[Also posted at
Reload]
A Libertarian Party candidate, Bruce Guthrie, entered the Senate race this week, and I found myself strongly disagreeing with his decision to run, even though I've always considered myself more of a libertarian than a liberal and have often supported Libertarian Party candidates in the past. Even more frustrating for me is that the Democrat in the race, Maria Cantwell, has a very poor record on civil liberties, including votes for the Patriot Act, praise for the decision to include anti-meth provisions within it, a complete inability to articulate opposition to the War in Iraq, and an unwillingness to stand up to President Bush's attempts at consolidating power and putting dangerously authoritarian jurists on the Supreme Court.
As I tried to
explain to Guthrie when he jumped into a Sound Politics thread, a major aspect of the threat to our liberty in this country is the fact that we have a Republican-led Congress unable to stand up to a President with very anti-libertarian views (or at least what I've always understood would constitute anti-libertarian views). For that reason alone, having an opposition party of any type gain ground in Congress is essential, even if they're not ideal on every issue. As bad as Maria Cantwell has been, she's a necessary part of a larger mechanism - the only larger mechanism that exists right now - that can hope to do anything to curb the President's power. And we need either a serious candidate to challenge her in the Democratic Primary, or we need to hold our noses and vote for her in November. Doing anything to put a Republican in that seat hurts the libertarian cause. But I'm starting to seriously question whether what I've taken for granted to be the libertarian cause is really what other Libertarians consider to be the libertarian cause.
Most people have seen the Nolan chart before. It has two axes for determining where you lie politically. There's a liberal-conservative axis and a libertarian-totalitarian (or authoritarian) axis. When I take these tests, I generally end up being close to the line between liberal and libertarian, where I'd expect to be. But I've also noticed that if I change my answer to questions of pure economics to be more in tune with free market answers, I will move along the libertarian axis, not along the liberal-conservative axis. Why is that?
My understanding of this chart has always been that the liberal-conservative axis represents the role the government should play in balancing free markets with other concerns, like public health, the environment, etc, while the libertarian-authoritarian axis represents the role the government should play in balancing freedom with security. I've obviously known for a while that it's never really been that simple, but until this week, I'd never truly thought through the inconsistencies of having both axes hinge upon economics. It has essentially merged liberal and libertarian together, and disguised the fact that the difference between liberal and libertarian can exist on the left as much as it does on the right.
The best way to appreciate this is to witness the confusion over the opposition to Maria Cantwell among Democrats. The typical refrain is that she has angered the far left. This is blatantly wrong. She's a hero to the far left (and for good reason). She's fought both Enron and the oil companies, and fought the unconstrained conservative economic policies that have given them so much influence to negatively affect the environment and to make it difficult for many to pay for their energy needs. The people who are most upset with Cantwell are the libertarian Democrats, the ones who were terrified that she sat quietly as Sam Alito was confirmed to the Supreme Court and doesn't seem to have any problem with an administration that feels unrestrained in spying on its citizens. These are issues that belong on the libertarian-totalitarian, not the liberal-conservative "left-right" axis. Why? Because they don't deal with our economic system.
Mollie at the Liberal Girl Next Door wrote a very nice post this week that once again made it clear to me why I want to make a real distinction between liberal and libertarian. She wrote about the crisis within our public schools, something I've also grown to have a bit of a dissent from the traditional liberal viewpoint on. I've found that the average liberal looks at the failures of so many of our schools and sees the problem and solution in economic terms. I look at the problems with our schools and see it as a societal problem, where the schools that struggle the most are ones in high crime areas where many of the parents are behind bars. And there's certainly an economic factor to it too, as many single parents have to work long hours that keep them from becoming more involved in their children's learning. But there is too strong of a belief on the left that just building new schools and buying new books and paying teachers more is going to fix it. I feel that understanding that this is a problem that goes beyond money is libertarian thinking - not because I don't think government can ever fix problems within our economic system - but because this particular problem is one that won't be fixed with money alone.
On the opposite side the left-right spectrum on this issue, we have John Stossel, who believes that free market ideals are going to fix the problems with education in this country. I was mostly unaware of Stossel's political philosophy until I saw him on the Colbert Report and he basically said that if there was no FAA, the free market would just guarantee that planes would still be safe. As someone who's actually tested flight control software at Boeing and worked with the FAA, I had to rewind the TiVo several times before I was able to convince myself that I wasn't just imagining what he just said. And actually, the saddest thing is not that Stossel believes in this hair-brained notion that the free market solves all problems, but that I found out that he thinks it makes him a libertarian. And what might be even sadder is that most people in the Libertarian Party actually agree with him. When I tried to use my own personal knowledge of this at a Libertarian web site to explain why the FAA has actually been necessary, I was belittled by a commenter and told to join the Green Party.
Over at the Hammer Of Truth this week, Michael Hampton posted a thread about unifying the Libertarian Party that sparked the discussion I referenced above. The spam filter deleted many of my comments (I trust that it was an accident, as I think I may have tried to post a very colorful word), but I'm tired of sitting on the sidelines and watching the Libertarian Party relegate itself to fringe status at a time when a meaningful libertarian movement absolutely needs to happen in this country.
The root of my disagreement is simple. Free markets are simply not the logical extension of free will and real libertarianism is separate from economics. I believe that government provides the best security when it guarantees total freedom to make our own moral decisions and respects basic rights (both here and abroad), but I don't believe that government provides the best economic security when it guarantees total freedom for companies to define their own "morality." Individual free will can exist on its own, isolated from the society as a whole. But corporations and individuals operating within an economic system can have wide reaching effects, and true liberty stems from people having the ability to both participate in and regulate this system through democratic means. Forcing free market solutions within this framework is not the equivalent of having total freedom within the system. Free markets are not infallible; they can fail us, and oftentimes they do.
The best living proof we have of this today is the crisis in our health care system. The free market folks look at the American health care system, which is the most privatized yet least efficient and most expensive, and still think that the solution is to let it ride the winds of the free market even more. If the Libertarian Party is ever going to be taken seriously, it needs to understand that a person without health care doesn't give a fuck that, in theory, they have more freedom than someone in France who can actually see a doctor without going broke. There are aspects to the economic system that we all share that have to be regulated by an agent for the general public. Sometimes that regulation will be inefficient and wasteful, but the answer is to improve it, not just throw it away.
Anyone who reads my Drug War Roundup diaries knows how strongly I feel that we have to end the war on drugs. Looking at politics from what I've always considered a libertarian perspective, I've become very alarmed recently at how urgent it is that we start talking about this problem, especially now that the current administration is doing a lot of things to merge the war on drugs into the war on terror. And I don't think it's a serious problem because I write about it. I write about it because I think it's a serious problem. It has become the single most important factor in preserving the lingering racial divide in this country and the failure to provide opportunities in areas where many drug markets operate under a cloud of violence. And it's a major contributor to other huge problems we face, like Latin American and South Asian anti-Americanism and the inability for millions of sick Americans to receive proper pain treatment. I've always known that it was a mess, but the more I've researched it, and the more I read of the damage being done as we carry this folly of a policy towards its logical extreme all across the globe, the more I realize we're nearing a breaking point.
For years, this country has had so much wealth in comparison to other nations that we could get away with wasting money chasing this unattainable goal, but the mission has grown so large (I'm not sure I can even list all the nations that our anti-drug officials operate in, mainly because much of it is done without much press coverage and fanfare) that the bubble is going to pop soon. The question becomes, what do we do then, once we no longer have the ability to even slow the amount of drugs coming into this country? The obvious answer for any libertarian should be that we have to legalize the behavior and regulate the market, in order to do whatever we can to keep our children from being able to just buy whatever drugs they want off the streets. But how can Libertarians do that if they still believe that the free market is infallible and all government regulation is bad? Does anyone really believe that we can go from drugs being illegal to there being an unregulated market overnight? How can the Libertarian Party seriously believe that it can be a viable alternative to the two party system when its economic beliefs prevent the only sensible solution to drug prohibition, the most egregious affront to personal liberty and free will in our time?