Chris Beam had a good piece on libertarianism in New York Magazine that Radley Balko described as “a thrashing disguised as a primer.” There’s no question that what Beam wrote was a takedown, but it was also about as fair as a criticism of an entire ideology gets. If there were really egregious errors of fact and logic in the piece, Balko would have torn Beam apart.
As others have noted, Beam actually gives libertarians too much credit when he describes the Constitution as a “libertarian document.” The Constitution was a compromise document, one that reflects the diverging political agendas of the Framers. This is why it contains so many values that are in tension, ideals that every pole of the political spectrum can glom onto in order to legitimize its own particular worldview.
But even if that were true, it’s not as though we haven’t learned anything about government and individual freedom since ratification. The fact is that 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.
When it comes to the subjects I generally write about, I agree fairly frequently with libertarians. I’d like to see fewer prisons, less draconian drug laws, a smaller more accountable national security system, and immigration laws more tailored to the realities of the labor market. I very much enjoy the writing of libertarians like Balko, Tim Lee, and Julian Sanchez, all of whom have influenced my own thinking on the above subjects.
But the reason I would never identify as a libertarian is despite all that, I can never forget that my mother was born into an America where millions fervently believed that “freedom” meant the unfettered authority of Southern states to force black people to live under racial segregation and unchecked terrorist violence, and ending that era required robust federal intervention. So the whole less government = more freedom equation just never seemed all that compelling to me as a hard rule.
So, for someone like, me, Beam’s question was the right one–do we want to live in a libertarian world? I wouldn’t. Do libertarian ideas and arguments have a lot to offer in terms of forming better public policy? I don’t think that’s even really in question.
