evil government.
And if you’re not already feeling some libertarian blood flowing through your veins, here are some additional examples of government thuggery.
Now we have a George Will column that will get you very angry. At least if you’re a good person.
Will starts by describing the federal bureaucracy’s attack on an innocent woman for a non-crime.
…our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled. Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask if the whistling constituted “harassment” of a marine mammal, which is an “environmental crime.” NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment — but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act, intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.
But it gets worse, because the federal jack-boots then raided her office (I don’t even know what “jack-boots” are, but they signify government thuggery, and that’s definitely a good description of what happened).
…after this bizarre charge — that she lied about the interaction with the humpback that produced no charges — more than a dozen federal agents, led by one from NOAA, raided her home. They removed her scientific photos, business files and computers.
This unfortunate woman has also been charged with another non-crime.
She has also been charged with the crime of feeding killer whales when she and two aides were in a dinghy observing them feeding on strips of blubber torn from their prey — a gray whale. To facilitate photographing the killers’ feeding habits, she cut a hole in one of the floating slabs of blubber and, through the hole, attached a rope to stabilize the slab while a camera on a pole recorded the whales’ underwater eating. So she is charged with “feeding” killer whales that were already feeding on a gray whale they had killed. She could more plausibly be accused of interfering with the feeding.
As an aside, Will notes that the NOAA bureaucrats have little regard for the Constitution.
Six years ago, NOAA agents, who evidently consider the First Amendment a dispensable nuisance, told Black’s scientific colleagues not to talk to her and to inform them if they were contacted by her or her lawyers. Since then she has not spoken with one of her best friends.
Most important, he concludes with the key point about how all of us are threatened by Leviathan.
In 1980, federal statutes specified 3,000 criminal offenses; by 2007, 4,450. They continue to multiply. Often, as in Black’s case, they are untethered from the common-law tradition ofmens rea, which holds that a crime must involve a criminal intent — a guilty mind. Legions of government lawyers inundate targets like Black with discovery demands, producing financial burdens that compel the innocent to surrender in order to survive. The protracted and pointless tormenting of Black illustrates the thesis of Harvey Silverglate’s invaluable 2009 book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.” Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, chillingly demonstrates how the mad proliferation of federal criminal laws — which often are too vague to give fair notice of what behavior is proscribed or prescribed — means that “our normal daily activities expose us to potential prosecution at the whim of a government official.” Such laws, which enable government zealots to accuse almost anyone of committing three felonies in a day, do not just enable government misconduct, they incite prosecutors to intimidate decent people who never had culpable intentions. And to inflict punishments without crimes. …The more Americans learn about their government’s abuse of criminal law for capricious bullying, the more likely they are to recoil in a libertarian direction and put Leviathan on a short leash.
Utterly disgusting. As Glenn Reynolds periodically suggests, “tar, feathers” would be an appropriate way of dealing with these hyenas.
By the way, government thuggery is not limited to the crowd in Washington.
P.S. For the second time, I feel compelled to apologize to Hyenas. They’re part of the natural ecosystem. Thuggish bureaucrats, by contrast, are a malignant and artificial force.
And since readers are sending in lots of good material, I’ll continue to share the really good jokes and cartoons.
Is this latest cartoon a false reading of libertarianism? Of course. But it’s funny since it takes a core truth (individual responsibility is good) and turns it into a caricature (you’re on your own, regardless).
And just to show that I’m not becoming a soft-headed statist, here are links to some of my favorite jokes mocking leftists.
Conservatives and libertarians supposedly agree with each other on economic issues, but disagree to some extent on social issues and foreign policy.
This is generally accurate. Principled conservatives (as opposed to the Bush/Rove variety) believe in limited government and free enterprise, so there is agreement on the economic side.
And there is disagreement on social issues, at least in terms of victimless crimes such as drugs, gambling and prostitution (though I actually think the disagreement could be bridged if libertarians went out of their way to explain that legalizing the aforementioned activities is not the same as personally approving of their abuse and if conservatives went out of their way to do a cost-benefit analysis to see whether criminalization makes matters worse rather than better).
But there may be a more fundamental difference between conservatives and libertarians (notice I said difference, which is not the same as disagreement). A column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal looks at the Tea Party movement and uses survey data to conclude that the protests against big government are driven by moral concerns.
…the passion of the tea-party movement is, in fact, a moral passion. It can be summarized in one word: not liberty, but karma. The notion of karma comes with lots of new-age baggage, but it is an old and very conservative idea. It is the Sanskrit word for “deed” or “action,” and the law of karma says that for every action, there is an equal and morally commensurate reaction. Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering. No divine intervention is required; it’s just a law of the universe, like gravity.
So what does this have to do with libertarians and conservatives? Well, according to this research, there are some big differences between the two groups.
Last year my colleagues and I placed a nearly identical statement on our research site, YourMorals.org: “Everyone should be free to do as they choose, so long as they don’t infringe upon the equal freedom of others.” Responses from 3,600 Americans showed that self-described libertarians agreed with the statement most strongly, but liberals were right behind them. Social conservatives, who, according to national polls, make up the bulk of the tea party, were more tepid in their endorsement. …In our survey for YourMorals.org, we asked Americans how much they agreed with a variety of statements about fairness and liberty, including this one: “Ideally, everyone in society would end up with roughly the same amount of money.” Liberals were evenly divided on it, but conservatives and libertarians firmly rejected it. On more karmic notions of fairness, however, conservatives and libertarians begin to split apart. Here’s a statement about the positive side of karma: “Employees who work the hardest should be paid the most.” Everyone agrees, but conservatives agree more enthusiastically than liberals and libertarians, whose responses were identical. And here’s a statement about the negative side of karma: “Whenever possible, a criminal should be made to suffer in the same way that his victim suffered.” Liberals reject this harsh notion, and libertarians mildly reject it. But conservatives are slightly positive about it. …Libertarians are closer to conservatives on two of the five main psychological “foundations” of morality that we study—concerns about care and fairness (as described above). But on the other three psychological foundations—group loyalty, respect for authority and spiritual sanctity—libertarians are indistinguishable from liberals and far apart from conservatives. …When you think about morality as a way of binding individuals together, it’s no wonder that libertarians (who prize individual liberty above all else) part company with conservatives. …The tea-party movement is a blend of libertarians and conservatives, but it is far from an equal blend, and it’s not clear how long it can stay blended. …The rank-and-file tea partiers think that liberals turned America upside down in the 1960s and 1970s, and they want to reverse many of those changes. …they want to live in a country in which hard work and personal responsibility pay off and laziness, cheating and irresponsibility bring people to ruin. Give them liberty, sure, but more than that: Give them karma.
This is all quite interesting, but I think it overstates the potential for disagreement between libertarians and conservatives. Unless I’m missing something, varying opinions on group loyalty, respect for authority, and spiritual sanctity shouldn’t be a hindrance to a coalition against subsidies, handouts, and bailouts.
International Liberty 
