I am a great admirer of your work and thank you for the tremendous job you are doing in raising the level of public discourse and, importantly, combating the cultural Marxist nonsense emanating from academe. Your exposition of the hypertruth of ancient religious narratives has had a transformative effect on my thinking, and through it you have, in my opinion, single-handedly shifted the broad societal debate on religion from the mundane, unproductive sphere of factual historicity to its proper domain of analysis — namely, from “is it true?” to “in what ways is it true and why is that important?” Additionally, your popularization of psychological insights has rendered an inestimable service to millions by helping them improve their lives in fields as diverse as parenting, mental health, motivation, and life and career planning.
Despite my profound admiration, however, I must humbly disagree with a recent statement of yours and hope that you will permit me to bring a somewhat nuanced point to your attention. In your interview with Katharine Birbalsingh, you criticized the Libertarian right for its ostensibly naïve faith in the beneficence of individual liberty:
“The Libertarian Right suffers from the delusion that if you just let people make choices, including market choices, that everything will work out for the best. But they don’t understand (and they should understand) that even the small ‘l’ liberals whose ideas they’re essentially utilizing understood that that individual freedom was only possible in a society that was moored [as a ship moored in a harbor is thereby prevented from drifting off into oblivion]. Once the game rules are in place, then everybody can be free to play; but if you can’t agree on the damn rules, you don’t have freedom, you have counterproductive, chaotic, revolutionary anarchy, and then you’re done [as a society].”
You correctly assert that productive cooperation requires rules, that classical liberals and the philosophy of liberalism provided the ideological foundation for the modern libertarian movement, and that those classical liberals could broadly be described as minarchists who believed that a minimal state was necessary to uphold said rules (through the courts, police and military). But the rejection of governmental rulemaking is distinct from the rejection of rules per se, as I presently aim to show.
The Libertarian right differs from the left-leaning libertarian movements precisely in its high regard for rules, traditions and natural hierarchies (i.e., those grounded in competence and thus arising organically). You would likely call the movement temperamentally conservative, though it is often at odds with political conservatism; for example, many Republican policies lead to an increase in the size and scope of government and are thus incongruent with libertarian principles.
Society arises as a higher-order consequence of the intentional cooperation between individuals reacting, more or less consciously, to the law of comparative advantage. Under conditions of voluntary, two-party exchange, two unequal parties will both derive increases in productivity if each specializes in that productive undertaking to which he is comparatively better suited. Crucially, this advantage holds even in cases where one party is absolutely superior in both productive undertakings. The more individuals specialize and trade, the better they are able to provide for their children and pursue eudaemonia. Consequently, the minimum necessary “game rules” for the existence and flourishing of any society are those on which the law of comparative advantage depends — namely, the protection of life, liberty and property. Note that if we conceive of the rights to life and liberty as consequences of self-ownership, as many on the Libertarian right do, then these three conditions condense into one fundamental principle — namely, the protection of property rights.
The State, defined as the institution that combines territorial monopolies on ultimate decision-making and taxation, provides a vehicle for some to benefit at the expense of others. On the free, unhampered market, the only way for an individual to lastingly increase his level of consumption (i.e., his and his family’s quality of life) is to first increase his level of production, and then either consume what he has himself produced or trade it for someone else’s property. In either case, the total amount of goods increases, resulting in a positive-sum game. But if someone can be forced to give up his property (i.e., taxation), then nothing need be given in exchange, which leads to a negative-sum game). Once this coercive mechanism is in place, everyone is incentivized to not only minimize the damage he will suffer from it but also to use it to his advantage, for by using the state as an intermediary, it is possible to increase one’s consumption without increasing production. If the state makes it illegal for others to compete with you, there will be greater demand for your wares; if enough politicians agree that you should be compensated for the enslavement of your ancestors, then someone else can be forced to subsidize your lifestyle, etc.
Such an incentive landscape is inimical to the cultivation of traditions, which are the tried-and-true best practices of our ancestors, filtered through the ages and raised to a kind of intergenerational art form. A healthy society builds upon such traditions and is able to pass down increasingly rich and meaningful collections of rituals, customs, rules and aspirational ideals to its heirs. But the systematic violation of property rights that arises in response to the incentives attaching to any state apparatus leads to the opposite; it pulls the carpet out from under the feet of the most productive members of society and raises time preferences by penalizing conservative, nonparasitic behavior. Left unchecked, it leads to the disintegration of social cohesion once a critical mass of individuals realizes that relative autarky offers better prospects for their children’s flourishing than participation in a society run by an increasingly tyrannical, legalized mafia.
Importantly, there is no way for a state to exist without violating the very property rights the state is supposed to to protect. Luckily, however, while governance is essential to a well-functioning society, monopolized coercion is not, and all the services currently being provided by the state can be provided better and cheaper on a voluntary, contractual basis without giving rise to those same perverse incentives: from infrastructure and courts to police and even the military. Special economic zones and private cities like Próspera are proving that governance is too important to be left to governments.
In light of such considerations, the socially conservative libertarian concludes that government is an ill-suited means to the ends he desires; only if they are voluntarily maintained on an individual basis can tradition, virtue and morality be preserved in the long run. That, in turn, requires that they prove themselves to be long-term value-enhancing to new adopters in every generation, and as far as the game rules are concerned, that the wheat be separated from the chaff. Thus, right-wing libertarians do not believe, as you contended, that there should be no rules. Rather, their understanding of the importance of rules means that they also know that not just any rules will do; only net-beneficial rules that justify the short-term sacrifices they incur must be handed down “l’dor vador,” from generation to generation. The freedom to ignore rules in principle is the necessary safeguard to ensure that only such rules are handed down which thereby fosters a general respect for tradition over time. State interference, on the other hand, invariably gives rise to net-detrimental rules that benefit only special interests and consequently engenders in the populace an attitude of justified skepticism toward rule following.
In politics as in economics, one must always consider the marginal unit. In terms of the current discussion, that means asking what specific rule should be applied in which specific situation. One size cannot fit all for all time, and the process by which better solutions replace inferior ones requires that, in principle, anyone with a new idea be capable of bringing it to market (i.e., that there be no entry barriers). When the state makes a rule, it forbids some solution to everyone, thereby hampering the dynamic discovery process by which consumer sovereignty is established — i.e., by which potential solutions compete to find situations in which they are best suited in the minds of those affected. Similarly, without governmental rules, communities will develop and adjust the game rules for their members, cultivating net-beneficial traditions and building civilization in the process. The insight of the Libertarian right is that we can only have such authentically good rules if we do not hamper the process that creates them and so must reject governmental rules, which necessarily distort and corrupt it.
