Crazy Elmont

Recently Simon Goldie was asking for suggestions on how he should categorize the libertarian bloggers he has on his blogroll. The term libertarianism covers a wide range of complimentary but distinct theoretical strands which is often confusing. (Not just to the uninitiated either!) I did a quick check on the different strands to see what people under the libertarian umbrella call themselves. The list is as follows:

Minarchists, anarcho-capitalists, constitutional conservatives, classical liberals, objectivists, mutualists, agorists, voluntaryists, geolibertarians, left-Rothbardians, green libertarians, dialectical anarchists, radical minarchists, civil libertarians, market liberals, crypto-anarchists……

I could go on and on with that list, the point being that trying to define libertarianism is a pretty thankless task. What I wanted to do for this blog post is look at the just three of those strands; classical liberalism, minarchism, and anarcho-capitalism, and show both the similarities and differences between them. I picked those three as they are all identified as being ‘right-wing’ libertarian theories.  (Andrew Heywood identified them as individualist-anarchist which is a pretty crude grouping but needs must.) Definitions are always problematic, and I’m sure many wiser bloggers would have an alternative view, but it’s my blog so my rules!

As I see myself as a classical-liberal I wanted to look at what I believe and compare it to the other two schools of thought. I see my classical-liberalism as pretty ‘rigid’, when I say rigid I see my beliefs as being very close to the core tenets of classical-liberalism, beyond these core tenets I feel liberalism ceases to be ‘classical’ and moves into other political philosophies. These core beliefs are:

• The primacy of the individual. An individual should be free to act as they wish, provided their actions do not infringe on any other individuals rights.
• A successful society is one where individuals interact without fear of coercion.
• Individuals act in their own self-interest. This is the natural, any attempt to pressure people to act in any other way is wrong.
• Individuals all have different abilities and personalities, left to their own devices people will exploit their talents and rise through society at different speeds and to different levels. This meritocracy is a good thing.
• Meritocracy is, by definition, unequal. Attempts to engineer equality are wrong, to give to someone you have to take from someone else. Therefore infringing on their rights. Equality before the law is the  only desirable and necessary equality.  
• By the same token ‘positive liberty’ is  no-no. People are free to do as they wish, but they do not have a “right to” anything. Rights for one person lead to responsibilities for another, often against their will.
• This vision of society is organised by individuals interacting through the free-market. The free-market, left unmolested, is the natural way for people to express their choices and meet their needs. If it is allowed to work without interference the market benefits everyone.
• Statists see the free-market creating ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and therefore try and manage it. This position is wrong and ultimately self-fulfilling. The state, through regulation and welfarism, creates winners and condemns losers to a lifetime of dependency.
• The state only has a very limited set of functions. It is responsible for maintaining the nation’s defense and  legal system (police and courts).

At this point there is very little difference between my view and that of a minarchist (I’ll come back to anarcho-capitalists a bit later on). But from here the philosophical differences become pronounced. From a purely economic point of view classical-liberals have the state intruding far more than minarchists do. I see the state having a duty to fund (via taxation) key infrastructure spending that minarchists would leave to private companies and the free-market.  What I mean by this is certain transport infrastructure, and also ‘energy’ infrastructure. I think security increasingly means energy-security, and would have the state funding a whole raft of nuclear power plants for example.

Perhaps more importantly the classical-liberal notion of ‘political power’ is completely different from a minarchists. I see political power as a public good. The individuals who make up a society recognise the value of the state protecting their rights through a universal set of laws and institutions. The institutions that uphold the law are their to serve the individuals needs and interests, but they are also ‘above’ the individual. It’s an essentially Lockean ‘social contract’ view that each individual gives up a tiny piece of their freedom to secure the necessary legal protection. To stop the state going beyond it’s strictly limited mandate there needs to be constitutional checks in place to protect the individual. Also the state needs to maintain it’s legitimacy, most classical-liberals argue that the best way for this legitimacy to be earned/maintained is through democratic institutions.

At this point most minarchists have probably thrown up their hands in despair! Many minarchists have an ambivalent attitude to democracy, seeing it as a potential risk to an individuals freedoms (the tyranny of the majority). For minarchists political power resides entirely within the individual. The minimal-state has only to protect individual’s rights, maintain a national defense, and adjudicate when individuals have disputes over private-contracts.

For anarcho-capitalists even this is too much, their position is best summed up by the following quote:

For those still pursuing the hopeless utopia of “limited” government (minarchy), there is little of substance to be said. In a nutshell, the State is the monopolization of coercion — initiatory violence.

Any defensive acts are incidental to its essence. To a libertarian, such coercion is the only social immorality. (Personal immorality is the individual’s problem.) Hence the State is the institutional monopolization of immorality, evil, altruism, irrationality, and/or whatever you call it in your belief system.‡

For anarcho-capitalists any notion of a minimal state is foolhardy. Even the minachist’s model presents an unacceptable threat to the freedoms of the individual. Unlike classical-liberals who see things the market can’t do anarcho-capitalists believe an the free-market can provide everything an individual needs including courts and policing. This isn’t the place to explore this further (mainly due to the length of this blog-post!), all that needs to be said now is some liberals see this kind of political system (the primacy of private contact, a lack of constitutional protection) as a form of 21st Century Feudalism. I think this criticism is mistaken and will blog about why at a later date.  

As I said at the beginning of this post these are only three strands of libertarian thought. I haven’t even begun to read up on ‘left libertarianism’°° yet.  Although there are profound philosophical differences it’s still useful to keep these groupings together, the current size and power of the state is such that we all have common causes to fight, and it’ll be well after my lifetime before we get anywhere near to any of our preferred outcomes.

ººMr Civil Libertarian wrote an excellent blog post on his left-libertarianism here. He also supplied the article where I took the quote ‡ from.

It’s become pretty obvious to my blogging ‘career’ has ground to a halt, mountains of unfinished drafts, a feeling of dread every time I log in, and a growing disinterest in a great deal of what passes for politics has turned what was an enjoyable hobby into an arduous slog. Therefore I’m taking a long-long break, when I do return it may well be on this blog (especially as my friend Simon did such a great job setting it up for me) or I may decide to make a clean break and start-over.

Although I know there are many bloggers who are complete stat-whores I just want to write interesting pieces and blow off some steam. When you can’t do either it’s time to stop. Thank you to the three or four people that actually read the blog (!), with any luck I’ll be back on it soon.

Henry Porter wrote an article* for The Observer in which he lavished praise on our new coalition government. Whether he’s right to do so is a matter for debate (one that I’m beginning to feel like getting involved in at last), but his words on the link between the authoritarianism and financial extravagance of our last government is perfect.

“It may be illogical but somehow the waste of taxpayers’ money under Labour and the targeting of individual rights became almost the same issue in my mind. This was a government that thought nothing of spending £600m on public CCTV, while fewer crimes were being solved each year by CCTV, and billions on databases when no improved productivity or clear benefit had ever been articulated. One wonders, for instance, how HM Revenue and Customs managed to spend £35m on the Business Link website and why the UK Trade and Investment website invested £4m to gain 28,000 users per month. I guess another person’s money is like their freedom – it’s never quite as valuable as your own.”

It’s not illogical to link the two at all, I’ve started to argue the point here before, but Mr Porter said it so much better.

*thanks to Simon Goldie for drawing my attention to the article.

Taken from the Mises Economics Blog. Proper blogging will resume soon.

While I was away last week I saw this, Anti-Monopoly is a game which sees free-marketeers take on monopolists in a battle to the (business) death. The two types of players have different rules to reflect the type of business they’re operating. At first I thought it was a clever offshoot of the well-known board-game, but having looked at the website it appears the story of Anti-Monopoly is better than the game. I’m buying the book and the newest edition of the game and I’ll let you know what they’re like when I get them.

Osbourne should have started his speech with this immortal paragraph from William Gladstone, as a denunciation of Gordo and Darling’s 12 year spending spree it’s perfect:

“The Chancellor of the Exchequer should boldly uphold economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted Chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question of only two or three thousand pounds, he says it is no matter. He is ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called candle-ends and cheese-parings, but he is not worth his salt if he is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of the country. No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who makes his own popularity either his consideration, or any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my opinion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the trusted and confidential steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all that he consents to spend.”

As I said yesterday I knew beforehand that the budget wouldn’t go far enough for my liking. Osbourne produced some a mixed bag of good and bad, but he works within a set of political assumptions about the state that I fundamentally disagree with. Until health spending is opened up to proper debate we’ll never get very far anyway. There has been some interesting analysis on the blogosphere today, so here’s the best:

The most interesting article by the mainstream media came from the Independent’s Steve Richards. He highlights the risks Osbourne is taking and asks whether this is the beginning of the end for the state.  The Libertarian Alliance don’t think so, their press release is scathing about the inadequacies of the budget. Liberal Vision highlights the idiocy of judging the budget in terms of purely distributive effects, it also gives Left Foot Forward a well-deserved kicking. The Adam Smith Institute looks at what a leaner post-budget government should be doing (a lot less – which is spot on).

On a lighter note; Mr Eugenides gets right to the heart of the budget in a few wonderfully crafted lines, Timmy Worstall reminds us Polly Toynbee is a moronic fossil who can’t even do basic maths, and The Daily Mash has the lowdown on Osbourne’s alternative budget plan.

I don’t need to wait to see what George Osbourne has in store for us today, I can already tell it won’t go far enough. If I was Chancellor (perish the thought) I’d cut, cut and cut some more (including the NHS). Ex-Labour ministers and Union leaders whining about ‘public-services’ would make the job even more enjoyable. If those muppet’s really cared about public services they’d have tried to REFORM them rather than indulge in a very expensive exercise in empire building and vote-buying. In the old-days when the Monarchy used to run the country Kings and Queens used to hand out patronage to their favourites and the last 12 years hasn’t been much different. Various non-elected bodies, Quangos, ‘charities’, and a massively over-inflated public sector have been the benefactors of a truly nauseating level of largess.

Enough is enough, the golden tit has run dry and it’s time to get a grip on things.

The Libertarian Alliance has published some of it’s older writings online for the first time. Amongst them was a short article on free trade by my old university lecturer Dr Nigel Ashford, Nigel was the first libertarian I’d ever met and his political outlook influenced me greatly. I also remember Nigel fondly because, as my dissertation tutor, he had to wade through my rather turgid musings on Richard Nixon’s economic policy. So here is his piece, 13 years later, coincidently 1997 was the same year I switched from Sociology to Politics at University. What glorious memories!

With the exception of the ever brilliant Marina Hyde the comments section of the Guardian is stuffed full of the type of people I loathe (Monbiot, Ashley, Toynbee), so imagine my surprise when Al Jahom pulled this gem from their website.

Simon Jenkins is spot on, we can’t legislate danger away. Tragedies like Whitehaven will ALWAYS happen, senseless slaughter can’t be stopped everytime, and the effort it takes to try actually makes us all fel a lot less safe.