Left-Libertarianisms

A liberal in the 19^th century was a believer in small government, free markets, and individual freedom, roughly what we now call a libertarian.^¹ “Libertarian” had earlier been used for left anarchists, still earlier for believers in the doctrine of free will. In the mid-20^th Century, after opponents of liberalism stole its name, believers in classical liberalism started calling themselves libertarians.

While “libertarian” can still mean a left anarchist, “left libertarian” usually means a libertarian in the newer sense who supports ideas or policies usually identified with the left. The oldest and probably best worked out doctrine along those lines is Geolibertarianism, based on the ideas of Henry George, a prominent Nineteenth Century economist and journalist. Its central tenet is that since no individual has a just claim to the income from the site value of land, government ought to support itself by taxing all and only that income.² The amount of money needed by a government, at least in the view of a libertarian, is much less than the total produced by such a tax, leaving the rest free to be distributed among the population. Thus the Georgist position provides an argument for some level of what others would regard as income redistribution.

Libertarians mostly base ownership on creation — I made it so it’s mine — but land, with rare exceptions, is not created by humans. John Locke famously argued that humans acquire ownership over land by mixing their labor with it, clearing the jungle or digging out the boulders, provided that there is as much and as good unowned land left for others, but that solution raises a number of problems. One is the question of why mixing your labor, or anything else you own, with something gives you ownership of it. As Robert Nozick put it, “If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules … mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?”

A second problem is the Lockean proviso, the requirement that your act of appropriation leaves “enough and as good left in common for others.” That is unlikely to be true of land in any densely settled country, which seems to imply that the conversion of land from commons to property must stop as soon as the amount of commons becomes small enough that reducing it farther means that people can no longer wander over the commons, feed their pigs on its acorns, collect deadwood, as well as before. A possible response is that the condition is satisfied as long as everyone is better off than he would be if all the land had remained commons, that the large gain from the greatly increased production due to treating land as property can be set against the loss from a reduction in the amount of land in the commons.

The Georgist solution raises problems too. Not only did I not create the land, we did not create it either, so how is the government entitled to give someone the right to exclude people from land that neither he nor the government justly owns? Readers who share my interest in the issue may want to look at a chapter of mine in which I offered my own not entirely satisfactory solution.

Left Libertarians: A Typology

Limiting it to libertarians in the modern sense,³ there are at least four categories of left libertarians:

The Bleeding Heart Libertarians, discussed in an earlier post, have constructed versions of libertarianism designed to be acceptable to the academic left, their fellow philosophy professors.

The left libertarians who view themselves as the heirs of the individualist socialists of the Nineteenth Century have constructed a version, and a presentation, designed to appeal to people who would describe themselves as socialists, more nearly the left of the labor movement than of the academy; they were the subject of my previous post. The Geolibertarians, Georgists, are distinguished not by their target audience but by their argument, offering their solution to the problem of initial appropriation as a justification for taxation to support both needed government functions and what other libertarians would view as income redistribution.

The fourth group are distinguished not by their view of libertarian doctrine, which is conventional, but by their view of everything else. They are likely to regard themselves as feminists, to be concerned with racism and climate, to favor same sex marriage. On what might be loosely described as culture war issues they take the side identified with the left.⁴

The groups have some overlap of members and ideas. Bleeding Heart Libertarians make use of Georgist arguments to justify income transfers. Members of the first two groups are likely to agree with the left on some culture war issues, making them at least fringe members of the fourth.

Verbal Plumage

Identification of left libertarian variants is most easily done by text, not garb or physical appearance. Bleeding Heart Libertarians speak respectfully of Rawls, whose name appears nowhere in Markets Not Capitalism, a book by members of the second group. “Boss” appears forty-five times in the book but its only appearance in the contributions by Bleeding Hearts to the Cato symposium I shared with them was a reference to the book’s subtitle and “Boss” makes no appearance in Progress and Poverty, the founding document of Georgism. References to the ruling class and the oppression of workers are more likely to appear in the rhetoric of my second and fourth groups than in that of other libertarians.

One More Category

The people discussed so far mostly self-identify as left-libertarians; there are also people who think of themselves as leftists but have been convinced by, or worked out for themselves, enough of the libertarian argument to be in some sense libertarians. Examples would be Cass Sunstein, who occasionally describes himself as a libertarian, Larry Lessig, whom I have occasionally tried to persuade that he should, and Kelsey Piper and Scott Alexander, prominent figures in the rationalist community. James Scott, author of at least two books that I and many other libertarians like, was arguably another example, despite his efforts to make it clear to his readers that he is not one of those icky libertarians.

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1. Nineteenth century liberals also favored expansion of the franchise. Modern libertarians mostly take no position on the details of democracy.

2. Two recent books, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism and Left-Libertarianism and its Critics, both edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, discuss Georgism, aka geolibertarianism, and other positions along similar lines.

3. More precisely its modern American sense. “Liberal” in Europe retains something close to its old meaning and “Libertarian” is more likely than in America to still be applied to left anarchists.

4. Not-left Libertarians are likely to agree with the left on some culture war issues, disagree on others, hence it would be misleading to describe all of them as right libertariansPast posts, sorted by topic

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

A search bar for text in past posts and much of my other writing.