Comments Elsewhere

Brian Doss:

That’s true, there is a form of economic populism that intersects with libertarianism, though Jim is right in that this is not even remotely what Kos & Dean think of economic populism.

Worst yet, though, is that for even those on the left for whom these ideas have traction, the preferred solution (at least initially) in nearly every case is government action.

Point taken, but I’m not sure that you’re actually being entirely fair to the likes of Kos or Dean. It’s true that the understanding of “economic populism” that they have may often involve government action, but it’s not clear to me either that this is always a first resort or that interventionism is more essential to their position than populism is. So there’s a question of how to approach them: you can approach them as primarily interventionists (in which case a belligerent approach, on the grounds that what they’re doing has nothing to do with libertarianism, makes sense) or you can approach them as primarily populists who don’t understand the problems associated with interventionist means (in which case a charitable approach, based on pointing out how radical populism entails libertarianism, makes more sense). I tend toward the latter approach, since (among other things) that’s how I remember becoming convinced of libertarian arguments, and also because I think that philosophically left-liberals’ commitments to populism are usually much deeper than their commitments to government interventionism. (For similar reasons I think trying to approach the Right on similar terms is foolish—it’s a strategy not well justified by its success, and I think there are good reasons to suspect that most Rightist’s commitments to traditional orders of power run much, much deeper than any commitment to small government or free market principles.)