One of the most basic threats to liberty, which is often overlooked, is that the defense of individual liberty as an ideal is seldom heard in political debate. The ideal of liberty is often overshadowed by quotidian political concerns that follow the latest outrage. In public debates on policies designed to advance social justice goals, the disputants generally argue about the effectiveness of the policies without questioning the underlying ideological premise or its implications for liberty. Most critiques attempt to show that for one reason or another the policy will not work as intended, or that the costs of the policy outweigh any benefits. They focus on problems of scope and implementation.
This is why both sides of the political divide are often referred to as a “uniparty”—two sides of the same coin that merely debate the speed at which government policies should unfold. In his book Socialism, Ludwig von Mises argues that “Communists and anti-Communists” are often involved in disputes of this nature. They are often two rival groups who agree on the premise that the government should replace the free market.
Both groups “want to substitute totalitarian government control for the market economy” although they disagree on the form that government should take. Mises also argued that the totalitarianism of progressives and self-styled anti-fascists is little different from that of “the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis” whom they claim to oppose. He saw all these groups as “mutual rivalries among the various totalitarian movements,” quarreling amongst themselves over “who should run the totalitarian apparatus.”
Murray Rothbard struck at the heart of this problem in relation to the debates on egalitarianism, when he pointed out that the public debate is framed around the types of egalitarian schemes that should be adopted, but very few question the premise itself. In Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature he addresses this question by asking the fundamental question—“should equality be granted its current status as an unquestioned ethical ideal?” He observes that this question is rarely asked. Instead, both sides agree on what they see as the ethical ideal, and disagree only on specific policies:
On the entire question of legally and judicially imposed “civil rights,” we have been subjected to a trap, to a shell game in which “both sides” adopt the same pernicious axiom and simply quarrel about interpretation within the same framework.
Rothbardian libertarians reject the egalitarian premise because they uphold individual liberty based on self-ownership and private property. This ethical foundation precludes any attempt to equalize people by force. As Lew Rockwell explains in Against the Left:
Libertarianism does not try to remold people to make them conform to some supposedly desirable ideology. It does not embark on the futile quest of making everybody equal. It does not favor trying to end “discrimination”.
He adds that “left libertarians” who argue that egalitarian policies are compatible with libertarian principles “attempt the impossible.” This is because, “They want to combine libertarianism, with its polar opposite, egalitarianism. It’s not enough for people to be libertarian. They must also be ‘nice,’ where this means surrendering to the latest leftist claptrap.”
Left libertarians might wonder, what’s wrong with people who are nice forcing other people to be nice too? If someone is being a jerk, shouldn’t he be forced to be nice? After all, that would make the world a better place, in which everyone would be nice to each other—whether they wish to or not—or else. But the notion of using force to compel other people to be nice is incompatible with liberty, even in cases where the behavior being compelled is regarded by most people as “nice.” Given that being “nice” is subjective, and that those intent on despotism tend to take advantage of schemes designed to mold people into better human beings, that approach is ultimately incompatible with individual liberty. Those who appoint themselves the arbiters of what it means to be nice get to compel others to bend to their will—all in the name of forging a better world by any means necessary. Rockwell explains:
To see libertarians, who of course should know better, jumping on the thought-control bandwagon, or pretending that the whole issue is about the freedom to be a jerk, is extremely short-sighted and most unfortunate. The State uses the “racism” racket as justification for its further extension of power over education, employment, wealth redistribution, and a good deal else. Meanwhile, it silences critics of State violence with its magic, never-defined word “racism,” an accusation the critic has to spend the rest of his life trying to disprove, only to discover that the race hustlers will not lift the curse until he utterly abases himself and repudiates his entire philosophy.
This sets society down the road to tyranny, a concern not only for libertarians but also for conservatives who value individual liberty. The conservative writer M.E. Bradford was opposed to what he called “the heresy of equality” for precisely that reason:
For this equality belongs to the post-Renaissance world of ideology—of political magic and the alchemical “science” of politics. Envy is the basis of its broad appeal. And rampant envy, the besetting virus of modern society, is the most predictable result of insistence upon its realization.
Bradford argued that the “cult of equality” is fueled by “an even more sinister power, the uniformitarian hatred of providential distinctions which will stop at nothing less than what Eric Voegelin calls ‘a reconstitution of being’: a nihilistic impulse which is at bottom both frightened and vain in its arrogation of a godlike authority.” Bradford favored, instead, what he called the “interdependence” of individual members of society. Individual liberty yields unequal outcomes because people have different skills and talents. This in turn provides an incentive for specialization, the division of labor, and voluntary exchange.
Each benefits from exchange with others, and each needs the other for the exchange to be possible. The cult of equality, in Bradford’s view, sought “to annul that dependency” on which society depends. If everyone is entitled to equal opportunities and equal outcomes, and the role of the government is to ensure that everything is equally and fairly distributed, people need not depend on each other to complement their respective strengths and weaknesses. This is why Bradford attributed the quest for equality to “arrant individualism, fracturing and then destroying the hope of amity and confederation, the communal bond and the ancient vision of the good society as an extrapolation from family.”
Bradford highlights an essential difference between the conservative and the socialist view of society—while socialism seeks to promote the good of society by giving the state a prominent role in equalizing fortunes, Bradford’s view of conservatism pursues the good of society by enhancing individual liberty and strengthening the bonds of family and community. On this point Rothbardian libertarians would agree with Bradford—the traditional family is “the hallmark of civilization,” as Rockwell put it, and this has made it a target for socialists who wish to replace the bonds of family with devotion to the state. As Mises explains in Socialism:
For it is a characteristic of Socialism to discover in social institutions the origin of unalterable facts of nature, and to endeavour, by reforming these institutions, to reform nature.
