Politics Compromises the Libertarian Project

This month's edition of Cato Unbound is featuring Roderick Long's lead essay Corporations vs. the Market; or, whip the conflation now along with reaction essays from 2 noted progressives, Dean Baker and Matthew Yglesias.

Baker's essay, Libertarians and Corporate Power: Actions Speak Louder than Words, which focused predominantly on copyright/IP issues, struck me as a bit of a strawman attack since even among so-called "vulgar libertarians" there are very few defenders of the current copyright/patent system. Baker asks where is the detailed libertarian alternative plan to the current copyright regime, seemingly incognizant of the fact most detailed libertarian plans can be summed nicely up by 2 words" "abolish it." Of course, Baker's crusade against copyright law is pretty much pissing in the wind these days given both major parties recently joined forces to legislatively apply the Drug War Model to Copyright/IP Enforcement. Once something has a "Czar" attached to it's enforcement, good luck with reforming it. "Vulgar Libertarianism" aside, it does strike me as ironic that other than a few noted exceptions(e.g, Cato and the Kochs), the libertarian movement generally can barely financially scrap together a pot to piss in; meanwhile both major parties collectively raised around 9 billion the last election cycle. What can I say, actions do speak louder than words, and, I couldn't help but think that progressives would serve as a better target audience for the brunt of that essay emphasizing a libertarian critique of the copyright regime rather than the intended audience of libertarians, who by and large would already be in agreement(and hardly unfamiliar with Baker's argument).

In contrast to Baker's essay, Yglesias didn't presume to lecture us on topics we are already quite familiar with. His essay, Politics Compromises the Libertarian Project goes straight for the jugular. He really doesn't dispute the libertarian critique of the State, rather he turns the critique of the State on libertarianism itself. Frankly, Yglesias' point that the libertarian critique of the State thusly spells doom as well for any idealized laissez faire markets operating under the purview of the State is quite legitimate. He seems to grasp this point better than most libertarians. Nevertheless, conceding the legitimacy of the libertarian critique forces Yglesias to more or less concede as well that living under the State promises only pockets of justice to counter hopeless corruption.

However, before we consign ourselves forever to the corruption of the Hobbesian leviathan, it should be pointed out that Yglesias fails to question the presupposition of the State itself. Yglesias more or less blithely dismisses the concept of market anarchism out of hand:

What there aren’t are places where politics just somehow doesn’t happen. The libertarian utopia is no more realistic than the socialist utopia of a perfectly informed and perfectly benevolent central planner.

This statement is empirically false. At virtually every point on this earth where there exists a political economy, there exists a stateless economy as well. It's virtually ubiquitous. And more to the point, Yglesias has certainly devoted part of his busy blogging schedule to previously deride the idea of Intelligent Design-- that is the need of a central planner in terms of biological evolution--but nevertheless somehow maintains that human emergent governmental orders can only coalesce around centralized enforcement mechanisms. I find such to be an utterly uncompelling argument and empirically falsifiable. It also would imply a unimaginably dystopian future if you were to project the implications of such out into, say, 5 centuries of information technology advancement--that is to say, humans require the State, or cannot overcome the impulses of the State, in terms of, say, coordination problems.

Hmm. I thought both Yglesias and Baker missed the point in a way, though Yglesias more severely. Matt seemed to zip right past what Roderick Long was actually arguing and instead say "yeah, whatever, you just help corporate apologists w/ your rhetoric anyway" in way more words. Dean at least got what the critique was, but his closing bit (the crack about libertarians attacking corporate power vs challenging social security) has me wondering what "libertarians" he's been hearing from until now.

It should be obvious where the blame on libertarians concerning corporate power came from. People who believed in a society built on "only the strong survive" found the rhetoric of spontaneous market order useful (so as to appeal to people who otherwise would NEVER side with them), & have since ran with it so hard that, sadly, most don't know the difference anymore. Rectifying that requires a critical mass of libertarians and liberals BOTH slamming the Right over their corporatism, unfortunately nowhere near enough people come at libertarianism from the left (yet) & for every Dean Baker type there's seemingly 8 liberals that, in the face of all possible evidence to the contrary, think the problem is the State is too small.

There's people that, at the least, understand what political intervention tends to really be for, but their influence is questionable. We need a megaphone, not an echo chamber.

Yglesias more or less accepts the (left) libertarian critique of the state but rejects anarchism as utopian. He basically said I agree with you Roderick, but your solution is impractical, now excuse me while I go bash on Cato.

From Yglesias' point of view, he's likely not be very sympathetic to claims he's missing the point. He equates libertarianism more or less with marxism, in that it's a utopian philosopy, and in the the real world of politics, the end of the result of endless libertarian babbling, whether from the right or left, is policy proposals like social security privatization and unimpeded air pollution.

In a tangential fashion he was perhaps taking an indirect poke at Long, more or less implying that he should come down from the philosophical mt. olympius and become, say, a "libertarian democrat" and strive to legislatively enact things like "revenue-neutral carbon pricing schemes."

Now, I, of course, disagree with Yglesias. Libertarianism is revolutionary, but it is not utopian. Unless you believe in the great central planner in the sky, the very fact of biological evolution is empirical proof that complex biological coordination emerges out of spontaneous order. The fact that stateless economies thrive is empirical proof that humans socially do not need centralized authority mechanisms to solve coordination problems. Now, granted, in the age of the State, market anarchy likely would not be stable because external state interference would likely muck up coordination. However, the State has it's own stability issues, centered around the Calculation Problem; the more complex the system, the more intractable this problem becomes. Following the insights of the likes of Hayek and Mises, I think we can see with our own eyes that our modern, complex mixed economies are not stable. Further, these instabilities are nonlinear(small variations in initial conditions in, say, of a piece of legislation regulating some industry) can have magnitudinous effects down the road. In short, those who presuppose the condition of the State, presuppose wrongly. I don't see the condition of the Nation-State surviving past the 21st century.

The message I would shout out over the megaphone would combine libertarian class theory with the calculation problem, specifically noting that all these bailouts today are sowing the seeds for a tsunami wave of instability down the road.