To the general public, conservatives and libertarians are bound to seem bedfellows – both groups adamantly support smaller government, decentralization of federal power, and lower and fewer taxes, to name just a few subjects. And as apparent allies with conservatives on countless national issues, compounded by the trifling number of Americans self-identifying as libertarians, we tend to blend into the woodwork of the national political scene. Naturally one would assume that the uniform leftism of the academy would only exacerbate libertarian obscurity.
Still, we seem to be far more noticed at Brown. This is likely owing to the different hot button issues current among university students – gay marriage, the draft, and the war on drugs to name a few – on which libertarians tend to seem more liberal than conservative. As such, the campus left will find themselves sympathetic to a vast swathe of libertarian social policies, which allows us to avoid the ire they save for the right, and perhaps to seem a bit more approachable – or even centrist.
To the libertarian, however, consensus is not to be gauged according to agreement on specific issues defined in such a way as to yield two clear-cut sides – e.g., pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay marriage/anti-gay marriage; we require (to risk sounding like John Kerry) a more “nuanced” approach – close examination of the philosophy behind the platform. When viewed as philosophies, despite any practical similarities, the difference between libertarianism and the ideologies of both the right and the left can neither be denied nor overstated.
The unifying principle behind all libertarian doctrines is that of self-ownership: an individual is sovereign over his or her body, which entails the rights to life, liberty, and property. Thus, for libertarians, a just government must both respect and protect individual rights, restricting the free action of a citizen only insofar as it infringes, whether by force or fraud, upon the rights of his or her fellows. The most reasonable way for us to begin formulating a political philosophy, the libertarian will argue, is to ask the question, “how should we treat the individual,” rather than “what sort of society do we wish to build?” It is in this Hayekian focus on a justice of rules that govern interpersonal interaction by delimiting individual domains, rather than on the desirability of the specific outcomes for different individuals or a society as a whole, that the libertarian believes we stand the best chance of establishing a society of free, prosperous, and equal persons.
Equality is in fact a first principle of a libertarian political philosophy – that is, equal treatment under the law. As nature certainly does not endow persons equally, the establishment of any equality among them, apart from equality of treatment, in fact necessitates unequal treatment – and by what impartial standard could a government evaluate claims for separate treatment for separate individuals? Any government endeavoring to tamper with ends finds that the dim hope of achieving its goal lies only in erecting a bureaucracy of force benefiting certain individuals at the expense of others. Thus, it is only in a society of equal persons under law that interactions between individuals can serve the mutual benefit of all parties, and any individual who respects his fellows benefits from cooperative engagement with them, serving neither as slave to nor master over another.
The various leftist and conservative creeds that diverge from the philosophy of freedom do so right at the outset – they are concerned with organizing a society that looks a certain way: for the left, a socialist utopia straight out of John Lenin’s (oops, I mean Lennon’s) “Imagine,” in which culturally disparate citizens join hands and bank accounts, and for the right, a “Christian” or other socially homogenous state which casts out “deviants” to build the “shining city on a hill,” to put it a bit uncharitably.
Although the right and the left abhor each other’s vision of the ideal state, they stand united in their fundamental belief that a government is justified in legislating equality, morality, or any of the other various means to erecting their utopias. Consequently, while libertarians will nearly universally join with the far left in calling for the decriminalization of drugs, and with the right concerning lower taxes, for instance, our position on these issues stems from a singular political philosophy recognizing the sanctity of individual rights and the duty of a just government to respect and protect these rights to the greatest extent possible.
Many brilliant men and women have proffered pragmatic justifications for both libertarian economic and social policy. For instance, given the arguments set forth by thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises, among others, it is clear that leftist fiscal practices are doomed to failure as a simple matter of economics, and that their lofty egalitarian ideals will always be frustrated in the process. And social conservatism qua legislated morality is of course incapable of effectively rooting out “deviant” practices, much less changing the hearts and minds of individuals, whose actions can of course only bear moral content if freely chosen anyway! Empirical evidence backing these claims abounds – e.g., the failure of the socialist experiment in Eastern Europe, and the miserable record of the War on Drugs – and yet the true libertarian staunchly opposes both conservatism and leftism on moral, not practical grounds: even if a perfectly egalitarian society were the result of a Soviet-style oligarchy, or drug use could be effectively stamped out by the DEA, a government cannot be justified in treating individual citizens as means to social ends.
While it is of course unquestionable that true happiness is possible to man only through his security in his person and in his freedom, and that aggregate wealth and social welfare are both best served by the free market, the libertarian believes that the moral value of respecting individual rights outweighs these essentially ancillary benefits. While freedom is the only means to these desirable ends, it is an end in its own right since justice is an end in its own right, and justice can be served only in respecting individual rights. In pale imitation of the late JFK, I will instruct you to ask not “what sort of society do we want our government to build,” but rather, “how must a just government treat the individual?”
