Whatever Happened to Political Philosophy?
The men and women who founded the USA were avid students of political philosophy, if not philosophers in their own right. People seemed to realize that ideas preceded actions, and that philosophy guided the formation of ideas.
So, the Physiocrats were the rock-stars of the era. It took intellectual ammunition as well as gun-powder to beat back the historically-entrenched forces of aristocracy. A “conservative” was one who believed that there should be a King. A “liberal” was one who believed that government could be constituted without an aristocracy. .
Today, we still use the labels which applied to bygone political eras, but the meanings have morphed so as to be unrecognizable to the Founders (if they were somehow available for comment). And the two major US political parties are completely irreducible, philosophically speaking.
Democrat philosophy vs Republican philosophy? Talk about an oxymoron! There is no philosophical coherence in the major parties. A decade or two ago, the Republicans were known as the party of peace and fiscal responsibility. The Democrats were known as the party of the working people who somehow got sucked into wars. By the Year 2000, the party of Ike and Reagan had become the party of neo-conservative budget-busting war-mongerers, and the party of FDR/Truman/Kennedy had become the party of welfare-bashing and the deregulating of high-financiers. Just as capital was freely flowing across borders, so were investments into political coffers.
But this is nothing new. Big money has been a problem in US politics since Day One. Political parties based on philosophy, such as the Whigs, all died out. Political parties based on greed flourished. The only consistent philosophy to be found in the Democrat and Republican parties is the application of financial self-interest. Some would question whether that is a philosophy at all. Not surprisingly, the electorate is disgusted with politics as usual and only gets excited about philosophical side-issues like the right to an abortion, or the right of homosexuals to marry, or the use of eminent domain for private profit. Or the right to keep and bear arms. Or the right to clean air and water.
So, there is always room for minor political parties which are more philosophical and ideologically-focussed. The Greens, Libertarians, Reform, or American Independents each have a set of common beliefs which unite their small numbers. There might be many more “numbers,” electorally speaking, but the winner-take-all political system is rigged against minor parties. Even when Ross Perot garnered 20% of the popular vote, Reform got zero electoral votes and no senators nor representatives. Political philosophy in government had attained a small resurgence under Reagan, which also blew Perot’s coattails, but it has been in decline ever since. Perhaps the Obama-non is in some respect a cry for a return to intelligent political thinking as a way to somehow get us out of the mess we are in.
Right, Left, Liberal Conservative–today, these have become shaped by media stereotypes more than by actual ideologies. Americans have replaced ideology with media entertainers who bash strawmen of the opposite ilk. Conservatives love Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, who bash the liberals as “fiscally-idiotic authoritarian whining elitists,” while liberals identify with Michael Moore and Al Franken, who bash the conservatives as “unfeeling authoritarian moralist hypocritical interlopers.” “Liberals feel but they don’t think” while “conservatives think but they don’t feel.” This all seems to be more about personality traits and style than it is about political philosophy. And lots of folks are just looking for a scapegoat. So the bashing of straw-men has become the daily routine on the cable networks.
But the actual core ideological liberals and conservatives have much more in common than they would care to admit: They are all ardent moralists; willing to apply their personal morality in the civic law, and to use the force of law to protect those whom they deem to be in need of protection. It is just a question of “who needs to be protected.” Conservatives seek to protect the unborn, while liberals seek to protect the poor/disadvantaged. They all want to protect children. You might be amazed at how much heat gets generated over so little a difference, but that’s what we are left to argue about. By the way, GWB’s sole contribution to political philosophy was the concept of Compassionate Conservative (which was never funded nor taken seriously after 9/11.)
Today, Right is conflated with Conservative, and Left is conflated with Liberal. But “left-liberals” and “right-conservatives” all devolve into de facto authoritarians when they rush to the government to aid their causes.
On the other hand, Libertarians can be broadly defined as those who are philosophically opposed to the use of government power. Of course, that makes them “odd men out” in a city of influence-peddling and power-brokerage like Washington DC. It’s like the snowball’s chance in hell. The only time the mainstream hears Ron Paul is when things go desperately wrong and a major paradigm is called into question. Perhaps deTocqueville was right when he warned that once an electorate learns that it can vote itself the public purse, democratic government is on the way out.
So what is a left-libertarian? We have some idea what left means, but what exactly is a libertarian?
In the 1970′s, disaffection with war, conscription, inflation, and Nixonian government abuses was running high among Americans. And Ayn Rand was on the best seller list; a major philosophical influence.
In 1973, a group of “libertarians” defined themselves across two broad categories: Social and Economic. They held that:
To be socially libertarian is to uphold individual rights to religion, expression, gun-ownership, freedom of association, and to infer broad privacy rights including consentual sex and abortion. It calls for personal responsibility for adult choices. It amounts to reiterating the first ten (or fourteen) amendments to the Constitution, with reservations about some of the amendments which followed.
This core social-libertarian stance was relatively uncontroversial, as it represented an established body of American law. It was basically constitutionalist; ie., concerned with confining the powers of the federal government to those enumerated in the Constitution (while bemoaning the fact that the 16th Amendment was made part of it). (And a few years later, the right-to-life libertarian contingent began challenging the right to abortion contingent.)
On the other hand, to be economically libertarian was to adhere to the idea that Ayn Rand’s concept of free-market capitalism was an “unknown ideal.” Ayn Rand had a profound impact on economist Murray Rothbard, who was the economist of the modern libertarians, and he wrote the LP platform which still stands to this day, AFAIK (due to a 7/8 majority rule to change by-laws). There was no provision made for public money. There was no distinction made for public works, nor for infrastructure, nor for public resources such as air land and water vs private property. It was assumed that everything public could and should be privatised, and that the government would whither away to nothing under the free market utopia. All regulation was unnecessary or evil. All issues of environmental pollution could be resolved in the civil courts. Competition provided by free markets would prevent monopolies. Monopoly was, in fact, a product of government and not of markets. Natural monopolies, hogwash. And back to the gold standard for the dollar.
Needless to say, this economic platform of the Libertarian Party was highly controversial, not only among the electorate, but among all but a handful of economists. It gradually became an embarassment for thoughtful libertarians. Looking back, it seems like a pipe-dream or a macho-flash in the form of an economic manifesto. Rothbard used his position in the LP to elevate Rand non-fiction to the level of economic gospel. Over time, this has made it rather easy for libertarians to be labelled as extremists, and ignored. There is no doubt that Rand and Rothbard were “of the right,” so it is fair to say that the LP platform is right-libertarian, due to its economic baggage.
Over time, many alternatives to Rand-Rothbard economics have emerged, which are far better suited to libertarianism.
Perhaps the word is “re-emerged,” as libertarians explored the philosophical roots of their movement, and found that classical liberal economics are much deeper and wider than the LP platform might indicate.
John Locke re-emerges as a founder of the revolutionary idea that human effort creates rightful private property. “If you create something, it belongs to you.” But the correlary, long forgotten by modern free market economists, is that land is to be used for the common good, since it is not produced by the labor of human beings, but provided by God or Nature. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were devout Lockeans. Henry George came along a century later and practically convinced the entire civilized world that the only moral tax was one levied on land ownership. Since the market economy demands private uses of the common stock of land for production, it is logical and ethical that the land-users compensate the community NOT based on their income or sales or production, but on how much valuable land they arrogated to themselves. This is the philosophical nail in the coffin of the divine rights of land holders of the entire planet, the final conqest of Classical Liberalism over the aristocracy/Church.
This bold idea that land owners should pay for their privilege had far-reaching implications in the USA. It led to the Progressive Era, established county property taxes in every state of the Union, freed up land, lead to affordable housing, and to massive local infrastructure improvements which benefitted the commonweal. But land and resource owners are nothing if not well organized politically, and they were gradually able to divert taxation onto other segments of the economy. Some of this “taxation” came in the form of the Federal Reserve System helping to stimulate speculative borrowing from central banks.
In the Roaring 20′s, interest rates were held down and land again became a private speculative instrument, leading to the Great Crash and Depression of the 30′s. During the Depression, unemployment hit 25% and the government bought out a massive amount of mortgages that were under water. 3 out of 10 banks went belly-up. Does this sound familiar?
In the 1980′s, Japanese banks set off a terrific land boom. At its peak, the value of real estate in the city of Tokyo exceeded the value of the entire United States. The subsequent crash resulted in what is now called the Lost Decade for Japan.
Back to the USA. 2004, yet another land boom is set off by a combination of loose real estate lending practices, low interest rates and creative financing encouraged by the Federal Reserve. The subsequent meltdown is still ongoing with no telling how bad things will get–and Alan Greenspan swears he was not to blame. Being a disciple of Rand, his ignorance of the wisdom of Locke and Henry George is his glaring Achilles Heal.
Elevating land prices gives rise to a FALSE sense of prosperity, which grossly misallocates capital. True prosperity comes from producing goods and services, not from a bigger fool coming along to buy land with borrowed funny-money. In fact, the price of land (and hence real estate) should be DISCOURAGED from rising, in order to keep it available to productive market forces, to allow new competition and to create job growth and to keep housing affordable. Expensive land, like expensive oil, is a tax on the entire economy. One way to keep land cheap and available is to collect the land rent for public use, and to eliminate other forms of taxation which weigh on the productive.
The Austrian and Chicago schools of economics have pretty much ignored the powerful ideas of Henry George and of John Locke, and allocated land as just another cost of production. Whether this was an accident of history or was somehow finagled by self-dealing landed interests, I leave to the economic historians to decide. Professor Mason Gaffney has produced ample evidence of a conspiracy to stifle Henry George — google: The Corruption of Economics.
In any case, Ludwig von Mises, in his voluminous manifestos, simply ignored the communal qualities of land. So Ayn Rand ignored it. And so Rothbard ignored it. The right-libertarians ignored it. Greenspan still has no clue, quite frankly. He is blind to the clear evidence of the gross misallocation of capital which occurs during great land booms, and the subsequest disasters to banks and to individuals. Greenspan is clearly stuck in a right-libertarian mindset. His blinders are so thick, that he cannot see the evidence of his own senses.
A left libertarian is any social libertarian or constitutionalist who questions the constricting economic gospel of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. Perhaps they believe that public goods should be provided by some form of government. Perhaps they simply want to see citizens paid dividends for the exploitation of common resources. Perhaps they are Georgists. Perhaps they are Greens. Perhaps they are leftists who have become disenchanted with abuses of government power or who have become aware of the proverbial unintended consequences. Perhaps they are “Cooperative Individualists.”
In short, a left libertarian is anyone who sees, like John Locke and all the Classical Liberals, that there is a valid public sphere for humanity, extending from the natural resources provided by God or Nature. (Right libertarians just say “Privatize it.”)
It becomes clear that left libertarianism (compared to right-libertarianism) is so broad that it may even dovetail with major aspects of the Green movement, which had suffered from the exact opposite philosphical problem. (That is, many Greens saw all human activity as a public problem (causing damage to the environment) with no room for necessary and beneficial private economic activity.)
It remains to be seen whether libertarians can regain their leftist heritage and throw off the untenable economic mantle of the right-libertarians. And it remains to be seen if Greens can learn the benefits of private property and of market economics. For a great read on the potential synergy of the greens and libertarians, visit Dan Sullivan’s website: http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/greenlibertarians.html
–Al Date, recently retired from computer manufacturing industry in Silicon Valley California
The author welcomes all corrections, comments and criticisms, al.date@comcast.net
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