Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Libertarian centralism

Posted on | December 3, 2009 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

“Centralization is ordinarily a sign of social decadence.” Russell Kirk

From a “skeptical empiricist” perspective (to use  Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s useful phrase) neither “rationalist”  nor public policy approaches to libertarianism are particularly credible.  But what is quite remarkable about current debates about “libertarian centralism” is that libertarians associated with rationalist schools of thought (Austrian economics, natural rights) display far more realism about how political power actually operates than  those libertarians that have extensive exposure to practical politics.

There are numerous occasions where libertarians are faced with the choice between instant gratification and advancing strategies to secure the long-term prospects of liberty. Using federal power to enforce individual rights  against states (or supporting the creation of even bigger supra-national entities to ensure more conformity) is perhaps one of the most counterproductive efforts in contemporary libertarianism. The reason is not  so much that such a strategy confers legitimacy upon a criminal organization (few public policy libertarians would be swayed by such reasoning) but that it seems to completely ignore the important role that  centralization of power has played in the decomposition of classical liberalism.

One would think that the astounding naivety of European market liberals on issues such as the European Union and the United Nations would have produced an almost universal rejection of centralizing top-down strategies among American libertarians and conservatives.

Libertarian philosopher Roderick Long captures the essence of this issue when he writes:

I am opposed to giving the Federal government the power to impose libertarian standards on the States, for the same reasons that I would oppose giving the United Nations the power to impose libertarian standards on the U.S. This is not because I think federalism takes precedence over individual rights, but rather because I think federalism is a better long-run strategy for protecting individual rights….The power to impose libertarian standards is also the power to impose non-libertarian standards; as Barry Goldwater (or perhaps Karl Hess) famously remarked, “A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.”

A majoritarian democracy that is not constrained by  the threat of losing “customers” to other nations or states cannot help but end up in a perpetual state of “churning.” At the risk of sounding dogmatic, whenever a libertarian is faced with the choice of competition between libertarian and non-libertarian political entities and the prospect of gambling on a more powerful political entity enforcing individual rights the choice should be clear. Government is not a politically neutral operation. There are infinite ways for government to intervene but only one way not to intervene. As Gene  Healy notes, libertarian centralism seems to be another variant of the utopian impulse to invest in the goodwill of politicians and judges at the expense of encouraging competition and the fragmentation of political power.

Category: Anarchism, Philosophy, Politics
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