A Stitch in Haste

Kay Hymowitz requires almost 3,600 words to try to debunk describe libertarianism.

I can do it in three:

Freedom ... with responsibility.
Any and every attempt I've ever seen to "refute" libertarianism (including Hymowitz') inevitably relies -- directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, innocently or disingenuously -- on omitting or wildly distorting the last two words.

It's quite simple really: Libertarianism is not anarchism.

Two quick examples from Hymowitz:

On the one hand, libertarians make a fetish of freedom; it is their totalizing goal [sic!]. On the other hand, libertarians depend on the family -- an institution that, in crucial respects, is unfree -- to produce the sort of people best suited to life in a free-market system (not to mention future members of their own movement). The complex, dynamic economy that libertarians have done so much to expand needs highly advanced human capital -- that is, individuals of great moral, cognitive and emotional sophistication. Reams of social-science research prove that these qualities are best produced in traditional families with married parents.

"Freedom" is not the "totalizing goal" of libertarians; "freedom ... with responsibility" is. I don't know a single libertarian who would, for example, suggest that a person has a right to bring a child into the world and then abandon, neglect or abuse that child. We may disagree on the precise definitions of "abandon," "neglect" or "abuse," but not on the applicability of the words themselves.

Meanwhile, the idea that a family is an "unfree institution" requires a totally upside-down definition of "unfree" (not to mention "institution"). People are "unfree" regarding the decision to get married in the first place? People are "unfree" to decide whether and when to have children? Of course not (thanks, let's recall, to "activist judges" subverting "the will of the majority" by "inventing" new rights). People -- parents -- are only "unfree" to violate their children's rights, in the same way and for the same reasons that they are "unfree" to violate their neighbors' rights. This is not a difficult concept.

[Incidentally, you know full well that in polite company Hymowitz would include the word "heterosexual" in the phrase "traditional families with married parents." Indeed, she already has.]

Second:

The civil-rights movement is an instructive case. ... [I]t is a perfect example of the inability of libertarians to find a political and moral framework suitable to the big questions of American public life. If people ought to be able to do what they want, then certainly hating blacks -- either by oneself or in the company of like-minded souls -- is nobody else's business, including the federal government's. To the extent that libertarians are remembered at all for their role in the civil-rights era, it is not for marching on Selma but rather for their enthusiastic support of states' rights and the freedom of white racists to associate with one another.

Flat-out incorrect, both as matters of history and of libertarian theory. Libertarians do not ever, under any circumstances, support "states' rights." States have no rights; only individuals have rights. States have powers -- powers that they can and do abuse. (This is, it bears repeating, precisely why Ron Paul, contrary to Hymowitz' uninformed pronouncement, is not a libertarian.)

As for the civil rights movement, it is true that asymptotic libertarianism would allow private individuals to run private businesses as they see fit, including with racist policies offensive to vast swaths of the population (and, therefore, the economy). However, asymptotic libertarianism would also demand that such racist business owners not collude with local governments to catalyze their racism via government coercion under the illegitimate trappings of "states rights" (as were omnipresent throughout the Jim Crow South). And, of course, asymptotic libertarians would themselves not be racist. The two "isms" are mutually exclusive: one simply cannot be a truly libertarian racist (or sexist or nationalist or heterosexist); it is a facial absurdity.

(Incidentally, the word "libertarian" as currently used and understood wasn't even in widespread use in the early 1960s; the big-L Libertarian Party wasn't founded until 1971. It's a bit silly to try to assign a "civil rights original sin" to a movement that hadn't even been founded yet. Stated differently, Strom Thurmond was no libertarian then and is no hero to libertarians today.)

Bottom line: Resorting to anti-libertarian solutions in order to correct anti-libertarian problems is hardly a legitimate data point against libertarianism. It would be akin to suggesting that using chemotherapy to treat cancer somehow "disproves" optometry.

(The rest of the Hymowitz piece is an overcooked stew of sweeping generalizations, red herrings, straw men, guilt-by-associations and flat-out historical inaccuracies. See how many you can find.)