Free to Be…

“You learn the essence of libertarianism in kindergarten,” Boaz writes. “Don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, and keep your promises.” Elsewhere, he gives this definition: “Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.”

I don’t know of any group that wouldn’t describe its political views in this way. I also don’t know of any that truly mean it besides the libertarians. The philosophy, so its proponents claim, is neither left nor right; it is, one might say, on the Z-axis of politics. To the libertarian, capitalism is not an economic system; it is a model for all human interaction. Government’s only role is to act as the custodian of what Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty: freedom from coercion and external force. Government is the protector, not the granter, of this liberty.

That’s the theory; practice is rather different. Boaz recites the ledger of state folly in the United States, apart from the eternal deficits of Medicare and Social Security. One sees the extent of the American federal juggernaut in its ever-expanding rulebook. “The Congressional Research Service identified 4,500 federal crimes,” he writes, “but said it didn’t have the resources to complete its count.” An attendant problem is the power of unelected bureaucracies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s regulations are so baroque it once set up a telephone hotline to answer questions about one of them. The caveat, Boaz notes, was that it couldn’t guarantee the correctness of its own answers and that this was no excuse for not following the law.

This is the most accessible book on libertarianism likely to be written​—​the best since Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980). Boaz does not browbeat his readers. He avoids dudgeon. He writes brilliantly about American law, natural rights philosophy, and the history of freedom​—​so well, in fact, that his work ought to replace the ridiculous civics textbooks in American secondary schools.

But there are problems with libertarianism that even those who support its aims mustn’t ignore.

While reading The Libertarian Mind, I turned to the back pages and took the political quiz in the appendix. You are asked to give numerical answers to 22 questions about whether the government or the individual should decide certain matters​—​who should say whether you “hire a worker of another race,” for example​—​and then plot your score on a graph that supposedly measures your political position. My score indicates that I am a pure libertarian. But I’m not, so when I returned to reading the main text, I did so with the suspicion that I was being subtly, if unintentionally, misled.

The problem is that Boaz makes libertarianism sound too moderate. It isn’t. This is no criticism of the philosophy itself: Something that’s extreme is not necessarily false, but it’s also not necessarily true. And there is a tendency among libertarians to believe that the more radical you are, the more pure and principled you are—​and thus, the more correct you are. Libertarians can be as hostile to their own as they are to any social democrat or neoconservative. All political ideologies have moderate and hard line wings, but as a former orthodox libertarian, I can attest to the overwhelming purity policing within this movement. It can be nearly as rigorous as that of the hard left.

For instance, Boaz writes admiringly of our Constitution. He does not mention that there are plenty of libertarians, most notably the anarchist followers of the late economist Murray Rothbard, who believe that it is a document of oppressive statism. There are also plenty of libertarians who think that the Cato Institute, the think tank of which Boaz is executive vice president, is too soft on the issues. How does a libertarian decide whether Milton Friedman, who advocated a state-provided minimum income, is a “true” lover of liberty? Can a libertarian believe that some measure of tax-funded welfare is acceptable, as Friedrich Hayek did, without being a “statist”? How does one decide where to draw the line? Boaz does not equip his readers to handle these essential intra-libertarian conflicts.

It is their tendency toward radicalism that prevents libertarians from achieving the influence they desire. Even those who agree that the United States is overcommitted abroad are often allergic to the Blowback Theory of Islamic Terrorism, to which many libertarians subscribe. Boaz writes, for instance, that American “meddling in [the Middle East] from the coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 .  .  . inflamed Islamic fundamentalists.”

This tiresome invocation of Mossadegh must be challenged. The globalized jihad is primarily a Sunni Muslim enterprise. Someone really needs to ask why Sunni religious fanatics care that a secularist such as Mohammad Mossadegh was deposed in a country full of Shiites​—​whom they loathe and kill at every opportunity. It can’t possibly be that Mossadegh, who called for the separation of mosque and state, is a symbol of affection for the Wahhabi movement. Nor can it be that Iranian Shiite radicals care much for Mossadegh’s political legacy. One high-profile target of the Khomeini regime after the 1979 revolution was Mehdi Bazargan, a democrat who had run the National Iranian Oil Company under Mossadegh’s premiership and who was briefly the country’s prime minister after the shah’s deposition.

Nor can it be that Islamic fundamentalists object to interventionist foreign policy, since they are never so comfortable as when they are fighting in foreign civil wars, from Afghanistan to the Balkans to Algeria to Syria. Nor can the problem be that the shah was a brutal dictator, since his Islamist successors have been even more disposed to tyranny and torture, as have their Sunni counterparts.

For a philosophy of individualism, libertarianism indulges in collective guilt on the international stage. If you believe that the state is the root of most problems, you will likely downplay individual agency as a factor in terrorism and extremism. Islamic terrorists, for instance, recently beheaded a Japanese journalist, whose nation’s constitution, adopted after World War II, renounces war as part of its sovereign power. Can we really attribute this violence to “foreign policy”?

The desire for one neat answer can also mean sloppiness with details. Consider Boaz’s:

This is true inasmuch as the American defense budget did not shrink to pre-1940s levels, but it is misleading in its evasion of the particulars. According to critics of the “military-industrial complex,” crony business interests lead to the threat of inflation, which leads to ever-increasing defense budgets and contracts. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, American defense spending followed suit. Grumman, one of the leading aerospace contractors during the Cold War, had to cut thousands of jobs. The Central Intelligence Agency downsized. There was even talk of a “peace dividend” from which all sorts of beautiful things were supposed to happen now that Western budgets had been freed from Cold War exigencies.

Immigration is the libertarians’ other weak selling point with the public. This is perhaps one reason Boaz doesn’t mention it, not even in the chapter called “Contemporary Issues.” Most libertarians are open-borders fundamentalists, a stance that the average person does not assume without significant peer pressure. The more radical factions among libertarians don’t think there should be borders at all, much less any that should be controlled or monitored. If, say, there existed a notional Country X, whose entire population believed in destroying individual liberty, and millions of citizens of Country X decided to emigrate to America, what would libertarians do? This is not as hypothetical a question as it appears.

Arguing that libertarianism has become increasingly popular, Boaz cites the declining support for central economic planning. He does not acknowledge (or, perhaps, does not realize) that socialism has pivoted from economics to culture. Most radical leftists these days don’t care about nationalizing heavy industry; they are concerned mainly with putting traditional Western culture through a kind of Maoist struggle session. Since the libertarian theory of freedom is highly rationalist, based on axioms and syllogisms, its proponents are at a disadvantage against such irrational and illogical attacks.

That’s why culture, often deftly avoided by free market thinkers, is so important to sustaining political liberty. Libertarians ignore just how much their philosophy derives from (and depends on) Western culture; thus they ignore how shifts in that culture affect the reception and survival of libertarian ideas. They tend to think that since libertarianism is logical and internally consistent, everyone will eventually accept it​—​a very Whiggish, and very dangerous, belief.

In his chapter on civil society, Boaz writes that the free market helps disparate cultures coexist peacefully through commerce. But the essential question remains: What if these cultures don’t agree to have a free market? I don’t doubt that what libertarians call the “nonaggression principle” is the best guide for our politics. But life is not mathematics, and no person or country can survive based solely on an abstract principle. 

Robert Wargas is a writer in New York.