Well, after a few weeks of taking it (relatively) easy, I figure that Super Tuesday is as good a day as any to get back into writing here. As people have probably figured, today I cast my vote in the Republican Primary (though I'm registered as "Unenrolled") for Ron Paul. Not that I think he's a perfect candidate, nor that I've ever expected him to snag the nomination. However, of the candidates available, Dr. Paul is the only one who really stands for liberty, and having written about rights and liberty lately, I think it's time that I weigh in on what exactly the libertarian (note the small "l") really is.
First of all, I do want to clearly state that I consider myself libertarian in the philosophical sense. I'll get to what specifically that means in a minute, but I do want to make it perfectly clear that I do not know very much about the Libertarian policy or what many of the specific candidates there represent. I plan on acquainting myself with the party a bit more as the real election approaches, but as of this point I'm not sure if I would ever vote for any of them as I don't know what specifically any of them stand for. On the subject of Ron Paul, I'm sure most of you know that he did in fact run as a Libertarian at one point, though now he runs as a Republican, in part due to our system's inherent limitations that virtually guarantee offices to members of one of the two major parties. Those issues are all out of the scope of this article, however, so I won't spend any more time dealing with them.
Now, on to the subject of libertarianism itself. The term itself is slightly more self-descriptive than most of our other political terms (conservative, liberal, progressive), and as is usually the case there are many different philosophies that all tend to fall under this umbrella. Generally, however, the unifying element of those who would consider themselves libertarian is adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). As it pretty clearly states, this prohibits the use of aggression to manipulate behavior, thus leading to a system where all action is voluntary. More specifically, aggression is defined as the use of coercive force (or the threat thereof) to directly influence an individual's actions or the disposition of his property. Stealing property is thus aggression, as is mugging at gunpoint, or a host of other threats that can influence an actor to do things he would not do of his own accord. It is very important to note that what specifically constitutes "coercion" depends heavily on what one has accepted as a basis for property rights, an issue I've already tackled and don't plan to revisit at the moment. It is important to note, however, that it is not aggressive to refuse service or exchange if conditions don't completely satisfy you: that simply a case of trade not happening, not rights being violated.
While the NAP is conceptually quite simple and straightforward, it's the minute details of what it means and how it should be acted out that really define most libertarians' actual day-to-day actions. Philosophically, it's easy to define a libertarian by this principle, but in practice there are a lot of people with a lot of different ideas about how exactly it should play out. There's ultimately quite the gap between theory and practice. Because of this, any discussion of libertarianism faces a difficulty in nailing down a specific group of adherents, so rather than trying futilely to narrow things down I'm instead going to provide a brief look a several different "schools" of libertarian thought as I understand them. This is not exhaustive, nor do I claim to be an expert on(or even a student of) all of these "flavors," and I'll try to give all a fair overview without any editorializing. Anyone who knows more about any of these, feel free to give me feedback and I'll see about editing your comments/further reading into this post if it seems appropriate. Ultimately libertarians fall on a spectrum, but for simplicity's sake I'll look at what I consider to be the three "factions," as well as a few narrow groups that have their own defining characteristics. Note that most of these are generally applicable to different countries, but in some cases I'm focusing on what is mostly an American phenomenon, so your mileage may vary.
On one end we have what many would say is the most pure strand of libertarian: they believe that the NAP applies in all cases and any sort of aggression cannot be permitted. Because the state is a body of government imbued with authority over its citizens and a monopoly on the initiation of "legitimate" coercive force, these libertarians oppose any state at all. Appropriately called "
anarcho-capitalists," they usually advocate a system of pure voluntary exchange where the tasks we generally ascribe to the state (policing, courts, disaster recovery) are instead handled by private, voluntary organizations. The state cannot do anything for free, and thus it must tax to provide anything. But taxes are the coercion (by threat of jail and ultimately by violence) of individuals to surrender their property to another body, which is aggression and is not permitted. Thus no government can be brought into existence to provide any of these services, hence the need for private insurance companies.
Without getting too bogged down, the general idea is that these organizations would offer many levels of service, and each individual would be free to choose exactly how much risk he wanted to transfer, then work out a deal with a company to do just that much. Anyone who felt confident that he didn't need insurance would be free to keep all of his money, but in the event of something unforeseen, be it natural or an act of aggression, he would be on his own to recover from the loss. In this world, they postulate, the forces of the market would drive down prices as insurance companies competed, and the resulting increase in prosperity would provide a damping effect on crime and violence. However, since most people would rather not be robbed than being paid back for things that are stolen, insurance companies would soon end up offering preventative services, such as police patrols, either to lower their expected payout or to use as an advertised feature of their plan to attract more customers. This same sort of reasoning is applied to all "government" services, and the supposed result would be a society where insurance is cheap and effective, but no one was forced to contribute for anyone else, nor even to give up his own money unless he wanted to. No coercion, no state.
A related term is "voluntarist" or "voluntaryist," which I believe relates to the same concept. A common claim from people bearing this label is that many services, such as security, would be provided on a voluntary basis but benefit everyone, even those not paying (for instance, the richest inhabitants of some region might finance a police force that protects their property as well as the property of others to deter crime as a whole, thus making everyone safer). There may be a slight different between these two groups, but for our purposes I'll leave them as one general end of the spectrum.
Moving further along the spectrum of libertarianism are those who agree that aggression is bad, but argue that since some aggression will always exist we can permit the development of a state that makes limited use of coercion to prevent greater abuses of rights. The term usually used here is "
minarchist," literally meaning "small state" or, more appropriately, "minimal state". While opinions within this movement differ, one area that generally falls under the purview of the state is the court system, providing a single universally available body to punish all other rights violations. Some minarchists hold that this is all that is necessary in a state, some even going so far as to suggest that, by permitting the state to impose its costs on those who are found guilty, the state could exist without needing to coerce the innocent. This sort of funding, they argue, is not aggression because the people being coerced are (most likely) aggressors themselves, and that by violating the rights of another they have forfeited their own property rights until the injured party is made whole. This sort of structure is usually called an "ultraminimal state."
More typically, minarchists tend to differ on what exactly is a "minimal" state, but justice (courts, law enforcement, prisons) and defense (foreign and domestic) are fairly standard answers for state authority. Some economic/trade elements are usually accepted (treaties with other nations, since the minarchist state doesn't exist in a political vacuum) also tend not to raise too many eyebrows. Welfare and schooling may be permitted by some, but I get the feeling this is exceedingly rare, except maybe in a bare minimum sort of way (and I know for certain that many minarchists oppose even these). To fund these minimal endeavors, some sort of tax can be allowed, but this again is a point of divergence for many who call themselves minarchists. Taxes are by nature a market distortion (since the transfer of money by definition alters the function of the market), so most common forms of taxation are excluded. Income tax, which is rightly viewed as disincentive productive labor, is almost certainly banned. Sales tax likewise skews action away from consumption, though a minimal tax here might be permitted. Often proponents point to the early United States' practice of adding small duties on imported goods, arguing that a flat duty on all goods can be fair and minimally invasive to the economy while still raising some money. Still others counter that these all violate the property rights of individuals and propose a different approach (and with it, a slightly different take on property rights).
Land, they argue, has inherent value for its owner that stems from purely natural factors (location, resources, climate, etc). Other than what the owner uses directly for his own needs, that value is actually imparted by society itself (oil reserves beyond what the owner personally uses can be sold at a market, for example.) This natural worth is not something the owner created, which he is certainly able to provide enhancements that benefit himself and others. Thus, rather than taxing the market value of the property, both natural and enhanced, taxes can be applied to the base value of the land without the owner's added labor, since this natural value belongs to the society that imparts it. By collecting taxes on the lands base value, the state can be funded for its basic duties and no one needs to have any rights violated. But as opposed to standard property/real estate taxes, the owner is not penalized for any use of that property he may pursue. Followers of this school of thought are generally called Geo-libertarians, due to their focus on the base land. Details on how the tax is handled differ, and I've heard some advocate a sort of "land rights auction" idea put forward where people bid for the rights to use certain bits of land, with the most eager buyer ultimately gaining the rights.
At the other "end" of the libertarian spectrum are
"Constitutionalists", that is those who favor limited government as explicitly declared in the Constitution (or, for those of you outside the States, whatever guiding document would apply). Now, before I get in to details here, I should point out that many libertarians wouldn't consider this a valid level of their philosophy: the Constitution authorizes many different cases of aggression, and in the US at least it puts barely any restraints on the States, permitting them to act in blatantly anti-libertarian ways. While the concessions of the minarchist may have merit (and some ancaps would deny even this), clearly this is going too far to still be considered libertarian! While I sympathize with this point, my reason for diving into this movement is twofold. First of all, I simply assert that the faithful Constitutionalist is so much closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum than either mainstream US party that I think it more appropriate to count him as a libertarian rather than an authoritarian. Second, I personally think it reasonable for those pursuing a more pure form of liberty, specifically the minarchist movement, to make use of the Constitutionalist movement as a sort of staging ground to reverse the disturbing trend of our government away from liberty. Because the Constitution was created with a provision for amendment, it is fully possible to support it and still reduce the power of the government to violate rights and limit liberty. However, this is useless unless the government actually abides by the Constitution, hence a necessary step is to unite people and make that a possibility.
A common theme amongst Constitutionalists is that of returning power to the states where the Constitution specifies it resides. This entails reversing decades (even centuries) of abuse of clauses such as Interstate Commerce and General Welfare to give the federal government responsibilities that violate the actual intention of the Constitution. While many critics rightly point out that doing this on the most literal level actually authorizes the states to violate basic rights, like those specified in the Bill of Rights, Constitutionalists usually counter that the way to resolve that is either attack it at the state level or pass a legitimate amendment that addresses the problem. Supporting the Constitution except when it doesn't work the way you want is hypocritical and undermines the ultimate movement. Presumably, affecting change at the state level would prove less of a challenge than doing the whole country at once, and getting even a few states to actively stand for liberty would likely start a chain reaction of people moving to states that supported their rights, hence leading states to compete over inhabitants by getting their act together.
Conclusion:
This post, while fairly long (I know, I talk too much), really just scratches the surface of what a libertarian really is. I hope that my very general overview (and very limited understanding) have made things a little clearer for at least a few people. But my real point of posting is actually a bit more important than that. While I've glossed over differences quite a bit, and there certainly are some substantial chasms between the various positions (as well as some unanswered questions that even otherwise similar stances can argue about, such as the permissibility of abortion), I think one thing should be clear: there are still plenty of similarities between the groups I've described. More importantly, there are substantial differences between the groups above and either mainstream political party. While the libertarian community may differ on the details, the substance is the same, and I think it's very important that we start working together more closely. This election has shown just how similar most Democrat and Republican politicians seem to be: they may quibble over details, but they are both authoritarian to nearly the same degree. The political fight of our day is not over left or right, but over liberty or statism. And while liberty's numbers are growing, we can't afford to waste all our energy fighting over minutiae while the real battle goes unheeded. There will be plenty of time to sort out our differences once we're on much more solid footing with regards to liberty.
