Comments Elsewhere

“Freedom,” as libertarians use the word, never seems to mean anything other than freedom from government intrusion. Real freedom, however, means having a wide range of attractive options. When someone’s options are eliminated by the marketplace, by illness, or by lack of available assistance, that is as real a threat to their freedom as government intrusion.

This is a common misunderstanding (and there are a number of libertarians, even, who encourage it by their practice). “Freedom” in the political sense that libertarians use it doesn’t mean “freedom from government intrusion;” it means “freedom from violent coercion” (hence the “non-initiation of force principle”). Government comes into the picture only when libertarians go on to suggest that government officials don’t have any special prerogatives to violently coerce peaceful people any more than ordinary civilians do. (But this entails — though vulgar libertarians don’t tend to recognize it — that systematic violence such as lynch law in the Jim Crow South, or union-busting gang violence, or pervasive male violence against women, are just as much matters for libertarian concern as invasive government is.

Nor do most libertarians claim that this is the only thing that can be intelligibly described as “freedom,” or that it’s the only valuable form of freedom, or even that it’s the most important form of freedom to any particular person at any particular time. What libertarian theory does demand is that you not try to promote other forms of freedom at the expense of freedom from violent coercion, because forcing people against their will to be “free” in other senses is (1) unlikely to work well, or (2) immoral, or (3) both. (Which one of these options the libertarian appeals to will vary depending on what kind of libertarian she is.)

(More to say, but it’ll have to wait until after work…)