Jeffrey Friedman: What’s Wrong with Libertarianism?

Should-Read: I think the very smart Jeffrey Friedman gets this… not quite right. The case for the empirical benefits of capitalism is very strong—but only if one is willing to remove libertarian blinders and focus on eliminating the market failures (in distributions, in aggregate demand, in externalities, in information, etc.) that keep the function the market maximizes from being a good proxy for societal well-being. And once one has the market properly supported and disciplined, the philosophical discussion can commence: Jeffrey Friedman: What’s Wrong with Libertarianism: “Libertarian arguments about the empirical benefits of capitalism are, as yet, inadequate…

…to convince anyone who lacks libertarian philosophical convictions. Yet “philosophical” libertarianism founders on internal contradictions that render it unfit to make libertarians out of anyone who does not have strong consequentialist reasons for libertarian belief. The joint failure of these two approaches to libertarianism explains why they are both present in orthodox libertarianism they hide each other’s weaknesses, thereby perpetuating them. Libertarianism retains significant potential for illuminating the modern world because of its distance from mainstream intellectual assumptions. But this potential will remain unfulfilled until its ideological superstructure is dismantled…

Thus John Maynard Keynes was not the enemy but, indeed, about the best and only friend of the True Friends of Liberty: John Maynard Keynes (1936): General Theory: Chapter 24: “In some other respects the foregoing theory is moderately conservative…

…It indicates the vital importance of establishing certain central controls…. The State will have to exercise a guiding influence on the propensity to consume…. It seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself to determine an optimum rate of investment. I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative. But… if the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary….

If our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practicable, the classical theory comes into its own again…. When 9,000,000 men are employed out of 10,000,000 willing and able to work… the complaint… is not that these 9,000,000 men ought to be employed on different tasks, but that tasks should be available for the remaining 1,000,000…. Thus I agree with Gesell that the result of filling in the gaps in the classical theory is not to dispose of the ‘Manchester System’, but to indicate the nature of the environment which the free play of economic forces requires if it is to realise the full potentialities of production….

The modern classical theory has itself called attention to various conditions in which the free play of economic forces may need to be curbed or guided. But there will still remain a wide field for the exercise of private initiative and responsibility. Within this field the traditional advantages of individualism will still hold good. Let us stop for a moment to remind ourselves what these advantages are:

• They are partly advantages of efficiency¾the advantages of decentralisation and of the play of self-interest.
• The advantage to efficiency of the decentralisation of decisions and of individual responsibility is even greater, perhaps, than the nineteenth century supposed; and the reaction against the appeal to self-interest may have gone too far.
• But, above all, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice.
• It is also the best safeguard of the variety of life, which emerges precisely from this extended field of personal choice, and the loss of which is the greatest of all the losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state.

For this variety preserves the traditions which embody the most secure and successful choices of former generations; it colours the present with the diversification of its fancy; and, being the handmaid of experiment as well as of tradition and of fancy, it is the most powerful instrument to better the future…