It’s a safe bet that on any given night, somewhere a group of American college students is engaged in a heated debate over the legalization of drugs, the ethics of seat-belt laws, or the absolute right of consenting adults to do whatever they please in their homes.
That experience, along with a brief infatuation with Ayn Rand, is probably the most prolonged exposure educated Americans have to libertarian thinking. Despite prominent champions such as Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, libertarianism has never made it into the country’s mainstream political or intellectual trends.
There is some justification for this. The organized libertarian movement has frequently been overshadowed by its own fringe elements and half-baked ideas. Some years back, for example, the libertarian magazine Reason published a cover story extolling polygamy. In 1994, Howard Stern was nominated the libertarian candidate in the New York gubernatorial race. Every four years the national libertarian party convention finds itself embroiled in a public dispute over what age children should be permitted access to whiskey. These hijinks have made libertaranism appear sophomoric at best and anarchic at worst.
Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, two of the most-discussed books of the last 15 years, has taken on the task of presenting a more sober, respectable libertarianism. What It Means to Be a Libertarian is an attempt to argue that a state premised on libertarian principles is not merely a theoretical ideal, but a practical alternative. He has written not a philosophic treatise on libertarianism, but a policy book in the form of a sustained argument. For both college students debating in their dorm rooms and free-market Republicans who are seeking the next step in limited government, Charles Murray’s book is a guide to what libertarian policy demands, and why it would make the country better off.
That is a worthwhile undertaking, but the resulting book is neither inspiring nor ultimately persuasive. The fault does not really lie with Murray, who is one of the most elegant prose stylists when it comes to complex matters of public policy. The problem is with libertarianism itself. This book will remind many readers why the philosophy has never really succeeded in the United States, and why it is unlikely to achieve critical mass any time soon.
Murray begins by focusing his reader on what he understands to be the aims of libertarian thinking. He believes in limited government and wants to restore classical liberal ideals to American life, but does not call for a minimal-state paradise, as Robert Nozick did in his influential book Anarchy, State and Utopia. He is not especially troubled by the powers of the Federal Reserve Bank, the size of the American military, the influence of mental-health professionals, or other libertarian bugaboos. He writes, instead, in the tradition of Jefferson, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. His vision of a better America is one with more “little platoons,” not rampant radical individualism.
He argues that most government functions offered in the name of “the public good” interfere with the honest man earning a living and minding his own business. Government robs him of his responsibility, and individual responsibility is Murray’s most constant theme. Throughout What It Means to Be a Libertarian, he emphasizes that responsibility is not the “price” of freedom, but rather its reward. Satisfaction in life comes from taking responsibility; it is the fullest meaning of the “pursuit of happiness.”
Murray’s vision of government would certainly foist many new responsibilities on Americans. He sketches a brief outline of what a libertarian government might look like: no regulations of products or services, and none for the workplace or for the relationship between employee and employer. Civil-rights laws would be replaced by constitutional amendments prohibiting any government discrimination or laws that interfere with private freedom of association (federal affirmative action would be gone, and a private employer could refuse to hire blacks). There would be no agriculture subsidies. No Energy Department, no Medicare, no poverty programs, no Post Office or Federal Communications Commission. No Social Security. This lean federal government would be left only with the responsibility of patents and copyright, maintaining the interstate highway system, restricting the export of military equipment, and (although he does not mention it) a federal court and law-enforcement system.
Murray then devotes the middle section of his short treatise to explaining how a libertarian government would work and why it would improve the quality of American life. He applies the general argument readers first encountered in Losing Ground: Government invariably is less efficient at solving problems than citizens who are forced to work things out on their own. By interfering, government displaces individual responsibility and makes civic institutions less necessary. In most instances, attempts by government to fix a problem have made things worse.
So, for example, Murray argues for replacing cumbersome product-safety laws with the simple application of contract and tort law; people should be able to sue manufacturers whose products don’t work under ordinary circumstances. In more sensitive areas like food, safety, and banking regulations, he suggests letting businesses have the option of exempting themselves from government rules and advertising themselves as “unregulated” businesses. Private organizations could emerge to verify the safety of drugs or oversee air traffic. People would be given the information, weigh the risks, and make their choices.
Murray would like to extend those same choices — and the risks and responsibilities that go with them — to education, health care, and welfare. He argues for completely unrestricted education; a free-market medical system that encourages people to purchase catastrophic health insurance; and the elimination of all government assistance and transfer programs. In their place, he would like to see the revival of informal, community organizations whose historical record in helping the poor is far better than government’s.
Readers who like what they hear so far may part company with Murray when he gets to the subject of addictive drugs, which he believes a free society should legalize (along with prostitution and pornography). Parents who are really concerned about their children’s drug use, he argues, should be able to choose a school that expels any kid who uses drugs. If employers want drugs out of their workplaces, they should be free to institute rigid anti- drug policies. In Murray’s libertarian vision, drugs, like so many other social problems, are best dealt with by requiring citizens, not government, to take primary responsibility.
This part of Murray’s argument awakens us to what happens when libertarian principles run head-on into bourgeois reality: The extremely limited government described in his book may not make for a very attractive place to live. The importance of personal freedom notwithstanding, most Americans loathe the idea of living in a country where heroin and cocaine are as legal as cigarettes. They want police to crack down on prostitution in downtown neighborhoods. They do not want to contemplate a society where the most troublesome chronic welfare families are left to fend for themselves. However critical we may be of existing government programs, there is no doubt that life under Murray’s regime would be uncomfortable, less stable, more risky, and require more effort from ordinary citizens.
Are Americans, even those who are strong advocates of unfettered free enterprise and individual rights, willing to accept that type of society? Murray argues at the conclusion of his book that a coalition exists of people who just want to be left alone. But the influence of such a coalition is easy to exaggerate. True, most Americans do want to be left alone — in theory. In practice, they show little enthusiasm for the sort of strippeddown government Murray proposes.
That is not to say that Americans are blithely marching down the road to serfdom. But neither do they view our collection of costly, inefficient, and poorly managed programs as the primary threat to liberty and selfgovernment.
And they are right. Federal farm programs, to cite a favorite target of libertarian ire, are certainly an example of big-government meddling. Yet despite them, America has developed the most efficient and productive agricultural system in the world. Similarly, government regulation is undoubtedly a drag on American business. Nonetheless, in the last two decades American entrepreneurs have managed to create a software and computer industry without rival.
Or consider Social Security and Medicare. They are outdated and fiscally unsusainable programs that have probably created a disincentive to save for retirement. But they have virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly (and in the case of Social Security, done so with remarkable efficiency). There is, as the last election proved, no demand to abandon them wholesale outside of libertarian intellectual circles.
The much stronger (and more popular) case for radically scaling back our federal government is that it often creates all the wrong incentives. That was the central idea of Losing Ground: A welfare system designed to promote independence wound up paying poor people not to work and not to marry. Implicit in that argument was a counter-argument: A government that was capable of sending the wrong messages might be capable of sending the right ones.
Across the country, the lessons of Losing Ground have been absorbed as a dysfunctional welfare system is slowly being dismantled. But the response has often been not less government, but more of it: workfare for welfare recipients; drug testing requirements for public assistance; curfews for teenagers; anti-loitering laws; intensive community policing; metal detectors and uniforms at public schools; restrictive zoning for adult book stores; orphanages for the children of habitually abusive parents.
We don’t know whether any of these experiments will work, and libertarians are justified in being suspicious of some of the Big Brother aspects of the ” civil society” movement. What we do know is that Americans engaged in trying to create more responsible, safer communities of self-sufficient citizens have little patience for libertarian purity on matters like drug legalization and the dangers of paternalism. When Americans read about babies abandoned by teen-age mothers on crack, they want more paternalism, not less of it.
Of course, government spending and regulation at any level can always benefit from a heavy dose of free market thinking. On this score, Murray’s policy arguments make the most sense. Yet for the most intractable problems the country faces — longterm welfare dependence, teen drug addiction, a failed public school system, violent crime, and even domestic terrorism — laissez-faire ideology seems beside the point.
For better or worse, America has become a more complicated and less manageable country in this century. In an interview with Reason two years ago, James Q. Wilson was asked what government will look like in the next century. “It’s going to be bigger, more complicated, more burdensome, and more costly,” Wilson said. “No matter what point in human history you ask that question, the answer is always the same.”
This unavoidable truth about government is what Murray never fully confronts in What It Means to Be a Libertarian. The sheer magnitude of the problems that government now fumbles with may militate against the voluntary and private solutions that worked during the early part of this country’s history. No reader will argue with Murray’s ultimate goal of creating a society that relies more on individual responsibility than on government. But today, the movement toward limited government demands a way to promote and guarantee individual responsibility — something that cannot be found in even Charles Murray’s thoughtful case for libertarianism.
Daniel Casse, who served as a senior official in the Alexander and Dole presidential campaigns, is a writer and consultant living in Nashville.
