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Illustration by David Drummond
(Photo: Shutterstock (White House, Picture Frame); iStock (Nature Painting))
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...In an
impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Ron
Paul called for Congress to be groped. The Transportation Security
Administration, having rolled out its new airport body scanners, had
decreed anyone who opted out could be subjected to the now-infamous
enhanced pat-down. “Let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes
through this,” Representative Paul said, waving his finger in the air.
“Get the X-ray, make them look at the pictures, and then go through one
of those groping pat-downs.” Perhaps this would put Congress in touch
(quite literally) with real Americans.
Paul, the 75-year-old Texas libertarian and quixotic 2008
Republican candidate best known for his quest to abolish the Federal
Reserve, is used to fighting lonely battles. But this time, he had
company. Fox News went wall-to-wall on the (nonexistent) health hazards
of body scans, naked outlines of passengers, and pat-down paranoia. “If
you touch my junk, I’m going to have you arrested,” said newfound
freedom fighter John Tyner to a TSA agent in a video that went viral.
The left backed Paul too. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald argued that the
screenings had “all the ingredients of the last decade’s worth of
Terrorism exploitation.” Blogger Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake called the
X-ray devices “porno-scanners.” For one beautiful moment, the whole
political spectrum—well, at least both vocal ends of it—seemed to agree:
Too much government is too much government.
Maybe it was inevitable that the National Opt-Out Day, when
travelers were going to refuse body scans en masse, failed to become the
next Woolworth’s sit-in (how do you organize a movement that abhors
organization?). It turned out most Americans actually supported the body
scanners. But the moment was a reminder of just how strong, not to
mention
loud, the libertarian streak is in American politics.
No one exemplifies that streak more than Ron Paul—unless you
count his son Rand. When Rand Paul strolled onstage in May 2010, the
newly declared Republican nominee for Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat, he
entered to the strains of Rush, the boomer rock band famous for its
allegiance to libertarianism and Ayn Rand. It was a dog whistle—a wink
to free-marketers and classic-rock fans savvy enough to get the
reference, but likely to sail over the heads of most Republicans. Paul’s
campaign was full of such goodies. He name-dropped Austrian economist
Friedrich Hayek’s seminal
TheRoad to Serfdom. He cut a
YouTube video denying that he was named after Ayn Rand but professing
to have read all of her novels. He spoke in the stark black-and-white
terms of libertarian purism. “Do we believe in the individual, or do we
believe in the state?” he asked the crowd in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on
Election Night.
It’s clear why he played coy. For all the talk about casting
off government shackles, libertarianism is still considered the crazy
uncle of American politics: loud and cocky and occasionally profound but
always a bit unhinged. And Rand Paul’s dad is the craziest uncle of
all. Ron Paul wants to “end the Fed,” as the title of his book
proclaims, and return the country to the gold standard—stances that have
made him a tea-party icon. Now, as incoming chairman of the
subcommittee that oversees the Fed, he’ll have an even bigger platform.
Paul Sr. says there’s not much daylight between him and his son. “I
can’t think of anything we grossly disagree on,” he says.
There’s never been a better time to be a libertarian than
now. The right is still railing against interventionist policies like
TARP, the stimulus package, and health-care reform. Citizens of all
political stripes recoil against the nanny state, which is nannier than
ever, passing anti-smoking laws, banning trans fats, posting calorie
counts, prohibiting flavored cigarettes, cracking down on Four Loko, and
considering a soda tax in New York. All that, plus some TSA agent wants
to handle your baggage.
Libertarianism has adherents on the left, too—they just
organize around different issues. Whereas righty libertarians stew over
taxes and bailouts, lefty libertarians despise de facto suspensions of
habeas corpus, surveillance, and restrictions on whom you can marry.
It’s not surprising that the biggest victories of the right
and
the left in the last weeks of this lame-duck session of Congress were
about stripping down government—tax cuts and releasing the shackles of
“don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Much of Americans’ vaunted anger now comes from a sense of
betrayal over libertariansim shrugged. Right-wing libertarians charge
that the Bush presidency gave the lie to small-government cant by
pushing Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and a $3 trillion war.
Left-wing libertarians are furious that Obama talked a big game on civil
liberties but has caved on everything from FISA to DOMA to Gitmo.
Meanwhile, the country faces a massive and growing deficit (too much
government!) that neither party has the power or the inclination to fix.
If there were ever a time to harness libertarian energy—on left and
right—it’s now.
The different substrains of libertarianism.
Illustration by David Drummond
(Photo: Shutterstock (Mount Rushmore); Getty Images (Rand))
Libertarianism is a long, clunky word for a simple, elegant idea: that government should do as little as possible. In
Libertarianism: A Primer,
Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz defines it as “the
view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he
chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.” Like any
political philosophy, libertarianism contains a thousand substrains,
ranging from anarchists who want to destroy the state to picket-fence
conservatives who just want to put power in local hands. The traditional
libertarian line is that government should be responsible for a
standing army, local security, and a courts system, and that’s it—a
system called minarchy. But everyone has his own idea of how to get
there. Washington-think-tank libertarians take an incrementalist
approach within the two-party system. The Libertarian Party offers a
third way. Ayn Rand–inspired Objectivists promote their ideas through
education.
Reason magazine preaches the gospel of cultural
libertarianism. Silicon Valley techno-entrepreneurs would invent their
way to Libertopia. Wall Street free-marketers want deregulation. The
Free State Project plans to concentrate 20,000 libertarians in New
Hampshire. “Seasteaders” dream of building societies on the ocean. And
then there are the regular old Glenn Beck disciples who just want to be
left alone. “They all want to shoot each other in the face over who gets
to be the real libertarian,” says Matt Welch, editor of
Reason. At the very least, they all agree they should be allowed to acquire the weapon with which to do so.
Libertarianism gets caricatured as the weird,
Magic-card-collecting, twelve-sided-die-wielding outcast of American
political philosophy. Yet there’s no idea more fundamental to our
country’s history. Every political group claims the Founders as its own,
but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution
was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The
Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the
state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a
court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. (Though
some Founders, like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to
centralize power.) All the government-run trappings that came after—the
Fed, highways, public schools, a $1.5 trillion-a-year entitlement
system— were arguably departures from our country’s hard libertarian
core.
Ayn Rand is the gateway drug to Libertarianism, though many toke into adulthood.
About one in ten Americans self-identifies as libertarian,
and even fewer consider themselves “movement” libertarians. Most of them
don’t subscribe to
Reason or attend conferences at the Cato
Institute, the libertarian think tank funded in part by the infamous
brothers Charles and David Koch. But many are libertarians without
knowing it. That is, they identify as economically conservative and
socially liberal. That number may be growing. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 23
percent of Americans responded to questions about the role of government
in a way that categorizes them as libertarian—up from 18 percent in
2000. A survey conducted by Zogby for the Cato Institute has put the
libertarian vote at around 15 percent. Loosen the wording, and the pool
expands. When the Zogby survey asked voters if they would describe
themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as
libertarian,” the number rose to 44 percent. When it simply asked if
they were “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” a full 59
percent responded yes. Not bad for a bunch of trench-coat-wearing
dungeon masters.
Libertarianism is far from synonymous with the tea party, but
the tea party is the closest thing to a mass libertarian movement in
recent memory.
Tea-partyers surveyed by Cato split down the middle
between social conservatives and social liberals, making half of them
traditional Republicans and half libertarians. But the fact that the tea
party organizes around fiscal issues alone—smaller government, lower
taxes—gives the movement libertarian cred. Its members speak the
language, too, waving Gadsden flags, quoting Hayek, and carrying signs
that say WHO IS JOHN GALT?—a reference to the hero of the Ayn Rand book
Atlas Shrugged.
Libertarianism gets marginalized in American politics because
it doesn’t fit into the two-party paradigm. Libertarians want less
state intrusion into the market, which aligns them with Republicans, but
also less interference in social choices, which aligns them with
Democrats. As Massachusetts governor William Weld put it in 1992, “I
want the government out of your pocketbook and your bedroom.” To the
partisan brain, this doesn’t compute. “In 1976, people didn’t have the
vaguest idea of what I was talking about,” says Ron Paul. “Why was I
voting with the left sometimes and with the right other times?”
Yet libertarianism is more internally consistent than the
Democratic or Republican platforms. There’s no inherent reason that
free-marketers and social conservatives should be allied under the
Republican umbrella, except that it makes for a powerful coalition.
Libertarianism lies crosswise to the partisan split, giving its
adherents a kind of freethinker, outcast status. This can be especially
attractive for young people. “When I was 19, libertarianism was an
argument for being awesome,” says Will Wilkinson, a former Cato scholar
who now blogs at
The Economist. It’s about flouting convention
and rejecting authority—the political equivalent of getting an eyebrow
ring. It’s also an excuse to indulge your most selfish instincts. But
you don’t have to call it “selfishness.”
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Illustration by David Drummond
(Photo: Gilbert Stuart/Getty Images (Washington))
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Ayn Rand has been called the “gateway drug” to
libertarianism, but many converts keep toking well into adulthood. Her
novels, including 1943’s
The Fountainhead and 1957’s
Atlas Shrugged,
sell more than 800,000 copies a year. Other libertarians credit their
conversion to Hayek, fellow Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (Ron
Paul’s personal fave), American free-marketer Milton Friedman, or
Austrian-influenced American anarcho-capitalist and father of modern
libertarianism Murray Rothbard. Ever since its publication in 1944,
Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom has been the anti-regulatory
Ur-text. Hayek wrote the book in response to the spread of
socialism—including National Socialism— which at the time was a genuine
existential threat to Western society. Since the fall of the Soviet
Union, though, socialism isn’t the menace it used to be. Hitler is long
gone. Yet libertarians still cite Hayek and Rand with the same urgency.
Ron Johnson, the newly elected senator from Wisconsin, called
Atlas Shrugged,
which tells the story of a group of creative capitalists who retreat
from an overregulated society to form their own Utopia, a “foundational
book” that serves as “a warning of what could happen to America.”
Representative Paul Ryan, also of Wisconsin, requires staffers to read
Atlas Shrugged,
describes Obama’s economic policies as “something right out of an Ayn
Rand novel,” and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public
service.” Glenn Beck touted
The Road to Serfdom on his show,
wondering out loud if it might be “the road we’re on.” The irony is that
Hayek believed in a role for the state. “In no system that could be
rationally defended would the state just do nothing,” he wrote. He
favored government intervention in the markets, for example, and
supported environmental regulation. When he warned against “socialism,”
he meant actual socialism.
Wilkinson still identifies as a libertarian but distances
himself from the doomsaying. “Part of my political maturation was
realizing there’s really not that much at stake,” he says. “That our
culture isn’t on the road to serfdom, we’re not one step away from
drifting into Fascism or totalitarian socialism or anything like that.”
It’s a realization many politicians have yet to make.
Republicans speak the language of
libertarianism. They talk about shrinking government and cutting the
deficit. But when one of them turns words into action, he gets shunned.
The latest Republican to mistakenly put money to mouth: Paul Ryan.
During the debate over health-care reform last winter, the GOP was
getting savaged for failing to present an alternative to the Democrats’
plan to reduce long-term spending growth. Ryan, an econ wonk and the
ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, decided to take a
crack. He introduced a budget and called it “A Roadmap for America’s
Future.” The Roadmap made all the tough cuts that other Republicans
discussed vaguely but never specified. It would simplify the tax code,
privatize Medicare and Medicaid, and replace parts of Social Security
with personal accounts. And it would work: The Congressional Budget
Office estimated that Ryan’s plan would put the country in the black by
2063. Sure, it would rip a Texas-size hole in the social safety net, but
it was a bona fide libertarian solution.
Ryan got points for boldness. Obama called the Roadmap a
“serious proposal.” But Republicans including John Boehner and Newt
Gingrich voiced doubts. Some GOP candidates initially supported the
Social Security plank but then flipped when their Democratic opponents
called them out. More recently, Republicans have studiously avoided
specifics when it comes to deficit reduction.
That’s how conservative politics is played—talk shrinkage, do
growth. Even right-wing godhead Ronald Reagan expanded the federal
government, bailed out Social Security, and signed off on tax hikes.
Bush 43 was only the latest in a long line of Republican spenders.
It’s this hypocrisy that makes some libertarians stray
outside the two-party monolith. Some gravitate toward the Libertarian
Party, which calls itself the third-largest political party in the
country. But few of its candidates are ever elected. Infighting can also
be a turnoff. “There’s something about libertarians where working as a
team is inconsistent with the whole concept of being a libertarian,”
says Warren Redlich, the 2010 Libertarian candidate for governor of New
York, who was sued by one of his opponents for the nomination.
Others buck the political system altogether. In 2001, a
graduate student at Yale named Jason Sorens wrote a paper arguing that
if enough libertarian activists moved to a small state in the union,
they could transform society—an undertaking he called the Free State
Project. A decade later, more than 10,000 libertarians have signed the
group’s pledge promising to move to New Hampshire once they get 20,000
signatures. About 800 activists are already there. What they do once
they arrive is up to them. Some Free Staters have won seats in the State
Legislature. Others engage in acts of civil disobedience: One man,
inspired by the movie
Gandhi, got arrested for performing a manicure without a license.
The last best hope for Libertopia
may be the ocean. There’s a long, not-so-proud history of seeking
freedom at sea. In 1972, Nevada real-estate developer Michael Oliver
built an island in the southwest Pacific by dredging sand near an an
existing reef, which he called the Republic of Minerva. The nearby
Kingdom of Tonga quickly conquered it. A proposal in the late nineties
to create a “Freedom Ship” nearly a mile long that would house 50,000
people never got past the planning stage.
That hasn’t stopped Patri Friedman, grandson of libertarian
hero Milton Friedman, from trying once more. Friedman founded the
Seasteading Institute in 2008 with the goal of creating a floating
society free from government’s grasp. While seasteading communities
would start small—just a bunch of family-size platforms floating off the
coast—Friedman imagines them harvesting energy and growing food.
What distinguishes seasteading from pure fantasy is money.
Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and bought a stake in Facebook back
in 2004, has become the Johnny Appleseed of futurist libertarians. Since
2008, he’s given upwards of $750,000 to the Seasteading Institute. He
recently announced that he will offer twenty grants of up to $100,000
each to teenagers who want to start their own tech companies—a proposal
that drew liberal scorn. Thiel is unapologetic about his disdain for
government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are
compatible,” he wrote in a 2009 essay. He’s not alone. Silicon Valley
has produced a whole cadre of libertarian entrepreneurs, including
longtime Sun Microsystems president Scott McNealy, Craigslist founder
Craig Newmark, and Cypress Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers.
It speaks to the breadth and versatility of libertarianism
that it unites Teva-wearing California entrepreneurs and flag-waving
tea-partyers under the same banner. The aesthetic is different, but the
ideas are the same.
Over the TSA airport pat-downs, the whole political spectrum seemed to be in agreement.
And yet, for all of libertarianism’s diversity, the
libertarian movement—those who feel so strongly about live-and-let-live
that they want to make you live and let live, too—still prizes doctrinal
purity. In 2006, a Cato scholar named Brink Lindsey wrote an essay for
The New Republic
called “Liberaltarians,” in which he argued that liberals and
libertarians have more in common than they think. Both support civil
liberties and gay rights. Both want to end the two wars. There’s also a
growing willingness among some liberals to embrace libertarian ideas
like school vouchers. The cold-war alliance with conservatives has
situated libertarians too far to the right, Lindsey argues. It’s time to
start reaching out to the left.
While the project drew attention in the D.C. wonkosphere,
traditional libertarians took a dim view, especially when Lindsey and
his colleague Will Wilkinson proposed writing a book. “There were a lot
of people at Cato who didn’t very much like the book,” says David Boaz,
executive vice president of Cato. The final straw was Lindsey’s scathing
review of a new book by Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative
American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In August, Cato and Lindsey parted
ways. Wilkinson left soon after. The Cato exodus was a reminder that for
all of libertarianism’s supposed ecumenism, there’s still an
Establishment that does not brook dissent any more than its conservative
counterparts. AEI pushed out former Bush speechwriter David Frum in
March after he repeatedly criticized Republicans. Frum described his and
Lindsey’s departures as “very similar situations, unfortunately.”
W hen I was in high school, I owned a book by Penn & Teller called
How to Play in Traffic.
It’s mainly a series of jokes, gags, and madcap yarns by the
magic-comedy duo. But it also channels the libertarian id of Penn
Jillette. “I sincerely don’t want to offend any of our readers, but I’ve
got something to say,” he writes. “It’s very simple, but a bit
controversial: The United States of America does not have a problem with
terrorism. We just don’t.” Airport security is not worth the hassle, he
continues: “Hey, we’re alive, there’s risk. Some planes are going to go
down like falling twisted burning human cattle cars and there’s no
stopping it. No one can make any form of travel 100 percent safe. We’ll
take our chances.” As for the victims of a security-free transportation
system? “Let’s consider those terrorism victims heroes,” he writes.
“Let’s say they died for freedom. They didn’t die for us to have our
phones tapped and have our time wasted at airports.” He then describes a
prank where you create a screensaver for your laptop that looks like a
countdown to detonation.
Jillette might choose his words differently today. Everyone
knows going through airport security sucks, even without “porno-
scanners.” But few dispute the need for some line of defense.
More-efficient, less-intrusive security would be great. But none at all?
Jillette’s tract is a good example of how libertarianism ventures down
some fascinating paths but usually ends up deep in the wilderness.
Same story on issue after issue. Taxation isn’t just a
poor allocation of resources; it’s an act of violence. “At least the
highwayman would take your money and leave you alone,” says Douglas
French, president of the Mises Institute. “The government takes your
money, then stands around and tells you what to do with it.” The Federal
Reserve doesn’t just restrict the markets; it’s an arrogant monstrosity
that should be abolished and replaced by the gold standard—a policy
that most economists agree would lead to economic meltdown. War isn’t
just bad; it’s a bankrupt excuse to suppress personal freedoms and wield
state control that’s never justified by the inciting incident. The
North should have let the South exercise its “right to secede,” argues
libertarian commentator Lew Rockwell. Conservative Pat Buchanan penned a
book in 2008 calling World War II “unnecessary.”
No political movement deserves to be defined by its extreme
elements. (For Democrats, that way lies socialism.) But
middle-of-the-road libertarianism is already pretty far out. “The
dominant strain of libertarianism these days is—and I’m not using these
words in any kind of pejorative sense—radical and utopian,” says
Lindsey. But if Libertopia is the goal, no one knows how to get there.
Lindsey compares libertarians who preach purity to the “Underpants
Gnomes” in
South Park, a popular analogy in wonk circles: “Step one, articulate Utopia. Step three is Utopia. Step two is a big question mark.”
Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But
the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we
started from scratch and created a society in which government covered
only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a
farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in
exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private
bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central
bank—otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different
types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll
create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t
have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there
isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to
start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their
basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few
entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent.
Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers
that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come
from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the
government would have to set up a school or two after all.
And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out
of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was
created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic
uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because “states’ rights”
had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system
evolved because private charity didn’t suffice. Challenges to the
libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from
regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of
poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor,
charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their
families will take care of them. If they have no families to take care
of them—well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Of course, we’ll never get there. And that’s the point.
Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never
have to prove it works.
There are all sorts of situations the private market isn’t
good at managing, such as asymmetrical information (I know my doctor is
qualified to treat me because he has a government license) and public
goods (it makes sense for the government to cover vaccines, which
benefit everyone, not just the consumer). There’s also a consistency
problem: Why should the government be responsible for a public good like
national defense but not air-quality protection?
Or, say, a stable world financial system? Most of the
libertarians I spoke with said they would have let the big banks fail in
2008. “I wouldn’t have done anything,” says French. “The key to
capitalism is you have to have failure.”
The financial crisis was not an indictment of their
worldview, libertarians argue, but a vindication of it. Letting the
banks fail would have been painful. But the pain would have been less
than it will be now that the government is propping up the housing,
banking, and automobile industries. Plus, the economy would have
recovered by now. “You’ve probably never heard of the depression of
1920,” says French. “You haven’t heard of it because it came and went in
one year, because the government didn’t do anything to prop up failed
businesses.” (Other economists argue that the government’s response was
actually consistent with the philosophy of John Maynard Keynes.) Letting
banks fail would also avoid moral hazard, say libertarians, since
investors wouldn’t take such risky bets the next time around.
It’s a compelling story. But like many libertarian narratives, it’s
oversimplified. If the biggest banks had failed, bankers wouldn’t have
been the only ones punished. Everyone would have lost his money.
Investors who had no idea how their dollars were being used—the ratings
agencies gave their investments AAA grades, after all—would have gone
broke. Homeowners who misunderstood their risky loans would have gone
into permanent debt. Sure, the bailouts let some irresponsible people
off easy. But not intervening would have unfairly punished a much
greater number.
There’s always tension between freedom and fairness. We want
less government regulation, but not when it means firms can hire cheap
child labor. We want a free market, but not so bankers can deceive
investors. Libertarianism, in promoting freedom above all else, pretends
the tension doesn’t exist.
Case in point: A house in Obion County, Tennessee, burned to
the ground in September because the owner had not paid the annual $75
fee for opt-in fire protection. As the fire raged, the house owner told
the dispatcher that he would pay the cost of putting out the fire. The
fire department still refused to come. The house burned down, with four
pets inside. Libertarians point out that this is how opt-in services—as
opposed to taxpayer-funded public services—works. If you don’t pay, you
don’t get coverage. The firefighters can’t make exceptions without
creating moral hazard. This makes sense in theory. In practice, not so
much. The firefighters showed up to protect a neighboring property. The
homeowner offered to pay not just the cost of the fire protection but
the full cost of the spray. A court would have enforced that contract.
But because the firefighters stuck to a rigid principle of opt-in
services, a house was destroyed. Will this serve as a cautionary tale
next time a rural resident of Obion County is deciding whether to buy
fire insurance? No doubt. But will someone else inevitably not learn his
lesson and make the same mistake? No doubt.
And that’s just the government side. Consider the social side
of Libertopia. It’s no coincidence that most libertarians discover the
philosophy as teenagers. At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own
self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in
Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s
first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his
climactic speech in
The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is
to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his
own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without
his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your
way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to
compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no
collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It
would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources,
everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not
Atlas Shrugged but
Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.
To a Libertarian, nothing is worth
sacrificing principle for—least of all political power. Yet Rand Paul
has already made some concessions. The first sign of Paul’s
domestication came when he appeared on
The Rachel Maddow Show after
winning the Kentucky primary. Maddow asked him whether he would have
voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for
businesses to turn away customers on the basis of race. Paul said it all
came down to a question of private versus public businesses. “Does the
owner of the restaurant own his restaurant?” he said. “Or does the
government own his restaurant?”
Paul got slammed, even within his own party.
The Wall Street Journal’s
editorial page, usually a staunch defender of libertarian positions,
wrote that Paul was wrong “even on his own libertarian terms.”
Paul went into lockdown. He gave few media interviews. His
public statements were tightly scripted. And his stance changed: He
would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act after all.
And he won. The lesson: If a libertarian wants to get
elected, he’s going to have to bend a few principles, deal with reality
as it exists. The same is true if he wants to legislate. Since the
election, Paul has challenged Republican orthodoxy by suggesting he’s
willing to cut military spending. He’s talked about expanding the House
Tea Party Caucus to the Senate. But he also drifted from his “no pork”
pledge by hinting he would accept federal earmarks for Kentucky in the
end. (Paul said he was misquoted and subsequently pushed for an earmark
ban.) During an appearance on CNN on November 9, he ended the interview
rather than name a spending cut. The test will be whether Paul is
willing to slash government in ways that irk his party—by cutting back
Social Security, say, or trimming Medicare. Luckily for him, that kind
of showdown will happen only if Republicans regain the Senate.
Ron Paul might even get the Fed to cough up a few extra
receipts. But no one is under the illusion that he will “end” it. (If he
tried, Republicans would smother him just as quickly as Democrats
would.) It took 35 years for Ron Paul to reach the center of American
politics. And it could take another 35 before he or someone like him is
back. It’s certainly a libertarian moment—but it’s not liable to last
too long. Libertarianism and power are like matter and anti-matter. They
cancel each other out.
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