Power Imbalance: The Difference Between Liberal and Libertarian Philosophy
Jun. 24 2011 - 3:09 pm
Warren Meyer
Coyote Den
Earlier this week, New York Times columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman argued that folks on the Left were better able to accurately reiterate competing (ie conservative or libertarian) economic and political positions than, say, the Right could outline the liberal position.
We will leave aside issues we might have with a Nobel Prize winning economist making such sweeping statements based on absolutely no facts. To a large extent, Krugman’s conceit is just part and parcel of the liberal hubris that they are smarter, better educated, and more empathetic than their political opponents (a conceit that is actually philosophically necessary for these former 1960's anti-authoritarians to convince themselves they are justified in swinging the heavy club of the state).
We will also leave aside how absurd this statement is from many a libertarian’s experience. Readers as old as I am will remember the old Tootsie-Pop commercial where the owl can never lick the candy more than three times without biting into it. This is my experience with the Left attempting to mimic the libertarian position. They can never get more than three sentences into free markets and smaller government without saying “because all libertarians just want to see everything polluted and everyone get poor and die.”
I wanted to see if, contrary to Krugman’s hypothesis, I could accurately articulate the liberal position. My gut feeling is that I can. In part, I have Krugman to thank. I attended Princeton University, where he is on the faculty, and took enough economics courses that I could have minored in the subject if Princeton offered such an option. Most of the economics curriculum there, and I would bet at other major universities, is taught from a left of center perspective. It is therefore hard to accept Krugman’s hypothesis the the Left is best at outlining the competing economic position when liberals are the one group who can safely escape college without even being exposed to opposing points of view beyond a few notes in the margin.
If I were to articulate the mainstream Liberal view, I would need to avoid the parallel Tootsie-Pop mistake of ranting Marxist notions before I was three sentences in. The mainstream liberal does not consider herself a socialist and accepts private property (though often as a construct of government rules rather than as a human right).
The approach I would take would focus on power imbalances. Just as enforcing personal morality seems to be a unifying principle behind many conservative appeals for government interventionism, liberals seem to be driven by a desire to reverse perceived power imbalances. My attempt would go something like this:
A good example is labor law. While it is a nice theory that wages are negotiated between employer and employee to the mutual self-interest of each, in reality large corporations have all the power and can impose low wages and bad working conditions on nearly powerless workers. This is why unions must be encouraged, to give workers more equal bargaining power, and why minimum standards for pay and working conditions must be imposed by the government.
The same kind of power imbalance obtains in product and financial markets, where individual consumers can be ripped off by powerful manufacturers and only minimum government standards prevent companies from offering the shoddiest possible product. Monopolies where one of the first examples of such power imbalances that government had to correct, with large trusts and corporations growing so large that no new entrant could take them on, leading to the specter of these now dominant enterprises abusing their position with higher prices.
Perhaps it is easy for me to articulate these Leftish positions because we libertarians share this fear of aggregations of power (though we address it in entirely different ways, more in a moment). But I will grant Krugman a partial win, as there is an element of modern Liberal philosophy that I find it impossible to mimic: the complete disdain for the average person’s ability to make decisions for him or herself.
To a large extent, this is tied up with the notion of power imbalances we discussed earlier. Liberals believe that power imbalances exist that must be corrected, not due to any structural factors but due to, for lack of a better term, the basic incompetence of the individual. Ralph Nader has made an entire career out of challenging product marketing, the underlying assumption of which is that people are rubes and fall for anything that is put on TV enough times. In fact, the leftish infatuation with campaign finance spending limits is based on roughly the same assumption. Bombarding people with messages creates a power imbalance because more poor benighted fools will be sucked in by the hype.
The difficulty in mimicking the liberal position is not in faking this disdain for the individual, but the requirement that it be done inconsistently. For example, teenage girls are smart enough to make decisions on abortion without parental involvement but strict state controls are needed to keep them out of tanning salons. The rubes out there can make good decisions about their sexual practices but can’t be trusted to eat the right foods. They can be trusted to consume violence and sex in the media intelligently but are incapable of accurately parsing political or product ads. Frankly, I can’t figure out the decision rule at work here.
So perhaps Krugman is right. If I wanted to be snarky, I could argue that my brain is simply not wired for the cognitive dissonance of contrdictory positions on personal liberty that is required to communicate either the liberal or conservative position.
But I do understand the leftish position well enough to identify its key mistake. As I mentioned earlier, we libertarians are similarly concerned with aggregations of power. We have, at best, a love-hate relationship with large corporations, for example, enjoying the bounties they can bring us but fearing their size and power.
But what the Left ignores is that there is absolutely no power imbalance as large as that between the government and its citizens. After all, you may get ticked off when Exxon charges you $4 a gallon for gas for reasons that aren’t transparent to you, but you can always tell Exxon to kiss off and buy from someone else, or ride a bike, or stay home. Because Exxon does not have armies and police and guns and prisons.
Every single time we give the government the power to right a perceived imbalance, we give the government more power than the private entity we are trying to contain. In effect, we make things worse. Because we want the government to counter-act the power of oil companies, Congress now has the power to dump large portions of our food supply into motor fuel, to the benefit of just a few politically connected ethanol companies.
One of the reasons the Left often cannot adequately articulate the libertarian position is that the notion of bottom-up emergent order tends to be difficult for many to understand or accept (this is mildly ironic, since the Left tends to defend the emergent order of Darwinian evolution against the top-down Christian creation vision).
The key to much of libertarian economics is not that libertarians trust private actors, but that libertarians trust natural correction mechanisms in free markets far more than it trusts authoritarian power of the government. When, for example, large corporations become sloppy and abusive and senescent, markets will eventually bring them down.
In fact, when government is given power, nominally to correct such imbalances, they tend to use it to protect those in power as often as they do to protect the disenfranchised. Government restrictive licensing of hair dressers, interior designers, and morticians; bailouts of GM, Chrysler, and AIG; corporate welfare to GE and ADM; and use of imminent domain to hand private property to favored real estate developpers — all are examples of finding government cures for perceived private power imbalances that are worse than the disease.
Isacc Asimov, in a book called Foundation that Paul Krugman recently rated as one of the most influential on his life, related this fable: Once there was a man and a horse, who were both imperiled by a wolf. The man approached the horse, and said that if the horse would put its superior speed at his disposal, he could kill the wolf. And so the horse agreed to take the man’s saddle and bridle, and helped the man kill the wolf. The horse said, “great job, now remove your saddle and we can both be free,” and the man said “never!”
I hope the moral of the story is clear. In trying to deal with the threat of the wolf, the horse gave the man so much power he became an even bigger threat. So too when we look to government to solve our problems.
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