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The all pervading ethos of the day is libertarian liberal. While not everybody is libertarian it is certainly one of the more prevalent ideologies around in the world today, and especially in the USA. Considering that it is so powerful and influential the fact that it has fundamental flaws is a cause for concern.

The main problems with libertarian philosophies come not with what they say and what they claim but in what is unsaid and unclaimed. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that if everybody does what they want without harming the interests of others they will optimize their self interests and this will result in an optimal result for all. This is what happens in classical economics. It works in theory, admirably, it works in practice to a degree as well. But libertarian ideals of the libertarian right seems to be based on the extension of this model to every sphere of human life. Freedom and lack of interference yields the ideal result. But does it? My view is that common sense and general experience tells quite a different story.

Imagine a cafeteria. There are twenty tables, each with six chairs around them. How many people could eat at one time? 120 say the mathematicians. Oh really? On which planet would that be? People fill up the places at tables in a way that is neither random nor optimal from the point of view of maximizing efficiency of the system. Parties of three fill tables of six. Loners sit at a table all alone and spread out as much as they can. In the real world by the time there were seventy people sat down there would be people milling around looking lost, harassed and inconvenienced.

I travel to work by train. The train has carriages laid out with three seats facing three seats, an aisle, then two seats facing two seats. The rest of the carriage is laid out with pairs of seats facing the backs of other seats. So how does the train fill up with real people in the real world? The first people almost invariably sit in the middle of the three seats, facing forward (and if they are under thirty, with their feet perched on the seat opposite, not out of comfort, nobody would voluntarily sit with their legs at that angle out of comfort, but out of sheer bloody-mindedness). One person taking up six seats. Not exactly taking them up, just making them difficult to use by anybody else. The next people sit away from the middle seats until all the pairs of seats have one person in them. Then people start to sit on the four seats, Then it becomes more difficult. The later people have to decide whether to sit next to a stranger or to stand and block the door. By the time the train reaches my station half the seats are filled and people are standing by the door. To make things more difficult there is the question of sex. It is easier to sit next to a stranger of the same sex, less embarrassing. So the skill becomes finding a skinny man with not very much baggage sitting next to the window and not sprawled over the halfway point of the seat. Is it any wonder that people prefer to stand? At the next station a party of six get on board, to find there are twelve vacant seats, mostly next to the window, blocked by baggage or bisected by lounging arses, eight people standing up and not a hope in Hell of the six either sitting or even standing together.

That is an illustration of how rationally optimizing the interests of the individual often fails to create an optimum or rational solution.

Here is another. Music. People play music because it has an effect on them. Like a medicine. But one man's medicine is another man's poison. People playing loud music in a way that other people can hear feign a mental block, how can their music be having a bad impact, it's just music. Think about it. Drink up your raw egg and vodka I've got a hell of a hangover. The music either has an effect on people or it doesn't. If it does then imposing it on somebody else is doing them harm, if it doesn't have an effect then you wouldn't mind if I switched the bloody thing off, would you? Many things which cause joy to some cause misery to others. There is no magical way in which these things can be balanced out. Adam Smith's invisible hand does not help us in these situations, it just gives us the finger. People will always see their pleasures as worthwhile and will fail to recognize the harm they cause to others. The idiot will get a buzz of pleasure from seeing the outside of his period house painted lime green as he sees it for two minutes of each day, what a whimsical man he is. The neighbour across the road facing it all day every day has a distinctly jaundiced view of this eccentricity. “Harmless eccentricity” to the first man is outrageously antisocial behaviour to the second. And how are we to judge who is right? The libertarian response is to favour the eccentric who gains a tiny pleasure over the community who suffer. For the right wing libertarian society does not exist, there is no common good, to suggest there is makes you a communist who should be shot by all right thinking individualists.

The extreme individualist line can be simply mocked as follows:

The individual is good

Groups are bad

Society is evil

Majorities oppress minorities

The majority is always wrong

Small groups are conspiracies

Larger groups are more evil conspiracies

The Government of the USA is the largest conspiracy yet known

A world government must obviously be even more evil

Find out whatever the government is doing and tell them to stop it

These ideas fail to recognize some very important facts. Small unorganized societies have murder rates higher than even the worst ghettos in sprawling modern urban cities. Life is better, longer, healthier and happier in modern social democratic states than in any previously known human society. Of course totalitarian socialist societies are bad, because they are totalitarian, not because they aim to use government power to attain social goals.

Governments can do things which cannot be done without them. Governments can embody and express the public good. Go back to the cafeteria, a government can act like a sensible head waiter, seating groups around sensible sized tables, seeing to it that there are sensible arrangements of tables, checking that nobody is inconvenienced to any significant degree. The government can listen to the real will of the people and design a system to meet it. Now I am not suggesting that the government should bother getting involved with the seating plans in trains and cafeterias, I was only using those as examples of how individuals pursuing their own selfish ends outside a capitalist market fail to achieve a sensible outcome. People act selfishly, harm the interests of others and feel guilty about it right up to the point at which somebody challenges them to do something about it. These were broad examples of a whole class of situations in which individuals left to their own devices will generate a self regulating but inefficient arrangement which fails to achieve a sensible outcome for the aggregate or common good. Other examples come under the heading of the tragedy of the commons and various forms of mob behaviour. Nobody wants to live in a world in which there are houses everywhere and wilderness nowhere, but how can that be achieved without regulation? Nobody wants to catch and sell the last fish in the sea, but if you don't do it will the next hungry fisherman think the same? Nobody wants to crush people to death in a football stadium but left to their own devices crowds will often do just that, rational individuals pursuing their own rational interest achieving a goal that nobody desires. The common good is often very far from being identical to the sum of the individual goods.

Sometimes people can organize themselves without figures of authority, spontaneously forming queues or other rational systems to achieve a common purpose through limited self denial, however many such systems work much more effectively with a figure of authority to impose the common good. Marshals, wardens, guardians and other officers of the peace. By using a very small amount of power, minimal coercion, infinitesimal loss of individual liberty much greater things can be achieved. If you doubt it just consider evacuating an aircraft. Which of the following systems would work best, which would ensure most people got out before a random unknown time interval had passed:

1] Every man for himself

2] Women and children first

3] Auction: Who'll give me Thirty thousand dollars for a chance to go through the door, do I hear forty?

4] You you and you, no not you Jewboy, him... Angie, just smack that fat guy...

5] Attention please line up in single file, do not panic, make your way to the exits calmly, quickly, just jump madam... I'll see he gets off as well now come along, next! Come on, keep calm, keep moving...

Power is not evil, power used responsibly can result in huge gains for all.

It is strangely ironic that the libertarian right are so often saying that it isn't the gun that causes the problems but how it is used. Power is a tool, how should we use it? Everybody, let's put our heads together and come up with a good plan. Is that inherently evil? Of course there are dangers but also there are great glittering prizes to be achieved: peace, harmony, prosperity, opportunity, security and empowered liberty. Throwing away the power of the collective is like throwing away fire.

The people want all people to be treated when they are ill, and are prepared to pay for it. The individualist libertarians say such a communal aim is illegitimate because there may be some who do not want to be coerced into a universal tax system. But there are a minority who do not want to be coerced out of taking things that are not their own. There is a minority which considers it a basic human right to kill people they don't like and a minority who see that money or might should be able to get them anything or anybody they desire. States coerce their members, that is what defines them as states, otherwise they are just people in a group. Rights are not just for individuals. Communities and states have rights. If the majority in a community consent to treating themselves as a state and organizing as a state then their rights are just as legitimate as the rights of families or individuals. If a community wants to organize social provision of services then no individual ideologue should be allowed to stand in the way.

There is a tendency for governments and administrators to ensure a need for their continuing existence, this tendency is best fought with other arms of the state empowered to trim back the excesses of the state rather than by constitutional barriers to trying to act in the public's interest as the libertarians suggest. Of course a state can meddle too much. That what the word “too” means, but opposing the refreshing breeze because you fear the hurricane is not a sensible strategy. Fight the excesses of the welfare state, the nanny state and the paternalist state but it is only a small proportion of such states' activities that are excessive.

Fighting state power because the state sometimes goes too far is like starving yourself to death out of a fear of obesity.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited