I’m in the awkward position of being a pretty radical libertarian. Given the opportunity, I would whittle down government interference in the economy down to zero. And by government interference in the economy, I mean any attempt to redistribute income by force from the rich to the poor, or from the poor to the rich. I’d end social security, medicare, medicaid, pretty much all healthcare laws, public schooling, public funding for college students, the government’s ability to grant places “historical landmark status” and therefore to infringe on people’s property rights. I would get rid of the minimum wage and collective-bargaining laws. I’d close Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, take away unemployment insurance, eliminate legal responsibilities of landlords, and shut down the federal reserve. I’d eliminate inheritance and capital gains taxes. So I’m inevitably asked, “But without the government in there too look out for the poor, won’t the rich trample them and exploit them?” That’s a good question.
There are a variety of approaches to answering it. The most common is what we might call the “Marxist” response, although radical Marxists make up only a tiny percentage of those who advocate it. The Marxist position is that there is something unhealthy in the holding of property, an inherent evil that will naturally lead to the existence of a wealthy controlling class and will make cattle of the poor. The radical Marxist will advocate the ending of all property rights. Other leftists will admit that the existence of private property, despite its exploitative tendencies, is for some reason necessary. So the soft Marxist will advocate government regulation of property rights, with a sliding scale of property taxes and other devices to reduce inequality and keep the rich in check.
Another option is what we might call stereotypical right-wingerism. The stereotypical right-winger will respond that the poor are in trouble because they are simply stupid, lazy, worthless people who refuse to work. He maintains that the only way to stop them from sucking all the wealth out of the nation is to remove all government helps for them and to promote anything big business every does. He looks at the billionaires of the world and assumes that the massive wealth they have is the result of their being good people and hard workers. One such fellow I knew, a junior-high student named Tim, was raised wealthy and was convinced that our country would become a better place if we simply restricted the vote to the wealthy and vastly increased the number of police in bad neighborhoods.
But there is a third option. The third option is libertarianism. Libertarianism embraces the concept of inequality. Let me clarify. The libertarianism believes that the economy can be boiled down to a variety of people trying to get a variety of things and doing whatever they think is the best way to get those things. For the libertarian, things boil down to incentives, and the fact that one’s well-being will depend on one’s effort is a great stimulus to constructive action. So the libertarian believes that inequality is not a monster to be exterminated but rather a positive force. Don’t get us wrong, though. Libertarians do acknowledge that there are exploiters out there, people whose greed and control leads to unhealthy and unnatural levels of inequality and oppression. The more theoretically-minded divide the entire society into an exploiters and exploitees. But there’s a crucial difference. We see the primary destructive economic force as not business per se, but government interference. We believe a number of counterintuitive ideas, such as that minimum wage laws harm the poor, that taxing the wealthy heavily hurts the poor, that zoning laws destroy small business, and that both the poor, middle class, and rich are best off in a world off laissez-faire.
And so the when we oppose legislation designed to redistribute wealth, it’s not that we don’t like the poor. It’s that we believe different things are helpful. Even hard-core libertarians are appalled at the way the elite have shared a level of growth that the middle class and the poor have missed out on. The real question, then, isn’t how much inequality there may or may not be. The real question is not whether liberalism or libertarianism view is most compassionate. The real question is whether governmentally imposed outcomes are better than voluntarily reached outcomes. The real questions are these: Does a minimum wage protect the poor, or does it hurt them? Is it Walmart that’s destroying our small businesses, or is it zoning laws? Is the war on drugs making our poor neighborhoods safer, or turning them into hell-holes? Does government involvement in healthcare mean that we get better care, or is it making healthcare worse and more expensive? Is social security an important way we care for our older folks, or is it a Ponzi scheme? The questions could go on and on, but the libertarian is the one who sees government interference as almost always counter-productive. We see the exploiting class not as the local MacDonald’s that gives you $1 sandwiches, but as the well-connected politicians and their beneficiaries who receive trillions of dollars of your money and get to tell you what to do with your life.
I can’t speak for all libertarians, but it is my belief that the poor are indeed being oppressed that drives my libertarianism.
2 Comments
Well thought out—and as someone who sways between libertarianism and radical liberalism, it was though provoking. My only question is: could that ever actually work? I think the problem with any form of gov’t (big or non-existently-small) is motives of people. In either system, most people will simply try to get their own and that will inevitably lead to exploitation. Until people begin to count others’ needs as more important than their own, it will always be a question of the lesser of two evils. May God’s kingdom come!
Would it ever actually work? My answer is that a more libertarian system will have a better shot at working than a less libertarian system, because all state regulation rests of coercion, which should be kept as light as possible. It is true that most people will just try to get their own, which is why the means for getting one’s own should exclude taking from others, i.e., political means. If someone’s going to be greedy and try to amass as much wealth as possible, I’d feel safest with them in a pure market situation where their only viable option is to do that by producing goods others want.
But political systems are nothing but methods of trying to cope with the problem of man’s evil in our fallen world. Here’s to the day when there’ll be no need to choose between two evils!