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By E.J. Dionne, Jr.<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON\u2013In politics, we often skip past the simple questions. This is why inquiries about the fundamentals can sometimes catch everyone short.<\/p>\n
Michael Lind, the independent-minded scholar, posed one such question last week about libertarianism that I hope will shake up the political world. I\u2019ll get to his query in a moment. It\u2019s important because many in the new generation of conservative politicians declare libertarianism as their core political philosophy.<\/p>\n
Libertarians have the virtue, in principle at least, of a very clear creed: They believe in the smallest government possible, longing for what the late philosopher Robert Nozick, in his classic book \u201cAnarchy, State and Utopia,\u201d called \u201cthe night-watchman state.\u201d Anything government does beyond protecting people from violence or theft and enforcing contracts is seen as illegitimate.<\/p>\n
If you start there, taking a stand on the issues of the day is easy. All efforts to cut back on government functions\u2013public schools, Medicare, environmental regulation, food stamps\u2013should be supported. Anything that increases government activity (Obamacare, for example) should be opposed.<\/p>\n
In his bracing 1970s libertarian manifesto \u201cFor a New Liberty,\u201d the economist Murray Rothbard promised a nation that would be characterized by \u201cindividual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government and a free-market economy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rothbard\u2019s book concludes with boldness: \u201cLiberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is where Lind\u2019s question comes in. Note that Rothbard freely acknowledges that \u201cliberty has never been fully tried,\u201d at least by the libertarians\u2019 exacting definition. In an essay in Salon, Lind asks:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early 21st century is organized along libertarian lines?\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, \u201cWhy are there no libertarian countries?\u201d<\/p>\n
The ideas of the center-left\u2013based on welfare states conjoined with market economies\u2013have been deployed all over the democratic world, most extensively in the social democratic Scandinavian countries. We also had deadly experiments with communism, aka Marxism-Leninism.<\/p>\n
From this, Lind asks another question: \u201cIf socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn\u2019t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?\u201d<\/p>\n
The answer lies in a kind of circular logic: Libertarians can keep holding up their dream of perfection because, as a practical matter, it will never be tried in full. Even many who say they are libertarians reject the idea when it gets too close to home.<\/p>\n
The strongest political support for a broad anti-statist libertarianism now comes from the tea party. Yet tea party members, as the polls show, are older than the country as a whole. They say they want to shrink government in a big way but are uneasy about embracing this concept when reducing Social Security and Medicare comes up. Thus do the proposals to cut these programs being pushed by Republicans in Congress exempt the current generation of recipients. There\u2019s no way Republicans are going to attack their own base.<\/p>\n
But this inconsistency (or hypocrisy) contains a truth: We had something close to a small government libertarian utopia in the late 19th century and we decided it didn\u2019t work. We realized that many Americans would never be able to save enough for retirement and, later, that most of them would be unable to afford health insurance when they were old. Smaller government meant that too many people were poor and that monopolies were formed too easily.<\/p>\n
And when the Great Depression engulfed us, government was helpless, largely handcuffed by this anti-government ideology until Franklin D. Roosevelt came along.<\/p>\n
In fact, as Lind points out, most countries that we typically see as \u201cfree\u201d and prosperous have governments that consume around 40 percent of their GDP. They are better off for it. \u201cLibertarians,\u201d he writes, \u201cseem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality … .\u201d<\/p>\n
This matters to our current politics because too many politicians are making decisions on the basis of a grand, utopian theory that they never can\u2013or will\u2013put into practice. They then use this theory to avoid a candid conversation about the messy choices governance requires. And this is why we have gridlock. <\/p>\n
E.J. Dionne\u2019s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a9 2013, Washington Post Writers Group<\/small>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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