I just finished writing a piece on the demise of Bleeding Heart Libertarians and the divisions among intellectual libertarians an hour ago crookedtimber.org/2020/06/09/bro…. Then @lindsey_brink writes an essay which speaks more directly to the disagreements. It's strong stuff.
"When it comes to making government strong enough and capable enough to do the things it needs to do, libertarianism is silent. Actually, worse than silent. ... [it] .... is dedicated to the proposition that the contemporary American state is illegitimate and contemptible."
"The gradual diffusion of these anti-government attitudes through the conservative movement and the Republican Party has rendered the American right worse than irrelevant to the project of restoring American state capacity. "
"none of this means that libertarians are wrong about everything, or that libertarian ideas are worthless. But it does mean that skepticism about government, standing alone, is an insufficient foundation for good governance."
"The ideology ... asserts that a set of important but partial and contingent truths are in fact a comprehensive and timeless blueprint for the ideal political order. The error ... made painfully obvious by the pandemic, but it was increasingly evident for many years beforehand"
"The ideals of free markets and limited government remain vital, and vitally important. But the times have made plain that the dominant conceptions of these ideals, rooted in libertarian ideology, are fatally flawed. "
"That ideology is based on fundamental intellectual errors about the nature of politics and the conditions that make individual freedom and competitive markets possible. " Brink argues for a very different notion of what the limits on the state should involve.
"The government policy ... must actually succeed in advancing its stated public purpose, and under no circumstances may benefit narrow private interests at public expense. The limiting principle, then, grows out of commitment to the public interest, not antipathy to government."
"The critical stance associated with policing the proper limits of state action thus shifts from anti-government to anti-corruption. ... there are other areas of public concern where restraining government power remains not only relevant, but morally urgent."
"In all the agencies of American government that deal directly in physical force – not just the police, but the larger criminal justice system, the immigration authorities, and the military – problems of excess and overreach and abuse are widespread. "
"libertarians’ portrayal of government as Leviathan is all too accurate, and their calls for additional chains ...well founded.This qualification, though, only highlights how misguided it is ...to conflate the provision of public goods ... with real problems of unchecked power. "
"controlling the instrumentalities of state violence is always difficult, but libertarians’ worthy efforts ... are badly undercut by their small-government fixation.. alienate themselves from their natural allies ...those communities that suffer most at the hands of excess force"
At the end of my essay, I suggested that the "divide [in libertarianism] has surely been sharpened by the events of the last few weeks, and is likely to get sharper still over the next several months." But I didn't expect quite this.
Postscript - I neglected to link to the actual essay, which is here - niskanencenter.org/what-the-pande…
