Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

Instead of acknowledging this fundamentally liberal origin of the legitimacy of certain varieties of state power, many libertarians - who cast themselves as the true heirs of the selfsame liberal tradition - ironically reject the legitimacy of state power out of hand as equal to totalitarianism, communism, fascism, Maoism, and all sorts of other isms which have little to do with using the government power monopoly to protect fundamental freedoms from the worst kinds of private coercion.

The harping on “statism” characteristic of right-leaning, unthinking elements of the libertarian blogosphere confuses cause and mechanism, and it discredits libertarianism: which is, fundamentally, a scientific research program concerned with minimizing coercion by eliminating the channels within which the pretenders of legitimacy operate (as opposed to eliminating the pretenders of legitimacy themselves a la socialism); i.e. opposing legislation which creates government champions under the guise of "safety regulations", Keynesian reinforcement of primitive power structures via the redistribution of tax-dollars derived (perhaps disproportionately in an ideal world) from the middle and lower classes, or otherwise well-meaning moral imperialism; i.e. the drug war or censorship measures.

It would behoove us to try to find the least invasive solutions to problems, but where socialists and libertarians primary differ is that although many of both persuasions identify the same problems: i.e. corporate control of the political apparatus, exploitation of the environment, etc. they envision radically different solutions.

For (very speculative, yet illustrative) instance, libertarians look back on the abuses of Western imperialism and blame the marriage of favored private enterprise and the legitimacy of government.  Socialists look back on the abuses of Western imperialism and blame the marriage of favored private enterprise and the legitimacy of government.  Libertarians (along with classical liberals) say, "if only the government were not so corrupt and favoritist, the free market would have sorted that problem out to the benefit of everyone involved." Socialists say, "if only the corporations had not been so greedy and enterprising, the government would not have been so corrupted."  Both sides identify the same problems, yet offer radically different assessments of blame and therefore radically different policy prescriptions.

Perhaps the solution lies in resisting the psychological imperative to assign blame to the meaningless echoes of long non-existent institutions: the only inescapable truth of Western imperialism is that people caused those terrible atrocities and institutions have been assigned the blame as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.

Where this Gordian Knot between the natural allies of libertarianism and socialism specifically relates to economics is vis-a-vis the respective understandings of the price mechanism.  Historically, socialists believed that prices could be fixed and controlled to make everyone better off: if bread were too expensive, all you had to do was declare that bread must be made cheaper.  The Hayekian contention, that prices cannot be controlled and to attempt to do so is to choke economic information flow, is compellingly parsimonious.  Accordingly, many modern brands of socialism, such as market socialism and syndicalism, have adjusted to this, and it is doubtful that there are many socialists remaining who support price-control totalitarianism.  The libertarian blogosphere would do well to recognize this and focus on debating the merits of particular policies rather than making devils out of abstract nouns.