Building off my earlier post, William D. Eggers & John O’Leary have a piece up at Reason’s Hit-n-Run Blog that really lays out where I think Libertarianism has been hurt by the type of arguments that they make:
1. Bad government leads to bigger, badder government. Today, only 23 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing. At first blush, this would seem to be an encouraging statistic for those opposed to “big government.” After all, the less citizens trust government, the less willing they should be to give it big new responsibilities, right?
Wrong.
An important recent academic study called “Regulation and Distrust” shows that, paradoxically, the worse government performs, the more citizens demand greater government intervention. The authors’ explanation for this curious finding is that in societies where people distrust large institutions—whether government or big business—the demand for more regulation and for more government is higher, even when government is incompetent or downright corrupt.
2. To shrink government, you need to love government. Most liberals believe deeply in government. As a result, they sit on school boards, city councils, and regional planning boards. They become expert at navigating through the bureaucracy and know which bureaucratic levers to pull to make their policy vision reality.
Many conservatives and libertarians come from the world of business. They don’t particularly like government. They view it as merely a necessary evil. As a consequence, they rarely immerse themselves in the intricacies of governing, preferring to make their case from a safe distance.
Once in power, they tend to have far more difficulty navigating the complex terrain of the public sector. The result? From Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission to the 1995 government shutdown by a GOP Congress, most high-profile attempts to shrink government fail.
Until small-government types better master the nuts and bolts of the public sector—how to design policies that work in the real world and how to execute on large public undertakings—their initiatives to downsize government will continue to disappoint.
3. Market-based reforms are not self-executing. Fans of limited government are quick to point out the shortcomings of “big government” policy initiatives. But market-oriented policy prescriptions will also fail if they aren’t well implemented.
The deregulation of the airline and trucking industries were two of the biggest and best things done by government in the 1970s. Well-designed and well-executed, they demonstrated the benefits of choice and competition. Consumers saved billions.
In the late 1990s, free-market think tanks were pushing the idea that competition could cut costs in the stodgy, monopolistic world of electricity. So what happened when California actually tried electricity deregulation?
Within just a few years, the new law caused soaring prices, rolling blackouts, and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis. Consumers lost billions.
What went wrong? The short answer is that energy companies such as Enron exploited design flaws in the legislation to game the system. Competition could work in electricity, but California’s poorly designed “deregulation” was a disaster.
Without a keen appreciation of the process by which legislation and programs are designed and implemented, efforts to move from monopoly to markets carry a high risk of failure.
4. Government bashing alienates those you want to reach. According to many libertarians, politicians are corrupt, bureaucrats are lazy, and public unions are a collection of thugs. The whole enterprise of government is a moral cesspool filled with Randian villains scheming to drain every bit of life, cash, and liberty from the noble John Galts of the free market.
This view is so at odds with the daily experience of millions of Americans that libertarians are easily dismissed by the average citizen. The distorted worldview in which government performs no useful functions—ever—is silly.
Incessant government-bashing may make you feel good, but alienates most everybody who knows and loves a police officer, firefighter, teacher, social worker, anyone who has ever collected an unemployment check, and anyone who saw NASA put a man on the moon.
In the short term, a philosophy of “government never works” might sell to the base but it’s not an effective strategy for building a broad-based electoral coalition or actually governing. Voters won’t trust people who hate government with the keys to City Hall.
5. Nobody will care what you know until they know you care. Many voters today may indeed want smaller government, but what they want most of all is competent government. In addition to pointing out the flaws of government, free-marketers also need to communicate a genuine interest in the effective performance of the important duties of government.
After all, what is it that gets you so worked up about the current state of affairs? It is the human potential squandered by a government that isn’t the best that it can be. The ultimate goal is the pursuit of happiness, and when a properly limited government does its job well, it fosters freedom, peace, and prosperity. That is a noble goal. Why not embrace it?
All these points have merit, and is a much better way of phrasing my own critique: libertarian minded people can’t let themselves be pigeon-holed as those who ‘hate taxes, but like pot’. A perfect example, since it is still mainly in the news, is healthcare reform.
Many libertarian minded people, specifically those whom gravitated to the Tea Party movement, argued that any reform was tantamount to socialist market control. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the government run healthcare options, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA, represent the largest single healthcare insurer, as it stands today. First off, it looks like you don’t care, second it ignores the market reality, and third it’s nihilistic alternative would allow great harms (gov’t deficit, death, and bankruptcy) that they themselves raised, but offered no solution towards. Their argument runs mostly, the government programs created the healthcare inflation crisis, so there is no way they can fix it. Nothing they do can be good. Which may be true, but it also doesn’t fix the problem, or answer the question of: what do we do now/next? (that apparently doesn’t matter)
To be clear I am a policy libertarian. Meaning that I think government policy should based on data. Theory is where policy is born, but we promote and empower based on results that can be measured. I agree with Mao, all political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and all political pressure is at base coercion.
But we live in a society where the vast majority has agreed, by consent, to live within and abide by the social contract. Therefore, the government will always exist, and will always respond to the interest of the majority. Our job is to make the best decision as to which policy, such that it limits the amount of coercion, and empowers/benefits the most people. That is the most we can do, and thus is what we ought to do.
