From Conservatism to Libertarianism: My Personal Journey (Part III)

Part I, II.


In the previous posts, I described how my strong distaste for the Left led me to become a conservative and how my frustration with the Republican Party, particularly over Iraq, grew. So the me who was neither shocked nor horrified by Republican defeats in November 2006 (in contrast to my enthusiasm for Bush in 2004) was an independently minded Republican with a socially liberal streak. If you were paying attention to the last post, you might have noticed that I did not use the word "libertarian" and that was on purpose. When I began this blog in December 2006, I still did not identify myself as a libertarian. Going back over my early posts, you can see that I identified myself as "operating within the classical liberal tradition" and use the word "libertarian" to describe the position that the government should stay out of people's bedrooms. For me, classical liberalism meant J. S. Mill, specifically that people should be left to themselves to pursue their own understanding of the good life, in contrast to modern liberalism. (I was unaware at the time that Mill was actually more open to government intervention in the economy than would be implied by On Liberty.) I was already even ok with gay marriage as long as it was framed in terms of personal liberty and not group rights. That being said, I did not identify myself as a libertarian. The main reason for this was that I had almost no contact with libertarianism as a political movement or as an intellectual tradition. I still thought in terms of conservatism vs. liberalism. I criticized conservatism from within conservatism. I still hated the left as much as always and was not about to turn traitor.

I started identifying myself as a libertarian around 2008 during the presidential campaign. I still supported the late Sen. John McCain and did not vote for Ron Paul even during the primaries. I even attended a McCain rally in Columbus when he clinched the nomination. I identified as a libertarian conservative as a way of telling people on campus that while I did not support Obama, I did not agree with the Republican Party on social issues such as abortion. I was not one of those "close-minded" religious extremist Republicans. At this point, I still had little contact with libertarianism. My libertarianism was the product of my own thinking. But I decided that if I was going to be a libertarian, I might as well discover what libertarians actually say.

I started binge-watching Youtube clips of Milton Friedman in the summer of 2009. Friedman was a revelation to me as someone who was saying the kinds of things I had been thinking and being far more articulate about it than I ever could. At a practical level, I recognized in Friedman a roadmap for a compassionate conservatism that could expand the Republican base to include blacks and Hispanics. From Friedman, I quickly branched out to reading Hayek (I owe a debt of thanks to Simon Snowball for giving me a copy of the Constitution of Liberty and for alerting me to the existence of a something called Austrian economics), Ayn Rand, and Murry Rothbard. I attended my first IHS conference in the summer of 2011. IHS has remained my chief lifeline to libertarianism as a flesh and blood movement. People like Sarah Skwire, her husband Steve Horwitz, and Michael Munger have been models for me of how to be an intellectually serious and principled defender of liberty in all of its radicalness while keeping both feet planted in the real not yet converted to libertarianism world. As someone on the autism spectrum, that last part has proven critical.

One implication of my path to libertarianism was that, since I came to libertarianism largely through my own thinking and only discovered later that there existed people who thought like I did, I have not felt tied down by faction. For example, being an Objectivist or a Rothbardian was never what defined libertarianism for me as I did not become a libertarian through them. I could recognize some things of value in such groups and move on.

It should come as no surprise, considering that I came to libertarianism while still a registered Republican, I was firmly in the minarchist camp. In fact, when I first encountered anarcho-capitalism through David Friedman, I was quite critical of it. Granted, my defense of government was firmly planted in pragmatism over principle. For example, I made a point of teaching my students that government was a magic wand that we used to call kidnappers policemen taking people to jail, something that could never seriously be defended unless we accepted that it was necessary for the well being of society that we all participate in such an immoral delusion.

What eventually turned me against even this moderate apology for government was my growing disenchantment with the American political system. As long as I could pretend that the Republican Party was serious about economic liberty and that everything else would pull itself together from there, I could hope that the Republican Party could fix America and that that the United States could still be considered a defender of liberty (even if an imperfect one). Once I lost faith in the Republican Party, it set off a domino effect in which I could no longer defend the United States government and modern states in general.

Even today, I am on the very moderate end of the anarchist spectrum. One could even argue that I remain a minarchist at heart. I still am, fundamentally, a Burkean conservative. I am not a revolutionary seeking perfect justice. The moment you make a claim on perfect justice, you hand a loaded gun to everyone out there to pursue their perfect justice, including those whose perfect justice requires your death. I am willing to accept that human institutions will always be marred by flaws and logical contradictions. The best we can do is make a good faith effort. If that means some government, so be it.

I acknowledge that I lack the moral authority to challenge governments rooted in some traditional authority, particularly if, like England and the United States, that authority itself is the classical liberal tradition. That being said, I feel no such bind when it comes to those governments premised on progressive notions of overturning tradition in the name of perfect justice. From this perspective, my anarchist attack on progressive government is simply the other side of my defense of traditional government. Edmund Burke himself famously defended the American revolutionaries as good Englishmen forced to defend English values against a monarch intent on changing the status quo. The Americans were not the real revolutionaries. They were forced to create a new system of government for themselves (that actually was not so different from what they previously had) because their opponents had embraced revolution first. (This argument is also crucial for how Burke understood the Glorious Revolution and why it was acceptable, unlike the French Revolution.)

While in principle I oppose government as an institution of violence, I accept, in practice, that we might not be able to do better than limited government. In pursuit of that goal, I embrace using the threat of anarchy as a weapon to threaten the political establishment. If this actually leads to the overthrow of government then so be it. In my heart, I have rejected the authority of government over myself and no longer see myself as morally bound to follow its laws. My obedience is merely that of a man with a gun to his head.

I Am Not Equal to Lebron James

Learn Liberty has a contest to do a video response to the following video regarding equality.




Here is my response, following up on the theme that we ordinary people are not equal to millionaire celebrities. My point is that this inequality goes all the way down to the genetic level. Lebron James is making millions more than I will ever make not because he is particularly hard working, but because he was born with a particular set of genetic traits that marked him even from childhood as an ideal basketball player.



Milton Friedman made a similar argument years ago about genetic ability. His point was that there are no clear lines between people born into wealthy families, leading lives of luxury that most people can only dream of, and people born with certain talents, like being able to play the violin, that others will never be able to do.




It is interesting to note that Adam Smith took it as a given that people were fundamentally equal in talent even in intelligence. Thus, if we were to remove aristocratic privileges, we would soon find a society where everyone was about equal in their economic circumstances. The only exception would be lottery winners; literal lottery winners as well as people who succeeded through equal dumb luck in business ventures or in becoming lawyers. The law of averages being what they are, even these distinctions would not hold for long. Smith lived before the industrial revolution and the new economic inequalities it created. He also lived before our celebrity culture, which pays millions to athletes and actors mainly for genetically based abilities. Finally Smith did not live in a world in which high IQ individuals could make millions creating companies like Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

Chicago Versus Austrian Libertarianism

The following is in honor of my wife, who has undertaken the reading of Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty as means to better understand me, Mark Pelta, who got me going on this topic and Michael Makovi, who will likely disagree with everything I say here.

Within libertarianism, there are two basic schools, the Chicago school, often associated with Milton Friedman, and the Austrian school, in its politically active form usually associated with Murray Rothbard. While they have their differences in terms of economic theory, particularly in regards to their understanding of money and the use of a Federal Reserve, I will focus here on the larger ideological question why be a libertarian and support free market policies over state solutions. I know I am being simplistic here, but I hope readers will bear with me. The Chicago school tends to argue for free market policies based on pragmatic arguments. The Austrian school tends to base itself around first principles. One starts with basic liberal principles, which people on the left claim to support, such as non-aggression, and then proceeds to argue that logical consistency demands that one accept libertarianism.

Take, for example, the issue of welfare. A Chicago school libertarian will tell you that government sponsored welfare is a mistake precisely because it does not help poor people. Through the process of "rent seeking," the money will be squandered by bureaucrats or by people who learn to game the system, living off of welfare instead of working. Even the money that makes it into the hands of the truly needy will cause them more harm than good in the long one as they will become dependent upon government and lose the instinctual ability to work their way out of poverty. An Austrian does not care whether or not government welfare is an effective remedy for poverty. What matters is that private property is protected and no coercive force be initiated. Funding welfare requires tax dollars which come from private individuals. Money is personal property and no person can be made to part with it without their consent. Furthermore, government is a form of coercion as any time the government does something it is with the implied threat that if people do not comply they will be arrested and, if they go far enough in resisting, possibly killed. Thus, as Lysander Spooner famously argued, the government is essentially a highwayman, who refuses to leave you alone after he has taken your money, lectures you about how you should live your life and insists that you should be grateful for the service he is providing by “protecting” you. Thus, from an Austrian perspective, the issue is not whether he has a heart to help the poor; it is that those who claim to be fighting poverty through government are really little Torquemadas, who are destroying personal liberty.   

Both the Chicago and Austrian schools have their potential vulnerabilities. The pragmatism of the Chicago school leads it to make ideological compromises on liberty out of a belief that a specific government intervention will benefit the public or at least out of a hope that by going along with the program they can convince the politicians to go with a less damaging plan. Thus, for example, Milton Friedman advocated school vouchers and a negative income tax. Instead of public schools, parents would receive a voucher that would allow them to send their children to a private school of their choice. Instead of welfare, people would receive a guaranteed income. Friedman’s purpose with these plans was to eliminate the government bureaucracies associated with these institutions, which he saw as the main threat, while still offering protection for the poor. Such a position, though, fails to confront the essential problem for the Austrian, mainly that private citizens are still being coerced into paying taxes to support programs that are not even designed to benefit them, but are essentially forms of wealth redistribution in favor of those the government deems “more deserving.”

In practice, we have seen over the past few decades Milton Friedman and his followers making a Faustian bargain with the Republican Party (to say nothing of dictators like General Augusto Pinochet of Chile). In exchange for serving as the intellectual front of the Republican Party, the GOP has rhetorically committed itself to the cause of “small government” and in practice has even attempted to at least slow the expansion of the welfare state. While allying with the Republican Party has given libertarians a voice within mainstream politics and may have even produced some positive policy results, the past few years have made it clear that the price paid for these gains has been high, perhaps a little too high. Libertarians have found themselves having to defend a Bush administration that was far from libertarian, making libertarians appear hypocritical. Furthermore, libertarians came to be associated with the non-libertarian excesses of the Republican Party, religious extremism, militarism and a vulnerability to the manipulations of big business. This has created a situation in which, at a time when it should be clear as to the limitations of government interventions in the housing market and on Wall Street, the left has been able to argue that the economic crisis was a product of deregulation.

The Austrian school also has its vulnerabilities.  Instead of offering a list of policies that people can pick and choose from, depending on what strikes their fancy, it offers a single package as an all or nothing proposition based on a very specific ideology. It then seeks to convert people to this ideology without offering them a means by which they can come to it on their own. Part of the problem with distinct non-mainstream ideologies is that most people see themselves as “non-ideological.” What this usually means is that they are simply prejudiced to the dominant ideology. (Part of the advantage of being a dominant ideology is that you can claim to not be an ideology, but simple common sense. The disadvantage is that such an ideology cannot afford to create believers. A person who consciously believes in something is free from the delusion that he is not an ideologue.) Furthermore, most people are not particularly concerned with ideas but think in terms of relationships. One can wish all one likes to live in a country where people cared more about ideas, but one has to advance the cause of liberty with the people he has.

As an ideology whose main claim to authority is its consistency, Austrian style libertarianism is vulnerable to extreme ethical dilemmas. For example if a million people were about to die unless they received a drug, whose supply was in the possession of one individual, who refused to sell, an Austrian libertarian would have to admit that the private property rights of the one should override the interests of the many and that a million people should die rather than have the government use force to expropriate the supply of drugs. When faced with the Austrian love for hypothetical things like liberty and private property over tangible utilitarian goods such as providing lifesaving medication to those who need it, most people are going to conclude that libertarians at best lack a firm grip on reality and at worst are heartless selfish people, who care nothing for others.

This is not to say that either the Chicago or Austrian schools are wrong. Simply that each position carries a price, which must be weighed very carefully.

New York Magazine Does Libertarianism

Christopher Beam of New York magazine has a long article on Libertarianism, "The Trouble with Liberty." The article does a good job at placing Libertarianism within the context of modern political debate, starting with Ron and Rand Paul, the most prominent libertarians holding political office down through the variety of libertarian movements in existence. There is also a summary of the intellectual roots of Libertarianism, mentioning not just Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, but Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard as well.

The problem, though, is that Beam seems unable to resist his journalist condensation, throwing in jabs like calling Libertarianism "the crazy uncle of American politics: loud and cocky and occasionally profound but always a bit unhinged" and "the weird, Magic-card-collecting, twelve-sided-die-wielding outcast of American political philosophy." This carries over into a condescending lecture as to how libertarians lack the practical sense as to how to go about realizing their ideals and that no one would really want to live under a libertarian government anyway. According to Beam:

Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I'm a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we'd need a central bank—otherwise you'd have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we'll create a central bank.

 

We would not have to start from scratch, we would just have to accept that most of the major laws created since the New Deal and Supreme Court rulings since the Warren era were unconstitutional and toss them over the side. Creating a central bank to print most of the money for a county would be quite simple. You start with local banks owning precious metals or land and offering currency to shareholders. These currency shares could then be bought out by larger banks in exchange for currency of their own until one bank comes to dominate the printing of currency. None of this would require government to do anything more than prosecuting banks if they ever tried to defraud their customers and enforce all contracts.

 

Some people don't have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn't enough charity money to help them? Well, we don't want them to start stealing, so we'd better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities.

 

There is plenty of poverty around the world. Often this leads to people turning to terrorism. Yet somehow I can sleep at night despite the fact that my government has not taken upon itself the responsibility of ending global poverty by itself. Taking care of the have nots is the responsibility of those who have (and this includes people living on graduate student salaries). I see no reason to treat the far less extreme poverty in this country any differently. It would be a moral blight on society, as a whole, if someone were to starve to death, but that does not justify endangering the liberties of every single man, woman, and child by authorizing the government to redistribute wealth as it sees fit.

 

We'd need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn't suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.

 

If charity did not suffice perhaps a private business could offer a loan or parents could turn their children into stock companies and sell shares in the child's future earnings. If that does not work, perhaps we need to consider whether this child will actually benefit from a formal education in the first place and would not simply be better off shining shoes or picking cotton. Last I checked there is no such thing as a right to an education; that is simply one more scam invented by politicians in order to demand more power over private individuals.

 

There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because "states' rights" had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system evolved because private charity didn't suffice.

 

The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression. Yes, there is a reason why our society has moved in a direction of greater government control. Every special interest group desires that government step in for their benefit. On top of that, there is the greatest special interest group of all, government bureaucrats. No matter what happens, government bureaucrats will insist that the solution is more government. You have a population brought up on politicians speeches and government public schools to believe this nonsense. Thus we have a society in which everyone tries to rob everyone else and politicians stand on the side taking the biggest cut of all.

 

Putting a libertarian government into power is simple in theory. We need a society that accepts libertarian principles and for everyone to agree to stop trying to use government for their own special interests. The fact that we do not have this cannot be blamed on libertarians but on those still under the sway of the scam of modern liberal big government. Libertarians unlike everyone else actually are consistent in their beliefs and have meaningful solutions to the problems of today that do not involve one group trying to trick or coerce any other. Our solutions may not make you comfortable; you might think that we are strange, but until you can offer something better you have no grounds to talk down to us or even debate us in the first place.

 

Jon Stewart is Great. Milton Friedman was Better.

Jon Stewart gave an excellent speech yesterday at his Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC that was a true ode to bipartisanship and a plea for mutual tolerance.





Stewart offers an example that we see every day of cars entering the Lincoln Tunnel. Drivers with Obama and NRA stickers, Evangelicals and atheists all work together to allow everyone to safely merge into the tunnel lane and do not simply cut each other off because of their political views. Stewart uses this example correctly to point out that outside of Washington and cable TV people do not live their lives as a political struggle. While I liked what Stewart was saying, something was bothering me that I could not immediately put into words. It finally hit me when I realized that Milton Friedman once employed a similar line of argument in regards to the making of pencils.




Friedman pointed out that, within the seemingly simple process of manufacturing pencils, there was a powerful mechanism serving to bring about world peace. The pencil is made up of resources drawn from different parts of the world by people of different languages and creeds, who, left to their own devices, would likely not tolerate each other if they ever met in person. The fact that they are all tied together in the manufacturing process of pencils forces them, even unwittingly to cooperate in the pursuit of a common goal.

Friedman, though, included one thing that Stewart did not, something that, for Friedman, was utterly essential. Stewart never asks why the people driving into the Lincoln tunnel bother to cooperate. Stewart seems to assume that this all happens as if by "magic." This is in keeping with modern liberal thought which assumes that people are naturally good, tolerant and, unless corrupted by outside forces (say right-wing talk-radio), will cooperate with others for the common good. Friedman knew better; it is the free market that allows us to buy complex devices such as pencils for mere pennies. People learn to stow away their prejudices and embrace tolerance because they do not wish to go broke and have to watch their children starve. Similarly, people learn to "tolerate" the oppositional bumper-stickers of the car in the next lane and do not try to cut that driver off, not out of any innate human goodness, but because it is not worth risking a car that one has paid for out of one's own pocket and the potential medical bills in order to not be few minutes late for something they do not want to be going to in the first place. (One can infer that any attempt on the part of the government to help people buy and insure their cars and offer them health care will lead to an increase in "intolerant" driving and accidents. Government aid will get you killed; the free market, like a seatbelt, will save your life.)

Yes, this country needs a restoration of sanity as the forces of both the left and the right seek to use physical force to impose their values on others. What is needed is for our societal struggles (whether marriage or healthcare) to be left in the capable hands of the free market.

Adam’s Rib and Anarchy: A Response to David Friedman

Previously I wrote about Milton Friedman of blessed memory and his documentaries "Free to Choose," done during the 1980s. John Stossel recently devoted an episode of his talk show to pay homage to "Free to Choose."






Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman, is also a libertarian economist. In The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism (follow the link to read the book for free), though, he takes his libertarian logic to its anarchist extreme. After spending the first half of the book suggesting ways to sell off excess parts of government such as schools and roads (policies that I heartily support), Friedman turns to government itself and to how we might function without it. Friedman offers the following scenario:


Suppose, then, that at some future time there are no government police, but instead private protection agencies. These agencies sell the service of protecting their clients against crime. Perhaps they also guarantee performance by insuring their clients against losses resulting from criminal acts.


How might such protection agencies protect? That would be an economic decision, depending on the costs and effectiveness of different alternatives. On the one extreme, they might limit themselves to passive defenses, installing elaborate locks and alarms. Or they might take no preventive action at all, but make great efforts to hunt down criminals guilty of crimes against their clients. They might maintain foot patrols or squad cars, like our present government police, or they might rely on electronic substitutes. In any case, they would be selling a service to their customers and would have a strong incentive to provide as high a quality of service as possible, at the lowest possible cost. It is reasonable to suppose that the quality of service would be higher and the cost lower than with the present governmental protective system.


Friedman's system goes all the way up to having private court systems. When members of different systems come into conflict the protection agencies step in as arbitrators. In essence, instead of one giant nation-State, we would have numerous private States with no relation to boundaries, but simply personal choice. The advantage of this is that people would be free to choose their protection agencies and even to switch agencies as it suits their interests.


I admit that there is a certain elegance to David Friedman's suggestion and if I were to try putting together an anarchist system it would look something like Friedman's. What I particularly admire about Friedman is that he comes to his anarchism honestly, from a libertarian desire to avoid coercion, as opposed to most anarchists who come to their beliefs from a socialism based desire to use coercion to overthrow capitalism. The problem, as I see it, with Friedman's anarcho-capitalism is that it does not take into account the question of authority; mainly that States, in order for their authority to be meaningful, need their citizens to accept them as having a meta-legitimacy regardless of what they think of specific decisions. The State cannot simply be something that you accept or reject based on how you feel about it at the moment.


Take for example a woman whose husband cheats on her. To play out this alternative Adam's Rib scenario, our woman approaches the political establishment, headed by Spencer Tracy, to demand justice. Spencer Tracy, operating within the parameters of modern legal theory, suggests that this woman should be able to get a divorce on favorable terms and might be able to sue for emotional harm. Now if we are operating by standard government, the story ends here. Regardless of whether this woman believes that her honor has been violated and that it can only be redeemed if her husband and his mistress are given a more frontier form of justice, such as a bullet in the arm, she is held back by her "social contract" with the government. As long as the government protects her life, liberty, and property, she is required to obey the law even when the results are not to her liking. Enter Friedman's anarcho-capitalism and all of a sudden we have an alternative to this woman going into therapy to get over her wounded sense of honor. She can break off services with Spencer Tracy's conventional modern justice protection agency and take up Katherine Hepburn's alternative protection agency, which offers its clients the option of choosing from its select line of vendetta specialists (otherwise known as hit-men) to bring them a more "personal" justice. Perhaps our woman can take a leaf from Shylock and prepare her scales to receive her pound of flesh and start sharpening her knife against her shoe. It is useless here to tell the woman that such actions are wrong because she believes that, in this case, she is in the right, and now she has a justice system to give her what is "rightfully" hers.


Libertarianism relies on the fact that people are usually rational in their economic activities and can shrug off the exceptions. These principles break down when it comes to tort law because it means handing decision making over to people who, in their current state, are, by definition, incapable of making rational decisions. Think of divorce cases with both parties engage in a mutually destructive conflict, consumed by a hatred for the other and egged on by their lawyers. Besides for being personal, divorce cases suffer from the fact that they lack clear expectations and rules of conduct. Allow someone to stew in their anger and they are likely to believe that they deserve nothing less than a pound of flesh and if their current venue does not give it to them, they will find one that will. Friedman's anarcho-capitalism would mean divorce style cases across the board with guns to boot.


I would also add a libertarian objection to Friedman's system. Libertarianism relies on a distinction between direct physical harm, which is the proper object of government intervention, and non-physical harm, which the government has no place in and which must be left to the individual to pursue privately through the social realm. (For example, our woman might not be able to use the government to punish her cheating husband, but she can still have him publically humiliated by being thrown out of his church or synagogue.) Once we turn to anarcho-capitalism, there is no longer any distinction between the political and social; everything becomes social. As such the protection system, coming to replace the government, will no longer be bound by physical harm. People can pursue "justice" for the non-physical harm done to them and keep looking for a protection agency that gives it to them until they find one.


If I were to hone in on the difference between David Friedman and I it is that Friedman approaches the issue squarely from an economics perspective. He assumes rational behavior on the part of his participants as they pursue their monetary self-interest. I come to the issue from political theory and therefore ask how it is that governments can carry innate authority. This is something outside of economics and outside of pure reason as the nature of the game is for everyone to buy into an illusion. This is strange because Friedman does not strike me as a narrow-minded economist. For one thing, in addition to his father and Friedrich Hayek, he also dedicates his book to Robert A. Heinlein. Friedman has a strong interest in science-fiction and fantasy and has even written some; my challenge to him is why has he not allowed these things to come over into his political writing to transcend the mere economist in him?

Libertarianism: The Healthy Choice for Single Hispanic Mothers

In response to my recent post on Milton Friedman, Miss S. asked about how someone like him would have dealt with the issue of health care. One of the things I so admire about Milton Friedman was that, unlike what you might think, he was motivated to advocate for libertarian positions in large part precisely because he cared so much about the poor and minorities, people without access to the establishment. Friedman was the son of working-class Jewish immigrants so this was something very personal for him. Friedman was a far greater thinker than I, but I think he would have approved of my sentiments regarding health care and how I would solve our health care crisis.

I have a younger brother, Mortimer Elliot, who is about to go into medical school. Unlike me, he is going to be the doctor who actually makes money. On this path though, he will spend years working miserable hours and contracting hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. What if Mortimer decided to skip medical school and set up shop as a non-licensed physician? Mortimer was a pre-med student in college and has worked as an intern in hospitals and even at the National Institute of Health. Without a doubt, he can handle basic issues of medical care. We are not talking about him performing brain surgery anytime soon. What we are talking about is him being able to give people basic checkups, figure out what is hurting them and advise his patients as to how to best pursue a healthy lifestyle.

Since Mortimer would be competing against doctors who have gone through medical school and have state-issued licenses he would have to charge less for his services and maybe even be willing to go to places that established physicians might shy away from; maybe a place like Washington Heights. In Washington Heights, you will find many poor Hispanic single mothers trying to make ends meet while raising their children. When faced with a child complaining of stomach pain or of a fever it would be very helpful to, instead of going to the emergency room or messing around with health insurance which they may or may not have, be able to go to Mortimer for help. For a very reasonable fee, say $10-$50 depending on the situation, Mortimer will be able to do so. The fact that Mortimer is cheaper and more accessible than established doctors means that people will come to him sooner with problems. This has the benefit of allowing him to catch and help prevent more serious issues.

Fraud will still be illegal even under a libertarian government so Mortimer will not be allowed to represent himself as anything besides someone with an undergraduate medical education. If he does he will go to jail. Since a libertarian government will be freeing all those sitting in jail on drug charges, many of whom just might be the fathers of some of the children in question, there will be plenty of resources to devote to going after those who commit fraud and we will have the jail space to keep such people behind bars for years to come.

Allowing poor Hispanic single mothers to have easier access to basic medical care and Mortimer to make an honest living sounds like an obviously good thing. The only problem with this idea is that right now one would run into some serious legal issues. So you have to ask yourself, who benefits from banning something that would benefit so many people. It is our medical establishment, full of wealthy white males, who benefit; they receive a monopoly on health care and can, therefore, charge inflated prices and offer inferior services. So being a libertarian means helping poor Hispanic single mothers to get better access to health care. Not being a libertarian means helping wealthy white doctors line their pockets at the expense of the health of the less fortunate. If being a liberal means supporting the poor and disadvantaged than the only option for a liberal of conscious is libertarianism.

For those interested, there are more clips available of Milton Friedman from other interviews and his show Free to Choose.

Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue Show 1979

Here is a clip of the late libertarian economist Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show in 1979. The main issue under discussion was a proposed government bailout of Chrysler. (It is funny how some things do not change in thirty years.) I would like to thank my cousin for sending this clip to me. I challenge anyone to watch the full program and come back and say that libertarianism does not offer a coherent and logical way out of our economic predicament.