Politics and Virtue: Positive and Negative Libertarianism

Why do we believe in liberty? Not as a question of natural rights versus consequentialism – that’s a different debate entirely. There are two ways to answer this question that cross the lines of the aforementioned argument:

• “I believe in liberty because I have faith in my fellow man that unconstrained, the market will drive society towards universal opulence.”
• “I believe in liberty because I have no faith in my fellow man to wield unconstrained power in any respect.”

Is human nature fundamentally good or bad? It’s no historical accident that belief in human perfectibility was the driving force behind the rise (as well as the cause of the failure) of Progressivism. Nor is it an inconsequential point that a free market does not require men to be virtuous in order to function:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

The Public Choice school of thought extends this reasoning to politics. As foolish as it is to rely on the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, and baker, why would we rely on the benevolence of the politician? We have to depend on institutions, not people.

Negative Libertarianism also quells the utopian vision of a lot of market theorists. The market is composed of people, and will not necessary achieve Pareto efficiency at all times. Anarcho-Capitalists and other market apologists waste a lot of time convincing themselves of the positive benefits of liberty – unrealistic benefits, in a lot of cases (I have never seen the public goods problem convincingly solved or explained away, for example). The real issue, as the Public Choice school would put it, is that though market failure can be bad, government failure is necessarily always worse. It is so because a government is sovereign, and except for token elections in democracies, mostly unconstrained.

C.S. Lewis sums up the distinction in a passage on Democracy. The idea, however, is pertinent to any kind of political or economic liberty.

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.

I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true … I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation…

The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns (emphasis mine).

The distinction is also salient when considering the self, instead of one’s fellows. Consider these two statements illustrating the same dichotomy in different form:

• “I believe in liberty because no one can tell me my good better than I can.”
• “I believe in liberty because though men can be brought to the stream of virtue, they cannot be made to drink of it.”

A negative Libertarianism, opposed to both positive Libertarianism and any other political theory, is also required by a Christian concept of virtue. As the doctrine of total depravity leads a Christian to a particular answer of why he believes in liberty, so the doctrine of unconditional election must lead the Christian to believe in liberty in the first place.

Classical political theory was fixated on virtue – on the system of government which produced the most virtuous citizens. It came to be defined in different ways as we entered the modern age, but except for a brief remission during the reign of Classical Liberal thought, virtue politics, in one form or another, has never left the minds of the intelligentsia.

Even today virtue politics in various forms is inflicted upon Americans from both sides of our false political dichotomy. The Right presumes to impose a semblance of morality on the people by prohibiting all manner of immoral behaviors, and the left presumes to save us from ourselves by regulating behavior after behavior in the name of public health, pity, or whatever else the common good requires this week.

Again, Lewis aptly describes the situation:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock.

The errors of both sides can be easily exploded by anyone with an inkling of Christian virtue as a system of virtue ethics and not of deontology. As virtue is internal, external coercion is totally ineffective at promoting real virtue. And as election is the unconditional choice of God, as well as the only source of true virtue, the state must necessarily be totally irrelevant towards that end. Indeed, this point is why the Protestant Reformation was instrumental in the rise of political liberty in the West: it relieved the state of the duty to make men virtuous, and thus paved the way for the erection of the separation between church and state.

Positive Libertarianism, on the other hand, takes the economically descriptive notion of subjective value and makes an existential claim of it. It’s fairly obvious that a totally relativistic value system is entirely incompatible with the Christian faith and with the idea of God as Summum Bonum. It is an arrogance that ultimately stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of divine authority.

To ape a quote from Winston Churchill, “The market is the worst form of social organization, except for all the other forms”. We will not achieve utopia on this earth under any system, as if men could by their own will and intellect bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. And yet, we may (and indeed must) be ardent believers in liberty without sacrificing the idea that God is the highest and only good.