How to Save the World

Fellow libertarians sometimes ask what is the best way of making the world more nearly what they and I want it to be. No answer is right for everyone because different people have different abilities, interests, tastes, but I can list a number of alternative tactics, each probably right for someone. I am offering them for libertarians but most, arguably all, would be equally appropriate for a socialist or conservative.

Political Activity

In a large polity such as the U.S. or one of its states, a single vote has very nearly no chance of changing the electoral outcome. When I vote, usually for the Libertarian candidate,¹ it is as a consumption activity, like a fan cheering for a football team. But although voting for a libertarian candidate has essentially no effect, running one may still be worth doing. Elections are a context where a lot of people are talking, some even thinking, about political issues, so running a libertarian candidate may be a good way of getting more people exposed to libertarian ideas.

Getting a libertarian elected to some prominent position, perhaps Congress, would be another way of getting attention for libertarian ideas. If one of our policies becomes popular enough to elect candidates, however, one or both of the major parties will adopt it, so we are unlikely to elect enough candidates to have much effect on legislative outcomes.

There is a second reason why we are unlikely to achieve libertarianism by the LP succeeding in electing a Libertarian president and congress. The political game is played for control over the collection and expenditure of trillions of dollars a year. If the Libertarian Party ever starts getting enough votes to elect candidates, even enough to consistently affect the balance of power between the major parties, true believers in the party hierarchy are likely to be gradually replaced by people mostly interested in making a living in the political marketplace and willing to adjust the party’s positions accordingly, towards the maximization of votes, not liberty. We already have two parties like that.²

Arguably the strategic model for the Libertarian Party of the 21^st century should be the Socialist Party of the 20^th century. They never elected their candidates to any office much more important than Mayor of Milwaukee³ but, over the course of the century, a considerable number of the policies they supported were adopted by the major parties.⁴

Litigation

A different approach to making our society more libertarian is litigation. The poster child for that project is the Institute for Justice,⁵ a libertarian public interest law firm that is the only organization to which I regularly donate money. They litigate against things such as eminent domain, civil forfeiture and professional licensing, occasionally persuading a court to establish a precedent that reduces government power. Even if they lose in the court, a high profile case in which the legal outcome is strikingly unjust may attract enough attention to persuade political actors to change the law. IJ lost Kelo v. City of New London but, in the process of losing it, brought attention to the abuse of eminent domain that the case was about, resulting in some state level legislation to restrict it.

Changing the mix of free information

Democracy is equipped, like a microscope, with a coarse control and a fine control. The fine control is special interest lobbying, the coarse control majority voting. It is coarse because of rational ignorance. Voters know their vote has a negligible effect on outcomes and so have no incentive to acquire the information they would need in order to do a good job of making sure that governments do good things instead of bad things. How they vote is largely driven by free information, what everyone knows, whether or not it is true.

Consider a few examples. "Everyone knows" that the 2008 financial crisis threatened economic catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression. It probably wasn't true — my guess is that the cure was more likely to create economic catastrophe than the disease it was supposed to be curing — but, true or false, a lot of people believed it. That made it politically possible for Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress, with some help from the Republican minority, to engage in a program of vastly expanded government spending financed mostly by a substantial increase in the national debt, a program that would not have been politically viable five or ten years earlier.

Or consider the longstanding issue of free trade vs protectionism. All economists know that tariffs, as a general rule with perhaps some exceptions, injure the country that imposes them. Everyone who isn't an economist knows that tariffs help the country that imposes them by protecting its industries from foreign competition and are bad only because other countries are likely to retaliate with tariffs of their own.

Part of the reason people see the issue that way is that the wrong analysis of foreign trade is easy to understand, the right analysis hard to understand, which is why the right analysis was not discovered until about two hundred years ago when David Ricardo worked out the logic of comparative advantage.

Since political outcomes are in part driven by the free information that affects the political cost of alternative policies, one way of influencing outcomes is by changing that free information. I suspect that one of the most important things I ever accomplished for public policy was to come up with a simple, intuitive explanation of the principle of comparative advantage and thus of why tariffs hurt us. To find it and see some evidence of how widely it gets quoted, google on "growing Hondas."

As a contribution to economic theory what I did was worthless, since it added nothing to what Ricardo worked out almost two hundred years earlier. But putting the argument in an easily understood, easily repeated, quotable form changes the content of the free information available to voters. It means that more of them will see support for an auto tariff as a reason to vote against a politician, fewer as a reason to vote for him, which makes it a little harder for the auto industry and their allies to get auto tariffs passed.

Another way of changing the mix of free information out there to is to write a novel or song, produce a movie or television series, containing the ideas you want to spread. Distinguished examples on the libertarian side would be the novels of Ayn Rand, the television series “Yes Minister” or, going farther back, the essays of H.L. Mencken. On the other side, George Bernard Shaw’s plays.

An alternative tactic is to influence the voters indirectly by influencing people the voters get their ideas from, university professors, high school teachers, newspaper reporters. That was the approach followed, with considerable success, by the progressive movement over the past few decades, with some but less success by Buchanan and Tullock’s work on public choice theory, Stigler’s on regulation. It is one obvious approach for a libertarian professor.

Casting My Bread on the Waters

A single talented individual, an Ayn Rand or Adam Smith, is worth more to a political movement than many millions of dollars spent on promoting its ideas. That raises the question of how to find and recruit such people. My approach is to make material that might interest and persuade as easy to find as possible. That is one reason that most of my work, including books, articles academic and popular, blog and Substack posts, along with video and audio recordings of a large number of my talks, is available for free on my web page.⁶ My intended target is a brilliant teenager in India, Vietnam, Nigeria, China, Brazil … who is unlikely to buy books, especially books in English, but might come across some part of what I have written online and get hooked by the ideas. Nowadays, with Google providing surprisingly good translation for free, he doesn’t even have to know English, although he probably does.

That is also a reason why libertarians should not post bad arguments for their views, however persuasive they sound. Bad arguments drive off readers intelligent enough to see through them.

Building Institutions

If something is being done by the government it is natural to assume that otherwise it would not get done. Abolishing the post office is more plausible now that everything except first class mail is being delivered by UPS and Federal Express. The existence of private commercial arbitration and private testing labs makes government courts and labs appear less essential. An easily usable privately produced money would make the need for government money less persuasive.

The public school system is a large industry run by governments. Its role in schooling children makes them likely to be taught views favorable to government. Its employees, through the teachers’ unions, are a powerful force in support of the Democratic party and left of center policies. An entrepreneur who produced a superior substitute, a model for an inexpensive private school that did a better job of educating children than the public schools, or produced other forms of education such as online classes that made home schooling more attractive, would, in the long run, do a great deal to reduce the influence of government.

Liberty Movement’s Missing Ingredient

That was the title of a talk at a libertarian event I recently attended. Extrapolating from the part of the talk I heard, the speaker thought the missing ingredient was a proper philosophical defense of liberty, probably along Objectivist lines.

I have a different answer.

Political activity, the attempt to change the world in a libertarian direction — or a socialist or environmentalist or conservative direction for that matter — faces a public good problem. My efforts, if successful, will make the world better not only for me but for many others. As with other public goods, the producer bears the cost of production but receives only a tiny fraction of the benefit. Why would anyone do it?

One solution to the public good problem is to pay the production cost with side benefits, making the net cost negative. In the case of a political movement too far out of power to offer patronage jobs or a step towards political office as a reward, the main side benefit is social. You are working on a common project with people who share your values. Doing that is fun — and a good way of making friends.

Not just friends. Mate search is, for obvious evolutionary reasons, one of the main human activities. A political movement is a good place to do it. Most humans are heterosexual, so to optimize a political movement for mate search you need roughly equal numbers of men and women.

The libertarian movement is, in that respect, far from the optimum. On one of my past European speaking trips I was accompanied by my wife; while I gave a talk she counted the house. On average, the m:f ration was about ten to one. The U.S. incarnation of Students for Liberty does better than that, or at least did a few years ago when I attended several of their conferences, possibly 2:1. When I asked one of the women running a conference how they did it she told me the trick was to get the men to dress decently.

The talk on the movement’s missing ingredient was at a European Students for Liberty conference event in Tbilisi, Georgia, which may explain why my answer to his question did not occur to the speaker. Georgia is, judging by casual observation on two visits, the one country in the world where libertarian women outnumber libertarian men.⁷

The missing ingredient in the liberty movement is women.

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1. Some years back I received campaign material from a Democratic congressional candidate listing all of the terrible things her Republican opponent was in favor of. I was in favor of all of them, so thought it only fair to vote for him.

2. For a longer discussion of that issue, see Chapter 47 of The Machinery of Freedom.

3. They also elected two congressmen.

4. Platform of the Social Democratic Party of America, 1900. At least the sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth demands are now supported by both major parties.

The Socialist Party Platform of 1912. Items 1,2,4,8, and 9 of the industrial demands and 1,2,4,12,13,14 of the political demands are supported, in part or whole, by both parties. 

5. Discussed in an earlier post.

6. The Mises Institute follows the same approach with material they control.

7. My research has not yet established how they do it but I am working on the problem. I have suggested to the Georgians that they should be importing libertarian men or exporting libertarian women but, so far as I know, they have not yet taken me up  on it.