The term "libertarianism"is distasteful to people who think seriously about politics. Both Dr. F.A. Hayek and your servant have gone out of their way, from time to time, to declare that they refuse to be tagged with this label. Anyone much influenced by t h e thought of Edmund Burke and of Alexis de Tocqueville - as are both Professor Hayek and this commentator - sets his face against ideology; and libertarianism is a simplistic ideology, relished by one variety of the folk whom Jacob Burckhardt called "the terrible simplifiers."
Nevertheless, I have something to say favorable to today's libertarians in the United States; later I shall dwell upon their vices. With your indulgence, I mean to make three points about persons calling themselves libertarians, whic h may warm the cockles of their rebellious hearts.
First, a number of the men and women who accept the label "libertarian!' are not actually ideological libertarians at all, but simply conservatives under another name. These are people who perceive in the growth of the monolithic state, especially during the past half century, a grim menace to ordered liberty; and of course they are quite right. They wish to emphasize their attachment to personal and civic freedom by employing this 20th century word deriv ed from liberty. With them I have little quarrel - except that by so denominating themselves, they seem to countenance a crowd of political fantastics who "license they mean, when they cry liberty."
Descendants of Classical Liberals. For if a man believes in an enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, established American way of life, and a free economy - why, actually he is a conservative, even if he labors under an imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics. Such America n s are to the conservative movement in the United States much as the Liberal Unionists have been to the Conservative Party in Britain - that is, close practical allies, almost indistinguishable nowadays. Libertarians of this description usually are intelle ctual descendants of the old "classical liberals"; they make common cause with regular conservatives against the menace of democratic despotism and economic collectivism.
Second, the libertarians generally - both the folk of whom I have just approved, and also the ideological libertarians - try to exert some check upon vainglorious foreign policy. They do not believe that the United States should station garrisons throughout the world; no more do 1; in some respects, the more moderate among them have the u nderstanding of foreign policy that the elder Robert Taft represented. Others among them, however, seem to labor under the illusion that communist ideology can be dissipated by trade agreements - a notion really fatuous. I lack time to la bor this point here; I mean to take it up again in my autumn lecture on the neoconservatives, who in foreign policy tend toward an opposite extreme. Let it suffice for the present for me to declare that so far as the libertarians set their faces against a policy of American domination worldwide - why, I am with them. I part with them when they forget that the American government nowadays, in Burke's phrase of two centuries ago, is "combating an armed doctrine," not merely a national adversary.
Perils of Ce ntralization. Third, most of the libertarians believe in the humane scale: they vehemently oppose what my old friend Wilhelm Roepke called "the cult of the colossal." They take up the cause of the self-reliant individual, the voluntary association, the ju st rewards of personal achievement. They know the perils of political centralization. In an age when many folks are ready - nay, eager - to exchange their independence for "entitlements," the libertarians exhort us to stand on our own feet, manfully.
In sh ort, the libertarians' propaganda, which abounds, does touch upon real social afflictions of our time, particularly repression of vigorous and aspiring natures by centralized political structures and by the enforcement of egalitarian doctrines. Rather cur i ously, libertarian publications have been widely circulated in Poland - apparently with no concerted effort by the communist government to prevent their introduction. (One may suspect, in this instance, that the eagerness of certain libertarian organizati o ns for cordial relations between the West and the Soviet Union induces some toleration by the squalid oligarchies of the East.) With reason, many people are discontented with the human condition, in many lands, near the end of the 20th century; the more i n telligent among the discontented look about for some seemingly logical alternative to present dominations and powers; and some of those discontented - the sort of people who went out to David in the Cave of Adullam - discover libertarian dogmata and becom e enthusiasts, at least temporarily, for the ideology called libertarianism. Inadequacies and Extravagances. I say temporarily: for an initial fondness for libertarian slogans frequently has led young men and women to the conservative camp. Not a few of th e people who have studied closely with me or who have become my assistants had been attracted, a few years earlier, to the arguments of Ayn Rand or of Murray Rothbard. But as they read more widely, they had become conscious of the inadequacies and extravag a nces of the various libertarian factions; as they had began to pay serious attention to our present political difficulties, they had seen how impractical are the libertarian proposals. Thus they had found their way to conservative realism, which proclaims that politics is the art of the possible. Therefore it may be said of libertarianism, in friendly fashion, that often it has been a recruiting office for young conservatives, even though the libertarians had not the least intention of shoring up belief in custom, convention, and the politics of prescription. There. I have endeavored to give the libertarians their due. Now let me turn to their failings, which are many and grave. For the ideological libertarians are not conservatives in any true meaning of t hat term of politics; nor do the more candid libertarians desire to be called conservatives. On the contrary, they are radical doctrinaires, contemptuous of our inheritance from our ancestors.
Read the rest: http://www.heritage.org/research/lec...f-libertarians
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