INTRODUCTION

In American political culture, and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state’s power should be expanded. The left has a laundry list and the right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the world and its inhabitants: liberty.

“There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it.”

Alibertarian must never tire of saying “I told you so.” Nor is there a dearth of opportunities to do so. Before 9-11, for example, it was the libertarians who said that 1990s sanctions against Iraq and broader intervention in the Middle East would inspire terrorism. The libertarians also warned that FAA regulations weren’t really making the airlines secure. The libertarians further saw that hundreds of billions spent on “defense” and “intelligence” weren’t really providing either.

Among the greatest failures of the free-market intellectual movement has been allowing its ideas to be categorized as a “public policy” option. The formulation implies a concession that it is up to the state—its managers and kept intellectuals—to decide how, when, and where freedom is to be permitted. It further implies that the purpose of freedom, private ownership, and market incentives is the superior management of society, that is, to allow the current regime to operate more efficiently.

[This column was written before the news came out November 2, 2000, that George W. Bush was arrested on a DUI charge 24 years ago. He was stopped in Maine for driving too slowly and briefly veering onto the shoulder of the road.]

It has been decades since legislatures have struck out daringly in some new and uncharted territory of social and economic management. For the most part, in the United States, Europe, Russia, China, and Latin America, legislatures are constantly at work reforming the systems they created in the past rather than embarking on totally new ventures.

Every July, Americans commence the annual national ritual of noticing that the Declaration of Independence is among the “founding” documents that gave birth to the country. And pundits, following innumerable scholars for 150 years, will twist and mangle the text to discern some other meaning from the document besides the obvious one.

A common accusation against libertarianism is that we are unnaturally obsessed with tracing social and economic problems to the state, and, in doing so, we oversimplify the world.

If you let the people who say this keep talking, they will explain to you why the state is not all bad, that some of its actions yield positive results and, in any case, the state should not always be singled out as some sort of grave evil.

A new poll shows 18–29 year olds turning against Bush, with 58 percent believing that the country is on the wrong track. This, however, doesn’t translate into support for John Kerry. In fact the margin of difference between support for either major candidate is negligible. What does seem clear is that the wave of student enthusiasm for the GOP that came about after September 11 has subsided.