One, vast college campus

National Review, April 2, 2007 by Jonah Goldberg

I'VE long thought there's a reason that libertarianism is so popular on college campuses. For many of us, the freest time of our lives was college. We seemed masters of our fate (particularly if we were lucky enough not to pay for school ourselves), free to make what seemed like all of the important choices for ourselves, from drugs to sex to satisfying our intellectual interests. Of course, this freedom was and is a mirage. An informal coalition of parents, taxpayers, administrators, cafeteria workers, janitors, security officers, regulators, professors, and others work behind the scenes or pay the bills so that kids can feel this sense of consequence-free liberty.

Last December, Brink Lindsey, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote a fascinating New Republic essay calling for a new fusionism between progressives (or liberals, if you prefer) and libertarians. Basically, Lindsey wants liberals to be libertarian on economics the way they're laissezfaire on culture. Put another way, he wants liberals to be libertarians. To which conservatives responded---including yours truly in these pages---"Don't we all?"

Responding to Lindsey, I noted that while libertarians constantly complain that conservatives have become too authoritarian and "theocratic," the truth is that libertarians have been "growing" too. Whereas they used to be obsessed with shrinking government, they're now increasingly concerned with expanding personal choices. Philosophically this represents a change from the classically liberal emphasis on "negative liberty" (restricting intrusions of the state) to the more progressive focus on "positive liberty" (giving people the opportunities and stuff they want or need to feel that they've realized their potential). At first, my point was greeted with considerable skepticism, but it's rapidly becoming conventional wisdom. Tyler Cowen, an eminent libertarian economist at George Mason University, recently wrote in a Cato Institute discussion, "We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don't have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal."

This might have seemed like heresy not long ago. After all, it took decades for conservatives and libertarians to stop calling Irving Kristol a socialist for advocating a very limited welfare state, concerned primarily with things like old-age pensions. But the immense prosperity of the West has changed the political culture. As Charles Murray put it in a speech to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, "Politicians around the world are getting better and better at doling out the amounts and types of freedom that will keep their economies growing without seriously interfering with the intrusiveness of government. Meanwhile, electorates that are increasingly wealthy are less energized by economic arguments for limited government." In short, prosperity allows people to design their own lifestyles, to pick their own cultures as if they were campus clubs.

When you look at Europe, Canada, and parts of, say, California, you can see this sort of "libertarianism" at work. The desire is to create one, vast college campus at the End of History, where it's against the rules to be mean to anybody, you have to recycle, and there are strict rules on parking, but otherwise you can do anything that floats your boat. Government is there to make sure you don't OD in the dorm but have access to an abortion at the clinic. There's actually much to recommend this worldview and I don't mean to be overly dismissive. But libertarians shouldn't complain anymore when they're called "sophomoric."