Baskin Robbins should have nothing on us: flavors of Libertarians

I want to start by acknowledging all the people who have taken the time to read and respond to previous posts, especially including Tom, Alan, Brian, Tyler, Shirley, and Duffie. Food for thought from everyone.

Shirley recently asked,

The nature of any political organization, or organizations in general for that matter seem to lead to strife, disagreement, and eventual ineffectiveness (I am thinking of Common Cause as an example). Can you address how the inevitable clash of egos and general crankiness can be managed?

This post is part of the answer to that, but I need to make an initial point quite clearly. In at least one response that I made to Tyler Nixon he was right to call me on a couple of my characterizations of him that were presumptious and almost certainly inaccurate. If you followed that strand I apologized, but I need to do so here more publicly. We will manage that clash of egos and general crankiness--at least as first step--by acting as individuals who have class and concern for the feelings of others. That shouldn't change regardless of ideological perspective.

On to the meat of the matter....

Zell Miller and Howard Dean both belong to the Democratic Party. Lincoln Chafee and George Allen are both Republicans. Partly because of the Demopublican duo-opoly in the American political system it is not surprising to find an entire range of views under the Sign of Ass and Pachyderm. There are Log Cabin Republicans and nearly libertarian Democrats, "notwithstanding the world of discredited bipolar propagandanda," as Tyler observed, in which all Democrats are crazed abortionists (go away Bob Casey) and all Republicans favor legalizing machine guns (sorry, Rudy), the truth of the matter is this:

Major national political parties that are effective and achieve power are built on working (and constantly shifting) coalitions of people who share some (but never all) significant political and social goals.

The Republican success of the 1990s was built on the combination of the social and libertarian conservatives in a very tumultuous and now disintegrating marriage. The Democrats (thanks, Will Rogers) have always been more of a conglomeration of interests than a coherent message.

Here's my first thesis of the day: minor or third parties (as opposed to candidates) stay minor and third because they will not bend sufficiently to build effective coalitions. They would prefer to remain true to pure ideological goals than to win.

Because to win you have to get votes from people who do not belong to your political party or wholeheartedly subscribe to every single one of your core beliefs.

Let's take a few minutes to substantiate that from recent comments several of you have made:

Duffie says,

The problem, as I see it with the Libertarian "brand" is that they're known as the party of legal drugs and legal prostitution instead of the party of low taxation and strong property rights.

Tyler talks about the refusal of the LPD to support him in his Senate bid. Note that whether or not his perception of the reasons he was turned away are accurate (and I am not suggesting they aren't) is immaterial. What is important is that his narrative certainly fits the general perception of a small party more interested in ideological purity than in actually becoming change agents. You can see the Greens, the Working Families Party, or the IPOD turning away someone like this, but it is difficult to see either wing of the Demopublicans doing so:

When I was informed that the decision was in fact based on a cursory review of a few bullet points from my website I was again pretty disappointed I was not offered any chance to elaborate or answer questions.

The summary nature of the decision didn't trouble me as much as that the cursory evaluation seemed to misconstrue my positions as written.

And Alan says,

I find a number of bloggers that agree with the libertarian position. But I also find the LP nowhere in the "rough and tumble". They sit back at DE-LP and nothing happens.

In another post (that I can't find at the moment), Tyler also makes the distinction between big-L "Libertarians" and little-L "libertarians." That's a critical distinction as well, because many libertarians would not dream of becoming Libertarians as the cost of ideological purity appears to be political impotence.

Better to stick with the Republicans and hold summits with the cultural conservatives?

So what's going to cut that Gordian Knot? In Delaware, I suggest that it has to be a systematic and intentional widening of the LPD's definition of being a Libertarian with a honking big L. How do you do that?

You begin by acknowledging that there is considerable breadth as well as depth in the Libertarian position.

Many of my posts have been critiqued by Tom, who is both a gentleman and whose views (insofar as he has shared them here) appear to be far more representative of what I would tentatively label "Classical Libertarianism" than my own. He has offered incisive analysis of many of my arguments that are certainly worth pondering (I do). But he has never suggested that because I disagree with him I am somehow not a Libertarian (with either kind of L).

So what I want to do with the remainder of this post is to take one of his most careful critiques of one of my positions and juxtapose it with my own responses. The purpose is NOT to defeat his ideas, but to begin the process of modeling the idea that the advocacy of personal liberty and smaller government (both in terms of size and authority) is a wide ranging spectrum.

And that Tom and I--or others like us--can work profitably together for decades before we get out of our wheelchairs to fight about the finer points (America having come so far in our direction that we're now on opposite sides of an argument again. Ha!)

This is the paragraph I wrote originally that Tom questioned:

It is also instructive to note that for every social/political success of "big government" like trustbusting, child labor laws, social security, medicaire, or the civil rights act, that same Leviathan also perpetrated kidnapping of Indian children, internment of Japanese-American citizens, racially segregated accommodations, an interventionist foreign policy, racial quotas on immigration, outlawing the use of cheap, naturally produced analgesics by doctors, forced sterilization of the mentally retarded, and employing direct violence to break up labor actions and political demonstrations.

(Note for big government advocates: segregation ended primarily because of two key events: Brown vs the Board of Education and Jackie Robinson's entry into major leagure baseball. Neither can be attributed to "big government." One was mandated by the courts after decades of government failure to adress racial inequality, and the other was the result of market forces within professional sports.)

(Note: he didn't actually take issue with the paragraph in parenthesis, but I included it because I am going to refer to it later.)

Tom said, first,

None of the "successes" of big government you cited seem very successful if examined too closely.

He then proceeded to take issue with me in five different paragraphs of response, which I am going to quote and respond to seriatem. This cuts up his response a bit, but has the advantage of placing our specific views directly opposite each other. I need to emphasize, however, that nothing in Tom's post has been deleted.

Tom:

The Civil Rights Act & child labor laws certainly did some good, but both went too far. If they had merely declared the "Jim Crow" laws unconstitutional but not outlawed private discrimination, market forces would have eliminated segregation & discrimination far more effectively than bureaucracy has. Racism is horribly inefficient -- any business that shuns or ignores a substantial segment of its potential market and/or a source of employees will not last long in a free market. But telling racists that the object of their irrational hatred is now a special government-protected class only serves to drive the hatred underground and strengthen it.

My response:

Start with civil rights: Tom contends that a simple ruling of Jim Crow unconstitutional without prohibiting "private discrimination" that the market would have eliminated both segregation and discrimination becuase "Racism is horribly inefficient..." I disagree. Racism at its basis is a non-rational cultural value that is not only non-economic but often strongly anti-economic. Both world and US history abound with examples of people who--for decades and even centuries--cheerfully maintained such forms of discrimination at significant economic cost to themselves. Apartheid South Africa was quite content to continue for decades under an economically substandard operating system to maintain racial purity. Southerners in the Jim Crow south demanded that their governments build expensive (for everyone!) dual sets of accommodations and schools and churches and hospitals and transport and sports arenas and so on so on son for years and years and years--even though such a dual (if unequal; sorry Plessy and Ferguson) infrastructure placed their regional at a continual and continually worsening economic position vis a vis the north and west.

Moreover, merely characterizing a practice as unconstitutional does not end it. In response to Cherokee Nation vs Georgia in the 1820s, Andrew Jackson is said to have remarked, "Mr. Chief Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it." Likewise, Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka Kansas mandated the end of segregation in public education "with all deliberate speed," which turned out--in many cases--to be several decades.

As I noted, segregation in this country received its death blows from Brown and Jackie Robinson. Robinson's entrance into the majors is--at least on the surface--and excellent point for Tom's case. Branch Rickey took on Robinson precisely because of market forces: wanting to win a pennant and a World Series, and wanting the extra revenue the sensation would give him. Nor was Rickey the first owner to think about integrating the Bigs. Washington owner Clark Clifford had given tryouts to several standout Negro league stars in the 1930s, and Bill Veeck attempted to buy the entire Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues to substitute for the Cleveland Indians in the early 1940s.

But market forces also protracted the period of de jure segregation in major league baseball. Because Clark Clifford often made more money from renting his DC stadium to the Homestead Grays than his own Nationals took in, he opposed the overt integration of the majors for two key decades. Instead, he actually played several black players but took pains to label them as "Cubans" in order to avoid the stigma attached to integration. Remember that the market is colorblind in the sense that if there is economic sense in oppressing a particular group (think African slavery in the Americas, renters in the Hudson River Valley before 1820, or sharecroppers in the late 19th century) then the market will also do that.

I think Tom is correct that after the mid-1960s the government went way too far in terms of quotas, affirmative action, and the like, but despite the dissents of Barry Goldwater and Al Gore Sr. there was not really a strong constitutional case against the original Civil Rights Act.

Tom says,

Child labor laws definitely eliminated some terrible abuses, but they too went too far, and have made many poor families dependent on government programs.

My response:

Show me the money, Tom. In balancing the rigor needed to correct "terrible abuses" against "going too far" we need to look at several standards. Note first that you haven't made a case that the market would ever have ended those abuses. After that, I don't think you can come up with the data to make a causal link between child labor laws and making many poor families dependent on government programs. Most child labor laws (which have extensive exemptions for agricultural work and family-owned businesses) were on the books well before the New Deal or the Great Society came along.

Tom says,

There is just nothing good to say about Social Security. Even if you pretend it is actually a retirement program and not a massive unconstitutional transfer of wealth from the young to the old, and further pretend that it can be "fixed" and isn't doomed to implode in the near future, it is still a bad program. It provides less than half the Return On Investment that putting your share of the "contributions" into a passbook savings account would. If you can call having the government take 7.5% of your paycheck and make your employer match 6.5% an "investment" or a "contribution"

My response:

Undoubtedly Tom wins this one on points. However, let me explain my context for the statement. SSI originally came into existence in an era when there was general American consensus that something had to be done for retirees, especially in the wake of the Great Depression. When you compare it to the Ponzi program, the American Social Credit Movement, Upton Sinclair's plan, or the infamous "Ham and Eggs" proposal, it looks pretty rational. Of course it was based on several (as it turned out) erroneous demographic assumptions, but nobody in the early 1940s anticipated either the Baby Boom or the dramatic technological advances in health and medicine that would make 65 a ludicrous retirement age.

Tom says,

In 40 years Medicare/Medicaid has turned more than half of what was once an excellent & affordable health care system into a single-payer socialist nightmare.

My response:

Start with that "excellent & affordable health care system." Even had Medicare/caid never existed, the technological and research-based advances in medicine would have made that health care system far less affordable. Even with market economies, cancer treatments based on CTs and MRIs; neonatal intensive care, and state-of-the-art geriatric medicine were not ever going to be cheap. Nor was the standard of excellence going to stand still. Moreover, the corporations who seized the opportunity left by the initial failure of Hillary-care to make over managed care in the 1990s haven't done such a bang-up job of it either. I have a 26 year old daughter who is working two part-time jobs and qualifies for benefits under neither. She cannot afford to pay for health insurance for herself or her son, so I have seen Medicaid first-hand, Ironically, the paperwork process she has to follow is actually simpler than the one Blue Cross/Blue Shield puts me through, at least for the run-of-the-mill stuff. Moreover, when Medicaid or Medicaire says a service is pre-approved or covered, it generally is. With BCBS and many other private insurers, I am told by credible insiders that as many as 20% of all claims are automatically bounced without regard to merit, because the insurers have discovered that half the people will not take the time to appeal the decision and simply pay out of pocket. Thus the insurance company saves the cost of about 10% of its claims off the top. This is a market force that certainly does not work on behalf of the consumer.

Tom says,

"Trustbusting" resulted in hundreds of thousands of pages of bewildering laws & regulations that make it extremely complex and expensive to manage a large, or even medium sized, corporation and a bunch of extremely inefficient government enforced monopolies that provide poor service at high prices.

My response:

Trustbusting was a response to anti-market, unethical, monopolistic tactics on behalf of major American corporations, employing such strategies as pooling and Rockefeller's "American Beauty Rose." The current maze of laws we have today is the consequence of their prolonged anti-free-market behavior. And, because in many ways large corporations dislike free market competition just as much as the government, we still have that behavior today. Microsoft's strategy in forcing small contractors out of business to buy their physical plants at the bankruptcy sales is only one example. Given the size of many of today's mega-corps, they don't necessarily respond to market forces, they often distort them.

While we are on the subject, even as a Libertarian I want the government to enjoy certain monopolies. I do not want to contract out our national defense to mercenary soldiers (even though through MPRI, Airscan, and others the State Department often does so). I do not want the government to contract out law enforcement, although I want more rational laws. I want the government to have a monopoly on protecting the president and senior officials (I like the Secret Service).

I could certainly do without the postal monopoly, but Fedex, UPS and email are killing it for me. Again, the market does great in sectors where economic factors are the only ones we need to concern ourselves with.

I say again:

The point of presenting this little mocked-up debate is not to have my interpretations or ideas to "defeat" Tom's responses to my original post. It is to point out that there can be a pretty wide variety of views between Libertarians.

And this is a critical point. Perhaps THE critical point.

Individuals, and especially individual voters, are not always (or ever) consistent in their views. People who oppose abortion on moral grounds sometimes support euthanasia because they saw their grandmother die a horrible lingering death. The dissonance between the two positions is often not rational but emotional.

While I tend toward preferring rationality as the basis of society and public policy, I'm not consistent about that, either.

Think of it this way: I equate rationality with justice and emotion with mercy. My faith and my political philosophy feel better to me (personally) when both dynamics are satisfied.

People sometimes ask me why I spent 21 years in the military. I can explain the rational reasons (enlistment bonus, travel, good-paying part time work, interesting jobs, etc.), but most days it is the corny patriotic side of me that holds the answer to which I have the most affinity: I love my country and somebody has to do it.

We need all flavors of freedom-loving individuals to feel accepted rather than pushed away from the Libertarian movement, and we do that by looking for common denominators rather than attention-getting stands like legalized prostitution or drugs. Moreover, in order to win, we need the votes of a lot of citizens who just want more open, less expensive, less intrusive government, and may be quite happy to keep some of the bureaucratic handouts that drive the rest of us crazy.

Again, thanks to everyone who has been reading along. I really do want to be part of the impetus to take libertarianism forward, and it certainly can't be done without you.