Libertarians are not pie-in-the-sky utopians
A recent Slate.com article by Jacob Weisberg has been getting a lot of attention among free market types over the past couple of days. You can get the gist of the piece from its title: “The End of Libertarianism- The financial collapse proves that its ideology makes no sense.”
Without dissecting his entire argument for its various and sundry intellectual and factual weaknesses, I will highlight a specific part in which he claims that libertarians are the “utopians of the right.”
Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.
Mr. Weisberg, libertarians are not utopians. It’s simply that we believe that liberty and free markets are the best system that we’ve got to improve the positions of the people of this planet.
Dr. Friedman said it best: ”The society that puts equality before freedom, will have neither. But the society that puts freedom before equality will enjoy a great degree of both.”
The world will never be perfect, but we can embrace a system that allows for it to provide opportunities of knowledge, wealth and prosperity for the greatest number of people.
That system is freedom.
[...] Thus, the actions of people like Pinochet, Deng, Yeltsin, et al. were in no conceivable way completed in the spirit of the principles of free market capitalism. Nor is free market capitalism a utopian theory–take a glance at my earlier riff on that claim here. [...]