Reason has had its 25 staffers say who they will vote for: 12 in favor of Chase Oliver, 6 will not vote, 3 for Harris, one Nikki Haley write-in, one Kennedy write-in, two two undecideds. None for Trump. Wow.
Daniel Klein and Host make the case that Trump is obviously the lesser evil, yet the leading libertarian organization won’t say this (other mainstream “respectable” groups like Cato, Mercatus, AEI, etc won’t even come clean, as Reason at least did) I think he’s right.
See:
- Libertarians Need to Get Real About Politics June 6, 2024 By Daniel Klein and Zachary Yost
- Getting Real about Libertarians June 13, 2024 By Peter Suderman
- Fear Not Lesser Evil June 27, 2024 Daniel Klein and Zachary Yost
- Empirical Proof That the Uniparty Does Not Exist, Zachary Yost and Dan Klein
Another interesting paper by Klein: Daniel B. Klein, Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard, Reason Papers 27 (2004), pp. 7-43″
“We embrace Rothbard‘s conceptions of ownership claims and his definition of liberty.3 But even within this ―negative-liberty‖ philosophy there are many unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, issues. The liberal schemes of ownership and voluntarism entail many gray areas. Rothbard tends to downplay the problem of ambiguity, but other liberal thinkers dwell on it.4
The ambiguities surrounding liberal concepts of ownership and voluntarism have often been used by critics to dismiss them: individual liberty is ―illusory,‖ etc. Liberals fight back by saying that all such concepts are rife with ambiguities, and that the liberal ones remain focal and intuitive—―obvious and simple,‖ as Adam Smith puts it.5 Indeed, away from politics
ordinary life in the United States shows that people seem to agree on what actions taken by a neighbor would constitute coercion, and the agreement conforms quite well to the liberal configuration of ownership.
The limitation that this article is concerned with, however, is something else altogether. The limitation concerns the scope and timeframe considered. Even when it is unambiguous that an action, considered in its direct aspect, is liberty-reducing, it might, when viewed in larger aspect, be considered liberty-augmenting. Taxing people to wage war and dropping bombs on others are liberty-reducing in their direct aspect, but if the war topples dictators like Saddam Hussein, it might be liberty-augmenting in its larger aspect. Thus, again, we have ambiguity about whether the action is liberty-augmenting. This ambiguity arises not from ambiguity in any local facet of the action, but in ―summing‖ over the facets. If all the facets go in one direction, either all reductions or all augmentations; there is no ambiguity. But when some facets are reductions and some are augmentations, then it might be very difficult, even impossible, to assess the action in terms of overall liberty. The difficulty stems from two problems: first, weighing the set of pluses against the set of minuses; second, knowing what is in each set. Saddam Hussein‘s regime was highly coercive, but do we know that toppling it augmented liberty overall?
In this article we are concerned with the possibility that the problems in summing may be pervasive and severe. If so, the liberal presumption of liberty might not be too meaningful. Frederick Douglass expounded liberty and called his antislavery newspaper The North Star. The cause of abolition was as unambiguous as one could imagine. But more generally, is liberty a North Star? Does it survive as a focal point for ideas, distinctions, causes, movements, identities, politics, and reform, when we recognize that it might often be hard to say whether a policy action, in its overall aspect, is liberty-augmenting?
In his book The Libertarian Idea, Jan Narveson draws attention to tensions between direct and overall liberty, cases of restriction in which ―our liberty is greater on balance when we impose these restrictions than it would be in the unrestricted condition.‖ He notes that such an approach ―requires some kind of quantification of liberty so that we can say that one situation involved ‗more‘ liberty than another,‖ and adds that ―[p]roducing a satisfactory theory about this matter is perhaps the greatest single theoretical challenge confronting the aspiring libertarian.‖6 We
