Libertarianism Is Mild-Mannered

Libertarian ideas seem strange and extreme to people who aren’t familiar with them. I’m going to argue in this post that they are not. Libertarianism is a mild-mannered ideology. From a few unimpeachable presumptions that no reasonable person would quarrel with, you can reach some extremely libertarian conclusions.

I often get the sense that libertarian policy proposals sound extreme-for-the-sake-of-being-extreme, at least to non-libertarians. It’s as if they think we’re courting controversy for its own sake, like we’re intentionally trying to be shock-jocks. “Hey, guys, watch me bite this bullet with a wolfish grin on my face!” And then I launch into an argument in favor of drug legalization or open borders or legalized organ markets. Some critics think these positions stem from an extreme deontology, a “Right must be done, or may the world burn” kind of ideology.

Not so. I’m much more of a utilitarian. If I hadn’t been convinced that economic freedom is actually good for society in some objective sense, I probably wouldn’t have become a libertarian. If some government policy demonstrates tremendous benefits, even if it significantly abridges freedom or costs a lot to implement, I would feel squeamish about ending it.

I favor legalizing heroin and cocaine because prohibiting these drugs causes enormous harm. Most of the heroin overdose deaths are due to prohibition, because in an illegal market you have to guess at the purity and even the identity of the substance you’re taking. Black market violence, which accounts for a substantial fraction of the murder committed every year, would basically disappear if we got rid of drug prohibition. We would have a lot fewer overdose deaths and murders if we legalized drugs. I’m not saying, “Legalize heroin, because freedom for its own sake trumps all other values.” This mild-mannered libertarian is saying, “Legalize heroin because it will save a lot of lives. I’m in favor of saving lives.”

I favor open borders because turning away an immigrant at the border potentially damns that person to a lifetime of third-world poverty. I’m against that. “That person” possibly means an innocent child who would make a fine American if given the chance. I don’t think we’d be flooded with hundreds of millions of new people. I think we’d increase the flow from a million or so immigrants a year to maybe two or three million. Housing prices and the existing job market (even the expanding job market) will attenuate any surge of immigrants, with or without any government border enforcement. I’m fine with screening for criminal backgrounds, so long as it isn’t too onerous. Once again, if the choice is “admit a questionable immigrant or damn him to third-world poverty for the rest of his life” we at least need to weigh these outcomes against each other. So, I admit “open the borders” sounds like shock-jock bullet-biting, but it’s not. It’s really a plea to allow willing landlords rent to willing tenants, to allow willing employers to hire willing workers, and to allow someone living in third-world misery to boost her family’s income by thirty-fold. And the majority of attempts to quantify the actual benefits of open immigration find that those benefits are truly enormous. Even the very most pessimistic estimates by the most anti-immigration economists (George Borjas) find that extremely liberalized immigration would only hurt high-school dropouts to the tune of ~10% of their income, while essentially everyone else benefits. Even if you think that's an unacceptable outcome, there is a potential deal to make everyone benefit with a tiny amount of redistribution. The ill-mannered shock-jock is the one who says, “My sense of national identity is more important than your family’s welfare, even after adding to that the welfare of my fellow countrymen who would rent, hire, and sell to you.”

I favor legalizing the sale of human organs because I don’t want thousands of people to die every year from preventable causes. Nobody is talking about selling the organs of unwilling donors here. I’m talking about allowing people to voluntarily sell their organs to desperate patients willing to buy them. I have an extra kidney, and you need an extra kidney. We can both benefit. I anticipate and appreciate all the “Yes, but”s. “Yes, but won’t some reckless individuals sell their kidneys for drugs and beer money?” “Yes, but if someone under economic duress is selling their kidney, isn’t that person being exploited?” “Yes, but the thought just gives me the heebie-jeebies.” (Frankly, I think this last “yes, but” is usually the real explanation, and the others are lame attempts to back-fit a rationalization to a visceral reaction.) All fine points well worth considering. But does it add up to thousands of lives saved each year? You can’t just blurt out a reason for not doing something. You have to somehow quantify it and weigh it against the alternative. I think the "moral" reservations are overblown. So what if someone uses their money on something you consider frivolous? Doesn’t someone else still get a kidney? So what if someone feels economically compelled to sell their kidney? Someone on the other side of that transaction gets to live (or at least gets to avoid the significant discomfort of dialysis). Mild-mannered libertarianism calmly deliberates on how to save the most lives and alleviate the greatest amount of human misery, even when the policy implications are uncomfortable and hard to swallow. It’s the shock-jock who blurts out the first answer that comes to mind and runs with every rationalization that sounds remotely plausible. Markets are the solution to waiting lists, so long as there is a usable supply of the thing being rationed. Raise the price and the shortage ends, whether you’re talking about wheat or kidneys.

There are dozens of other government programs with horrible consequences. Taxes on capital income. Underfunded pensions, which lead to fiscal catastrophes that completely paralyze the government. Underfunded long-term liabilities in general. Excessive regulation. Excessive control of medicine. Excessive control of pharmaceuticals. Misguided stimulus programs. "Anti-poverty" programs that expose poor working families to extremely high marginal tax rates. Mostly libertarians oppose these programs because they do tremendous harm, not because we’re willing to forgo an extremely beneficial program for the sake of freedom as an end unto itself.

I think most non-libertarians don't even realize that policy analysis is non-trivial. They just assume that their favorite government programs have all the benefits they imagine them to have, and anyone who opposes them does so because they don't want to pay (or they're just plain evil for the sake of being evil, or they are too stupid to know better). It's easy to think we've identified all the appropriate "fix the world" levers, and we're just arguing about how hard to pull on them. Really, we're arguing about whether that lever actually helps at all or does positive harm. Mild-mannered libertarianism is trying to remind populism, conservatism, and progressivism that they've identified the wrong levers, or that they're trying to pull them in the wrong direction. It's hard sometimes to get over the sense of "do something"-ism, the notion that doing anything is better than doing nothing. But sometimes "nothing" is better than something. Society's problems are anti-inductive, after all. They thwart our best attempts to "do something."