Tim Lee writes about how libertarians have done pretty well despite ostensibly not being part of the in crowd in either major party:
I think DeBoer is basically right. We obviously don’t live in a perfectly libertarian world, but libertarians have had a pretty impressive winning streak in recent decades, especially on economic policy. Income tax rates are way down. Numerous industries have been deregulated. Most price controls have been abandoned. Competitive labor markets have steadily displaced top-down collective bargaining. Trade has been steadily liberalized.
Simultaneously, the intellectual climate has shifted to be dramatically more favorable to libertarian insights. Wage and price controls were a standard tool of economic policymaking in the 1970s. No one seriously advocates bringing them back today. The top income tax bracket in the 1950s was north of 90 percent. Today, the debate is whether the top rate will be 35 percent or 39 percent. There’s plenty to criticize about proposals for government-mandated network neutrality, but no one is seriously proposing that we return to the monopoly model of telecommunications that existed for most of the 20th century. At mid-century, intellectuals idealized large, bureaucratic firms like General Motors and AT&T. Today, intellectuals across the political spectrum argue that their preferred proposals will promote competition and foster the creation of small businesses.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Lee in person, and I told him that what I thought was the key difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals actually internalize policy critiques from their ideological rivals, and I think that’s clear from policy outcomes he describes. The most obvious recent example is that liberals were willing to sacrifice a single payer health care system for one that preserves the private insurance market if it ultimately meant that millions more Americans would be covered.
That emphasis on empricism, which Jon Chait is often citing, is part of the reason that I’m a liberal and not a conservative. But the reason I’m not a libertarian is because the most influential movement for individual freedom in United States history, the civil rights movement, demanded federal intervention, while the forces of white supremacy framed their appeal using the libertarian rhetoric of Barry Goldwater. As Damon Root has written, there were some libertarians who deployed ideological arguments against Jim Crow. But the Southern states that went Goldwater in 1964 weren’t doing so because they wanted to implement their own local desegregation efforts. They did so because Goldwater’s libertarian position offered a superficially non-racist moral and constitutional defense of segregation and racial discrimination.
While I generally write on a number of subjects where I have points of agreement with libertarians, the “freedom” of child to die from minor dental problems because their mother can’t afford health insurance isn’t the kind of I’m interested in preserving. But neither am I interested in preserving the kind of government regulation that serves as a pretext for paramilitary drug raids on barbershops. The lesson of the civil rights movement and American history is that the equation “less government = more freedom” really fails as a hard rule.
