by Tim Sommers
A libertarian. Old joke. I mean, marijuana is not even illegal in a lot of states anymore. How about this one? A libertarian walks into a bear. Okay, that’s not really a joke. It’s the title of a recent book by Matthew Honogoltz-Hetling, subtitled “The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)”. It’s about a group of libertarians who move to a rural town with the express purpose of dismantling the local government and producing a libertarian utopia. The resulting problems with coordinating refuse disposal attract a lot of bears and the lack of a government makes it difficult to mount a response. Bears 1. Libertarians 0.
I have been thinking about libertarianism again since I read Thomas Wells’ smart 3 Quarks Daily article Libertarianism is Bankrupt arguing that libertarianism, “like Marxism or Flat-Earthism”, has “nothing to offer”. Which is kind of unfair to Marxism if you ask me. But a real-world example of how dead the libertarian horse is, is offered by the departure of many recovering libertarians from the Cato Institute recently, the bulk of them forming a new non-libertarian think tank (Nikensas). What lead most of these former Cato staffers to abandon libertarianism was the existence of a political problem that they felt libertarianism had no response to. I bet you can guess what it is. (I’ll tell you at the end, just in case.)
In the meantime, given the moribund state of libertarianism, rather than beat on it some more, I thought it would be fun to return to its glory days, to Robert Nozick and his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick was arguably the most philosophically sophisticated libertarian ever. He was charismatic. He was purportedly widely read in the Reagan White House. And he was lauded as one of the Philosopher Kings of Harvard by Esquire Magazine in 1983 (including a full-page photospread in which he looked very thoughtful). (The other Philosopher-King, John Rawls, refused to be interviewed or photographed for the piece.) Read more »