Coercion vs. consent: a reason debate on how to think about liberty

Reason, March, 2004 by Richard A. Epstein, Randy Barnett, David Friedman, James P. Pinkerton

There are many other examples of government policies that Epstein does not like but that could be defended on his principles, including government involvement in education, in research, and in the production and regulation of information. His exceptions swallow his rule, leaving us with everything up for grabs and familiar public choice reasons to expect that far too much of it will be grabbed.

Epstein hopes to prevent this outcome by better institutional design. Perhaps that is the best we can do. But there are at least two other alternatives worth serious consideration.

The first is the extreme version of the libertarian state: no coercion beyond a monopoly on retaliatory force. Such a state will do less well lotus than a state that initiates coercion in the rare circumstances where doing so produces large benefits. But it might do considerably better than the realistic alternative: Epstein's society as we can expect to see it actually implemented, in a world with plentiful arguments for extensive uses of state power and strong incentives to act on them.

The second alternative is to eliminate state coercion by eliminating the state. In that world, some coordination problems will go unsolved, making the result worse than the world that would be produced by a state run by perfectly wise and virtuous libertarians. But eliminating the state also eliminates the largest coordination problem of all: the problem of controlling the state. Given the record so far, that is a more serious problem than how to build roads without the power of eminent domain.

David Friedman (ddfr@daviddfriedman.com) is a professor in both the law school and the economics department of Santa Clara University.

His first book was The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to a Radical Capitalism (Open Court). His most recent is Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (Princeton University Press). A draft of his next book, Future Imperfect, can be found on his Web page (www.daviddfriedman.com)

Beyond Economics

Freedom is more than dollars and cents.

James P. Pinkerton

RICHARD EPSTEIN MAKES the useful point that libertarianism should be embedded in a practical philosophy, and he offers an elegant two-tier approach to deciding when and where to work toward the laudable goal of "expanding the scope of human freedom." I can't quibble with his approach to the issues that fall within his purview, but I also can't help but observe that the most important issues of the day seem to fall outside of that purview. Epstein's circumscribed approach to libertarian philosophy will, I am afraid, also circumscribe libertarianism's appeal and influence.

On the biggest issues of the day, Epstein is silent. I looked in vain for words such as drugs, pollution, immigration, foreign policy, terror, Iraq, or even Bush. That, to me, is the definition of a narrow piece. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I believe libertarians have an important contribution to make on the hottest of the hot-button issues: drug laws, immigration controls, environmental regulation (including the reality that the United States is involved in a host of international agreements that affect America, no matter what we do), biotech and stem cell research, and, most of all, the "war on terror," which affects everything from civil liberties to federal spending to the ongoing war in Iraq.