The Libertarian's Fatal Conceit

Over the last several years, I have been closely affiliated with the libertarian movement. I worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, a wonderful organization that supports free-market groups around the country. During my time with CGKF, I had many opportunities to communicate with prominent libertarian thinkers, who were highly intelligent and persuasive. I continue to be active in the free-market movement.

Although there are numerous strands of libertarianism, all libertarians are united by the belief that a just government exists to protect individual rights and do little else. On matters of political economy and philosophy, I see eye-to-eye with most libertarians on most issues. However, there is one area that continues to be a major point of contention.

At the risk of generalizing, most libertarians have a special disdain for Republican politicians who do not fight for transformational change. By transformational change libertarians mean a radical departure from our current mixed-economy that boasts a massive welfare state and is constrained by burdensome regulations. Libertarians vehemently oppose the strategy of incrementalism, advocating major leaps in policy instead.

The brilliant libertarian scholar and historian David Boaz, Executive Vice President of the libertarian Cato Institute, once said that he did not think Ronald Reagan was a very good President because he did not abolish the Department of Education or privatize Social Security. The free-market conservative scholars, activists and politicians who helped drive the Reagan Revolution supported these libertarian proposals in theory, but the President and his Cabinet did not attempt to implement them--and as we shall see, for good reasons.   

To my shock, David Boaz also noted that many libertarians feel like Thomas Jefferson betrayed the libertarian cause by purchasing Louisiana from Napoleon and waging war against the Barbary pirates of North Africa who were terrorizing and hijacking American merchant ships, and often killing or enslaving the ships' crews.

David Boaz represents the majority of libertarian thinkers who believe that any departure from a pure libertarian ideal is a betrayal of that ideal. Furthermore, libertarians believe that political compromise and pragmatism are convenient cop outs that hinder progress towards greater liberty.

I strongly disagree with this view and it is the primary source of my beef with the libertarian movement.

To begin with, impugning Thomas Jefferson for expanding and significantly strengthening the young and fragile republic is naive, for if it wasn't for Jefferson's vision of an American navy that ultimately subdued the menacing Barbary pirates, America might have been fatally vulnerable to British aggression in the War of 1812. Moreover, do libertarians really believe that the Constitution prohibits the Commander-in-Chief from deploying the military against an enemy with a track record of murdering and enslaving Americans? The Constitution is not a suicide pact and neither the Louisiana Purchase nor the just war against the Barbary pirates violated the Constitution or betrayed America's founding principles.

To castigate Ronald Reagan for not achieving transformational libertarian change seems to me equally foolhardy. The political process is highly complex, and all politicians are constrained by precedents, rules, and procedures that make transformational change very difficult if not impossible. We are witnessing this first hand as the Health Care legislation nears its final stages. Barack Obama (and I would venture to guess most Congressional Democrats) supports a single-payer healthcare system. But due to a plethora of political constraints, neither Barack Obama nor Democratic leaders dared to even seriously consider single-payer. In fact, it appears almost certain that even the so-called public option will not be included in the final healthcare bill. And this is despite the fact that the Democrats have a super-majority in the Senate and a significant majority in the House.

Had Ronald Reagan committed political capital to the goal of abolishing the Department of Education or privatizing Social Security, he would have been thoroughly defeated by the Democrat-controlled House and humiliated. Such an ambitious goal would have made the failure all that more dramatic, and rendered Reagan largely inefficacious for the remainder of his term.

Foregoing this political suicide mission, President Reagan instead chose to eloquently defend the principles of liberty, while fighting for significant, but non-transformational change. He succeeded in lowering taxes, growing our economy, stimulating entrepreneurship, and reining in some wasteful spending.

President Reagan wisely differentiated between idealism and pragmatism. What good is idealism if it doesn't affect positive change? Libertarians resent what they view as Reagan's lackluster efforts to rein in the welfare state, but would the country have been better of if President Reagan unwaveringly embraced idealism at the expense of failing to push through any pro free-market initiatives?

The axiom that we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good should teach libertarians an important political lesson: it is better to fight for incremental change than to stubbornly perpetuate the status quo just because the ideal is unattainable. Libertarians cannot ignore the constraints imposed by the political process, and should not view politicians who compromise in order to advance pro-free market change as spineless, or worse, perfidious. The freedom movement should continue to defend the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and attack the folly of the welfare state. But libertarians ought to accept the immutable law that in politics, if you allow idealism to trump pragmatism, you will not advance the ideal.