I mean this in all seriousness. We can argue over what exactly a “liberal-tarian” means in practice and alter the details, but the overall direction of change is already baked in at this point. The idea that liberalism can possibly become dominant simply by presenting the New New Deal is just as ridiculous as the Paulistas delusions that the GOP can be rescued from neo-conservatism. The association of libertarianism with the Right is dying and in politics there can only be two teams. The Left will become libertarian simply because that’s what’s going to win more elections.

Liberals can’t just appeal to other liberals in order to be successful. They’ve tried that strategy for the last 40 years and essentially conceded the field to the conservatives (and, increasingly, authoritarians). They have to ally with libertarians. If not libertarian, then who?

Have you ever read any of Hayek’s theories about the distribution of knowledge in society? If you have, wouldn’t they have some impact regarding ‘optimal’ levels of scale, as discovered by market processes?

As far as any “empirical” argument, I’m not sure what economy you’re basing your argument on. We haven’t had a free market for a long, long time, if we ever did.

The only way to determine in any meaningful sense the “proper” size of government is to ask “proper for *what*?” And I explained why I thought most of the functions actually carried out by a government of the size you support involve subsidizing and correcting the instabilities of a corporate economy the government created in the first place.

I suppose it’s technically true to say that a radically smaller degree of government is “just another form of state,” in the same sense that calling for a reduced crime rate is just calling for a crime rate of a different kind. But I believe the main function of government in American history, by its qualitative nature, has been to protect privilege and subsidize the wealthy.

chuckles,

I don’t for a moment deny that economies of scale exist–only that the enormous size of the corporations dominating our economy has anything to do with them. Of course economies of scale exist. But the effect of government policy is to artificially shift them upward–way, way upward. The ideal economy of scale, in any particular case, reflects a total package of costs and returns. In almost every case, the effect of government intervention is to shift costs off of the large operators and to increase their returns. The central function of government in the mixed economy is to subsidize the operating costs of big business, to subsidize capital accumulation, and to regulate competition so as to protect stable oligopoly markets. The secondary function of government is to regulate the nasty side effects of the corporate economy it created: keynesian fiscal policies to remedy maldistribution of income and underconsumption, public works and a permanent war economy to absorb oveproduction, and an aggressive foreign policy to forcibly open up markets for surplus goods and capital.

you say–

e.g., the cost of shipping goods from a large factory a thousand miles a way that could be more efficiently produced in a small one twenty miles away; buying factory farmed produce that could be more efficiently grown locally on small farms; oligopoly markups; brand name differentiation that served mainly to repackage commodities at a 400% markup; push marketing that served mainly to dispose of overproduced goods whose production reflected the internal needs of corporations rather than a response to autonomous demand…. and on, and on, and on.

This seems to amount to a claim that in true free-market, the little guy will always beat the distant, giant corporate competitor. Can you really be arguing that economies of scale never obtain except when the government rigs the process?

This seems overly romantic and false as an empirical matter.

This relative interpretation serves as another hurdle to libertarianism, because while virtually no one would say out loud “why yes, I want a big government”, the majority of politically coherent folks each have their pet features of the State which they see no big deal over — and conflict with everyone else over them. Sure, we can argue with one person about their particular attachment, but libertarianism at its root dismisses ALL of them. In that respect, since bickering over competing initiatives to be carried out by force is what politics boils down to, libertarianism is anti-politics itself.

No wonder we have virtually no political influence. Would you expect a militant vegan to cook good BBQ?

The silver lining, however, with respect to any liberal-libertarian alliance is that the “no big deal” attachments of most liberals are the type of things that are debatable on the means — helping the poor, protecting the environment, that kind of thing — while the attachments of the Right-wing are deal-breakers on the ends themselves. In a way, “good” government & “small” government both have a liberal bias.

My own preference is for no government in the long run. I just figure it’s more reasonable to shrink it & grow used to less and less of it than to go cold turkey.

blogged.

http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/myth-of-socialism-as-statism.html

The other day I was speaking with some graduate students who had expressed bewilderment at some of my heterodox views, and I tried to break my outlook down by arguing that I side with the “far left” on economic and civil liberties issues (I’m to the left of Noam Chomsky) and the “far right” on being anti-government, pro-2nd Amendment, in favor of decentralism and localism, “isolationist” in foreign policy (like the Swiss-although I could also be considered “far left” on this as well as I generally sympathize with 3rd World nationalism). Probably the most rightward aspect of my thinking (and controversial) is my insistence that “non-progressive” cultures have the right to exist, whether Islamic tribes in Afghanistan or Pakistan, polygamous cults in Texas, fundamentalist religious sects who prefer their own institutions, racialists who prefer their own separatist enclaves, aboriginal peoples’ in Australia, or hedonist cultures committed to an ethos of sex, drugs and rockn’roll.

In the interests of full disclosure, there you have it.

Why am I against the state? The state is an institution of mass murder. The twentieth century was a unique time as states started acquiring unprecedented levels of power. Not coincidentally, the body count started to rise. Check out the work of R.J. Rummell on this. He estimates 170 million people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century. That’s an incredible figure.

Now, I’ll grant that the majority of these were “undemocratic”, to use conventional political science terminology, and that the big body counts came from Nazis, Commies, Idi Amin, etc. However, I’m not so sure the body count is that much lower when we consider the number of people killed by democratic governments in countries other than their own. The democratic states do not seem to produce the domestic body count of a Hitler or Stalin, but in foreign matters there is a little more gray area.

For instance, a number of independent researchers like Johan Galtung, Chomsky, Peter Dale Scott, former CIA man John Stockwell and some others have generally estimated six million killed in coups, covert actions or counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by the US government. The body count from Central America circa 1980-1992 is easily well into the hundreds of thousands. The number of Vietnamese who died from US involvement in the war there is probably in the millions. The US destabilization of Cambodia is what allowed Pol Pot to seize that country (and the US supported him after the Vietnamese ran him out). The best estimates of casualties in Iraq amount to 500,000 to 1 million since 2003, maybe half a million between 1992-2002, at least another couple hundred thousand in 1991 (probably much more).

This not a good track record to say the least. Even on domestic matters, while the US has yet to cross the line into Hitlerian or Stalinist territory, it’s also true that one quarter of the world’s prisoners are in the US (the highest per capita). The US is second only to China in the number of annual executions. There are 36,000 paramilitary police raids on private residences annually. There are more black male Americans in jail than there were under apartheid. Again, not a very good track record.

As a “leftwing” libertarian, I have no use for big business, big banking, big media, the military-industrial complex, capitalists, landlords, welfare corporations, big oil, big pharma, etc. In fact, I dare to say I probably oppose most of that stuff more fervently than anyone else on this blog, except maybe Kevin Carson, as I’m the one who advocates a lumpenproletarian class revolution.

I just disagree that government is any better than any of these other institutions. If anything it is worse. I’m flexible on this. For instance, I could see using the system’s power of eminent domain against the class enemy by, say, municipalizing the cartels of the medical-industrial complex and converting these into mutualist-syndicalist worker-consumer cooperatives.

Speaking for myself, I’ve had numerous run-ins with family, schools, organized religion, bosses and cops in my lifetime, and as a general rule I would have to say cops and other state agents are the worst. Those who want to expand the state and the police power to save us all from these other things are, IMO, similar to those who want to treat the flu with chemotherapy.

As for how anti-state radicals, decentralists, anarchists, libertarians, whatever we may be, can exercise more influence over society, I’d say from what I’ve seen most in our camp haven’t really given much serious thought to the matter. I think it’s a mistake to try to convert the masses at large to “our side”. Rather, we should seek to be able to achieve a position for ourselves where we can wield power and influence far beyond our numbers. I’ve written about this extensively. Take my views for what you will.

http://attackthesystem.com/liberty-and-populism-building-an-effective-resistance-movement-for-north-america/

With the help of libertarianism’s handy methodological individualism, the idea of a simple two sided scenario is difficult to defend. There are many forces at work that help to shape society apart from political parties. An ideology that can contribute time and money to both the ACLU and the Institute for Justice, for instance, is something worthwhile.

We are cursed with a well-entrenched two-party system. However, the saving grace is the identity of those parties are pretty fluid. If you hold your nose and pick a side, you’ll have an infinitesimal influence on the party. If you don’t pick a side, you will have zero influence. I have recently had to do this in the Taiwanese election even though I hate both the parties here for varied and ever revolving reasons.

When it comes to being the opinion-influencing “court jesters” though, the libertarians have a great advantage. Americans love Liberty!(tm). So stuff with the Liberty!(tm) stamp upon it such as “Republicanism — now with small-government goodness!” sells well to the American public, regardless of what’s in the box. Use this power wisely, and hopefully future “X-libertarian” alliances will see some freedom inside the box too.

Henley, you magnificent bastard…

Ain’t he, tho?

I’ve been a libertarian all of my adult life, and as with Jim, until recently for me that meant believing I tilted right. In my case, that was easier in the 80s because I then shared the view that most abortions ought to be criminalized. (A position I no longer hold, even tho I think too many pro-choicers make morally repugnant arguments; my views on the status of the embryo/fetus have not changed, merely my position as to the feasibility and justice of criminalizing early abortions.)

As a “nontraditional” undergrad student in that same decade, I ran into inane left-wing academics who drove me batshit insane, thereby confirming that I was correct in favoring conservatives over the left.

Of course, I also watched Reagan ratchet up the drug “war” by many magnitudes, and then in the 90s a depraved right-wing attack machine peddling all manner of viciousness about the Clintons that really made me ill. (”Lesbian Hillary killed her lover Vince Foster on her way to burning her Rose Law firm billing records, and forgot to bury him where the other 40 or so Clinton murder victims rest undiscovered.”)

But it was Bush&Co. in these Naught years that pulled me sharply back toward the areas where libertarians have generally always had more in common with liberals: civil liberties, and opposition to imperialist wars and the military-industrial complex. If I had to pnipoint one single event that really began my path toward favoring the left over the right, it was the Schiavo derangement. After that, I seriously began considering what the clowns who woulddo that were perpetrating in other areas, and had an, um, “awakening.”

What you’re talking about is an alliance between libertarians and a portion of the left that is not in power. What Jim is talking about is an alliance between libertarians and the portion of the left that does enjoy some amount of power.

We libertarians are not terribly useful to the portion of the left that does enjoy power, and if we side with them we have to give up a lot–not merely agree to defer certain issues, but elect people who will actively work for and achieve things that we view as a step backward.

The portion of the left that you are most interested in has no more power than libertarians (so neither side is really useful to anybody) but they still outnumber us (so libertarians won’t be the senior partners).

I still think that we libertarians are most useful for ideas, critiques, and for activism on select issues, something closer to what Jim and Tim said above.

That’s true, Rodger. I would assume that some libertarians use the scale of government as a quick, short-hand way of referencing much larger concerns they have. Those larger concerns are both complicated to explain and also difficult to measure. But scale, especially government spending as a percent of GDP, is easy to measure and therefore offers a useful shortcut. Scale is not my issue, but I am sympathetic to the need to have some shortcut methods for measuring complicated subjects. So long as people remember it is just a shortcut to something more important.

By analogy, if I had a fever of 103, I’d be worried. I would not really be worried about the fever, I’d be worried about what might be causing that fever. But core body tempature does offer a useful shortcut to getting at something vastly more complex - the issue of “Am I healhty?”

I’m not so sure liberals and narrow cohort libertarians are entirely useless to each other. We’re still potential allies in the kind of prioritized dismantling you mentioned in that post about crutches and shackles. We can agree to disagree on the liberal agenda for new government programs, and recognize that there’s no basis there for common action–and still work together on dismantling government interventions that serve the interests of big business and the plutocracy. Narrow cohort libertarians don’t have to convert liberals to the nonaggression principle to have fruitful cooperation on removing “shackles” right now.

Roger: Part of the problem is, you seem to be taking the “functions” of government as a given. I would argue that most of the functions of government involve regulating and stabilizing a corporate economy whose origins were not in any sense “necessary,” but which is itself a result of top-down government intervention. I would also argue that, in the period of prosperity under corporate liberalism (ca. 1932-1970), as much as half our workweeks involved paying for layers of Rube Goldberg irrationality: e.g., the cost of shipping goods from a large factory a thousand miles a way that could be more efficiently produced in a small one twenty miles away; buying factory farmed produce that could be more efficiently grown locally on small farms; oligopoly markups; brand name differentiation that served mainly to repackage commodities at a 400% markup; push marketing that served mainly to dispose of overproduced goods whose production reflected the internal needs of corporations rather than a response to autonomous demand…. and on, and on, and on.

The question that occurs to me, regarding the prosperity of the mid-20th century, is compared to what? We have to consider the road not taken. What we got was the economy celebrated by Alfred Chandler. IMO we’d have been better off with the kind of economy described by Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi.

The corporate state has been “efficient,” mainly, at solving problems posed by the corporate state.

As a liberal, I have a question for libertarians. There is a libertarian trope - or perhaps it is more of an obsession - which has never made much sense to me, and that has to do with the scale of government. I’m not sure why libertarians are so set on government being small. I think of scale simply as a product of function, and I would think you would want the government to be of the scale that would match your sense of the functions it should play. The fetishization of smallness as a good in itself seems to be a way of avoiding talking about the functions that you want the state to take on. And, in fact, the current administration, with its pious talk of small government and its 500 billion dollar deficit, is a perfect instance of the separation of ’scale’ talk from reality.

When I look at the last sixty years in the West, which has been the greatest period of mass prosperity in history, I see a range of the size of the state as a part of the GDP which seems to move to a natural average - and if I were really concerned with giving some meaning to this concern with scale (if it does matter how big it is), then I would think my arguments would at least note this fact. But when the scale of the state as part of the GDP is noted, it is always noted as something horrible in itself. I find that, well, amusing. It is like noting what a terrible thing it is that people above 6 foot 9 dominate in basketball, when it used to be that 5 foot niners could join the club.

Another way to phrase your point is that libertarianism is just a political version of skepticism. Not all libertarians are like that–there are some who are absolutely in love with Big Business or are true religious believers or what have you.

But some great number of libertarians are just fallibilists: they have an extreme skepticism about the possibility of knowing Big Things or executing Great Plans and that colors their (our) view of government. It’s libertarianism less as a political philosophy and more as an epistemic stance.

Shorter: libertarians have their bullshit meters set to hair trigger.

And on a few issues, I maintain that our recommendations ARE the best program. One obvious place is the war in Iraq. Another place, perhaps more controversial to some, is drug legalization. OK, I’ll grant that if recreational drugs are legalized there might be some interest in at least regulating distribution and safety and all that, and maybe the pure libertarian approach wouldn’t be perfect. However, any half-way sane scheme of regulating recreational drugs would be SO much better than prohibition, and compared to the status quo it would be like 99% libertarian.

So let’s not sell our libertarian selves short on what we have to offer.

That is a kind of jesterism, though, isn’t it?

I think you sell yourself short. In any X-libertarian fusion (whether X is “conservative” or “liberal,” “red state” or “blue state”), libertarians end up, necessarily, trying to make arguments that are compelling to group X, and those arguments offer group X a way to gracefully back away from its worst mistakes without having to concede points to its main opposition.