I feel like I owe libertarians an apology, for severely underrating their ideology. I was so focused on its theoretical flaws that I ignored its political importance. I concentrated only on the marginal benefits that might be achieved by building on our economic system’s libertarian foundation, ignoring the inframarginal losses that would happen were that foundation to crumble. I had only a hazy, poor understanding of the historical context in which libertarianism emerged, and of the limitations of libertarianism’s most prominent critics.
The most obvious thing that has prompted me to make this apology is Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy….
I should also have realized that as right-leaning ideologies go, American libertarianism was always highly unusual. I had lived in Japan, where the political right is protectionist, industrialist, and sometimes crony-capitalist. I should have realized that this was the norm for right-leaning parties around the world, and that the American right’s Reaganite embrace of free markets and free trade was the anomaly. That, in turn, should have given me a warning of what would happen if libertarianism fell in America.
I did not understand the relevant pieces of history, nor did I think carefully enough about what I had observed overseas. And so when I was a graduate student writing about the ills of libertarianism, I imagined that the realistic alternatives to the American system of 2007 were either the gentle progressivism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or the vigorous nation-building of FDR and Eisenhower, rather than the madness of a charismatic populist with zero understanding of economics….
I’d be lying if I said that Trump’s madness is the only thing that made me feel more sympathy for libertarianism. Over the past decade, I’ve seen the excesses of progressive economic ideology more clearly than I ever did as a graduate student.
Contrariwise, I’ve grown more critical of libertarianism over the last few years, because I’ve come to recognize that too many libertarians confuse proper skepticism of government and preference for voluntary markets with crude anti-governmentism, which is not the proper lesson from the classical liberal tradition. The crude anti-governmentists tend to eventually find themselves drifting to the Glenn Greenwald-esque left or the racist and populist alt-right. Both those ideologies provide a much more satisfyingly universal hostility to the US government than the much more nuanced philosophy championed by the likes of Epstein, Friedman, and Hayek. Both seem to appeal specifically to followers of the late Murray Rothbard, whose hostility to anything and everything related to the US government I increasingly believe has really harmed libertarianism and opened it to all sorts of crackpots.
In any event, I don’t agree with everything Smith says, but I found his essay thought-provoking. As they say, read the whole thing.
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