Category: Libertarianism

I have some bones to pick with Legutko, but this is good:

[Libertarianism] crumbles because it attempts to square the circle. Two loyalties — one particular to one's own community, the other to an infinitely open system — cannot be reconciled.

 

― Ryszard Legutko, The Cunning of Freedom: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols

Maybe not. It might not be in their best, long-term self-interest, assuming that they are more than a discussion society and want to see their values implemented politically. Libertarians stand for limited government, individual liberty, private property, and free markets. On these points I basically agree with them, although I am not a libertarian. But they don't seem adept at thinking in cultural as opposed to economic terms.

They need to ask themselves whether the culture of libertarianism, its ensemble of values and attitudes, is likely to flourish north of the Rio Grande if an endless stream of mainly Hispanic immigrants is allowed into the country. I suspect that these newcomers will swell the ranks of the Democrats and insure the triumph of socialism when that is presumably what libertarians oppose.

Libertarians may be in a bind similar to the bind Sierra Club types are in. The latter, being 'liberals,' must oppose Trump's Wall of Hate which is of course immoral and divisive and racist. But the porosity of the southern border leads to very serious environmental degradation — which is presumably what Sierra Club types oppose.

Libertarians are like Marxists in their overemphasis on the economic. And like Marxists, their understanding of human nature is deeply flawed. They think of human being as rational actors — which is obviously not the case.  The vaunted rationality of the human animal is only in rare cases consistently actual; in most it remains mainly potential, and in some not even that. There can be no sound politics without a sound philosophical anthropology, i.e., a correct understanding human nature.

Excerpts worth pondering:

Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit, published in 1988 when he was approaching ninety, returned to the topic of the spontaneous order, which is “of human action but not of human design.” The fatal conceit of intellectuals, he said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses.

[. . .]

Reagan and Thatcher admired Hayek, but he always insisted that he was a liberal in the classical sense, not a conservative. The last chapter of “The Constitution of Liberty” was titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He pointed out that the conservative “has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.”

You won't hear about Hayek and his ideas in the the leftist seminaries, which is what most of our universities have become. Yet another reason to bring down the Left.  

Although I am experiencing some salutary pressure from the neo-reactionary direction, I continue to hold that a sound conservatism must incorporate the insights of the classical liberals. How to pull this off in concreto is of course a difficult question given the  limitations of libertarianism.

Libertarians seem to think that we are all rational actors who know, and are willing and able to act upon, our own long-term best self-interest.  This is manifestly not the case.  That is why drug legalization and open borders are disastrous. They are particularly disastrous for a welfare state, which is what we have, and which is not going to "wither away."  Sure, if libertarians were in charge there wouldn't be a welfare state; but the Libertarian Party of the USA — founded by USC philosopher John Hospers in 1970 by the way — will never gain power. They are the "Losertarian Party" to cop a moniker from Michael Medved.  Remember the clown they ran for president in 2016, the former governor of New Mexico?  I've already forgotten his name.  Something Johnson?

The libertarians think of man one-sidedly as homo oeconomicus. Accordingly, humans are "consistently rational and narrowly self-interested agents who usually pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally."

That's a text-book case of false abstraction.

Libertarians have something  to learn from conservatives.  But go too far in the particularistic conservative direction and you end up with the tribalism of the Alt-Right . . . .

Perhaps we need to resurrect some version of fusionism. It might help with the current political 'fission' and 'centrifugality.' No doubt you catch my drift.