More on Libertarians and Climate Change
April 8th, 2009 by Nick SaintWhen I said that Ryan Avent was speaking nonsense when he claimed that climate change poses an ‘existential threat’ to libertarianism, I did not mean in any way to deny that there are a lot of people calling themselves libertarians and saying some very crazy things about global warming. There are. The Avent post in question was a response to a full page ad run by Cato in several major newspapers, taking Obama to task for saying that the science predicting dangerous global warming was beyond dispute. It was not an honest or credible effort, and it’s not the only instance of libertarians taking this position. Objectively Biased has a theory of why this is the case:
People who call themselves libertarians have this whole market open to them of conservatives with money who will pay for an intellectual justification for their decidedly non-intellectual views. Similarly (and in a related fashion), specific pseudo-science causes like Intelligent Design and anti-Global Warming think tanks have lower desired qualifications in terms of quality of work done for hiring thinkers and writers than do other mainstream think tanks and especially universities. Basically, if you’re a “libertarian” who has one of these views, you can get hired to speak or even be a fellow at a place that wants to pay people for justifications.
That seems right, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Libertarianism in America has the very odd distinction of having far more make-believe adherents than actual adherents. There aren’t very many self-described libertarians out there, but there are far more of them than there are actual libertarians, and almost all conservatives claim to be broadly sympathetic to the core principles. The reason for this, I think, is that Americans, by and large, love the sound of libertarianish rhetoric, but hate most of the policy that would result from taking these ideas seriously. Republicans love to talk about smaller government and individual freedom, because it forces Democrats to shuffle their feet and change the subject; they can win these battles on the specifics, but no one wins elections promising bigger government and less freedom. And when Republicans fail to do anything to promote smaller government or individual liberty beyond lowering taxes and fighting off gun control, no one gets mad at them, because they didn’t really want anything else in the first place.
Americans genuinely do like the sound of smaller government and individual liberty, but in most instances these preferences are outweighed by their desire for government assisstance, their aversion to being held personally responsible for their ills, and their fear of individual liberty in the hands of people other than themselves. But while they are very proud of the former, they won’t conciously admit to the latter. So libertarian-leaning rhetoric goes over like gangbusters. Meanwhile, the last state in the Union that lets adults decide for themselves whether or not to wear a seatbelt may be about to change its mind.
April 9th, 2009 at 5:57 am
Word on the street is that Akhbar is a libertarian.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Monkey, you know me better than that. I’m libertarian-leaning.