Brian Doherty: Completely Wrong and Nothing New

I'm trying to decide if I want to purchase Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. I've skimmed through two chapters in my local Barnes and Noble.

The book begins with a falsehood. On the first page of the introduction, Doherty states that Social Security is unsustainable in its current form. Not too further into the introduction, he has "libertarians" building on classical liberals. In this context, Doherty makes the false statement that classical economists depicted markets as bringing about social harmony. No, neither Adam Smith nor David Ricardo depicted members of different classes as having harmonious interests.

I also looked at the chapter on the Austrian economists. My problem here was that I know this story in too much detail. I doubt I would learn much new from Doherty's account.

So I'm leaning against purchasing Doherty's book.

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Why No More Great "Libertarian" Economists?

"...What distinguishes the new generation [e.g., Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Richard Freeman] of policy-relevant mainstream economists? They are not, alas, philosophical Keynesians. But they often arrive at Keynesian policies by elaborate neoclassical routes - by building asymmetric information or increasing returns or externalities into an otherwise orthodox model and tracing through the implications. They combine a facility with this method and an openness to empirical observation, the choice of important cases, and a willingness to tackle hard problems of policy design and to consider ingenious solutions to particular policy problems. Moreover, they are willing to devote time and energy to explaining the issues to a larger public - whether in economic policy journals like Challenge or broader public forums like The New York Times. In these respects they do resemble Keynes, who remains the ultimate example of a modern economist who could do it all.

So what is the problem over there on the libertarian side? Klein is right: there is a problem - the libertarians are strangely quiet these days. One might think that new libertarian voices would emerge in the Bush era, when many actual libertarians are closer to state power than ever before. But no. There are no new Friedmans, no Hayeks, no Wanniskis, no Gilders to chorus in the new regime, to lend it an air (badly needed one might add) of intellectual authority.

I think I know the reason. The libertarians, let me suggest, have lost the courage of their convictions. Libertarian followers of Lucas, unlike, say, those of Tullock, rarely speak on public questions for a simple and well-considered reason. What they do is, indeed, very implausible. It cannot be conveyed to the ordinary literate and sensible person because, once the assumptions are spelled out, the ordinary literate and sensible person will reject them.

Furthermore, no one any longer believes Milton Friedman's old methodological saw about false assumptions being irrelevant - so long as the 'implications' are valid. The point made against Friedman long ago by Tjalling Koopmans - that this allows one to escape difficulties by reclassifying unpersuasive implications as assumptions - is elementary enough to be grasped intuitively by those who will never read Koopmans. Better to be a scholastic, in short, than a figure of fun.

A second group of scholastics is silent on policy questions for a different reason: the scholasticism that is increasingly up-and-coming inside economics no longer supports the libertarian view. It would be quite dangerous for a serious student of, say, game theory or non-linear dynamics or of models with multiple equilibria to delve too deeply into the policy implications of such work. Such forms of modern economics simply no longer support the libertarian political viewpoint, and to make this too widely known would greatly jeopardize right-wing support for mainstream economic research..." -- James K. Galbraith (2001). "Response from an Economist who also Favors Liberty", Eastern Economic Journal, V. 27, Iss. 2: 227-299.

Galbraith's paper is part of a symposium. The symposium is organized around comments on a paper by Daniel B. Klein. Gordon Tullock, Deidre McCloskey, Israel Kirzner, Charles Goodhart, Robert Frank, and James Galbraith provide the comments.

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Libertarianism Versus "Libertarianism"

One might meet, in certain precincts of the Internet, soi-disant libertarians. As far as I am concerned, "libertarians" of this stripe are victims of commodity fetishim, and they have stolen the label. Traditionally, a libertarian is an anarchist, that is a kind of socialist. For example, Maureen Stapleton plays a libertarian in Warren Beatty's movie Reds. Anarchists, generally, do not have Ludwig Von Mises in their pantheon of heroes.

"...readers should take ... particular warning that I am absolutely not against freedom. On the contrary, I am for it. Libertarians ... think they are for freedom but they don't know what freedom is. In reality, their doctrine is so contrary to freedom that it ought to be entitled 'anti-libertarianism'. The thief comes in innocent disguise, but the beautiful garment is stolen. (The Right are good at that sort of thing.) So, if you want to make your copy of this book read more accurately, you should delete 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism' throughout, substituting 'anti-libertarian' and 'anti-libertarianism' as you go. For 'anti-libertarianism', etc., you should substitute 'anti-anti-libertarianism'. Unfortunately, this would make the book cumbersome to read, so I haven't followed the advice myself except in my choice of title, where my subject is named according to its true nature." -- Alan Haworth, Anti-Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy, and Myth, Routledge, 1994: 5

Haworth does have more substantial points. Warning: this is political philosophy for those who think "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him" is a thesis worth discussing and who are comfortable with thought experiments which might lead one to be willing to say that a rock feels pain. Nevertheless Haworth is quite readable. (As an example of unreadable philosophy strongly following the later Wittgenstein, I cite John Wisdom's Other Minds.) I realize that those interested in political philosophy and "Libertarianism" should also read Robert Nozick.

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