I have written before about the libertarian left, but have not gone into great detail about the many contradictory aspects of this philosophy. However, as it has become much more common on the internet, and as my own philosophy incorporates some aspects of libertarianism¹, I feel it is time to examine this philosophy and point out why the two elements make such a poor fit, and why, if one is consistent, libertarianism cannot incorporate the elements adopted by the libertarian left.

The libertarian left is something of an ill-defined philosophy². In some ways, they are akin to other libertarians, including one element of traditional libertarianism with which I disagree, the almost pathological fear of government ("Third Party Problems"). However, the left libertarians make a common mistake, and confuse economic and political power ("Economic and Political Power Revisited", "Power - Political and Economic", "Greed Versus Evil"), and so often adopt a fear of business as well, especially fear of big business ("Fear of the "Big"") This sometimes leads to the contradictory position of a group openly opposed to government power endorsing government measures to curb business. In addition, despite their fear of government, many on the libertarian left are open to some degree of welfare state measures, though they often differ as to specifics.

The other area in which the libertarian left differs from other libertarians is that they tend to go beyond the strictly political, or politico-economic, and, unlike most tradition libertarians, have positions concerning religion and culture³. Part of this is due to their confusion of social and political power, managing to confuse authority voluntarily given to religious leaders with power coercively held by the state, and thus they tend to distrust all sources of authority, whether that authority is held through persuasion, tradition or force. But another part is likely due to an iconoclastic streak that runs through the libertarian left, a rather juvenile "revolutionary" philosophy, similar to the one I described in "Why We Need Adults". As a result, the libertarian left tends to automatically distrust any appeals to tradition or cultural norms, no matter how well founded or justified⁴.

Finally, the libertarian left, though not uniform in this regard, is more prone to accept the theories of monetary cranks than traditional libertarians. While most on the right tend to favor gold standards, with a handful of monetarists, Chicago school devotees and other "conservative" mildly interventionist schemes, the libertarian left tends to have a wider range of theories⁵. While some mirror the right, most are prone to fear banking and bankers, just as they fear all businesses. As a result they tend to accept strange theories, be it for land banks, automatically depreciating currency or other bizarre schemes. That such schemes end up granting power to the government is over looked, again.

So, having defined, as much as possible, what makes up the libertarian left⁶, it should be immediately obvious what one of the problems is. As was stated several times above, their confusion of political power with economic and social power, with any sort of authority at all, often leads them, despite their fear of government, into handing power back to the state. Not that they admit this. Often, as with monetary crank theories, such as "decaying currency", they propose plans without thinking about the truth behind implementing them.

Let me give an example.

One theory that enjoyed currency a long while ago -- in the 1960s and 1970s -- was money which decayed in value over time. The idea being that interest tended to favor the accumulation of great fortunes, favoring the rich, and a decaying currency would instead favor consumption, increasing economic activity and penalizing those who simply accumulated wealth. Ignoring for a moment the very real, and quite numerous⁷, economic objections against this theory, the question remains, once you create a "decaying currency", how is it implemented? And that is where the libertarian left often gives back power to the government without realizing it. as money can't be made to decay on its own, and people would not accept such a poor store of value unless forced to do so, so any theory such as this requires the government be given control of establishing the value of currency, ensuring it decays and forcing individuals to use it. In short, though they don't consider it, the theory proposed hands a lot of power to the state.

And the same is true of most of the libertarian left political repertoire. They make propositions, such as "CEOs should not be allowed to incorporate golden parachutes" or "companies should be required to provide health care", but they then forget that implementing such a scheme requires handing power to the state. And the same is true of the many vague environmentalist yearnings of many on the libertarian left. They propose solutions, but ignore the fact that such solutions involve giving the state much more power than they claim the state should have.

And in the end that is the reality of left libertarianism. While the rhetoric is libertarian, in practice there would be no difference between a traditional liberal and a left libertarian. The many proposals to control companies, religion, polluters and others would end up granting so much power to the state that the results of a consistent libertarian left government would be no different from a traditional left wing state.


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1. This is not the place to elaborate upon my personal political philosophy. In a nutshell, I believe we would be best served by a state which limited itself to police, military and courts, and which interested itself only in protecting rights and adjudicating civil disputes. On the other hand, as I described "Why I Am Not A Libertarian", I believe the libertarian approach, imposing freedom centrally, is the wrong approach, and so I support a federalist approach, for a number of reasons, even if every state or locality might not adopt a fully libertarian position. You can find more detailed analysis in "My Vision of Government", "My Vision of Government Part II", "The Benefits of Federalism", "Prelude", "A Simple Proposal" and "An Analogy For Government". I may shortly write a more coherent, integrated description of my philosophy and reasons for adopting federalism over libertarianism, but for now those essays provide the best summary of my thoughts.

2. In "Revelation From Bottom Feeding" I described the libertarian left thus:

It is a common enough perspective on the internet, probably the official philosophy of most "geek" sites and many teen and twenty-something pages, that strange mix of liberty worship, including and almost obsessive fascination with open source code, and a fear of "power". Unfortunately, by not distinguishing between economic and political power,t hey often try to take power form government with one hand, while giving it back in spades with the other, in order to "fight corporate power".

That is probably as much of a definition as we need. Since they themselves tend to lack a coherent guiding philosophy, coming together based more on a cluster of common beliefs, it is rather hard to define them with logical rigor.

3. To be completely fair, the Objectivists, because they adopt a full philosophy including explicit atheism, tend to have religious aspects to their philosophy, as well as positions on many cultural questions. But they are a small minority on the right, and, though explicitly atheist, do not often adopt political positions based on that philosophy. So, while the libertarian left not only adopts positions but acts upon them, the Objectivists adopt such positions, but they rarely result in political positions. Still, most of the right wing of libertarianism does not adopt explicit religious or cultural positions, seeing such questions are best left to individuals and thus irrelevant to a political-economic system.

4. Some may object that appeals to tradition are always invalid, but that is a bizarre position. Traditions exist for a reason, and often for the obvious reason that they have functioned effectively for a very long time. As I described in "In Defense of Standards" and "Addenda to "In Defense of Standards"", before rejecting tradition outright we must show that the replacement is a better choice. However the libertarian left often adopts the very opposite position, assuming tradition is always suspect and needs to be justified before one follows it.

5. There are some ostensibly right wing monetary cranks, but most do not fall into the libertarian right, instead being "paleo-cons" and other protectionist groups. Among libertarians, the support for fringe monetary theories is almost entirely on the right. (There may be a few very fringe technocratic solutions adopted by a handful of right-leaning libertarians, but they are so unusual I can't even think of one such current theory off the top of my head.)

6. I ignored the largely anti-military attitude of the libertarian left, as it is not distinguishing. Many libertarians of all stripes have a fear of the military, especially those who have a fear of government, so being anti-military hardly distinguishes the libertarian left. And so I ignored it.

7. To give a brief summary. First, anyone living under such a scheme would try to hold no cash, exchanging it for something having constant value, then converting back to currency only immediately before making a purchase. Ignoring this, the system has many other issues. For example, by preventing the gradual accumulation of capital, it make starting new ventures and investing almost impossible and would lead to a collapse of the capital market. There is simply no way to make the ludicrous theory workable. Which is probably why after a brief period of currency it vanished and is now almost forgotten outside of the "Illuminati" series of science fiction novels.

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POSTSCRIPT

My prior writing on this topic can be found in my posts "Copyright as Politics", "The Failure of Wikipedia", "Some Libertarian Analogies", "Liquid Ice? Female Father? That's Nothing!", "Revelation From Bottom Feeding" and "The Political Spectrum".

POSTSCRIPT II

I am sure some left libertarians could raise objections against specific elements of my essay, mainly because there are so many minor variations in the left libertarian philosophy. For example, the monetary nonsense I used as an example is currently proposed by no one, so I am sure some critics would find fault with it, but I offered it only as an example. Modern left libertarians propose theories which, while perhaps a bit less absurd, still implicitly require just as much government involvement.

And that is the truth. Ignoring the specific details, left libertarianism is simply incompatible with liberty. Once you talk of limiting business or limiting the "power" of anything but the state, you are talking of giving power to the state, and you are no longer a libertarian. The details don't really matter at that point. It is the confusion of economic and political power which is both the defining characteristic of the libertarian left and which lies at the root of all the incompatibilities between the theory and liberty. So, by definition, the libertarian left is simply incapable of proposing a truly libertarian system, at least not so long as they seek to limit "economic power" (or "social power") in any way. And if they don't, then they cease to be left libertarians and become simple libertarians once more.