Libertarianism 2.0: Should We Attempt to Maximize Liberty?

At this year’s FreedomFest conference in Palm Springs, California, I had the pleasure of attending a panel discussion entitled Libertarianism 2.0, featuring speakers Bret Weinstein, Spike Cohen, Avens O’Brien, and Judd Weiss, and moderated by Free the People’s own Matt Kibbe.

The topic of discussion was how to make libertarian ideas attractive to those not already in the movement, those who Kibbe calls the Liberty Curious, not just through words but through actions. This is an important subject because libertarians are notoriously esoteric in their communication styles and prone to counterproductive infighting. While the other panelists have been active participants in the liberty movement for many years, Dr. Weinstein is a relatively new voice speaking out in favor of freedom, and therefore represents a good test case for how our messaging can either attract or alienate others who might be sympathetic to our cause.

A self-described progressive who spent most of his life highly skeptical of libertarianism, Weinstein now charitably admits that he was a little rash in this judgment, and that there is more value in the ideology than he initially supposed. He’s not exactly a convert, not yet, but he’s Liberty Curious enough to have conversations with prominent libertarian thinkers and explore the ideas with an open mind. For this, I have tremendous respect for him.

During the panel, Weinstein challenged the other speakers as being too rigid in their opposition to government regulations. He agreed that most world governments, including that of the United States, are malignant and need to be drastically reformed, but he argued that governments can be good insofar as their rules expand freedom rather than restrict it. To make this point, he gave the example of the regulation that requires drivers to drive on the right side of the road. By imposing a uniform standard on roads, traffic flows more smoothly, more quickly, and more safely, expanding the individual’s freedom to travel in ways that easily trump the hypothetical right to drive on whichever side of the road you want. The other panelists enthusiastically agreed with this point, and it’s not hard to see why. Libertarians do not oppose order, organization, governance (as opposed to government) or even regulation (in the sense of “to make regular”). They merely oppose the coercive force of the state to accomplish these things.

Having secured the support of the panel, Weinstein then extrapolated from his point about roads that libertarians ought to be united in championing any policies that maximize liberty, even if they come from the government, and be willing to make common cause with anyone who does the same.

Here, I think Weinstein is making a slight error. I confess that I find it hard to disagree with his point about driving on the right side of the road (although in an ideal world I would prefer that road rules be determined by market competition, which has the potential to yield better and more efficient results than a top-down imposition from the state). But the word “maximize” started to set off alarm bells in my economist brain. Of course, it seems obvious that anyone calling himself a libertarian should want to maximize liberty, right? Not so fast. Like many things that sound good, this statement runs into some problems when put under scrutiny.

In order to maximize anything, you have to have a way to measure it. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing whether a particular policy moves you closer to or further from your goal. But there is no unit of measurement for liberty. You can’t plug freedom into an equation and determine whether the sums on either side of the equals sign add up. So while Weinstein’s driving example seems pretty clear, you do not have to go far for the waters to get very murky indeed. For example, keeping with the theme of roads, it would be easy to use Weinstein’s logic to argue that government should build and maintain highways. The existence of these highways greatly expands liberty by allowing easy, fast, and efficient travel for individuals, and for goods to be transported from all over the world. However, highways are financed by taxation, which involves the government taking people’s money without their consent (what would be called theft in any other context), which somewhat reduces their liberty. How do we balance these two competing effects? The amount of money each individual has to personally pay for a highway is small, while the benefit he receives is large, but can we definitively say that one outweighs the other? Without a common unit of account, I don’t think it’s possible. Such a cost-benefit analysis also ignores the possibility that privatized roads have the potential to yield the same benefits at a lower cost, both financially and in terms of the coercion used in taxation.

This has always seemed to me the core problem with utilitarianism. The goal of maximizing utility is doomed to fail since it is not possible to compare one person’s utility function with another’s. In short, because there’s no such thing as a “util”. More importantly, utilitarianism makes it possible to justify seemingly unjustifiable things, like the famous example in which a doctor is asked to kill one healthy person and distribute his organs to save the lives of five sick patients. If five lives are worth more than one, it’s hard to see how such a ghoulish practice could be opposed from a utilitarian standpoint.

The same problem manifests in Weinstein’s liberty maximization framework. Would a policy that enslaves one person to increase the freedom of five, or ten, or a hundred others be justified? How do we measure the lost freedom of the slave against the gained freedoms of others? I worry that this approach has the potential to trap libertarians into supporting some very unlibertarian things. If, on the other hand, one has a deontological stance that slavery is always wrong, the problem no longer exists. It doesn’t matter how beneficial the work of the slave may be to others. No ends can justify the means of enslavement.

After the panel, I asked Dr. Weinstein whether he considers himself a utilitarian and prompted him to think about this problem. He answered that he was not, but that in most situations he tended to behave like one. He then acknowledged the validity of my objection, but said that maximizing liberty should be aspirational with the recognition that it cannot always be perfectly applied in the real world. I appreciate the answer and accept that sometimes reality forces you to make compromises, but I do not think Weinstein has yet fully grappled with the drawbacks of a utilitarian approach to libertarianism.

I have been a fan of Dr. Weinstein for some time, and am thrilled that he is approaching our movement with an open mind, and so none of what I’ve said is meant to be a rebuke. Nor am I imposing a purity test on Weinstein in order to determine whether he is worthy to join with libertarians. I merely wish to point out the flaws with a liberty-maximizing conception of policy, and how I believe this mental framework is one of the hurdles preventing Weinstein from fully understanding or accepting the libertarian worldview. The panel concluded with a somewhat humorous discussion of what constitutes a “real” libertarian, a mythical beast nearly impossible to spot in the wild. I find it somewhat ironic that Weinstein’s criteria as outlined above, though seemingly logical and uncontroversial, would exclude me from that category.