A disclosure to you, dear readers: I have only just completed (er, mostly) the annual, uncomfortable trial of spirit known as holiday shopping. Yes, I am one of that despised, harried mass of men that haunts the malls and outlet stores of America as Christmas nears, taste declining from already unenviable levels to true execrability, a one man instantiation of an inelastic demand curve as desperation mounts and time runs out.
As I wandered the temples of consumerism tonight, I was struck by the sheer volume and surfeit of our material wealth. Rivers of clothes, housewares, books, games, toys, the whole deal - and increasing difficulty, even for middle-class people, of finding something truly needed. Excluding the truly poor - of whom there are of course some in our society, who deserve our compassion and aid - for most people the accretion of a few more material possessions doesn't really move the needle on happiness. The big determinants, at our stage on the Maslow hierachy of needs, are relationships and the satisfactory pursuit of "life projects" broadly defined.
Is this an un-libertarian thought, a signpost on the road to unctuous redistributionism and vaguely elitist disdain for productive economic activity?
Strong elements of both can be found in many college educated twentysomethings, at least, among whom work at nonprofits of various kinds comes higher on the moral scale than the manifold varieties of "selling out." Given that this kind of activism is, sadly, wedded to counterproductive understandings of economics (how much energy has been wasted lobbying for an increased minimum wage, or nationalized health care) the natural instinct of libertarians is to set their face against the whole mindset. The consequence can be a kind of caricatured Randianism, in which the whole end of life is to produce more and more wealth to no apparent end. (Objectivists, before you send me angry emails, note that I said caricatured.)
I think this is a mistake. There are problems with the current American way of life, obstacles to full human flourishing. The sensitive, often cultured souls offended by materialism are onto something: they just draw the wrong economic and policy conclusions from their unease. Libertarianism is actually fully compatible with their desire to tease more meaning out of existence: the market is a freedom machine that you can drive wherever you want, as long as you accept the tradeoffs. There is no authority that can pronounce working 60 or 70 hour weeks, perhaps neglecting family in favor of that new car, boat, or electronic gadget, to be the highest end of capitalism. To paraphrase a great Citibank ad, "capitalism isn't the goal. Your goals - that's the goal." For many people, serious sacrifices for a career make sense in light of financial obligations or a drive for Maslovian self-actualization; but there are many, many intermediate points between the world of "The Apprentice" and ascetic withdrawal from events (or subsistence poverty, to put a worse spin on it.)
The critical insights that libertarianism can bring to this question are two: 1) that freedom and free markets help us climb the Maslovian ladder in the first place, and 2) that if we can eliminate certain key state-imposed restrictions on freedom the number of intermediate points (and hence opportunities to live flourishing human lives) will increase. Let me speculate just briefly on this second point.
All except the lowest-paid hourly workers generate an impressive amount of purchasing power by any historical or contemporary global standard. But it's absolutely true that even middle-class people feel economic anxiety. This anxiety drives them to work more, and in jobs they care less about, than they would in their "ideal" world. Part of this is just reality - we can't always get what we want, and even the hyperproductive American economy only pushes tradeoffs back, not eliminates them. Part is caused by phenomena of state intervention. Think of some leading areas of anxiety:
*Healthcare. People are terrified of job transitions because they can lose their insurance. Loss of income is always going to be a 'fear factor', of course, but if insurance were decoupled from the employer workers would feel more independent.
*Safety. Because our ability to create voluntary residential communities is limited by housing laws, the filter for the safer and "nicer" neighborhoods has to be price-based. This often means that the "poor" neighborhood is also unsafe - emphatically NOT the case in earlier periods of American history. Lack of safety has all kinds of knock-on effects for community, psychic health of children, etc. Likewise, the fact that ONLY the price filter can be applied creates uninteresting communities where neighbors rarely know each other. (they have little incentive to.)
*Retirement. The need to build wealth for retirement isn't going to go away, but it could be made immensely, immensely easier by reducing and simplifying income taxes, eliminating capital gains taxes, and simplifying the other legal arcana that give the rich and well-lawyered such an advantage over the amateur investor. Not all the problems are government produced, of course - shareholders need to take corporate governance back from the insiders, overcoming the "commons problem" caused by dispersal of shares and knowledge. With these changes it's not impossible to imagine 'ordinary people' retiring at 55, 50, or even earlier - the compounding calculations are very sensitive to even small increases in the rate of return, no? And so almost two decades of life could be unlocked for people to pursue their own interests - with their own personal endowment.
*Access to housing. The income tax deduction for interest payments unfairly skews the housing market in favor of those with the access to capital (credit history and income flow) to purchase a home. If renters got the same deduction (or better yet, if both were eliminated and a corresponding reduction of income tax made) lower-income individuals would have better housing access.
*A controversial point, because I know many libertarians view cars as the "freedom machine" - in most parts of the country, just to be a functioning individual you must own and maintaining one or two cars. This can be a significant expense and is a kind of water level that one must stay above just to be viable. If mass transit were thrown open to private provision - allowing jitneys, hopper buses, even subways and light rail lines - many more communities across the country would gain the "carless option." I think the existence of government-subsidized roads, and the mediocrity of "public" transport, has caused many American cities and towns to become unnaturally spread out. If these distortive factors could be removed, a range of urban options would reappear including viable, walkable or 'bus" able town centers. Carless living would no longer be just for New Yorkers and residents of other expensive metropolises.
Just some ruminations...but I think the country is ready for new ways of living life, and we libertarians have a lot to offer in this department. We should look past the bad economics and help develop real, practical solutions to the surfeits and excesses of modernity.
Excellent post, Chris. All pretty good policy ideas as well.
I totally agree that libertarian politics should not get conflated with an endorsement of crass commercialism, for the same reason that I can be against government censorship while still loathing certain ideas and forms of "expression". In libertarian circles there tends to be a lot of emphasis on "the government has no business prohibiting X" arguments but very little on "people really shouldn't do Y" arguments. Which is probably because so many people conflate the moral with the political, so we're always fighting a rearguard defense to try and seperate the two, but this has the downside of people (conservatives mainly) tending to think of libertarians as amoral libertines.
Posted by: Matt McIntosh | December 23, 2004 at 12:58 AM
Super post. This should be fleshed out into a longer essay with rigor and evidence... I'm sure it's there.
Posted by: Alex Ausage | December 23, 2004 at 11:00 AM