Punditus Maximus:

That’s not a ton of movement away from President George W. Bush toward the Libertarian Party there.

As if the only options of which libertarians might partake were (1) voting for the Republican presidential candidate or (2) voting for the Libertarian Party candidate. In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader; in 2004, I voted for John Kerry, and in 2008, because I had given up on both third-partyism and lesser-evilism and, in fact, electoral politics as a whole, I voted for nobody at all. In fact, many libertarians reject electoral politics and don’t vote. None of this, by the way, has to do with insisting that I am (or that other non-GOP-voting libertarians are) the One True Libertarian; it has to do with the fact that you made a blanket statement about libertarian political behavior which actually has nothing to do with the political behavior of many actually-existing libertarians. If you want to sit around and complain about so-called libertarian GOP voters, feel free to do so — I do so all the time, and, hell, I also complain about most so-called libertarian LP voters. But don’t pretend as if this is a meaningful indictment of libertarianism as a philosophy, or the libertarian movement as a whole.

Apparently, once Bush was off the ballot, the Republican Party became significantly less attractive to libertarians.

Actually third party vote totals are affected by a lot of different things, including the fact that absolute number of votes for all parties tends to rise from one election to the next (since the total voting population is constantly growing). It’s also dramatically affected by the peculiarities of the candidate in any given year (Badnarik was a much less competent campaigner than either Browne or Barr), by how many other prominent third party candidates are in the race, by how close the general election is likely to be (slam-dunk elections tend to favor third party candidates, since fewer people are worried about trying to tilt the outcome for their less-hated big party candidate), etc. In percentage terms, Barr’s miserable failure in 2008 was about equivalent to Harry Browne’s miserable failure in 1996; the difference in the interim had little to do with some special fondness for George W. Bush and his “compassionate conservatism” or bomb-the-world antics, and a lot to do with a bunch of minor factors that can have little effects that seem large only because we are dealing with such a small number of voters to begin with.

Punditus Maximus:

There will never be a free market, ever, since one basic assumption of a free market is of participants each with an infinite quantity of information and infinite computation time. Said persons are also perfectly aware of future events (or their probabilities) and are never at any time liquidity constrained. Seriously, the economic models of free markets require this. . . .

No, they don’t. You seem to be confusing the neoclassical general-equilibrium analysis (especially modeling of markets under the ideal conditions of so-called “perfect competition) with free market economics. But these are two separate topics: freed-market economics per se are not the same thing as perfect competition or general equilibrium modeling. Some free market economists make use of the neoclassical modeling; but many, notably those associated with the “Austrian School” in economics, do not, and in fact specifically criticize that kind of idealized reasoning about competitive markets as some sort of frictionless plane. For a broad overview, you might read over the essays in the Austrian School section of David Prychitko’s Why Economists Disagree. In fact, if you look at Mises’ and Hayek’s work on the role of price as a decentralized information network, or Israel Kirzner’s work on entrepreneurship, you’ll find that Austrian economists (typically among the most radical of free-marketeers) generally think that the facts of imperfect information, limited time, and uncertain futures are central to the case for economic freedom (because knowledge problems are inherent in any form of resource allocation, and because the decentralized, trial-and-error processes of the market provide a way to move ahead in spite of uncertainty and ignorance, in ways that centralized bureaucratic planning, which depends on an unrealistic faith in the capacity to discover and aggregate information about people’s wants and needs, cannot).

Libertarians are people who believe that these assumptions could under some circumstances be valid.

If your notion of libertarianism is such that Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard wouldn’t count as a libertarian, then your notion of libertarianism probably needs to be revised.

Gracchus:

No, she’s offering insights into what attracts misogynists and her patented NiceGuys® . . . to the prevalent mainstream form of economics-focused libertarianism.

Just so we’re clear, besides being a radical feminist I have also been corresponding with Amanda since she was at Mouse Words. You don’t need to spell out basic terminology for me.

That said, I do not think it’s at all obvious that a statement like this:

Even libertarianism doesn’t really function without anxious masculinity to fuel it, and Ayn Rand knew it and used phallic fantasies to lure in her followers.

is in fact a statement about libertarianism as publicly perceived rather than a statement about libertarianism as internally understood. If it is, then, again, it seems to me that there’s a basic problem in trying to figure out what “fuels” libertarianism based on public perception and that insiders’ understandings of the movement are, in fact, more useful than “public perception” in figuring that out. You, of course, have been clear that you’re talking about “prominent” libertarians throughout; but “prominent” is not a univocal term.

If you want to say that there are lots of self-identified libertarians with a superficial understanding of libertarianism, and those people are often exclusively concerned with a specific range of economic issues, to the exclusion of other important social and cultural issues, then I’d agree with you. I complain about and argue with them all the time. This certainly justifies a claim about “libertarians I see on the TV” or “libertarians I deal with in my blog comments.” But it doesn’t justify a claim about libertarianism, which like any movement has more and less peripheral figures, and which like any philosophy has more and less consistent and well-informed advocates. As for whether it justifies a claim about prominent libertarians, the “prominence” of those people is not necessarily prominence within the particular community you’re trying to address; and it’s often the case that the intellectual or social structure of non-“mainstream” movements are not very well understood by trying to glean something based on the figures who are most prominent among people outside the movement, because the reasons for their prominence (and for the prominence of the specific things about them that are prominent outside the movement) typically has little to do with what “fuels” the movement, and a lot to do with what fuels the institutions which are choosing who to report on and who to engage with.

Which “insiders”? The comparitively small group of libertarians who read Reason, understand who some of the people on your list are, and see beyond the economic facet? Or the much larger group of self-professed libertarians who are beta-grade Gordon Geckos looking to save their future imaginary millions from the tax man?

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not wanting to pay taxes.

2. A lot of libertarians read Reason. As far as I know it is the highest-readership libertarian magazine currently being published.

3. I don’t know who this amorphous group of polemically-defined libertarians is, and I don’t know any way of reckoning how many of them there are compared to other groups. I do know that you get a better idea of what a philosophy is by looking for the most consistent and best informed advocates of it, and you get a better idea of what a movement is by looking for the most influential people within it. There are other criteria that you also may want to weight: for example, influence among the least consistent and well-informed, or among newcomers to the movement, may be less important than influence among the more consistent and better-informed, or among people who have spent years or decades working within the movement. Movements are structured social entities, not just heaps of people, and if you want to make statements about a movement it’s often a tricky matter trying to get a grip on that structure — a matter which is certainly not well served by simply depending on what’s most visible in the media or in your personal corner of the Internet. Of course there’s an easy way around this: to talk about specific people’s views rather than about the views of a movement as a group. Part of the reason I think it would be useful to talk more about that — what motivates Ayn Rand (certainly, there’s a lot of misogyny there), or Lew Rockwell (certainly, there’s a lot of patriarchy there), or (ugh) Bob Barr, or Will Wilkinson (a feminist), or Kerry Howley (a feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism), or Carol Moore (a radical feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism) — and less about what “fuels” amorphous collections of people, especially amorphous collections that are defined by polemical terms or by contestable and easily-shifted terms like “prominent” or “mainstre am.” (Of course, the fact that, as a radical and an anarchist, I happen to think that the most consistent libertarians are typically the least “mainstream,” is part of the reason for my disliking that as a criterion for selecting who to discuss.)

Gracchus:

Which “insiders”? The comparitively small group of libertarians who read Reason, understand who some of the people on your list are, and see beyond the economic facet? Or the much larger group of self-professed libertarians who are beta-grade Gordon Geckos looking to save their future imaginary millions from the tax man?

1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not wanting to pay taxes.

2. A lot of libertarians read Reason. As far as I know it is the highest-readership libertarian magazine currently being published.

3. I don’t know who this amorphous group of polemically-defined libertarians is, and I don’t know any way of reckoning how many of them there are compared to other groups. I do know that you get a better idea of what a philosophy is by looking for the most consistent and best informed advocates of it, and you get a better idea of what a movement is by looking for the most influential people within it. There are other criteria that you also may want to weight: for example, influence among the least consistent and well-informed, or among newcomers to the movement, may be less important than influence among the more consistent and better-informed, or among people who have spent years or decades working within the movement. Movements are structured social entities, not just heaps of people, and if you want to make statements about a movement it’s often a tricky matter trying to get a grip on that structure — a matter which is certainly not well served by simply depending on what’s most visible in the media or in your personal corner of the Internet. Of course there’s an easy way around this: to talk about specific people’s views rather than about the views of a movement as a group. Part of the reason I think it would be useful to talk more about that — what motivates Ayn Rand (certainly, there’s a lot of misogyny there), or Lew Rockwell (certainly, there’s a lot of patriarchy there), or (ugh) Bob Barr, or Will Wilkinson (a feminist), or Kerry Howley (a feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism), or Carol Moore (a radical feminist who has written a lot about libertarian feminism) — and less about what “fuels” amorphous collections of people, especially amorphous collections that are defined by polemical terms or by contestable and easily-shifted terms like “prominent” or “mainstream.” (Of course, the fact that, as a radical and an anarchist, I happen to think that the most consistent libertarians are typically the least “mainstream,” is part of the reason for my disliking that as a criterion for selecting who to discuss.)

Me:

trying to deal with the bizarre notions that people concoct about the motives, goals, and intellectual structure of feminism based on “public perception”

Gracchus:

And yet this is where newcomers to a movement arrive from.

Well, no, not necessarily; I arrived at ideological feminism from conversation with friends of mine who were themselves feminists, not from newspapers or A-list blogs. But in any case, where “newcomers to a movement arrive from,” while interesting, is not necessarily more interesting than where they end up after they have kicked around the movement for a while and thought more deeply about the things that they believe.

Public perception counts, and so do those incumbent insiders who define and dominate that perception

Counts for what, specifically? What’s the specific problem you think that libertarians need to solve by fixing “public perception” and by (somehow or another) changing out the “incumbent insiders” who happen to be prominent in media outlets and other institutions that operate according to criteria that are largely outside of our control.

BlackBloc:

Their problem is one of praxis, where they naively think that the projects they’re shooting for will *remove* state interference instead of *changing its nature*, and that by removing the state they will somehow eradicate large capital accumulation. The likely outcome of their projects, if they were to miraculously pass a ballot to eliminate all forms of state interference in the economy . . .

BlackBloc, I agree with you about this, more or less entirely. That’s part of the reason why, besides being an anarchist, I am specifically an agorist, and why I advocate means of social change other than electoral politics. But what makes you think that libertarians as a group are committed to electoral politics as a means of change? Certainly the Libertarian Party is, but not all libertarians are involved with the Libertarian Party, and historically many prominent American libertarians have been specifically opposed to electoral strategies for checking, rolling back, or abolishing the State. (I actually disagree with a lot of the non-electoral strategies that have been proposed by folks like Nock, Chodorov, Read, LeFevre, et al. — but for reasons quite other than thinking that they are naively putting their trust in electoral politics.)

Hector B.

So true. Whenever I question the value of the free market system, a libertarian will point out that we have never truly had a free market system in recorded history.

Well, but we haven’t, have we?

Whether or not that’s an appropriate response depends of course on the argument that it’s made in response to. If you’re trying to use historical, empirical examples to question the value of a free market system, then surely it does matter how far, and in what aspects, the examples you’re citing actually are empirical examples of a free market, n’est-ce pas?

Punditus Maximus:

I’m sorry, but the libertarian failure to bolt the Republican Party during the Bush power abuses . . .

What about libertarians who were never in the Republican Party to begin with?

If you’re starting out by using the word “libertarian” to mean the smaller-government types and “fiscal conservatives” within the GOP, well, then, I agree that there is little or no consistent philosophy behind what those people say or do, other than apologia for a certain subset of actually-existing power structures (e.g. softer or harder versions of bail-out capitalism, American nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and law-‘n’-orderist violence against immigrants and minorities).

I would like it, though, if you recognize that other people might use the word differently, and, in particular, that many self-identified libertarians use it very differently from the way that you’re using it. Gracchus:

First, I’m talking about public perception by non-libertarians, here, not wonks or insiders. In other words, I’m talking about the people we see on TV, in newspapers, in books, in politics, in public protests, in the A-list blogosphere, in Pandagon’s comment section . . .

Why?

I mean, this is all very interesting as a discussion of, for example, why libertarians might have a public image problem among self-identified liberals and progressives. But the conversation began with some remarks that were supposed to offer insight into the motives behind libertarianism as a political movement, and it seems to me like if that’s the goal, then it would be far more useful to consider insiders’ perspectives on who the movement is and what they do then an impressionistic survey of what “public perception” (or the perception of liberal or progressive bloggers) indicates about a grab-bag of people who have nothing really in common even with each other (e.g. Lew Rockwell, Radley Balko, Bob Barr, the NRA, orthodox Objectivists, and nWo-conspiracy theory survivalists). I don’t expect people who aren’t libertarians to follow much, or to care much, about the different origins, or different views, or weird internecine feuds that go around within the libertarian movement, but I would suggest that not knowing about them will undermine the insightfulness of analysis about what libertarians as a group really care about or what motivates them. I mention this not only as a libertarian but also as a radical feminist — as someone, specifically, who’s spent more than enough time for one life trying to deal with the bizarre notions that people concoct about the motives, goals, and intellectual structure of feminism based on “public perception” and some random grab-bag of figures that happen to have popped up in the malestream media (say Gloria Steinem, Kim Gandy, Hillary Clinton, something they saw on TV once about the Miss America protests, and maybe something that they heard at a party once about a column that somebody once wrote about Catharine MacKinnon). Having tried to have these discussions in the past, I have invariably found that they tell you a lot more about TV, newspapers, books, political debate, and the A-list blogosphere than they tell you about feminism. And I think that the same is true of libertarianism.

As for my own list: you originally asked for “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians;” now you’re asking for “prominent mainstream representatives of more intellectually honest and broad-based libertarianism in the popular mind.” These seem to be different requests, since the first one stressed being ideologically “hardcore” and the second one now stresses being “mainstream,” even though the most mainstream views are typically quite different from the most “hardcore” views. Be that as it may, I would say that if you’re looking for representative examples of libertarianism, for the purpose of understanding libertarian motives (rather than, say, understanding the selection biases that determine which libertarians are most likely to get heard in public debate), I’d suggest some of the following: Will Wilkinson, Kerry Howley, Radley Balko, Lew Rockwell, Sheldon Richman, Roderick Long, Brad Spangler, Kevin Carson, Carol Moore, William Gillis, and, if we’re going to throw dead people into the mix, there’s also Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard, Bob LeFevre, Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lysander Spooner, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and (God help us all) Ayn Rand. (I am not at all a fan of Ayn Rand, and I wish she were less representative of libertarian thought than she is, but if you think that she is narrowly concerned with economic issues to the exclusion of any other issues of social or cultural import, then I wonder how much of her work you’ve read.) Note that the people I named are all very different people, with very different takes on libertarianism and on broader cultural issues. Most of the ones I’ve mentioned are people I’d consider to be on the right side of the broader cultural and social issues that they write about; others I consider to be mixed bags at best or open enemies at worst (how bad Rockwell gets depends a lot on the subject that he’s writing about; one some subjects he can get very, very bad). Maybe some of these people don’t count as “prominent” or “mainstream”; I’m sure that several of them don’t count as “in the popular mind.” Many of them are prominent only among libertarians and are not known by much of anyone else; some of them are prominent only among certain groups of libertarians (e.g. most libertarian anarchists know something about Roderick Long, Lew Rockwell, and William Gillis; very few minimal-statists, Constitutionalists, or whatever know much of anything about any of them, unless they found out about Lew Rockwell through his anti-war work or his work in the Ron Paul campaign). But, again, if the discussion is about libertarianism rather than about the popular mind I’d question which selection criteria are the most relevant here — prominence and deference among libertarians, or prominence and deference among outsiders looking in. I certainly agree with you that if the contours of your experiences with self-identified libertarians are set by what you see in the mass media or on the blogs you read, then you’ll get a lot of people who are heavily focused on economics, maybe on civil liberties a little, and on not much of anything else. (For one thing, libertarian economists are some of the only libertarians whose views are ever printed in major newspapers or solicited by the television news; hence the outsize influence of, for example, Milton Friedman.) But I would like to suggest that there is more going on in libertarianism, as a political and intellectual movement, than what you are likely to see emphasized in the venues that you mention.

Gracchus:

The problem is, the most hardcore and prominent libertarians are so narrowly focused on the economic aspect that not only do they brush aside the social aspects as “nice to have, but not central,” but also their viewpoint that every bloody activity, including male-female relationships, is a financial transaction leads to some extremely misogynistic views.

Could you tell me who, specifically, you’re thinking of when you mention “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians”? (Obviously, I don’t need an exhaustive list, but some representative examples would help.) It’s easy to talk about your impression of amorphous groups, but I suspect that discussing specific people might be productive for mutual understanding. In part because I also suspect that your list of “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians” might be different from the list that people who are more directly involved in the libertarian movement would offer.

David,

You wonder how one can have a productive discussion with someone who simply states “individuals have rights.” Really, I don’t know, but of course it is a ridiculous caricature to suggest that natural rights theorists “simply state” that. It is generally asserted as the conclusion of an argument (Rand inferred it from prior ethical conclusions to the effect that the life of the individual being is its standard of value, together with an auxiliary premise that widespread respect for individual rights is a precondition for the form of life proper to human beings; Hoppe infers it from argumentation ethics; etc.). Maybe you’re not aware of those arguments, but if not, that’s your problem, not natural rights theorists’ problem. Maybe you know those arguments but don’t like them (I’m not especially fond of Rand’s argument or Hoppe’s, myself), but your time would be better spent engaging with the arguments than walloping on straw dogs.

Or perhaps you mean to say that once “individuals have rights” is concluded, there is no further interesting discussion to be had, whereas a conclusion to the effect that “you should maximize good consequences and minimize bad ones” allows for all kinds of subsequent argument about the application of the principle. Of course, if the argument for the conclusion is a good argument, then I can’t for the life of me see why it would matter that the conclusion settles the issue. (In light of the proof, is there any more productive argument about whether or not you might need more than four colors to color a map? If not, how is that an objection?) But it is in any case a mistake to suppose that there are no discussions about how to best to apply principles of individual rights to actual cases. (See, for example, the debate between Walter Block and other open-borders libertarians as against Hoppe on immigration; see also debates among Roderick Long, Rothbard, Spooner, Rand, et al. on intellectual property; see also debates among Rothbard, Block, Nozick, et al. on the possibility of selling yourself into slavery; etc.)

As for whether this style of argument appeals only to “true believers” — that is, whether or not it is an effective form of outreach for libertarianism when speaking with non-libertarians — well, first, I think that whether or not an argument is a good argument is independent of, and more important than, whether or not it is broadly convincing. (The purpose of argument is to justify your beliefs, not necessarily to convince others of them.) But, secondly, I think you’re supposing — without argument — that non-libertarians don’t share a commitment to the non-aggression principle. I think actually that most people do already have some commitment to it; in their own lives they act on the principle that coercing peaceful people is wrong and the problem is that they make unjustified exceptions to that principle in the case of common arbitrary claims of political authority, or else rationalize coercion as not really coercive, in light of some theory about political collectivity. (Didn’t “we” agree to the tax increase?) But if so, the thing to do is to attack the basis for making the exception or the rationalization — something which is quite possible to do, philosophically, without appealing to some kind of claim that they produce bad consequences above and beyond the violations of individual liberty involved.

Jeff,

Perhaps this has not occurred to you, but the primary purpose of a magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education might turn out to be primarily to educate people about (freed-market) economics, rather than to convince them of libertarianism as a moral principle. Of course, you might ask “Well, why educate people about freed-market economics, if not to convince them of libertarianism?” Well, I don’t know; why educate people about nutrition, home-repair, or buying an automobile? There are lots of things you might learn which have some bearing on libertarianism but which are not learned primarily as a means to convincing people of libertarianism.

Of course, the outcome of the education will probably not be irrelevant to libertarianism, in this case. But if one thinks (as I do) that libertarianism is a moral imperative independent of its economic outcomes, that hardly means that people who move in a more libertarian direction because of becoming more educated in economics are moving towards libertarianism for the wrong reasons. Some evils are evil in themselves; others are good or neutral in themselves but evil in light of their full consequences; and some are both evil in themselves and also produce evil consequences. Among the last are some things that produce evil consequences because they themselves are evil. (Getting beaten or tortured over and over again can lead to long-term consequences like depression or debilitating flashbacks. The beatings and the torture aren’t evil because of the long-term effects — they’d be evil anyway, even if the victim had no memory of them at all — but rather the long-term effects for the victim are what they are, in part, because of the wrongness of what’s been done to her.) In this last sort of case, it may be an important part of the dialectic to come to understand how the consequences are evil — not because the evil of the root cause depends on the evil of the consequences, and not because the student is wrongly pretending that it does, but rather because once you understand that the consequence is evil, the explanation for the evil of consequences may have something to do with seeing the evil of the root cause. Why does statist intervention have bad consequences? Well, it has something to do with the fact that it violates peaceful people’s rights to make an honest living through consensual economic arrangements. Seeing the evil of that is part and parcel of fully understanding why it produces the bad economic consequences that it produces.

Incidentally, Jeff, on a different but related topic, as a consequentialist, no doubt you have some notion of what sort of consequences are good consequences and what sort of consequences are bad consequences. (I mean, some notion beyond just “utility,” which apparently you are using to mean not “usefulness,” but rather as a synonym for “the balance of goodness over badness in a consequence.”) Do you suppose you could tell me which are which? What makes a set of consequences a good set or a bad set? And how did you decide that?

“I have no idea whether this is enough to appease the communists, the mutualists, the uber-left libertarians. I hope it would be, primarily because I’m simply not sold on the idea that individuals shouldn’t have the right to own and acquire productive assets, at least not on any moral grounds.”

Well, sure, but which anarchists are trying to sell that idea? Maybe some of the commies (although, remember, most anarcho-communists do believe in, or at least nod at a principle which declares, the right of individuals to withdraw from communist arrangements if they desire; the idea is usually that they imagine communist arrangements would be so obviously superior that nobody but a few lone weirdos would want to, and that even if those lone weirdos somehow amassed enough resources to build a factory under private proprietorship, that nobody would want to toil in it). But in any case, I certainly don’t know of any mutualists or “uber-left libertarians” who think that individual people shouldn’t have the right to own and acquire productive assets. If you do, I’d like to hear some names and quotations.

Of course, there is a separate question, as to what forms of organization and what levels of centralization of control over machinery and technology, would be most likely to flourish within a market freed from government privileges and increasingly distant from the shadow of past government subsidies. That question is interesting and important, but separate from the moral question of what individual people ought to have the right to do or not to do. For what it’s worth, though, I think it would be absolutely wrong to claim that, on the predictive (as opposed to the normative) question, mutualists ad “uber-left libertarians” somehow imagine that there wouldn’t be any individual ownership of capital in a freed market. Actually, the position is generally that individual ownership of capital would become much more widespread than it currently is, because forms of collective ownership that currently dominate the market (e.g. large centralized corporations) would be undermined by the collapse of state privilege. To take an example, as I understand it, Carson’s view (for example) is that vastly more productive assets would be owned individually in a free society than are today, because he envisions that, absent government intervention in favor of large centralized operations, a much larger portion of production would be carried out within households and small family shops.