Simplistic definitions of freedom fail to address social realities by Matt Hellman

One of the reasons we decided to name our new magazine The L-Word is that the idea of liberalism serves as a touchstone for a wide variety of thought. After all, given that the mantra of liberalism has been employed to justify policies from the New Deal to NAFTA, it should come as no surprise that there are many conflicting conceptions about what it means to be a liberal. The libertarian version is one such conception, the principles of which Brian does such a nice job of outlining in his essay. Essentially, Brian's charge is that "modern" liberals have shied away from the true virtue of liberalism, i.e. freedom, in favor of oppressive social engineering. Taxation, government regulations and government standards all represent unjustified illiberal incursions on our freedom according to his account. Speaking as a proud modern liberal, I want to respond to his charge by demonstrating that a country of hard-nosed libertarians is ultimately self-defeating. I say self-defeating because it would be incapable of supporting many of our most important institutions which let us make good use of our freedom, including our school systems and armed forces. Such a country would also be incapable of providing each citizen with even a roughly equivalent amount of freedom with which to lead his unencumbered life. Thus, I will prove that, as paradoxical as it may seem, for freedom to be of any real use, it must often be curtailed. But before I begin, I want to respond to the claim that liberalism has it authentic roots in a tradition of unmitigated freedom. Immanuel Kant, who is considered to be father of liberal thought, and who placed an enormous value upon autonomy, still recognized that we have unbreakable duties to others. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that "[a]ll the members of human society stand in need of each others assistance." And, even the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary has as its first definition of liberalism "a movement... emphasizing... the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity" - hardly the stuff which drove Ayn Rand to defect from the Soviet Union. Now, on to the more important point about why libertarianism is self-defeating and modern liberalism has gotten it right with its taxation policies. Libertarians feel that such policies are an unjustified infringement upon individual freedom. They also claim that, in the absence of those policies, we would live in a society which could still protect those freedoms. This is simply not so, however, as I will show using the economic concept of "public goods". Public goods are those goods for which it costs very little to provide another with the good and for which it is impossible (or nearly so) to keep people from using the good whether or not they pay for it. The best example of a public good is national defense. It costs the Armed Forces a negligibly greater amount to defend the country every time a baby is born and, should the county ever come under attack, it would be very difficult and expensive not to defend those people who, say, did not pay their taxes. Herein lies the rub. Imagine a society trying to decide whether or not to have a mandatory tax for a national defense program or to institute a libertarian "pay-as-you-go" scheme in which individuals only pay for as much defense as they want. Clearly, individuals will realize that, with the latter plan, it is in their best interests not to pay for any defense but instead to "free ride" off the defensive forces which are financed by other people, since there is no effective way to keep them from mooching. Unfortunately, every individual realizes that they are better off not paying for defense and so no one does, leaving the society undefended. And it goes without saying that one of the many problems facing an undefended society is that it will have a hard time resisting attacks by other groups seeking to restrict its freedoms. Clearly then, because no freedom can be maintained with a pure libertarian defense plan, a mandatory tax should be instituted for the sake of freedom.   $10 for the Grenada plan, $30 for the Panama version.   Similar arguments are applicable to many other goods. Take public education, for instance. The government has decreed that, regardless of whether you have children who use the public schools, you still are required by law to pay taxes for education. Given that education is a good which lets us make vastly better use of our freedoms (both civil and economic), it would seem that a society in which there were no public schools would produce a majority of citizens whose freedom would be superficial, given that they would be insufficently developed to take advantage of it. Yet, under a libertarian "pay as you go" school system, schools would rarely be sufficiently funded, as many residents in a given district would not have any children in the schools and hence no reason to pay to support them. Education would be unavailable to all but the most wealthy families, leaving the majority with "freedom" but no understanding of what they can do with it. Thus, without a small restriction on freedom in the beginning (the tax), a much larger amount of freedom will be lost. The last point I want to make about libertarianism is that, within it, all freedoms are not equal. That is, the same freedoms granted to people with different backgrounds and skills may lead to vastly different levels of empowerment. And surely, given that freedom is the only currency which truly matters in a libertarian society, libertarians should be concerned that every citizen has at least an equal opportunity to express her freedoms. For without meaningful opportunities to use one's freedom, it becomes worthless (as in the above case of the undertaxed and undereducated society). Let me explain by way of example. Imagine a libertarian society in which 80% of the citizens are born with no serious health problems and have families with at least moderate means. The remaining 20% represent an underclass either for health or economic reasons, and thus lack many of the opportunities open to the other 80%. According to libertarian dogma, it would be coercion to require some sort of transfer of resources from advantaged 80% to the underprivileged 20%. Yet, if freedom truly is the sacred cow of libertarians, then just such a transfer should be endorsed by them in the name of giving that 20% a better opportunity to use their freedom (notice I guarantee opportunity here, not outcome). For how could the libertarian argue that the pre-transfer society provides the same freedoms to everyone when 20% are too poor or sick to use them? Without the transfer, libertarianism ends up championing not freedom, but the status quo. Obviously, this analysis assumes many questionable conditions, including that transferred resources will provide more opportunities for 20% than they would for the 80%, and that 20% haven't willfully placed themselves in a disadvantaged position (e.g. through laziness). But debate about the accuracy of these conditions is exactly what needs to (and does) take place. What is unhelpful is a blanket statement about the illegitimacy of government coercion and the reasons that people come to be poor. Finally, before I finish, I want to address the fact that, at this point, my arguments sound awfully cold-hearted. After all, can't we simply justify public schooling on the grounds that everyone deserves an education? I fully agree with this line of reasoning, and acknowledge that my discussion of liberalism has ignored all sorts of compelling arguments, including the need for caring communities and the idea that some things are more important than economic "freedom". I take this rather dry tact only because I want to show that libertarianism cannot stand up on its own when a simplistic definition of freedom is its rallying cry. It is only by showing that libertarianism is untenable on its own terms that we can prove the flaws in it and realize that self-responsibility is not as obvious a set of directives as it initially sounds.

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