Fellow Slate -ster Chris Beam takes to the pages of New York to analyze the “libertarian moment” in American politics. He subsequently discovers that libertarians are as sensitive in their self-defenses as, say, artists promoting their latest portraits of Jesus in various stages of degradation at a gallery opening. Radley Balko, a sometime Slate contributor on crime issues – i.e., not a Rand disciple with head firmly planted in cloud – responds to Beam:
If this had been a straight Jacob Weisberg-style trashing oflibertarianism, we could evaluate it on those terms. But this ismore subtle and, I think, in some ways more pernicious. This was athrashing disguised as a primer. That Beam makes these critiques himself comes off as abrupt and, frankly, condescending.There’s an aesthetic I’ve noticed among some journalists thatlibertarianism is so crazy and off the rails that it’s okay to stepoutside the boundaries of decorum and fairness to make sureeveryone knows how nuts libertarians really are. (A couple yearsago, I emailed a prominent journalist to compliment him on a bookhe had written. His strange response: He thanked me for thecompliment, and then ran off several sentences about how dangerousand evil he thought my politics were.)
I’m a contributing editor of Reason, where the mention of my name can generate 8-10 angry comments in Hit & Run threads, so I know about libertarianism and thrashings. Beam’s “thrashing” is based on what’s happened as the current crop of libertarian politicians have been tested by the electorate, gotten burned, and walked back a little. “Libertarianism and power are like matter and anti-matter,” he argues. Their ideas are never really tested, and when they’re tested, they crumble, because voters like the trains and the Social Security checks to be on time. “Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.”
Beam’s history and etymology are going to be useful to outsiders, who don’t pay attention to this stuff. It’s a better case against libertarian policy, if you want that, than a shouty “investigative” blog post at some liberal site that connects a congressman’s staff to the Koch family with the assumption that evil has just been uncovered. But no case against libertarianism sounds very compelling right now, because any alternative to the managed economy sounds great to a country with 9.9 percent unemployment.
Do libertarians promise utopia? Sure. So do the socialists who came up with the ideas that motivate Democratic politicians. Voters don’t care much about where ideas come from as long as they have jobs. Now, the real test for libertarians will come if a year of Republican austerity budgeting is followed by economic growth. In the 1990s, the new, libertarian-minded Republican congressmen and governors discovered that fast growth allowed them to cut taxes
and
grow budgets for services that voters liked. In the 2010s, if unemployment falls, will the libertarian Republicans keep cutting budgets and reducing services? It doesn’t sound impossible right now.
