Views on liberty: basic thoughts on libertarianism

The use of the word libertarianism itself can be controversial and, as most ideologies, comes in several shapes and sizes, with different beliefs and nuances. Presently, it can be considered an umbrella term for people who believe in liberty and often manifested through the medium of natural law, negative rights and limited – or among the more purist zero – government.

Of course, libertarians differ on a wide array of subjects and I think it can be said no two libertarians agree on everything, but let’s just say this to get it out of the way: libertarians are not Objectivist and Ayn Rand is not some sort of patron saint, most never read her work – I certainly have not.

The essence of modern libertarianism is, in my view obviously, more often than not found in its philosophical side and it is based on individual liberty and individual rights, which should not be infringed arbitrarily by government bureaucracy or by the whims of politicians and state leaders. This is mostly deontological in nature.

A significant subset is economic libertarianism, which tends to sound more consequentialist as it talks about freedom bringing good economic outcomes. It is more present in general debate, because it appeals more to some people, who take pure philosophical notions of freedom to be meaningless – what is freedom if you are hungry they may ask (it is quite precisely the same as freedom when not hungry). It talks, correctly in my view, of how strong property rights and free markets benefit the economy and society, and bring prosperity to large numbers of individuals.

This is obviously very important, because most people desire to live in a prosperous society, but very often in can be incorrectly assumed that this is the purpose, the “raison d’étre” if you will, of all libertarian thought.

Prosperity and economic growth are some of the positive consequences of libertarianism, but do not represent the core purpose of libertarianism as a philosophy. There are purely utilitarian libertarians out there, but in my experience even more are deontological. It is considered that people have the right to be free, even if it makes them less prosperous, and person A should not infringe person B’s freedom even if this increases economic output.

For an example, frequently, the question asked is would we have “iPhone/GPS/nuclear power/whatever” under libertarianism, and the answer is quite probably we would have, but it is irrelevant in the end. You have no right to infringe someone’s freedom in order to use Waze on your iPhone to get around (on government roads presumably).

It is easy to look at some achievement – let’s say great monuments of old – and forget about the human cost of their being built. Maybe you could develop better medicine by experimenting on children, but that does not justify it. An exaggeration, off course, but not by as much as it might seem.

To address the point, without all the destruction of war, the waste of resources by government misallocation, corruption, by cronyism, by misapplied patent and copyright, science could have done well. People researched and invented outside of government and would have continued to do so. Those who worked for government and invented great things would have had ideas in the private sector as well, and there is little basis for thinking otherwise. So technology would probably have advanced as much or maybe more, but that is, in any way, irrelevant to libertarian ideas.

There are inherent dangers in pure utilitarianism, which stem from the fact that there is no clear way to measure utility and that vague utilitarianism can be a dangerous weapon in the rhetoric of the power-hungry. A philosophy can have utilitarian components, but must be quite careful with them.

Who needs roads?

Let’s be honest, individually and up to a point, most are somewhat utilitarian, no one dreams at re-enacting Mad Max in the real world - i mean desert heat and leather pants don't mix that well. But often a so called utilitarian tends to embrace authoritarian solutions to the world’s problems, as he substitutes his own preferences for those of everyone else and invents reasons to justify this by claiming it increases general happiness.

For many libertarians liberty is an end in itself, not a mean to something else.