A number of bloggers seem to agree that something is afoot at the Cato institute; the departure of Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson quite suddenly and on the heels of the now-infamous Koch brothers piece is all too much at once to dismiss outright. That being said, if it is a purge it is hardly over. A number of other similarly honest left-leaning libertarians work at Cato still (Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko, Jason Kuznicki just to name a few – and Glenn Greenwald has put together material for them as well) – and so far, if there is a purge, it hasn’t been terribly widespread. There’s a beginning to every story, of course.
All speculation aside, I wanted to echo this passage from John Quiggin which I think is true and hopefully prescient:
On the other hand, breaks of this kind often lead to interesting intellectual evolution.There is, I think, room for a version of liberalism/social democracy that is appreciative of the virtues of markets (and market-based policy instruments like emissions trading schemes) as social contrivances, and sceptical of top-down planning and regulation, without accepting normative claims about the income distribution generated by markets. Former libertarians like Jim Henley have had some interesting things to say along these lines, and it would be good to have some similar perspectives.
NobodySpecial
The problem I have with the whole ‘Liberaltarian’ idea is that when the rubber meets the road, they continue to vote with the party of tax cuts. Even in 2008, Libertarians broke, what, 57-40 for McCain?
Jewish Steel
Libertarians in general, and in the saddest way, seem to want to make a virtue of the alienating ways of the market.
Please try not to hear The Internationale when I ask you to look around at the objects in your house. What among those objects was made by one man or woman all by themselves? Almost nothing that can be conceived of is the product of individual labor. The very thoughts in your head and language that you use to express them are the product of collective endeavor.
Libertarians stopper their ears and shut their eyes and believe with all their might in an atomized individual. Pure fantasy.
cs
I wouldn’t call Balko one of the left-libertarians. He’s one of the good guys and his work on police abuses should have gotten him a Pulitzer, but he’s not on the left.
silentbeep
How is Jason Kuznicki left-leaning? I only know him through reading his stuff on Ordinary Gentlemen. Left-leaning in the socially liberal sense you mean? Serious questions, because I’m not seeing a lot of liberal sympathies coming from him at this point.
silentbeep
@cs: True. His work is focused on issues that liberals happen to care about as well. I mean I wouldn’t describe Glenn Greenwald as a libertarian, but he is a liberal that is concerned with issues that are hot button ones for libertarians too.
Villago Delenda Est
Here’s the thing:
CATO (majorly funded by the infamous Koch Brothers) and “conservative” libertarianism is really about establishing neo-feudalism. These heirs to fortunes (the Koch fortune was built by providing Stalin oil extraction technology and expertise in the 30’s) wail about “entitlements”, but the reality is they’re the most entitled members of this society.
I read somewhere that mainstream libertarianism in this country is pretty much an authoritarian movement, in that it’s got a “me me me, mine mine mine!” mindset that compares favorably to the screaming of a three-year-old. It’s a rationalization for that sort of behavior. It’s the authority of the individual over everyone else around him; blind to the very real issues that government exists to resolve the inevitable conflicts between individuals insisting that they should get their own way.
These people are for their own personal maximum “liberty” at the expense of everyone else. The Founders understood the need to balance power; if they were around, they’d be incensed at corporate power in this country, they distrusted and despised corporations, all their experiences with the tender mercies of the Honorable East India Company would lead them to conclude their experiment went awry somewhere, probably in the latter half of the 19th century. When, as we’ve seen recently in regard to the attacks on the 14th Amendment, the spirt behind that amendment was undermined by the most “libertarian” era of the Supreme Court.
wengler
American libertarianism simply makes no sense. It envisions a world where every person is the owner of their own destiny but it provides the exact opposite framework to make that happen. You don’t provide liberty to an oppressed people by making property sacrosanct. Hell, a good portion of Americans used to be property.
Instead you make politically structures where people are able to make decisions about how they want to run their own lives. How different would this country be if everyone didn’t have to make decisions out of desperation and instead had a choice? You know liberty. Freedom. The things that the Propertarians don’t really care too much for.
And I really do have to admit for all the complaining that libertarians do about their shit being taken to educate the children or feed the hungry by a big nasty state, they sure as hell don’t seem to mind that that same government protects their own shit and enforces their ownership rights.
Alex S.
That John Quiggin quote sounds like european conservatism which has been around for 60 years. I think America used to be further than that, but there are some forces that keep on turning back time.
Also, a capitalist society uses money as incentive to be productive. Money is supposed to determine the social order. As a consequence, the libertarian vision of the state leads to an uneven distribution of freedom because some people end up having more money than others. Because of the libertarian concept of freedom, the unlimited freedom desired by some will lead to a limitation of the freedom of others. That distribution of freedom, under the current system, will inevitably be unjust because older people can accumulate more wealth than younger people, some people are born into rich families, some have better connections than others, some kids are born into dysfunctional families and so on and on…. If there is no regulation of freedom, society will become the reign of the lucky, the rich and the shrewd.
Duke City Roller
@Villago Delenda Est:
“That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
Kim Stanley Robinson
Michael
In a truly just world, the “meritocratic” heir Koch brothers would have to have the undersides of their limos swept for bombs every time they left their homes and would need to employ food testers.
The world would be a much better place if each of them were spectacularly whacked on pay-per-view.
brantl
Top-down planning is the only way to avoid the pains involved in any evolutionary method (read “free markets”, that have never worked in any complex society/economy/government, if you want a substantial part of your population culled frequently more power to you, but I thought humans were supposed to be intelligent); and emissions trading schemes are just plain stupid.
brantl
All “the markets” have done is to consolidate money in the rich.
Resident Firebagger
Mayer’s feature on the Kochs is eye-opening, to say the least. Let’s see if I can manage to blockquote this:
That kind of sums up libertarianism for me: Of course the generous people who get rich off of putting carcinogens into the water supply will nobly step in to help fund a cancer cure.
brantl
Sort of the definition of “conflicted dick“, isn’t it?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Huh? Assuming normal grammar, is the second part of that supposed to mean that they don’t accept the argument that markets don’t distribute wealth up, or does the second part mean that they accept the argument that markets don’t distribute wealth up?
Jim Henley
Radley hasn’t worked at Cato for years. He’s an editor at reason magazine.
p.d.obvious,esq.
Hold on- when did Henley become a FORMER libertarian?
WereBear
The virtue of markets is that Apple is still around because enough people like their stuff, and they were started early enough for Bill Gates’ big foot to not squish them, like the Amiga.
Markets rely on choice.
But things like the egg recall expose the fallacy of relying on “magic markets,” because we don’t have a choice about eating, and we don’t have a choice about who makes our eggs, either.
Yeah, I can hunt down a farmer and hope they still have eggs when I get there. Your typical harried parent trying to cram in all the chores outside the home before they start all their chores inside the home?
Not so much.
Don
But things like the egg recall expose the fallacy of relying on “magic markets,” because we don’t have a choice about eating, and we don’t have a choice about who makes our eggs, either.
More accurate to say we don’t have the ability to make an informed choice. In my grocery, at least, I can pick between three or four egg brands and with sub-choices among them. However I have no reasonable ability to know what differentiates them other than what they print on the label (thankfully I have a reason to have a smidge of confidence that a regulator is making them keep accurate information on that label) and nothing tells me if they all source their eggs from the same place or process them in the same factory or….
I think it’s important to stay on point when dealing with these clowns, same as with the supposed Adam Smith devotees: they lionize a system that depends on the ability of a consumer/investor to make informed choices. In Smith’s case he was blunt that this optimal market required full transparency, which never seems to come up for these folks.
An opaque system with choices may as well have no choices at all. In our modern life with the degree of interconnectedness and the size of corporations we deal with it is about as practical to say “well, if everyone would just LEVITATE to work we wouldn’t have all these car accidents!” It’s fantasy until you can fill in item 2 on “1: free markets: 2: ? 3: Profit!”
Stillwater
Where is the prescience here? The whole sentence is jibberish. Decoding it I would say he’s suggesting that there is room (where, in intellectual space? in the electorate?) for liberals to be (wallah!) free-market conservatives. And he’s apparently not trying to be humorous. Haven’t read the piece the quote comes from, but anyone who uses a phrase like market-based policy instruments as an example of something a liberal could support sets my BS detectors a-buzzin.
IM
But what Quiggin demand already exists: It is called the third way and is a colossal failure. Neo-liberalism in social democratic clothes.
And the white raven argument or one honest man in Sodom argument -does the existence of Norm Ornstein makes AEI a centrist institution? I doubt that.
Pug
The main problem with libertarians is that it is simple to prove their philosophy wrong when applied the real world.
Take Rand Paul for example. He believes that there should be no safety regulations imposed on mining companies by government because if the company doesn’t operate a safe mine, nobody will apply for the mining jobs. Really, that’s just stupid.
Free markets are the best means to allocate goods and services efficiently, but libertarians seem to think they are perfect. They aren’t.
mikeyes
Is there any proof that this is a “purge?” Lindsey has a new job and Willkensen didn’t mention anything about a purge in his blog.
The Cato institute has not backed off from those positions that the conservatives dislike such as siding with the mosque in NYC and attacking the standard conservative take on the wars in the middle east.
Also they continue to hold that drugs should be de-criminalized, ect. None of these positions have changed at the Cato Institute.
It is possible that there are areas of difference between these two men and the Institute that may have lead to a parting of the ways, but philosophically they are not different.
liberal
That’s putting it mildly.
A large fraction of the wealth held by the truly rich was not “generated” by any (competitive) market at all; it’s simply rent collection. As such, the classical liberals (who modern libertarians falsely claim as progenitors) understood such wealth to be ill-gotten. Modern libertarians? Not so much.
E.D. Kain
@Jewish Steel: That’s such a caricature of libertarianism it barely merits a response.
E.D. Kain
@Jim Henley: I thought he still published there. Nevermind.
hazey
Spectacularly absent from the discussion is the fact that the “Tea Party Movement” first gained momentum as an internet fund-raising campaign for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.
Supporter’s of Dr. Paul’s campaign run range from every political stripe and central to their shared political ideas are limited Federal Government and return to greater State’s rights, a non-interventionist/imperialist foreign policy, decommissioning of the IRS and implementation of a Fair-Tax plan, greater transparency of Government and the Federal Reserve, secure borders, ending corporate wellfare and subsidies, instituting fair-trade policies, protecting civil liberties and revoking draconian Patriot Act and Fed legislation, etc. Sound familiar?
…Socially liberal, fiscally conservative policies that promote and extend freedom and our true to the orginal intent of the US Constitution and what TEA party advocates want. They’re center right voter’s who are sick of party politics, government corruption, and corporate special interests.
Its sad and curious that CATO, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity (etc.), are usurping the political energy of the TEA partiers to their own political ends, yet haven’t shown any support for Dr. Paul (the only honest polititian in D.C.) (and CATO even espouses Hayek’s economic theories).