Maggie's Farm

The essay in Opinion Journal is subtitled "The cultural contradictions of libertarianism." This is a subject of great interest to me, and Kay Hymowitz is one of my heros - and someone who I am happy to have doing my thinking for me. A quote:

On the one hand, libertarians make a fetish of freedom; it is their totalizing goal. 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.

Family breakdown, by contrast, limits the accumulation of such human capital. Worse, divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing leave the door wide open for big government. Dysfunctional families create an increased demand for state-funded food, housing and medical subsidies, which libertarians reject on principle. And in courts all over the country, judges who preside over the manifold disputes occasioned by broken families are forced to be more intrusive than the worst mother-in-law: They decide who should have primary custody, who gets a child on Christmas or summer holidays, whether a child should take piano lessons, go to Hebrew school, move to California, or speak to her grandmother on the phone. It is a libertarian's worst nightmare.

A libertarian, according to Brian Doherty, "has to believe" that "the instincts and abilities for liberty . . . are innate," that we possess "an ability to fend for ourselves in the Randian sense and to form spontaneous orders of fellowship and cooperation in the Hayekian sense." But this view of the relationship between the individual and society is profoundly and demonstrably false, especially when applied to the family.

Children do not come into the world respecting private property. They do not emerge from the womb ready to navigate the economic and moral complexities of an "age of abundance." The only way they learn such things is through a long process of intensive socialization--a process that we now know, thanks to the failed experiments begun by the Aquarians and implicitly supported by libertarians, usually requires intact families and decent schools.

Libertarianism did not have to take this unfortunate turn. Ludwig von Mises himself warned that the attempt (of socialists) to undermine the family was a ploy to strengthen the state. Hayek, too, grasped the family's role in upholding the free market. Coming of age in Europe around the time of World War I, he stressed the state's inefficiency but also warned, more generally, of the limits of human reason. "Hayek's economics was rooted in man's ignorance," Mr. Doherty writes; so were his political views, which included both an enthusiasm for freedom and a Burkean respect for customs and institutions.

Read the whole thing.

I think what Hymowitz is getting at, along with the many Libertarian thinkers she discusses, is that "fetishist freedom" is insane, and that freedom can only exist within the context of a strong culture of family, responsibility, duty, morality, and maybe even religion. The Founding Fathers recognized this well.

The "diversity," "tolerance," and "multiculturalism" movements are destructive by undermining the cultural foundations that permit freedoms to prosper. We see the sad consequences of that in Europe today.

On Maggie's Farm, we tend not to be "freedom fetishists."  We are Constitution Fetishists, however, and we believe that individual freedom must enter strongly into the equation whenever government seeks to do something - that the balance must always tip in the direction of freedom. We believe that because it is in the nature of people in government to try to accumulate power at the expense of the individual and the locality.

In other words, we believe (I think) that our government, like other public institutions like schools and the military, exists to provide the conditions for individual freedom and the human spirit to prosper.

Photo: Ayn Rand