Visions of Liberty

Aaron Ross Powell, Paul Matzko

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948647267
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Ideologie politiche

Noted scholars and advocates of liberty offer inspiring visions of a more libertarian world.

Regardless of our political commitments, we all want the world to be better. We want people everywhere to be healthier, happier, safer, and more prosperous than ever before. Political liberty?the freedom to live our lives as we want while affording others the right to do the same, free from the heavy hand of the state?is the best way to achieve that goal.

Visions of Liberty is more than just an introduction to the broad scope of political liberty. It will leave you with a strong sense?a clear vision?of what the application of genuine libertarian policies looks like in practice.

Our contributors take different approaches. Some look to the past, pointing out how things worked before government got involved. Others look forward, offering future histories that describe how things could play out if we make certain choices. But each of them shares the fi rm belief that when freed from the meddlesome and coercive hand of the state, people can do amazing things. Liberty unleashes our drive for ingenuity and sense of compassion. This radical vision of a world that might be is truly worth striving for.

1

Poverty and Welfare

Michael D. Tanner

The stereotypes of libertarian attitudes toward the poor range from indifference to outright hostility. Yet a libertarian world would offer the poor a greater opportunity to escape poverty, become self-sufficient, and attain their full potential than does our current government-run social welfare system.

A libertarian approach to fighting poverty would be very different from our current one, which primarily consists of throwing money at the problem. This year, federal, state, and local governments will spend more than $1 trillion to fund more than 100 separate anti-poverty programs.¹ In fact, since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty 52 years ago, anti-poverty programs have cost us more than $23 trillion.² That’s a huge sum of money by any measure.

Although far from conclusive, the evidence suggests that this spending has successfully reduced many of the deprivations of material poverty. That shouldn’t be a big surprise. As George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen notes, under most classical economic theories, “a gift of cash always makes individuals better off.”³ Regardless of how dim a view one takes of government competence in general, it would be virtually impossible for the government to spend $23 trillion without benefiting at least some poor people.

Yet it is impossible to walk through many poor neighborhoods, from inner cities to isolated rural communities, and think that our welfare system is working the way it should. These are areas where the government has spent heavily to reduce poverty. A high percentage of residents are receiving some form of government assistance. And as a result, the poor may well be better off financially than they would be in the absence of government aid. Yet no one could honestly describe those communities or the people living in them as thriving or flourishing in any sense of the word.

Perhaps The Economist put it best:

If reducing poverty just amounts to ushering Americans to a somewhat less meagre existence, it may be a worthwhile endeavor but is hardly satisfying. The objective, of course, should be a system of benefits that encourages people to work their way out of penury, and an economy that does not result in so many people needing welfare in the first place. Any praise for the efficacy of safety nets must be tempered by the realization that, for one reason or another, these folks could not make it on their own.⁴

And therein lies the real failure of government anti-poverty efforts. Our efforts have been focused on the mere alleviation of poverty, making sure that the poor have food, shelter, and the like. That may be a necessary part of an anti-poverty policy, but it is far from sufficient. A truly effective anti-poverty program should seek not just to alleviate poverty’s symptoms but to eradicate the disease itself. We should seek to make sure not only that people are fed and housed, but also that they are able to rise as far as their talents can take them. In a sense, we focus too much on poverty and not enough on prosperity.

Attacking the Root Causes of Poverty

A libertarian approach to poverty would instead attack the underlying causes of poverty, including structural barriers to economic success.

Consider the criminal justice system, for example. Ample evidence indicates that overcriminalization and the abuses inherent in the U.S. criminal justice system contribute significantly to poverty. As President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers pointed out in 2016:

Having a criminal record or history of incarceration is a barrier to success in the labor market, and limited employment or depressed wages can stifle an individual’s ability to become self-sufficient. Beyond earnings, criminal sanctions can have negative consequences for individual health, debt, transportation, housing, and food security. Further, criminal sanctions create financial and emotional stresses that destabilize marriages and have adverse consequences for children.⁵

Harvard’s William Julius Wilson—taking note of the nearly 1.5 million young African American men who have been rendered largely unmarriageable because of their involvement with the criminal justice system—has written extensively about the effect of criminal justice on nonmarital birthrates in poor communities. Conservatives are often quick to lecture poor women on the need to delay pregnancy until after marriage—and the evidence suggests that nonmarital childbearing can make it more difficult to escape poverty—but that begs the question of who poor women are supposed to marry. If large numbers of men in their communities cannot find work because of a criminal record or are simply not present because they are incarcerated, the likelihood of having children outside marriage increases dramatically.

Scholars at Villanova University found that our criminal justice policies have increased poverty by an estimated 20 percent. And another study found that a family’s probability of being poor is 40 percent greater if the father is imprisoned. Given that 5 million children have an imprisoned parent, that factor is an enormous contributor to poverty in America.⁶

But a more libertarian society would end overcriminalization and dramatically reduce overincarceration. Ending the war on drugs, and legalizing other victimless activities from prostitution to gambling, would remove this enormous barrier to economic participation and self-sufficiency.

Education provides another example. Numerous studies show that educational success is a key determinant of poverty.⁷ The days in which a person could drop out of school, head down to the local factory, and find a job that enabled him to support a family are long gone. Someone who drops out of school is five times more likely to be persistently in poverty before age 30 than someone who completes high school.⁸

At the same time, government-run schools are doing an increasingly poor job of educating children, especially children who grow up in poverty. Studies have consistently shown that schools attended mostly by poor children have poorer records of educational achievement than schools attended by more affluent students.⁹

Libertarian policies will break up the government education monopoly. Whether we are talking about taking incremental steps, such as charter schools, vouchers, and tuition tax credits, or more fully separating school and state, a libertarian approach to education would lead to more competition and innovation in educational alternatives and would give parents the ability to escape poorly performing schools.

Libertarian policies would also reduce the cost of living, especially for those with low incomes. For instance, trade barriers significantly raise the cost of many basic goods that make up a large portion of the poor’s budget. Tariffs levied on shoes and clothing alone cost the average household in the poorest quintile $92 a year, and those with children often pay far more.¹⁰

Zoning and land-use policies can add as much as 40 percent to the cost of housing in some cities.¹¹ In neighborhoods like New York’s Manhattan, the zoning tax is even higher, at 50 percent or more. And these regulations are thought to affect far more than just housing prices: geographic mobility, economic and racial integration, and economic growth are all affected negatively. Libertarians would eliminate these costly regulations that make it difficult for the poor to afford basic goods and services.

Most important, libertarian policies would lead to more rapid economic growth and would ensure that the benefits of that growth were spread more inclusively. As President Obama once pointed out, “The free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history—it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.”¹² By reducing taxes and regulations, libertarians would spur economic growth, increasing the overall wealth in society.

But to really raise the poor out of poverty, we must ensure that they can fully participate in the opportunities that a growing economy provides. Here again, libertarian policies would benefit the poor by removing barriers to economic participation. For example, an estimated 40 percent of professions in the United States currently require some form of government license to practice. That includes more than 1,100 different professions requiring a license in at least one state—from florists to funeral attendants, from tree trimmers to makeup artists.¹³ Removing licensure barriers not only unlocks employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the poor in low-skill occupations, but also lowers prices in industries such as health care where occupational licensure restricts competition.

Effective Charity

Of course, even if all the reforms discussed above were completely successful, some people would still be unable to become fully self-sufficient. A libertarian world would support a vigorous network of private charity to assist them.

Charity works where government does not for a variety of reasons. For one thing, private charities can better individualize their approach to the circumstances of the poor in ways that a government program can never do. For reasons both legal and bureaucratic, government regulations must be designed in ways that treat all similarly situated recipients alike. As a result, most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or in-kind goods and services without any attempt to differentiate the specific needs or circumstances of individual recipients.

Do individuals have family problems or mental health issues? Do they lack job skills or have a criminal record? What prevents them from becoming self-supporting? Administrators of government programs seldom know or care. And even if they did, they must still respond with a one-size-fits-all answer.

Private charities are also much better at directing assistance to those who need it most. That ability is not just a question of efficiency, although relatively few successful charities have the burdensome bureaucratic infrastructure of government programs. Rather, private charities have the discretion necessary to focus their assistance where it will do the most good. Private charity is also more likely to target short-term emergency relief, rather than long-term support. Consequently, it can both better address a crisis and avoid problems of dependency.

To the degree that poverty results from individual choices and behavior, private charities can demand a change in behavior in exchange for aid. For example, a private charity may withhold funds if a recipient doesn’t stop using alcohol or drugs, doesn’t get a job, or gets pregnant. For any number of reasons, we don’t want the government to adopt such paternalistic measures, but private charities have proven effective when they do so.¹⁴

Governments lack the knowledge of individual circumstances that would enable them to intervene in matters of individual behavior. Moreover, paternalistic interventions inevitably run headlong into divisive cultural issues. Allowing government to enforce particular points of view on such issues is questionable on ethical grounds and a certain recipe for political conflict. And charities are better at scaling up or down in response to particular needs or issues, whereas government bureaucracies inevitably seek to continue or expand their mission.

Finally, private charity builds an important bond between giver and receiver. For recipients, private charity is not an entitlement, but a gift carrying reciprocal obligations. But more important, private charity demands that donors become directly involved. It is easy to be charitable with someone else’s money. As Robert Thompson of the University of Pennsylvania noted a century ago, using government money for charitable purposes is a “rough contrivance to lift from the social conscience a burden that should not be either lifted or lightened in any way.”¹⁵

Can Charity Be Provided Voluntarily?

Americans are an amazingly generous people. In 2015, w...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Poverty and Welfare
• 2. Education
• 3. Health Care
• 4. The War On Drugs
• 5. The Funding of Science
• 6. Regulatory Science
• 7. Criminal Justice
• 8. Intelligence and Surveillance
• 9. Unshackling Our Freedom To Trade
• 10. Immigration
• 11. Foreign Policy and National Defense
• 12. Money and Banking
• 13. Cryptocurrencies
• 14. Digital Expression
• 15. Technology
• 16. A History of Libertarian Utopianism
• 17. The Presidency
• 18. The State In The Gaps
• Notes
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors