Boom. Adam Hopson Stephan Myles Cooke Ed Justin For now I will say only that if the idea of a social safety net strikes many readers as obviously incompatible with libertarianism, this is testament to the way in which an excessively narrow understanding of libertarianism has come to dominate our political discourse. For many people, it seems, libertarian thought begins and ends with the ideas of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. And, of course, both Rand and Rothbard were indeed important libertarians, and libertarians from whose ideas I and many others have profited immensely. But while those ideas have played and continue to play an important role in the libertarian intellectual tradition, they do not exhaust that tradition. Once we adjust our eyes to see past the giants of Rand and Rothbard, it is clear that the libertarian intellectual landscape is far more diverse than it first appeared, and far less hostile to the idea of a social safety net. We can, of course, define libertarianism however we wish, and it is possible to conceive it in a narrow enough way so as to rule out all support for income redistribution by definitional fiat. But any definition of libertarianism that is so narrow as to rule out the likes of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Loren Lomasky, and Eric Mack, to name just a few, seems both historically distortive and pragmatically unhelpful. The arguments these thinkers have advanced on behalf of a (limited) social safety net might be mistaken. But that is something to be established by a careful examination of the substance of the arguments themselves. Arguments about what counts as a “real” libertarian position, especially arguments poorly informed by the writings of seminal historical and contemporary libertarian thinkers, do little to advance the debate.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 16:55:26 +0000
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