I've already blogged a bit about why I think we libertarians should find our place on the left. Now I'd like to talk (or ramble) about what our immediate aims should be.
In my mind, to qualify as a libertarian, your long-term ideal has to be one of two possibilities- a Nozickian minarchy or a Rothbardian anarchy. Libertarians are those who aim, ultimately, at a state either miniscule or nonexistent. Obviously, that isn't going to happen tomorrow. So today, what should we try to accomplish? Aside from the standard answer about education and spreading our message, what should our immediate platform be?
Here's my answer: the destruction of corporate power. By 'corporate power,' I mean the nexus between business interests and the state, as embodied by subsidies, tariffs, tax loopholes, limits on liability, and ultimately corporate personhood itself. I think our immediate aim should be the elimination of agricultural subsidies and trade barriers. These government interventions harm poor Americans by making food more expensive and harm poor around the world by preventing them from selling their goods to the wealthiest people on Earth. Further, I think that of all the essential human needs, we are closest to a pure market in food. If we attain this end, the example of how successfully the market can feed the masses will serve us well as we try to win more converts.
Any Objectivists reading this are sharpening their knives and ready to go after food stamps while the Friedmanites are salivating over the prospect of smashing the FDA. To them I say, wait a damn minute. I think that food stamps should be our last target as we go after government interventions in the food supply. Food safety programs should be our penultimate target. First, let's get rid of price supports.
Going after price supports first will establish our anti-corporate (as in, anti-business/government nexus) bona fides, hopefully going some way towards laying to rest the canard that all libertarians are lackeys of big business. What's more, and even more importantly, abolishing price supports will have the greatest immediate benefit for the poor. Food will be cheaper. The highly distorted American diet, arranged as it is by price supports for sugar and subsidies for corn (among other things), will correct. Perhaps we could even go some way towards rectifying our nation's problem with obesity.
In this effort, we would find natural allies in the environmental and public health left, concerned as they are with high fructose corn syrup and agricultural runoff. As the benefits for Third World farmers materialize, we will find allies in the anti-globalization left as well. Most of these will be one-issue allies to be sure, but just getting them to listen to us, rather than shriek at us, will help us win some converts from their number, while the example of a clear market success story might even shake the rest's faith in government planning.
Further, I think going after corporate power will be a strategy of increasing returns. Here's why: we libertarians, with our economic reasoning and our philosophy of liberty, are the only intellectual support left for the Right. We are the only legs the Right has left, the rest having been cut off at the knee by slow but relentless advance of Enlightenment rationalism. No longer can they call on Religion for support, because science has destroyed religion's intellectual power (although obviously not its popular appeal). Tradition has fallen before Reason, and Aristocracy died on the guillotine. The Right's tribalist atavism still has a strong emotional pull (as the celebrations after Bin Laden's assassination demonstrate), but intellectually the Right is a spent force. The only reason it lingers at all is that the Left hitched its wagon to the diseased nag of Marxism, leaving us, the advocates of Enlightenment liberty, with only one possible ally- the doddering, addled, atavistic Right. In the face of revolutionary communism, we struck our Faustian bargain with the Right, leading to the depressing spectacle of a reactionary nitwit like Glenn Beck hawking Hayek on Fox.
If we struck our tent and left the Right's camp, they'd be intellectually defenseless. Sure, for a period we'd be homeless, but are we any less functionally homeless now? The Right depends on us to win their intellectual battles and sells us down the river whenever our principles get in the way of war and corporate welfare. Allying ourselves with elements of the Left to bring down government supports for agribusiness, we could start winning converts to the cause of liberty in their camp. Eventually, with a combination of intellectual argument and empirical example (the best example coming from a steadily freed market in food), we could replace socialism with liberty as the horse drawing the leftist wagon. Meanwhile the Right would be intellectually defenseless and steadily less capable of resisting each successive attack on the corporate/government nexus.
I should be clear that I'm not talking about a plan to win the 2012 election, or even the 2032 election. What I am talking about is a long term plan to win the battle of ideas- first by taking over the Left, then by destroying the Right. And the battle of ideas matters. It doesn't have much effect on this generation, but winning that battle in our generation will translate to political influence in the next generation. I think agricultural policy is an attainable short-term political objective- by short-term, I mean over the next twenty or thirty years- and as I said above, a tactical victory in agricultural policy will translate to a strategic advantage in the battle of ideas.
But why not utilize our existing alliance with the Right and go after the FDA and food stamps? I think the market achievement of food safety and nutritional welfare is a second-order effect of a freed market. In other words, given the existing, direct government interference in supply and demand via trade barriers, production subsidies and price supports, eliminating food stamps and the FDA will do more harm than good. Only when the market alone is determining prices will food be so cheap as to make food stamps redundant, and only when firms selling bad food cannot rely on their Congressmen to save them will the FDA become obsolete.
Much current libertarianism is I think aimed wrongly at these second-order effects of freed markets. Only when we eliminate the direct government interference in the provision of supply and the satisfaction of demand can we address our efforts at the various ancillary varieties of government intrusion on liberty. As it stands now, I believe much of our current government is the product of two reinforcing processes- first, business interests demand special privileges, subsidies, tariffs, favors, or what have you. These policies create negative knock-on effects, and out of their (commendable) desire to alleviate suffering, progressives demand further government programs to ameliorate the consequences of the original government tampering with supply and demand. Let's go after the root, the tampering with supply and demand, and these various leaves will wither on their own.
Phew. Anyone read all that? Tell me why I'm a moron in the comments.
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