All too many libertarians aren't actually interested in libertarian policy. That's fine insofar as they don't hurt libertarian policy, but there exist in the world a brand of not-so-serious libertarians that can't accept anything but perfect policy on issues such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In doing so, they hold back any hope of the evolution of libertarian policies.
Matters of policy are always going to be about the adjacent possible. They’re going to be about making marginal changes that accumulate over time. In this sense, states do evolve. They do accumulate tiny variations, whether useful or not, and their forms are changed across the generations as a result of that accumulation of variation. The point of good public policy, or statesmanship if you will, is ensuring that the best marginal changes happen.
For libertarians, policy should largely about choosing the policy that ranks higher in liberty. As a political program, libertarianism can largely be collapsed into a single principle: The liberty principle, exhorting people to support the policy that ranks higher in liberty. Yet for many libertarians, that isn’t enough. Instead, they only option that can be considered is an option that ranks 100% in liberty. For them, politics is about utopia or nothing.
N. Stephen Kinsella is one such libertarian. In “Trans Pacific Partnership is about Control, Not Free Trade,” Mr. Kinsella argues that the “TPP is just the latest instance of the US federal government employing its post-WWII dominance to advance the interests of the music, movie, and pharmaceutical industries in the US, at the expense of US consumers and foreigners.” He argues that the only acceptable libertarian position would be unilateral trade:
A real free trade policy would amount to a couple of sentences, not thousands of pages: one nation announcing that all imports and exports to and from that nation are to be exempt from duties, controls, quotas, tariffs. That is free trade. Instead, we have the managed trade of the last 60-70 years.
However, Mr. Kinsella seems to be utterly blind about the state of free trade as an issue in America. A large chunk of the population don’t even like slightly open trade. Unilateral free trade is simply not attainable in the nation Mr. Kinsella and I live in. Curse out the people for that, try to educate them and do whatever else one may desire to do, unilateral free trade is suddenly not going to become a policy any politician can successfully commit himself to. Barack Obama, normally an enemy of libertarian reform, has had to work quite hard and defy his own party to get the reform that’s on the table right now. Yet, because it doesn’t correspond with Mr. Kinsella’s ideal, he rejects it.
Normally, libertarians are very good at calling out when other people use the nirvana fallacy in support of government encroachment, but they tend to be as utopian as anyone else when talking about what they like. Harold Demsetz coined the term ’Nirvana fallacy’ in his paper, “Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint,” writing: “The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing "imperfect" institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice is between alternative real institutional arrangements.”
The libertarianism of Mr. Kinsella falls victim to such a view. Rather than thinking about how policies affect liberty on the margins, he merely considers 100% cases. His libertarianism is a Nirvana libertarianism and it actively hurts any chance of libertarian reform in the world people live in by preventing marginal reforms for liberty.
Overall, as attested to by “Trans Pacific Partnership is about Control, Not Free Trade,” Mr. Kinsella isn’t a very serious libertarian. He may write on libertarian policy, but he fails to grasp the basic fact that all matters of policy are about marginal changes. It’s about evolution and the accumulation of slight variations that drive any evolutionary process. It’s a shame that such not-so-serious people tend to dominate the discussion about liberty.
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