Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard.
It is both the best and worst of times for libertarians. On the plus side, real, live politicians who might conceivably get elected call themselves libertarians. On the negative side, true libertarians have lost their ancient luxury of being able to avoid any responsibility for the gaffes and errors of political leaders.
Libertarianism rests on two bedrock beliefs: human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up. The first belief is based more on faith than empirical result; the second derives from millennia of human experience. The increased appeal of libertarianism today reflects a nonpartisan view that the public sector has been deeply problematic under either party. It is a backlash against President Bush as well as President Obama. (Ron Paul was, after all, the only Republican to vote against the 2002 Iraq war resolution). Libertarians tend to think that the Bush years taught that all governments were flawed, not that everything would be better with a new leader who would expand the public sector.
Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg Jeffrey Miron Showing a remarkable sense of timing, my colleague Jeffrey Miron has just published an excellent primer on libertarian thought: “Libertarianism, From A-Z,”
an engaging arrangement of brief essays illustrating one libertarian’s view on everything from abortion to zoos. Professor Miron’s libertarian mix of love of liberty and skepticism toward the state
leads to his view that “radical reductions in government make sense for any plausible assessment of the effect of most policies.”
In some cases, like drug legalization, his views are clever if not nuanced -– “the right policy toward drugs is legalization.” Professor Miron’s writing
on drugs is interesting not because his overall view is a surprise, but because he has spent decades marshaling arguments and facts in favor of drug legalization. Drug prohibition, he asserts, “harms the public purse,” because of both the cost of enforcement and the lost tax revenues; breeds “disrespect for the law”;
“enriches drug traffickers”; leads drug dealers to resort to violence and causes some “thrift-minder users” to use more dangerous drugs that have “the biggest bang-for-the-buck.”
He also asserts that some people would benefit by using drugs and that the risk of imprisonment and higher prices that drug laws bring do excessive damage to drug users. Professor Miron’s warning that
drug prohibition erodes civil liberties concerns anyone who worries about the millions of Americans who have become part of the prison system because of our drug laws.
I always find it refreshing to take a quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of libertarian thought, but I find myself most interested in the murky areas on the edge of libertarianism, which Professor Miron explores with aplomb. Libertarians are rarely anarchists. Almost all of them believe in some form of state power, at the very least the protection of private property and the enforcement of contracts. Many of them, including Milton Friedman, are quite comfortable with larger exercises of state power, including the redistribution of resources to those who have less. Professor Miron writes that “antipoverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited antipoverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”
But once the need for public action is accepted, things start getting very muddy and we can’t rely on either a love of liberty or fear of the state for guidance. Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.
Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best lawyers that money can buy. Andrei Shleifer and I have argued that the early regulations were appealing precisely because of a sense that the courts couldn’t be counted upon to protect private property.
I have been learning from Jeff Miron ever since he hired me in 1989 as his research assistant in Cambridge. I may not always agree with him, but I can think of no one who is better suited to write an introduction to the economics of libertarianism.