New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State

5/28/14 1:16 PM

New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State

A new libertarianism is coming. It is more accommodating, less strident, more pragmatic, less hard core, more moderate. It is more in line with mainstream American values
and less opposed to core elements of a mixed economy and the modern welfare state. It
is being developed in libertarian think tanks, political science departments, and campaign headquarters across the country. If the new doctrine keeps spreading and makes
its way into political platforms and public policy, the last major American political doctrine even nominally defending individual rights will be gone.
Lets call the new doctrine simply New Libertarianism. And lets look at where it came
from, why it is importantly different, and why it is generating both excitement and contention. To do that, we need to understand where the current libertarianism came from.
And to do that, we need to review some history.
*****
The term libertarian has long been used to refer to anyone
who believes that citizens have rights and that a proper political system is one that protects those rights. The 1934 textbook The American Problem of Government called Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and
Benjamin Franklin convinced and fairly consistent libertarians. These men believed a
good government protects rights to life, liberty, and property. In the late 1800s there
were also writers who thought rights would be more secure if there were no government at all. These writers also called themselves libertarians.
In the mid 1900s, there were lively debates about what rights citizens actually have. The
rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were widely
accepted. But Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed to go further. His New Bill of Rights
(1944), included, for example, rights to a decent home, a good education, and adequate
medical care. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
added, among others, a right to paid holidays and a right to good working conditions.
Conflicts then necessitated debates. How will everyone be provided with housing and
education without violating the rights of citizens to choose their own profession and
keep their earnings? Who will fund the unemployment insurance, the pensions, the
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medical care, and the paid vacations if employers and other citizens do not voluntarily
provide them?
Out of these debates grew the main sort of libertarianism of the last fifty
years. It was based on a principle articulated by Murray Rothbard in the
1970s this way: No one may initiate the use or threat of physical violence
against the person or property of anyone else. The idea had roots in John
Locke, Americas founders, and more immediately Ayn Rand, but it was Rothbards formulation that became standard. It became known as the non-aggression principle or
since Rothbard took it as the starting point of political theory and not the conclusion of
philosophical justificationthe non-aggression axiom. In the late twentieth century, anyone who accepted this principle could call himself, or could find himself called, a libertarian, even if he disagreed with Rothbards own insistence that rights are best protected
when there is no government at all.
The non-aggression principle sets boundaries on what is and is not a right. If a proposed
right to paid vacation would conflict with the right of an employer to offer whatever
employment terms he wants, then the proposed vacation pay has to be rejected, since
forcing the employer to pay for vacation time would amount to a threat of physical violence against him or his property. The same logic applies to minimum wage laws, government-provided pensions (Social Security), tax-funded schools, regulated medical
care, prohibition on recreational drugs, an enforced postal monopoly, and many other
aspects of a mixed economy and the modern welfare state. All violate the non-aggression principle. Over the objection of left libertarians who reject the content of Rothbards axiom and of Objectivists who reject its being an axiom, libertarianism has come
to be seen as a principled defense of laissez-faire capitalism based on the doctrine that
people have an inalienable right to be secure in their person and property.
From the time of
the Progressives,
both Republicans
and
Democrats
increasingly abandoned this doctrine, even if they kept some of the old language.
Woodrow Wilson (D), said liberty is an attribute of societies, not of individuals. A society is free if it runs without obstructions. It is still intolerable, he said, for the governhttp://www.johnmccaskey.com/joomla/index.php/blog/71-new-libertarians

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ment to interfere with our individual activities, except where it is necessary to interfere
with them in order to free them. Herbert Hoover (R) insisted he was an individualist,
but of a distinctly American sort. He was proud to have abandoned the laissez faire of
the 1700s and said the first consideration in government should be a high and increasing
standard of living. This preference for advancing the collective over protecting the individual has become the norm. John F. Kennedy (D) said, Ask not what your country can
do for you; ask what you can do for your country. John McCain (R) took Country
First as his 2008 presidential campaign theme. Before Clarence Thomass 1991 Supreme
Court nomination hearings got redirected into allegations of sexual misconduct, the primary attack against Thomaslaunched in the opening statement by then Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Bidenwas that Thomas actually still believed in
the doctrine of natural law and inalienable natural rights. The Cato Institute, the countrys leading libertarian think tank, paraphrased Bidens attack as Are you now or have
you ever been a libertarian?
The Libertarian Party was founded in December, 1971. Although it is the third largest
political party in the United States, it remains tiny. Much more influential now is the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. Congressman Ron Paul was the Libertarian Partys presidential candidate in 1988, but in 2008 and 2012 he sought the Republican Partys presidential nomination instead. His son Rand Paul, also a self-described libertarian, is a Republican senator. Joining him on the Senates libertarian wing is another
young Republican, Ted Cruz of Texas, a Tea Party favorite. In the House, Republican
Justin Amash of Michigan, another self-described libertarian, is chairman of the increasingly influential House Liberty Caucus. Libertarianism is becoming more mainstream.
But the cause is not, or not just, that Americans are warming up to libertarians laissezfaire principle of non-aggression. It is that libertarianism itself is changing. It is becoming less distinctive, less different from other political ideologies. And some old-timers
dont like this.
Rothbard was an anarchist. He held that
rights could best be protected if there was no
government. After all, he argued, governments have been the worst violators of rights
in history, much worse than private companies have ever been. Private companies
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could, he claimed, provide the same protection that people had commonly sought in
governments. This claim was rebutted by the Harvard philosophy professor Robert
Nozick. Nozick argued that even if we adopt the non-aggression principle and start
with private companies that provide legislative, judicial, and enforcement services,
these companies will become indistinguishable from a minimalist, Lockean or Jeffersonian, rights-protecting, laissez-faire government. The companies executives would for all
purposes act just as mayors, sheriffs, governors, congressmen, and judges would. Nozicks 1974 Anarchy, Utopia and State became the standard theoretical defense of libertarian government.
But Nozick is increasingly being replaced as libertarianisms canonical theorist by F. A.
Hayek, Nobel-winning economist and author of The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Our entire civilization, Hayek insisted, depends on capitalism.
There is simply no other way to inform individuals how to contribute as much as possible to societys total product. No central authority could ever match the economic efficiency of many people left to make their own decisions. If government just sticks to establishing and enforcing an objective set of laws, a spontaneous order will emerge and
prosperity will be maximized. Hayek did not defend the propriety of laissez-faire capitalism by saying government regulation and coercion violate the individual rights of citizens. Rather, he said, arbitrary governmental coercion is bad because it prevents a person from using his mental powers to the full and consequently from making the greatest
contribution he can to his community.
So Hayek is no strict laissez-faire defender of free markets. He insists that laws should
be objectively written and consistently enforced, but he offers no strict principles about
what those laws should prohibit or allow. He himself believes providing minimum
food, shelter, and clothing, providing social insurance, prohibiting certain kinds of
trade, enforcing minimum wages, providing an education system, running public works
projects, regulating techniques of production, and regulating factories are all legitimate
functions of government. He might object to some of these on grounds of economic efficiency, but he has no objection on moral grounds. He also has no objection to laws justified on religious groundsagain, as long as they are written objectively and enforced
consistently.
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ory. But another is crucial. This is libertarians growing adoption of the Progressives
doctrine of social justice. To understand this, again, some history is needed.
*****
Any theory of individual political rights is
necessarily based on a morality of individualism. Whether you say individuals have a
right to life, liberty, and property, or to food,
clothing, and shelter, or to free speech and unhindered religious practice, or to equal
wages and low-cost medical care, you put at the center of your theory an individual demanding something for his or her personal benefit. You hold that individuals may justifiably place demands on societyeven if the demand is just to be left alone. In the Enlightenment and in America into the nineteenth century, this was not particularly controversial. Individualism, selfishness, and egoism were not treated with the disdain they are nowadays. As late as 1888, John Oberly, a commissioner in the Department of the Interior could get to the motherhood-and-apple-pie summary of his public
report on what a good job he was doing by saying he was spreading the exalting egotism of American civilization, where a man could say I instead of we, This is
mine instead of This is ours.
But the morality of individualism came under strong attack in the mid-nineteenth century, first in Europe and then in the United States. In 1844, young Karl Marx railed against
how the self-interest, practical need, and egoism of the everyday Jew had become the norm among Christians. In France, Auguste Comte invented the term altruism to oppose egoism. He said that we must consider society as prior to the individual. People should give up their selfishness. A proper political philosophy could not tolerate rights, for such a notion rests on individualism. Rights are absurd and immoral.
They must be eliminated. In the American South in 1857, the defender of slavery George
Fitzhugh said the present philosophy of human equality, selfishness, individual sovereignty, and right of private judgment may have stimulated a revolution, but it is false,
untenable, absurd, and must be replaced. He rightly observed that if that philosophy
were true, then clearly slavery would be wrong.
The moral attacks on individualism of the mid 1800s turned into the Progressives athttp://www.johnmccaskey.com/joomla/index.php/blog/71-new-libertarians

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tacks on laissez-faire capitalism in the 1910s and 20s. In 1901, a baker named Joseph
Lochner received his second fine for violating a law against letting an employee work
more than sixty hours in a week. Lochner challenged the conviction and the case made
it to the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled in Lochners favor, saying that a
labor law regulating terms between employer and employee amounted to an unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual
to contract. But things soon changed. Wilson sought to ensure the machinery of society
ran freely even if this meant interfering with individual liberty. In the 1910s and 20s,
the United States got a federal bank, national factory regulations, national labor laws,
major public works projects, a ubiquitous and compulsory government-run education
system, and a national income tax. Roosevelts New Deal accelerated the change and
brought a national old-age pension program, laws to support labor unions, a national
lending program to provide citizens with housing, and large government-run farms.
The Federal government became the largest employer in the nation. The so-called
Lochner Era ended in 1937, when the Supreme Court ruled that voluntarily agreed
terms of employer and employee could legitimately be overruled when doing so served
the interests of the community or the public interest. All the main pillars of the
modern mixed economy and welfare state were laid.
The moral standard for political institutions had changed. No longer
was it protection of individual
rights. It became the advancement
of social justice. Wilson: We must inspirit our people with the prospects of social justice. Hoover: We now legislate for social and economic justice. Social Justice: A Critical
Essay was published in 1910, Essays in Social Justice in 1915, Stephen Leacocks The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice in 1920. And the term took on a particular meaning. Leacocks Elements of Political Science, probably the most popular textbook on political theory all through the 1910s and 20s, said, The view that social justice demands that the individual should be left in possession of his natural rights may therefore be discarded.
It had to be discarded, for the narrow individualism of the nineteenth century refused
to recognize the social duty of supporting somebody elses grandmother, Leacock
wrote. Social justice came to mean altruism applied to politics: Everyone should work
for the good of others. Trade between citizens must be regulated to meet societal goals.
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Nearly all income above a certain amount had to be handed over for distribution by
government authorities. (Federal marginal tax rates were above 90% for most of the
1940s and 50s.) Social justice came to mean equality for all.
This norm was upset in 1971, with publication of John Rawls A Theory of
Justice. Harvard professor Rawls worked from a simple premise: A rational and self-interested poor person should not demand equality if he
could be better off with inequality. A smaller share of a bigger pie might
be better than an equal share of a smaller pie. The poor person should be content with
inequality if he himself is better off. This part of Rawls theory (the difference
principle) came to be the new standard of social justice. Economic inequalities in a society should be distributed to the greatest advantage of the least advantaged. That social
institution is morally best which best serves the interests of the poor.
In a field dominated by calls for economic equality, Rawls was at first seen as a reactionary. To be a defender of inequality was to be a defender of laissez-faire capitalism.
But the tide soon turned, and Rawls became the primary political theoretician of Americas political left. His argument was forceful. There is no good reason for the rational
poor to shoot themselves in the collective foot by demanding equality, when inequality
would serve them better. Let the rich keep some of their money, as long as the poor realize a net benefit. By the late 1970s nearly all political philosophy took Rawls standard
for redistribution of wealth as its reference. Robert Nozick was not only answering Murray Rothbards anarchism. He also said, Political philosophers must now either work
within Rawlss theory or explain why not.
Rawls became the standard theoretician of the political left. Hayek replaced Nozick as
the standard theoretician of the libertarian right. And that is where American political
theory stood at the end of 2006. And thats when the foundations of libertarian philosophy got hit by an earthquake.
*****

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Brink Lindsey, then Vice President for Research at the Cato

Institute, called on libertarians to abandon the doctrine that a good government is one that protects the rights of its citizens, abandon the non-aggression principle, and instead adopt the moral standard of social justice
advanced by Rawls. By Lindseys reasoning, free markets are not moral because they
protect individuals rights to keep the fruits of their own labors and to freely contract
with other individuals doing the same but are moral because they benefit the poor. Period.
The proposed new libertarianism would be a marriage of left and right, liberaltarianism; it would be a marriage of Rawls and Hayek, Rawlsekianism.
Brink Lindsey and his collaborator on this, Will Wilkinson, leftor, many speculate,
were made to leavethe Cato Institute. But the cat was out of the bag. There was now a
new libertarianism to be reckoned with, advanced by one of Catos most distinguished
thinkers. The American Conservative, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon took notice. Lindsey
took the proposal to academic venues across America. A conference dedicated to it was
held at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University in October of 2008. The
idea was picked up at leading academic centers of libertarian philosophy, such as the
University of Arizonas Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and Brown Universitys
Political Theory Project.
Then, in October 2012, after the organization appointed a new president, John A.
Allison, Brink Lindsey returned to the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow. He has since become, again, Vice President for Research.
Lindsey calls for a union of progressive ends and libertarian means. He proposes a compromise: Lift regulations to encourage economic growth. Then use the resulting wealth
to improve the social safety net. Treat economic policy issues as empirical questions
about what works rather than as tests of ideological commitment. When we do this, and
make some adjustment to the details, libertarians should, Lindsey believes, accept policies they have been rejecting. Go ahead, tax the rich, but dont do it when theyre being
productive. . . . And tax everybodys energy consumption. Go ahead and have the government fund unemployment insurance, pensions for the indigent, health care for those
with catastrophic expenses, various programs for the poor.
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In academia, the call for a Rawlsian libertarianism has been

defended most vigorously by (my colleague) John Tomasi,
professor of political science at Brown University. His book,
Free Market Fairness, was released in February 2012 and for
at least a year, there was, on average, at least one colloquium, lecture, or workshop a
month on it, at venues that include the Cato Institute, Princeton University, Stanford
University, University of Notre Dame, George Mason University, and several forums in
Europe. Tomasi calls for an end to the antagonism between the Rawlsian critics of free
markets on the left and the Hayekian defenders of them on the right. He is being hailed
as one of Americas leading social and political philosophers and his book as the
very best philosophical treatment of libertarian thought, ever. Stalwarts of libertarian
and conservative thought, such as Charles Murray, Michael Zuckert, Richard Epstein,
and Loren Lomasky are cheering Tomasis proposal.
A more accessible treatment, for a non-academic audience, is Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, published in 2012 by the young scholar and recent graduate of the
PhD program at the University of Arizona, Jason Brennan. Brennan claims there have
been three kinds of libertarians: classical liberals, such as Adam Smith, John Locke, F. A.
Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Americas founders; hard libertarians such as Ayn
Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Nozick; and neoclassical liberals, such as Brennan,
Tomasi, and others of the new Rawlsian doctrine. The first group were defenders of liberty but not as doctrinaire as the hard libertarians, Brennan says. And those hard libertarians of the late 1900s, he assures his readers, are now only a fringe part of libertarianism. (Older libertarians have been appalled to be so marginalized.) Libertarians that are
now the mainline, Brennan reports, are not dogmatically committed to the non-aggression principle. They defend their commitment to free-market institutions because these
institutions are the ones that best serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged.
The new mainstream libertarians are not ideologically opposed to, say, government
schools or social safety nets.
The academic new libertarians have a web site, BleedingHeartLibertarians.com. Regular contributors include Brennan, fellow Arizona graduate and John
Tomasis co-author Matt Zwolinski, and a dozen others dedicated to, as the masthead
say, free markets and social justice. Guest contributors include Tomasi, Lindsey,
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Wilkinson, the University of Arizonas Founding Director of the Freedom Center David
Schmidtz, George Mason Universitys BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism Peter
Boettke, and other young and influential scholars.
Another prominent defender of free markets, Arthur Brooks, president of
the American Enterprise Institute, a large think tank dedicated to limited government,
private enterprise, and individual liberty, is actively promoting the bleeding heart defense of capitalism. Brooks calls it conservative social justice. He says that the problem
with Social Security and Medicare is not that they take money from one group of citizens and give it to another. It is that the programs impending insolvency imperils the
social safety net for the neediest citizens. New approaches to education are needed, he
says, not because it is immoral to educate the children of some parents using money
forcibly taken from others but because poor children deserve good schools.
The young Senator Ted Cruz, mentioned above as a Tea Party favorite, a
thought leader on the Republicans libertarian wing, says his party needs a new message. Republicans should conceptualize and articulate every domestic policy with a
single-minded focus on easing assent up the economic ladder. We should assess policy
with a Rawlsian lens.
New Libertarians endorse many conventional liberal social programs, including government schools (Adam Smith, they note, gave it limited support and Thomas Jefferson, after all, founded the University of Virginia), anti-trust laws (Milton Friedman endorsed
them), government-funded health care (Hayek allowed it), government pensions
(Hayek again), product regulation (Hayek), and minimum wages (Hayek).
Many New Libertarians are now particularly enthusiastic about making welfare universal, using what is called a basic income guarantee (BIG): Instead of giving welfare money only to those who can claim to need it, send welfare checks to everyone, and then, using taxes, take the money back from those who dont really need it. Having everyone on
the dole is supposed to be more efficient and to create fewer weird incentives than conventional welfare.
*****

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New Libertarians confuse benefit and justification. Not all

benefits, no matter how wonderful, make legitimate standards of right and wrong. Having grandchildren is a wonderful benefit of
having children. There should be no end of meetings, books, and web
sites about the joys of grandparenting. But if you make your parenting decisions based
on what will bring you grandchildren, you will make some very bad decisions.
Lets not stop celebrating all that secure private property and unfettered free trade can
do for the poor. But if helping the poor becomes your very standard of right and wrong,
youll end up proposing universal welfare and other schemes that abandon even a facade of defending peoples individual and inalienable rights to life and liberty.
Thats what New Libertarianism does.
To keep up with New Libertarianism and other developments in libertarian thought, watch bleedingheartlibertarians.com, www.libertarianism.org, and www.cato-unbound.org. The chart above is a Google
Ngram. For a criticism of BIG, see Craig Biddle, The Libertarian Case for Legalized Plunder. For a criticism of Rawls, see my A Dog-Eat-Dog World: Rand vs. Rawls."

Comments are invited. But commenters, please identify yourself with a real name, real
web address, real email address, or at least a unique handle.

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