What Is Libertarianism?

If you pay any attention to the internal debates within the libertarian movement [and really, who among us does not enjoy nanotech?--ed.], you might have noticed a pronounced split over the right libertarian position on gay marriage. E-mail correspondent JWB provides a pretty complete summary of the "libertarian" argument against gay marriage:

1. It seems self-evident that the existing legal institution of marriage is repugnant to libertarian principles, and should be, according to those principles, immediately abolished, with couples (and perhaps larger groups) thereafter free to formalize their relationships with contracts customized to their own tastes.

2. A more pragmatic libertarian (e.g., the sort who is willing to talk in the alternative about what the public schools should do rather than say it doesn't matter because they shouldn't exist) will, however, be faced with the question of whether absent abolition of the current legal regime for male-female couples who elect to be subject to it by getting married that regime should be extended to same-sex couples who would like to be subject to it.

3. It is not clear to me why libertarian principles should favor that extension. A libertarian aggravated that taxpayers have subsidized new playing facilities for the local NFL and NBA teams will not necessarily agree that it's only fair that the NHL franchise should get the same deal. A libertarian who accepts that federal subsidies to peanut farmers are unlikely to be abolished does not for that reason generally favor the extension of federal subsidies to the producers of mohair and belgian endive. A libertarian who opposes those aspects of the current tax law that are generally thought to favor homeowners over renters would not necessarily favor giving the free-spirited minority who wish to purchase RV's or houseboats for use as their principal residences the same tax preferences as homeowners.

4. If there seems to be an intuitive difference between those situations and the appeal of SSM, I suspect it should lead one to the conclusion that the subject matter of marriage and family (along with the distinct but related subject matter of human sexual desire) cannot be easily accommodated within the libertarian worldview. This is not (necessarily) in and of itself an argument against libertarianism, simply an argument for understanding its limitations, with a consequent need to recognize that certain issues will need to be resolved by principles drawn from another source.

Rather than I address his premises directly, I want to go meta-theoretical and try to figure out how one goes about determining the "libertarian" position on anything.

So: What is libertarianism? The available definitions are multi-form. The most concrete and specific definition I would give without fear of committing myself to any propositions I reject is that libertarianism is the political philosophy that seeks to maximize individual liberty (hey, maybe we got a non-circular definition of utility!) wherever possible and to the full extent possible. One might add further provisos making exceptions for temporary suspensions of liberty in gravely urgent circumstances. As for calculating how individual liberty is maximized, I leave that as a question for empirical political and social science, the only fields, however flawed, that have a prayer of providing an answer.

The conditions JWB has set up for defining libertarianism---which are no doubt very popular and perhaps majority opinion among self-professed libertarians (leaving aside the anarcho-capialist sub-set)---might more accurately be described as favoring an extension of Smithian/Ricardoian (is that the right adjective for Ricardo?), or perhaps Friedmanian economic principles across the full range of political and social issues. Just how such an extension is made is certainly contentious---though that never stops individual (self-avowed) libertarians from claiming that their own unique political theory is an indubitably valid deduction based on the (primarily) economic premises that serve as first principles.

If libertarianism is going to be defined as a principle of minimizing A)in all cases without exception, or B) to the extent that's practicable (I think that captures the essence of JWB's fork) the involvement of government in the lives of citizens (running asymptotically to the point where the state ceases to exist), then I think we can rather easily identify counterexamples that force a re-examination of the principle both its strong (A) and weak (B) forms.

Consider the state in which the government collects exactly zero tax revenue, and functions to do nothing other than provide a collective defense and define national boundaries, with the funding for the military coming from revenues garnered from business conducted in precisely the same manner as a corporation, namely providing for-profit goods and services to individual consumers at market-determined prices rather than conducting involuntary collective transactions at arbitrarily determined prices (setting aside the issue of second-order justification of market values, i.e., in virtue of what the market price is the right price). If we want to get really detailed, we can say that the government builds its military from volunteers drawn from across the state, who are quite happy to join the army because the government's various agitprops for recruitment (also funded by business profits) is consistently successful at maintaining necessary troop levels.

This, I think is the minimal state. (If there's something more minimal I'd like to hear it). I hope we can all imagine the infinitude of ways that such a state could as easily be a libertarian hell as a libertarian heaven. Since there is a absolute vacuum of centralized authority in all areas except the distribution of military force, any private entity, however benign or malevolent, can seize whatever spheres of domestic life it is within its power to seize. The composition of the government itself, whose members wouldn't really be responsible for anything other than approving defense budgets and nationalistic ad campaigns, could take any form whatsoever, from one man rule to Athenian democracy. Those libertarians who would contend that the "invisible hand of the market" or something like that will preserve a persistent equilibrium in which maximal liberty is available are not contending much more than "just because I say so." If the state's only concern is national security, then any private entity has perfect freedom to infringe on the liberties of others so long as he/it/they does/do not overreach into the highly limited sphere of purely state affairs. That such a state could (and likely would, given how fundamentally crappy human nature is) devolve into an amalgamation of corporate-controlled regions in which individuals have zero political power and only as much personal liberty as is necessary to support target levels of productivity. Those who say that what we're actually talking about are separate states that are all ruled despotically are ignoring crucial socio-cultural data: common national identity and self-identification, common culture, common language, common demographic distributions, cross-regional unified military service, popular acceptance of the state's legitimacy withinits recognized boundaries, etc.

Furthermore, if we were to ignore all that for the sake of argument andjust assume that the above description is not of a single state but of several, then the strong-form state-minimalism is still making a fatal concession, namely that the potential for private-sector despotism and oppression is built into its definition. The point of all this, is less concrete and more meta- than I have perhaps suggested. There quite simply is no a priori logical relationship between the state-minimization principle and the liberty-maximization principle, so any connection between them is going to be (excluding the wierd analytic philosophers' problem cases of contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori propositions) contingent and synthetic. In fact, what we have seen is that any formal resemblance between the states governed on liberty-maximization principles and the states governed on strong-form state-minimalization principles are going to be purely incidental and indicative of nothing either in counterfactual or future instantiations. And you'll find as well that the same is true---any correlation is accidental---between weak-form state-minimization theory and liberty-maximization theory, though the contingency and unrepresentativeness of such correlation is easier to mask because the weak form of the theory is willing to make compromises.

How does this relate back to gay marriage? Well, since I've already gone on too long, I'll leave it at this: I think it's contentious whether or not legal ratification of gay marriage is justified on state-minimization grounds. But that doesn't matter because the state-minimization criterion is fatally flawed and hence unreliable as a rubric of individual liberty expansion. Conversely, the legalization of gay marriage, I think, is quite self-evidently justified on maximization of personal liberty grounds.

If I have mischaracterized libertarianism I'll be pleased to hear why. But I'd contend, echoing Wittgenstein, that labels like "libertarian" are empty vessels, and the only definition of libertarianism that is even remotely intelligble to me is one that proceeds from some form of liberty-maximization principles—it’s the only definition that fits with the cluster of identifying descriptions I associate with the word “liberty.” If one's agenda is only and always shrinking the size of the state, then one would be foolish not to pursue policies that achieve that end, but don't insist that there is some indivisible equivalence between that aim and one that has nothing, except perhaps accidentally, to do with it,
namely the expansion of liberty.

Although I don't like applying convenient political labels to myself, and I have problems with both the term "left" and "libertarian," the easiest way I have to describe my politics is "left libertarian," and I hope some of the foregoing explains why that's a tenable logical possibility.