Brian Doherty
(Note: Below is the Introduction to the new book, Modern Libertarianism, A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States, published by Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute, and available through Amazon and the Cato Store. The author, Brian Doherty, is a senior editor at Reason magazine.)
Introduction
What is the American libertarian movement? It is a largely unorganized group of intellectuals, economists, journalists, activists, think tankers, politicians, and storytellers striving to change American ideology—and through that American politics. The movement’s efforts include well-funded public policy research institutes, political opinion magazines, pro bono litigators, bloggers, novelists, training and funding centers for college professors, and America’s most successful, longest-lasting third political party.
Libertarians advocate a simple idea with rich and complicated implications: government, if it has any purpose (many libertarians think it doesn’t), should do nothing but protect its citizens’ lives and property from direct violence and theft.
Why do libertarians think that? For one, their understanding of economics leads them to believe that a free people would spontaneously develop the institutions that a healthy and wealthy culture needs. Most government attempts to redistribute wealth—or to manage the economy through taxing or regulating—make society poorer without making it any safer or fairer.
The implications of that idea can seem radical indeed: from legalizing all drugs to leaving education, money, and credit to the free market; from financing roads entirely through user fees to bringing overseas troops home; from managing potential harms from new medications through tort law rather than top-down regulation to eliminating antitrust law.
However radical their conclusions, most libertarians believe that the Founding principles of the United States are also their principles. The federal government’s original constitutional role was limited to a small set of explicitly delegated powers.
The libertarian movement in America contains many who believe in a government somewhat like one that in theory was established by the US Constitution: a government of limited powers surrounded by a sea of rights both explicit and implicit. But it also contains many anarchists, who often call themselves “anarcho-capitalists” to distinguish themselves from so-called anarchists who don’t believe private property is legitimate.
Though rooted in the American Founding, the libertarian vision is not reactionary. It extends into “progressive” areas of sex, drugs, and science—no restrictions on, or unequal state treatment of, stem cell research, cloning, gay marriage, gender identity, cryptography, biotech, or space travel.
Although radical, libertarianism is not utopian. Libertarians believe that economics and human nature impose limits on the degree to which humans can reshape society to achieve grand goals. We now live in a post-communist world where the tyranny and poverty created by supposedly benevolent attempts to impose equality are clear, in the aftermath of a 20th century during which governments impoverished, imprisoned, and killed more millions than a sane mind can comprehend.
Meanwhile, since the start of the 20th century, the world has seen enormous increases in human material well-being, life expectancy, and health that occurred largely in lockstep with the spread of market liberalism across the globe and in connection with increasing levels of market freedom. For just some examples, the gross domestic product of the world’s economy has increased by more than 40 times since the start of the 20th century (from $3.4 trillion to $121.0 trillion), while global life expectancy has more than doubled in the past two centuries, to more than 72 years. Meanwhile, infant mortality in the United States fell more than 95 percent over the past century—in just the past 30 years, worldwide infant mortality was cut in half. In addition, the rate of battlefield deaths worldwide fell by more than 95 percent in the past 60 years. The percentage of the world’s population that was undernourished fell by more than two-thirds over the past 50 years; global cereal yields tripled over the past 60 years; and we are getting more and more value per time spent working and earning worldwide, with Americans specifically now spending less than half their income on basic necessities, compared with 80 percent at the turn of the 20th century.
And humanity isn’t achieving these things by despoiling and using up our natural patrimony: the area of the earth covered by trees grew by 2.24 million square kilometers from 1982 to 2016, with Europe’s tree canopy growing by 35 percent and that of the United States by 34 percent. And although one would assume the great likelihood of natural resources getting more expensive as they got scarcer, in fact, of 50 major important natural commodities, including metals, energy, and food, the inflation-adjusted price of 43 of them fell from 1982 to 2017, with their real price overall falling by 36.3 percent; translated to the amount of average hourly income required to obtain them, they fell by 64.7 percent.
With such evidence of the wealth-increasing powers unleashed by even small and incremental increases in market freedom, the cause the libertarian movement fought for over the past 70 years seems more and more relevant, even as it is threatened in various ways. We are now in a 21st century when international power politics and medieval religious throwbacks threaten chaos; fiscal doom looms for the 20th century’s entitlement state; technology is carving huge arenas of commerce, finance, and communication where calls for government regulation grow louder, yet might be recognized more widely by the citizenry as unnecessary (even as existing regulatory bureaucracies will continue to fight to control those new technologies); and humans could be (as much of a long shot as it seems now) on the cusp of building new societies on the high seas or off the surface of the planet. In this century, the daily papers are filled with stories of new possibilities for production, communication, and commerce—from 3D printing to the “sharing economy”—that promise better lives for most yet which government seems set on delaying or destroying.
The more our powers and wealth increase, the more many see libertarian ideas’ relevance as perhaps for that very reason attenuated. We already have the benefits of a restricted free-market capitalism, a common objection goes, so why should we feel compelled to give even more free rein to corporations and entrepreneurs? In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that many saw as demanding mass restriction of human working and social behavior allegedly in the name of public health; social and cultural unrest often connected to changes in the distribution of jobs and wealth due to freer international trade; or liberating changes in human behavior that alarm others who demand a crackdown (such as, in America these days, transgender identity), many people from across the ideological spectrum seem to think that seeking any further expansion in human economic and cultural liberties is a cause best seen as something from a prior age.
Libertarian intellectuals and activists of the sort whose story this book tells would differ strongly, of course, and think that we haven’t yet reached any edges we might fall off in pursuit of human liberty, which they maintain still has benefits, both practical and moral, to offer.
Libertarians believe either that people have a right to be left alone if they don’t harm others or that things will on balance work out best that way, generating the most varied and richest culture, or, more commonly, both.
Modern libertarianism is, in many ways, a continuation of the European classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Classical liberals of that time believed that free trade made the world richer and more peaceful, that decentralized private-property ownership created a rich and varied spontaneous order, and that legally enforced guilds and aristocracies that lock people into a fixed social status, rather than allow them to live and do business freely, made for an unjust and poorer world. The abolitionist movement that led to the end of slavery in the 19th century was classical liberal to its core, recognizing that all humans should be granted equal rights to obtain and trade property freely, irrespective of national or ethnic background.
Liberalism in that sense meant moving toward greater liberty. In the 20th century, “liberalism”—at least in the English-speaking world; much of continental Europe and Latin America have held fast to its original meaning—has come to mean expanding state power for the (perceived) advancement of social welfare. Some modern libertarians stick closely to that original classical liberal tradition, and some expand it radically: If private property is good, do we need public property? If individual liberty helps us flourish, then why should government regulate our use of drugs or cryptography or weapons, or take from some to benefit others, or make us pay to indoctrinate our children in public schools? The libertarian mission has been to refocus the purpose of politics on that core goal of guaranteeing liberty.
To order Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States (Libertarianism.org/Cato Institute), click here.