Part two in a series to divide and illuminate. Why do we believe in liberty? Not as a question of natural rights versus consequentialism – that’s a different debate entirely. There are (at least) two fundamental ways to answer this question that cross both sides 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.

As a Christian, the only proper answer to the question is the second. For all his brilliant work on spontaneous order, F.A. Hayek held to a very positive Libertarianism; was unduly optimistic about human nature. James Buchanan and the Public Choice school, on the other hand, have a great conception of negative Libertarianism: whatever good guy you give power to, you have to be prepared for that power to be used badly as well. 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 fail at times. It’s not a panacea – 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 (the public goods problem, for example). The real issue, as the Public Choice school would put it, is that though market failure can be bad, government failure is always worse. It is so because a government is sovereign: it faces little to no competitive pressure in its internal endeavors; nothing to constrain it.

We will not achieve utopia on this earth under any system, as if we could by our own will and intellect bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. It is unrealistic to expect any system to live up to that ideal. In truth, to ape a quote from Winston Churchill, “The market is the worst system there is, except for all the other ones”.