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Libertarianism and a Justification of the Powerful State
Submitted by Scott Scheule on Mon, 2008-03-17 11:16.
They say libertarians support the minimal state. Should they? Perhaps—but clarification is needed.
What do we mean by minimal? I see two possibilities: a government whose power in total is very weak, or a government that only has power in a few areas.
For example, Government A has five government employees and an annual budget of $40,000. Its powers are manifold: with these five employees it endeavors, though not with great success I imagine, to redistribute income, to protect the environment, to wage wars, to fund basic health research, etc. In a sense this state is minimal—it has very little power to back up its activities, even though it participates in many fields.
Now, consider Government B, which has two billion employees and unlimited funds. It does nothing but run the legal system. In some sense this government is large—it has a huge amount of power, but power circumscribed in a narrow field. Indeed, this is a particularly large version of Nozick’s night watchman state.
I class the power of the government (the sense in which B is bigger than A) as its “power” and the number of areas that the power is exerted in (the sense in which A is bigger than B) as its “width.”
Now, to the opening question. When we ask whether libertarians should support the minimal state, we are asking two questions: “Should libertarians support the weak state?” and “Should libertarians support the narrow state?”
The answer to the latter is yes (as I essentially said by characterizing it as Nozick’s state). There are few justifiable government functions among libertarians (I refer to minarchist libertarians, of course): war powers, perhaps, running of the legal system, perhaps, and maybe even environmental protection. In one phrase, we could say that the government’s only function is to enforce libertarian rights—with only one function, it is thus a narrow government. Any broad government probably goes beyond this mere enforcement power, and is illegitimate by libertarian lights.
But as to the question, “Should libertarians support the weak state?” the answer is a surprising “maybe.” For one can easily imagine protection of libertarian rights demanding a huge governmental apparatus, even if that apparatus is restricted to this one power! Perhaps rights violations are particularly difficult to enforce in some situations—maybe pollution is widespread and difficult to trace—and so any enforcement demands many resources. In such a situation, the libertarian should support the strong state and fight against a state too weak to preserve libertarian rights.
The power of the state that can be justified is thus an empirical matter, and not, as with width, a matter of ethics.
(Anarchist libertarians of course disagree, and consequentialists pick the government that maximizes utility, whether it be broad, narrow, weak, and/or strong.)
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A large enough state is thick
With two billion employees, no matter how thin the government's mandate, the government's effects and policies are thick. With that many employees, very small changes in fairly trivial policy can change everything. If a government of that size decides, eg, that will implement workplace drug testing for its employees, it is in effect creating a massive legal and cultural change overnight. If it decides to store its unlimited funds overnight in bank A versus bank B, it might rewrite an entire economic sector.
Nothing is purely internal to government; a large enough government makes social and economic policy for the whole country by changes in its internal policies. Government is a wedge in a crack; the wider you make it at the top, the thicker it cuts.
Thick "libertarianism"
Maybe we can relate this to thick "libertarianism". It takes a thick state to ensure that everyone has enough opportunities to maximize their positive freedom. For instance Castro's Cuba with its universal health care and its country-wide calorie-restricted diet ensures longevity for all its inhabitants. The ultimate positive freedom is surely longevity, since without life you have zero opportunities.
Yeah, I should have picked
Yeah, I should have picked another term. "Broad" vs. "narrow" perhaps.
Night watchman
One familiar term for what I think you mean by "thin" or "narrow" is "night watchman state". The opposite might be called "nanny state", or, at the extreme, "totalitarian". Meanwhile a common term for a state that has little raw power to implement its plans, however restricted or ambitious, is I think "weak state"; the near-extreme is "failed state", and the extreme is "anarchy".
There is in any case some link between strength and nannyhood, as Grant pointed out. The stronger the state, the more easily it is able to intervene.
Right, hence my use of the
Right, hence my use of the term "night watchman state." I do think "strong" and "weak" is better, and am swapping terms.
Ah
hence my use of the term "night watchman state."
Ah, well, it had after all been a whole hour since I read the essay.
"weak" is definitely not the correct answer.
The weaker the government, the more likely it is to a) be taken over and b) behave in a fashion that is destructive. Weak governments have to do scary things in order to scare would-be usurpers from trying to get the throne. But if a government is truly strong, then there's no need for that - it can be self-assured in its power. Further, no one would try and take it over, because such an effort would be obviously futile.
Government functions best when it eliminates ambiguity.
Now, anarchy might still be a reasonable option - but overall the goal for libertarians should be a stable outcome. In my mind, that either means strong, narrow governments, or no governments at all.
POWERFUL STATE
If it exists at all, the central government should be (1) strong (read: efficacious) in terms of national defense and warding off internal, domestic aggression against the person and his/her property rights AND (2) limited (read: constitutionalist, classically liberal), meaning a ban on redistributionist schemes and certainly, specifically, no welfare state, no regulatory apparatus, no war on victimless crimes involving consenting adults, no ban on freely ingested substances, no smoke-free workplaces/restaurants/bars unless the owner chooses to impose bans on tobacco, no forced licensing of hairdressers and the like, etc.
Aren't national defense and
Aren't national defense and internal defense just two redistributionist schemes/welfare programs many libertarians happen to like? What if I happen to like free, government provided cheese more than free, government provided 911 service?
Yes, they are. National
Yes, they are. National defense and internal defense are, however, unlike other redistributionist functions in that, per Nozick, such redistribution is justified.
Right. But Nozick is wrong.
Right. But Nozick is wrong. There is no valid distinction between the two forms of redistribution.
Nuh. Uh.
Nuh. Uh.
Defense vs. Cheese
"Aren't national defense and internal defense just two redistributionist
schemes/welfare programs many libertarians happen to like? What if I happen to like free, government provided cheese more than free, government provided 911 service?"
I could retort, "Aren't murder and rape just to crimes many libertarians happen to dislike. What if I happend to dislike drug use more than the imposition of sex on unwilling participants?"
I think what matters is why the libertarians happen to like or dislike those things. For my sentence a libertarian will give you a dicussion on rights and how rape and crime are trespasses while drug use is merely a vice.
If you accept that distinctions matter then it's pretty easy to see distinctions between defense schemes and schemes that provide cheese. For instance there are advantages to providing for defence outside of emergency situations that don't apply to supplying cheese.
Having a permanant defense organization is something that prevents surprise attacks and being overwhelmed by existing armies. Having an able bodied person permanently on the dole has no such justification. Certainly there are arguments about emergency and being overwhelmed that do apply in the same way. So one could make an argument that emergency provision of food, and therefore preparedness for such emergency is identical in kind to concerns for defense.
So having a permanent emergency supply of cheese might be justified but having multi-generation welfare families isn't.
If I were calling myself a libertarian then I would be one that believed in certain kinds of government provided emergency aid. There would be a hell of a lot of conditions on it though. One being that you'd have to pay back the government when you got back on your feet. I think those rule follow from a form of expanded natural rights that I was developing in my discussions of Good Samaritan law.
If you recall in the lost hiker example he was allowed to break into a cabin in order to resolve his emergency but was required to compensate the owner for damage. I also had outlined the issue of when the owner and the hiker both found themselves in danger. The reasonable person test would need to be used to decide if the actions of the hiker truly endangered the owner. Certainly a likely inability to repay the owner and damages that put the owner in a position of destitution are reasonable grounds for the owner to fail to provide help.
It's not only inability to pay that counts but inability to pay in a timely manner. You can't take someone elses last morsel of food during a famine with the hopes of repaying them when the spring crops come in.
Reciprocity and duties
As you should be able to deduce I believe that duties can arise exnilo from considerations of reciprocity. For example, your duty not to murder arises reciprocally from your expectation not to be killed for no good reason.
I can't really think of an
I can't really think of an area in which a weak government would be remotely effective. I suppose it *is* the safest way to ensure that it never threatens liberty, but in that case you might as well turn enforcement of things like law and environmental protection entirely over to the private sector, as it's become so powerful overwhelming a weak government would be a matter of little concern or difficulty.
Take environmental protection, for example. Without the infrastructure required to penalize companies, test vast amounts of water and soil for pollution and publicize its results (which is about as much power as the EPA has now), everything could be buried- if ever discovered- and nothing would be genuinely regulated. At best, we could expect spot-checking, and as all the accounting scandals have shown us, plenty of major companies are willing to take that risk.
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