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Wysłano: 11 stycznia 2008 16:33

Temat:

Myth and Truth About Libertarianism

By Murray N. Rothbard

Posted on 1/11/2008

Introduction

Myths

1. Libertarians believe that each individual is an isolated, hermetically sealed atom, acting in a

vacuum without influencing each other.

2. Libertarians are libertines: they are hedonists who hanker after "alternative lifestyles."

3. Libertarians do not believe in moral principles; they limit themselves to cost-benefit analysis

on the assumption that man is always rational.

4. Libertarianism is atheistic and materialist, and neglects the spiritual side of life.

5. Libertarians are utopians who believe that all people are good, and that therefore state control

is not necessary.

6. Libertarians believe that every person knows his own interests best.

Conclusion

Notes

[This essay is based on a paper presented at the April 1979 national meeting of the Philadelphia

Society in Chicago. The theme of the meeting was "Conservatism and Libertarianism."]

Libertarianism is the fastest growing political creed in America

today. Before judging and evaluating libertarianism, it is vitally

important to find out precisely what that doctrine is, and, more

particularly, what it is not. It is especially important to clear up a

number of misconceptions about libertarianism that are held by

most people, and particularly by conservatives. In this essay I

shall enumerate and critically analyze the most common myths

that are held about libertarianism. When these are cleared

away, people will then be able to discuss libertarianism free of

egregious myths and misconceptions, and to deal with it as it

should be on its very own merits or demerits.

M YTH #1: L IBERTARIANS BELIEVE THAT EACH INDIVIDUAL IS AN

ISOLATED , HERMETICALLY SEALED ATOM , ACTING IN A VACUUM

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WITHOUT INFLUENCING EACH OTHER .

This is a common charge, but a highly puzzling one. In a lifetime of reading libertarian and classical liberal

literature, I have not come across a single theorist or writer who holds anything like this position.

The only possible exception is the fanatical Max Stirner, a mid-19th-century German individualist who,

however, has had minimal influence upon libertarianism in his time and since. Moreover, Stirner's explicit

"Might Makes Right" philosophy and his repudiation of all moral principles including individual rights as "spooks

in the head," scarcely qualifies him as a libertarian in any sense. Apart from Stirner, however, there is no body

of opinion even remotely resembling this common indictment.

Libertarians are methodological and political individualists, to be sure. They believe that only individuals think,

value, act, and choose. They believe that each individual has the right to own his own body, free of coercive

interference. But no individualist denies that people are influencing each other all the time in their goals,

values, pursuits and occupations.

As F.A. Hayek pointed out in his notable article, "The Non-Sequitur of the 'Dependence Effect,'" John Kenneth

Galbraith's assault upon free-market economics in his best-selling The Affluent Society rested on this

proposition: economics assumes that every individual arrives at his scale of values totally on his own, without

being subject to influence by anyone else. On the contrary, as Hayek replied, everyone knows that most

people do not originate their own values, but are influenced to adopt them by other people. [1]

No individualist or libertarian denies that people influence each other all the time, and surely there is nothing

wrong with this inevitable process. What libertarians are opposed to is not voluntary persuasion, but the

coercive imposition of values by the use of force and police power. Libertarians are in no way opposed to the

voluntary cooperation and collaboration between individuals: only to the compulsory pseudo-"cooperation"

imposed by the state.

M YTH #2: L IBERTARIANS ARE LIBERTINES : THEY ARE HEDONISTS WHO HANKER AFTER " ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES ."

This myth has recently been propounded by Irving Kristol, who identifies the libertarian ethic with the

"hedonistic" and asserts that libertarians "worship the Sears Roebuck catalogue and all the 'alternative life

styles' that capitalist affluence permits the individual to choose from." [2]

The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only

a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in

social life.

Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for

government to do, and government is distinguished from every

other group in society as being the institution of organized violence.

Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to

defend person and property against violence, that any use of

violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive,

unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which

states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be

free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of

another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and

important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.

"What a person does with

his or her life is vital and

important, but is simply

irrelevant to

libertarianism."

It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of

alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or

religious morality. There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly to the disciplines

of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians who have no moral theory at all apart from the

imperative of non-violation of rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral

theory.

Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his

own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that "liberty is the highest political end"

not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values.

There is no question about the fact, however, that the subset of libertarians who are free-market economists

tends to be delighted when the free market leads to a wider range of choices for consumers, and thereby

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raises their standard of living. Unquestionably, the idea that prosperity is better than grinding poverty is a moral

proposition, and it ventures into the realm of general moral theory, but it is still not a proposition for which I

should wish to apologize.

M YTH #3: L IBERTARIANS DO NOT BELIEVE IN MORAL PRINCIPLES ; THEY LIMIT THEMSELVES TO COST - BENEFIT ANALYSIS ON

THE ASSUMPTION THAT MAN IS ALWAYS RATIONAL .

This myth is of course related to the preceding charge of hedonism, and some of it can be answered in the

same way. There are indeed libertarians, particularly Chicago-school economists, who refuse to believe that

liberty and individual rights are moral principles, and instead attempt to arrive at public policy by weighing

alleged social costs and benefits.

In the first place, most libertarians are "subjectivists" in economics, that is, they believe that the utilities and

costs of different individuals cannot be added or measured. Hence, the very concept of social costs and

benefits is illegitimate. But, more importantly, most libertarians rest their case on moral principles, on a belief in

the natural rights of every individual to his person or property. They therefore believe in the absolute immorality

of aggressive violence, of invasion of those rights to person or property, regardless of which person or group

commits such violence.

Far from being immoral, libertarians simply apply a universal human ethic to government in the same way as

almost everyone would apply such an ethic to every other person or institution in society. In particular, as I

have noted earlier, libertarianism as a political philosophy dealing with the proper role of violence takes the

universal ethic that most of us hold toward violence and applies it fearlessly to government.

Libertarians make no exceptions to the golden rule and provide no moral

loophole, no double standard, for government. That is, libertarians believe

that murder is murder and does not become sanctified by reasons of state if

committed by the government. We believe that theft is theft and does not

become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft "taxation." We

believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing

that act calls it "conscription." In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it

makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government.

"Libertarians make

no exceptions to

the golden rule and

provide no moral

loophole, no double

standard, for

government."

Hence, far from being indifferent or hostile to moral principles, libertarians

fulfill them by being the only group willing to extend those principles across

the board to government itself. [3]

It is true that libertarians would allow each individual to choose his values and to act upon them, and would in

short accord every person the right to be either moral or immoral as he saw fit. Libertarianism is strongly

opposed to enforcing any moral creed on any person or group by the use of violence except, of course, the

moral prohibition against aggressive violence itself. But we must realize that no action can be considered

virtuous unless it is undertaken freely, by a person's voluntary consent.

As Frank Meyer pointed out:

Men cannot be forced to be free, nor can they even be forced to be virtuous. To a certain extent,

it is true, they can be forced to act as though they were virtuous. But virtue is the fruit of well-used

freedom. And no act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue

or of vice. [4]

If a person is forced by violence or the threat thereof to perform a certain action, then it can no longer be a

moral choice on his part. The morality of an action can stem only from its being freely adopted; an action can

scarcely be called moral if someone is compelled to perform it at gunpoint.

Compelling moral actions or outlawing immoral actions, therefore, cannot be said to foster the spread of

morality or virtue. On the contrary, coercion atrophies morality for it takes away from the individual the freedom

to be either moral or immoral, and therefore forcibly deprives people of the chance to be moral. Paradoxically,

then, a compulsory morality robs us of the very opportunity to be moral.

It is furthermore particularly grotesque to place the guardianship of morality in the hands of the state apparatus

that is, none other than the organization of policemen, guards, and soldiers. Placing the state in charge of

moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.

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Whatever else we may say about them, the wielders of organized violence in society have never been

distinguished by their high moral tone or by the precision with which they uphold moral principle.

M YTH #4: L IBERTARIANISM IS ATHEISTIC AND MATERIALIST , AND NEGLECTS THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF LIFE .

There is no necessary connection between being for or against libertarianism and one's position on religion. It

is true that many if not most libertarians at the present time are atheists, but this correlates with the fact that

most intellectuals, of most political persuasions, are atheists as well.

There are many libertarians who are theists, Jewish or Christian. Among the classical liberal forebears of

modern libertarianism in a more religious age there were a myriad of Christians: from John Lilburne, Roger

Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and John Locke in the seventeenth century, down to Cobden and Bright, Frédéric

Bastiat and the French laissez-faire liberals, and the great Lord Acton.

Libertarians believe that liberty is a natural right embedded in a

natural law of what is proper for mankind, in accordance with man's

nature. Where this set of natural laws comes from, whether it is

purely natural or originated by a creator, is an important ontological

question but is irrelevant to social or political philosophy.

"Placing the state in

charge of moral principles

is equivalent to putting the

proverbial fox in charge of

the chicken coop."

As Father Thomas Davitt declares: "If the word 'natural' means

anything at all, it refers to the nature of a man, and when used with

'law,' 'natural' must refer to an ordering that is manifested in the

inclinations of a man's nature and to nothing else. Hence, taken in

itself, there is nothing religious or theological in the 'Natural Law' of Aquinas." [5]

Or, as D'Entrěves writes of the seventeenth century Dutch Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius:

[Grotius's] definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary. When he maintains that natural law

is that body of rule which Man is able to discover by the use of his reason, he does nothing but

restate the Scholastic notion of a rational foundation of ethics. Indeed, his aim is rather to restore

that notion which had been shaken by the extreme Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents

of thought. When he declares that these rules are valid in themselves, independently of the fact

that God willed them, he repeats an assertion which had already been made by some of the

schoolmen [6]

Libertarianism has been accused of ignoring man's spiritual nature. But one can easily arrive at libertarianism

from a religious or Christian position: emphasizing the importance of the individual, of his freedom of will, of

natural rights and private property. Yet one can also arrive at all these self-same positions by a secular,

natural-law approach, through a belief that man can arrive at a rational apprehension of the natural law.

Historically, furthermore, it is not at all clear that religion is a firmer footing than secular natural law for

libertarian conclusions. As Karl Wittfogel reminded us in his Oriental Despotism , the union of throne and altar

has been used for centuries to fasten a reign of despotism on society. [7]

Historically, the union of church and state has been in many instances a mutually reinforcing coalition for

tyranny. The state used the church to sanctify and preach obedience to its supposedly divinely sanctioned rule;

the church used the state to gain income and privilege.

The Anabaptists collectivized and tyrannized Münster in the name of the Christian religion. [8]

And, closer to our century, Christian socialism and the social gospel have played a major role in the drive

toward statism, and the apologetic role of the Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia has been all too clear. Some

Catholic bishops in Latin America have even proclaimed that the only route to the kingdom of heaven is

through Marxism, and if I wished to be nasty, I could point out that the Reverend Jim Jones, in addition to

being a Leninist, also proclaimed himself the reincarnation of Jesus.

Moreover, now that socialism has manifestly failed, politically and

economically, socialists have fallen back on the "moral" and the "spiritual" as

the final argument for their cause. Socialist Robert Heilbroner, in arguing

that socialism will have to be coercive and will have to impose a "collective

morality" upon the public, opines that: "Bourgeois culture is focused on the

"An action can

scarcely be called

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material achievement of the individual. Socialist culture must focus on his or

her moral or spiritual achievement."

moral if someone is

compelled to

perform it at

gunpoint."

The intriguing point is that this position of Heilbroner's was hailed by the

conservative religious writer for National Review , Dale Vree. He writes:

Heilbroner is saying what many contributors to NR have said over

the last quarter-century: you can't have both freedom and virtue. Take

note, traditionalists. Despite his dissonant terminology, Heilbroner is interested in the same thing

you're interested in: virtue. [9]

Vree is also fascinated with the Heilbroner view that a socialist culture must "foster the primacy of the

collectivity" rather than the "primacy of the individual." He quotes Heilbroner's contrasting "moral or spiritual"

achievement under socialism as against bourgeois "material" achievement, and adds correctly: "There is a

traditional ring to that statement."

Vree goes on to applaud Heilbroner's attack on capitalism because it has "no sense of 'the good'" and permits

"consenting adults" to do anything they please. In contrast to this picture of freedom and permitted diversity,

Vree writes that "Heilbroner says alluringly, because a socialist society must have a sense of 'the good,' not

everything will be permitted." To Vree, it is impossible "to have economic collectivism along with cultural

individualism," and so he is inclined to lean toward a new "socialist-traditionalist fusionism" toward

collectivism across the board.

We may note here that socialism becomes especially despotic when it replaces "economic" or "material"

incentives by allegedly "moral" or "spiritual" ones, when it affects to promoting an indefinable "quality of life"

rather than economic prosperity.

When payment is adjusted to productivity there is considerably more freedom as well as higher standards of

living. For when reliance is placed solely on altruistic devotion to the socialist motherland, the devotion has to

be regularly reinforced by the knout. An increasing stress on individual material incentive means ineluctably a

greater stress on private property and keeping what one earns, and brings with it considerably more personal

freedom, as witness Yugoslavia in the last three decades in contrast to Soviet Russia.

The most horrifying despotism on the face of the earth in recent years was undoubtedly Pol Pot's Cambodia, in

which "materialism" was so far obliterated that money was abolished by the regime. With money and private

property abolished, each individual was totally dependent on handouts of rationed subsistence from the state,

and life was a sheer hell. We should be careful before we sneer at "merely material" goals or incentives.

The charge of "materialism" directed against the free market ignores the fact

that every human action whatsoever involves the transformation of material

objects by the use of human energy and in accordance with ideas and

purposes held by the actors. It is impermissible to separate the "mental" or

"spiritual" from the "material."

"We should be

careful before we

sneer at 'merely

material' goals or

incentives."

All great works of art, great emanations of the human spirit, have had to

employ material objects: whether they be canvasses, brushes and paint,

paper and musical instruments, or building blocks and raw materials for

churches. There is no real rift between the "spiritual" and the "material" and

hence any despotism over and crippling of the material will cripple the spiritual as well.

M YTH #5: L IBERTARIANS ARE UTOPIANS WHO BELIEVE THAT ALL PEOPLE ARE GOOD , AND THAT THEREFORE STATE

CONTROL IS NOT NECESSARY .

Conservatives tend to add that since human nature is either partially or wholly evil, strong state regulation is

therefore necessary for society.

This is a very common belief about libertarians, yet it is difficult to know the source of this misconception.

Rousseau, the locus classicus of the idea that man is good but is corrupted by his institutions, was scarcely a

libertarian. Apart from the romantic writings of a few anarcho-communists, whom I would not consider

libertarians in any case, I know of no libertarian or classical liberal writers who have held this view.

On the contrary, most libertarian writers hold that man is a mixture of good and evil and therefore that it is

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Rothbard - Myth about libertarians.pdf

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