The key difference between normal people who are libertarians and normal people who are liberals is that when we see a starving person in the street we don’t think it’s okay to take our neighbors food and give it away as if it were our own.
The key difference between normal people who are libertarians and normal people who are conservatives is that when people behave in ways we might not like such as using recreational drugs, or having sex in ways and with partners god doesn’t approve of, we don’t think the violent coercive power of the state is an appropriate way to enforce our opinions on how others behave, no matter how wrong we think it is.
“I have no position on the openness of Soros’ giving, but he has always been far more in the public eye than the Kochs.” Does this low profile include David’s bid to become vice president of the United States?
Your charge that the Koch brothers have had to “subordinate their values to people who simply do not care about freedom” is libelous and without foundation. Take a look at what the many Koch supported entities are doing about liberty, and you will find vigorous support for full personal and economic freedom all down the line.
Quite simply you have added to the character assassination the New Yorker started and you owe them an apology. Finally the idea that James Madison would remotely approve of the current size and scope of the federal government is even more ridiculous than the idea that Charles or David Koch micromanage the groups they fund. Most people who work at these places even in very high levels have never spoken to the Koch’s at all, and certainly are not in regular contact with them.
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
James Madison

Fascinating analysis. I suspect your thoughts on the Tea Party involvement are a bit out on a limb, i.e., not much factual foundation. Perhaps in their dotage they have truly become Tea Party advocates. Hang out with ‘em long enough and they’ll getcha. Those folks used to belong to the Birch Society. Unlike the above commentor, I doubt that either of the brothers K are philanthropists in the traditional do gooder sense. Enlightened self interest seems to be the order of the day.
The most interesting aspect of today’s blog is the item immediately below it: a little Google ad for Kochfacts. The wonders of the ‘net! An autoprogram or is Big Brother watching?

“Libertarian” – You have laid out a long list of charges, and I’ll start with the last and work up to the more philosophical.
FIRST: James Madison. You and many other laissez faire libertarians – all of them? – repeat a slogan out of context: that growth of government leads to oppression. Often that is true, but if we look at history oppression can occur with quite small governments, barely any government at all, and very large ones.
A great number of democratic governments in Europe manage far larger projects for the public than does ours. In some cases they have done so for well over 70 years, and the promised slavery has not arrived. While far from perfect the Nordic countries and Finland measure up better on a great many standards than the US, and I would venture to guess virtually none emigrate to here. Canada is not so active as these countries, but has an exemplary record on many issues of liberty, better than ours often. I could add a number of other European countries. I do not know about Australia and New Zealand, but I suspect the same pattern would emerge. This means, I suggest and have written without published rebuttal, that the key issue regarding freedom is whether or not a country is reasonably democratic, not whether or not it has a large or small public sector.
This point sees Madison in the light of a advocate for limited democratic government, not small government, as I assume he would want to be. It makes sense of all his writings and not just carefully edited pieces.
SECOND, I have not libeled the Kochs, for whom I have absolutely no personal dislike and for Charles, quite fond memories – as I explicitly said in the interview, in my published discussion that elicited the interview, and now. I never knew David. I disagree with what they are doing to forward a libertarian ideology I once shared until I became convinced it has serious weaknesses even in its own terms. I have published on those issues in various places – again without rebuttal. For one place, see http://www.studiesinemergentorder.com
THIRD, a great many of those apparently integral to organizations the Kochs fund are in no sense supporters of individual liberty. For example, the Tea Party is not. I gave a few examples and like most on the right, you ignore them the better to sound like a wounded whale inexplicably attacked by small feral creatures who do not appreciate your nobility. Look up the Tea Party’s position on the Islamic Cultural Center, built on private property, as an example. The Koch’s support of conservative Republicans is another example.
I have long recognized, praised, and when interviewed by Jane Mayer, emphasized that the Kochs do not simply support right wingers. They have long been a major, perhaps the major, force supporting a wide variety of libertarian and classical liberal organizations that on balance do support liberty. The Institute for Humane Studies, Mercatus, and CATO, for example, are far from simple right wing organizations. Mayer herself said as much. (I say “on balance” rather than “completely” because of disagreements I will touch on below.)
Based on Mayer’s research, trouble arrived when the Kochs wanted to expand into accumulating a large popular base because the people they sought to bring on board are not particularly friendly to classical liberal values. If they were friendly to such values David Koch would have done much better when he ran for Vice President. The Kochs have a problem: they do not have enough popular support to do well at the ballot box without bringing in outside support attracted for other reasons. This support is not committed to the same values they are.
Given the problem of not having electoral strength on their own terms, they had three alternative strategies, as far as I can tell. One is the strategy the New Yorker article described. It carries a risk even in their own terms: that the tail can come to wag the dog. Most right wing libertarians value extreme economic liberty above other forms of liberty, and so that is a risk many were willing to take. I come down differently on that trade off – because I see the preservation of freedom more in ensuring basic civil liberties and religious freedom than in extreme laissez faire. I think the non-libertarian tail is wagging the dog right now, and see no evidence of a change.
There are two other strategies the Kochs could have pursued – and they HAVE pursued one of them with pretty good results. That one is to invest in support for intellectual advocates for liberty. When I was a college student and into the first years of graduate school, most academics in the social sciences were advocates of extensive government planning. Some were outright socialists – accepting much of Marx’s critique of capitalism but thinking the transition could be made peacefully and democratically. There are almost no such people today and lots who accept the inevitability and even desirability of markets. The Kochs played a big role in this process, and here they did wonderful work in my opinion. The problem as Mayer explains it – and here her analysis makes sense but I have no way of personally knowing – is that this kind of change is slow and the Kochs became impatient.
The third strategy which they did not pursue is encourage outside the box thinking within their general paradigm, thinking that could re-order political categories, but might also change the way classical liberal insights are understood. To give one very personal example – my Ph.D. dissertation at Berkeley applied the insights of one of the most important of all classical liberal thinkers – F. A. Hayek – to democratic theory. If its argument is valid in many respects democracies are more like CO-OPs than traditional states. Many issues take on a new gloss – and one of the implications is that many public functions could be better performed outside of both traditional politics and traditional markets. My analysis readily explained why freedom is more related to the limits on government than to its size. It explained why the classical liberal prediction that governments providing many social services inevitably degenerate into tyranny does not happen.
The dissertation became a book and further research generated many refereed articles. The book was never reviewed, the arguments in the articles almost universally ignored. What happened to my research happened to others as well.
My point is not that I am right and those seeing Hayek’s work more traditionally were not (thought I obviously do think that) my point is that when new interpretations are ignored, a way of thinking degenerates into a dogma. Ideas stay healthy by being continually open to challenge.
Worse, when creativity is not rewarded a theoretical framework does not attract many people who might otherwise use it to do creative research rather than simply applying an existing paradigm to new issues. I am not blaming the Kochs for this, not at all. Most academics stay comfortably within existing paradigms and seek to avoid challenges to them. But what the Kochs could have done and did not is use a tiny portion of their resources to ensure that there would always be venues where outside the box thought could appear and be confronted. I obviously think this was a fatal error that boxed the classical liberal paradigm into a framework good for fighting Marxists and arrogant planners, but increasingly irrelevant elsewhere.
FOURTH, You make a good point regarding David Koch’s run for Vice President – but had you read the New Yorker article the patterns Mayer was describing came afterwards. I think you will grant that even with his run, Soros is far more in the public eye than either Koch brother. It’s a simple fact, neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad.
FIFTH, Your description regarding the difference between libertarians and conservatives is accurate for hard core libertarians, such as I once was. It’s why I was deeply troubled when the two terms became so interchangeable that today they are often used interchangeably. We have no disagreement here.
As to libertarians and ‘liberals’ we have a big disagreement. Our disagreement is rooted in two claims you make that I reject. The first is that everything in society can be adequately understood in terms of private ownership and its violation, as in your statement that liberals want to “take our neighbors food and give it away as if it were our own.” Second, I suspect that you hold that insofar as freedom exists everyone’s situation reflects their own creative capacities. Hayek himself rebutted this second claim in his second volume of Law Legislation and Liberty. I recommend your reading it.
As to the first claim, who defines property rights? Property rights do not define themselves. Some way needs to exist such that everyone thinks at least the process by which a definition arises is fair. Societies use a combination of inherited tradition and courts and legislators to do this. To give an example that most reasonable people will accept:
Missoula, Montana sits in between mountains where, once the population grew big enough, the air became increasingly dangerous from trapped wood smoke hanging over the city in the winter. Originally there were too few people for this to matter, and everyone had wood burning stoves. (Wood is plentiful and cheap.) As Missoula’s population grew people with breathing difficulties increasingly had trouble, and some might die prematurely from the pollution. Burning wood, a use of property once harmless and practiced universally, had become dangerous once enough people did it.
Missoula’s city government banned the use of wood burning stoves and fireplaces in new buildings. The air would remain dirtier than some liked but far cleaner than some would have preferred so long as they could have a fireplace. ANY point between zero regulation and no regulation could be criticized as inferior to some other point along some principle or another. Air that interfered with some people’s views might still be safe enough to tolerate.
What matters in such cases where a range of options can appear reasonable is that the procedure for deciding the issue be regarded as fair. Democratic procedures are more fair than unanimity because, as James Madison pointed out, requiring more than a majority can hold a majority hostage to an unprincipled minority, as California and the US Senate have both discovered to their sorrow. Anything requiring less than a majority means a minority could rule.
Property rights are ALWAYS established within a social context and ALWAYS could have been defined differently because the world does not exist of discrete objects intrinsically distinct from one another.
As David Koch himself acknowledged, his financial good fortune came from inheritance, not hard work. His hard work expanded that fortune, but did not create it. IF as Hayek for one emphasized, the market economy undermines traditional means by which people cared for themselves in hard times, then, as he also acknowledged, there is no injustice in providing alternative means. Hayek supported a guaranteed floor for incomes. So did Milton Friedman. I think you would have great difficulty convincing most sane people that Hayek and Friedman are liberals in the sense you meant.
I have taken so much time addressing your attacks because my memories of Charles Koch are pleasant ones, he played a absolutely crucial role in my own intellectual development, and I disagree strongly with very important aspects of what he and his brother are currently up to politically, assuming as I do that Mayer’s article is accurate in its factual claims. I would be delighted if you respond to this reply in a reasoned way, addressing issues rather than flinging insults, but it would be a nice surprise because I have of late found very few on the right who know how to carry on a serious and rational discussion of important issues.
As to Becky’s post – I hope she’s wrong and I am giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Libertarian, I have a question. You’d mentioned: “having sex in ways and with partners god doesn’t approve of”
WHICH God would that be?

Gus,
All I will say about this whole tempest in a teapot is that money from Koch-funded organizations has been central to my development as a scholar and a teacher. Not once in all of that time was I ever explicitly told, or was it even vaguely suggested, that there was some ideological line I had to toe or some interest I had to serve. Not only that, I have been part of numerous events paid for by Koch money at which the virtues of a non-interventionist foreign policy, same-sex marriage, an end to the drug war, and clear defenses of free speech and other core liberal values were discussed. Finally, my own VERY “non right” scholarship on the history of the family and family policy has been featured at events and funded directly by Koch funded organizations. And their funding of these events is hardly covert or secret.
The New Yorker piece was not a smear, but it sure as hell was misleading.
If the Kochs are funding only the Tea Party/conservative libertarian revolution, someone forgot to tell THEM about it.
I’ve had exactly one conversation with Charles in my life and I’ve never met David, so I cannot know what is in their hearts. All I do know is that they have funded my work directly and indirectly over the years, and as you well know, I’m hardly the model of a Tea Party conservative etc..
Finally, whatever sins the Kochs have committed, and I have no doubt some are real, I’d much rather have their money than a grant from the federal government, an organization which actually IS responsible for the murder of millions and the impoverishment of millions more.

Steve-
Your experience with the Kochs is like my far lesser experience. But you are dealing with what I called the second strategy in the response I made to ‘libertarian’ immediately above. I have tried to make it clear that their work in the realm of supporting classical liberal scholarship was good and very important.
As to the Tea Party issue – it’s really important I think. Here is where we evaluate matters differently.
The level of debate that the tea party has promoted is almost completely irrational, it is not oriented towards freedom in any very strong sense, and many of its leading lights are opposed to freedom in damn near any sense. I see no sign that the Tea Party movement cares about nonintervention, gay marriage, legalized drugs, or fighting against Bush and Obama’s attacks on basic civil liberties – other than having guns. I’d sing a very different tune were that otherwise.
Worse, the Tea Partiers are destroying from one end any place for reasoned public debate and discussion within this country, while a centralized corporatized press attacks it from the other. IF the Kochs are major financial supporters, as Mayer contends and as seems to be the case, they are making a big mistake in my judgment. I think their support comes from equating small government with limited government, which I critique in my response to ‘libertarian’ above.
And yes the US government in its current form is a criminal enterprise at many levels. No disagreement there. Good people work within many of its organizations, but they are overruled and manipulated by people who are not, and I think the system works to ensure that the not-so-good people dominate the better ones. This is why my own work has focused on how genuinely public purposes often can be best pursued outside of government – but NOT by private business which is incapable of acting from public values once it becomes corporate, and often before that.
This is not to attack business – it is to say that like everything else it can do some things better than other things, and some things it cannot do at all.

@Cheryl: Clearly, the Abrahamic god. I can’t think of any other deities who care much about the kind and number of partners one takes, so long as one is respectful and responsible.

The L, well actually as I understand it the Abrahamic God frowns on same-sex unions no matter how respectful and responsible.
I was just curious as to whether or not Libertarian had a specific Deity in mind.

Gus,
The Tea Party movement arose spontaneously in opposition to Obama”care”, Wall Street bailouts, and the taxes that would be increased to pay for all this, as well as the financial and insurance industry regulations that were being proposed. It’s a big tent with lots of people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a libertarian text or attending a libertarian confab.
The fact that tea partiers are not demanding the cessation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and an end to the war on drugs, as well as a host of other invasions of liberty and violations of rights is not as big a black mark against them as you seem to think. It’s a lopsided movement, not very old, and has no deining texts of which I’m aware.
My guess is that some tea partiers share libertarian positions on some of these issues. As I said, it’s a big tent.
If you can point to a Tea Party manifesto that differs from my take, I’d like to know about it.

Bill-
You have much greater optimism about the Tea Party movement than I.
It seems to me there are two basic mental orientations to those who call themselves libertarians. There are those who believe that people should all be free to live as they wish so long as they did not hurt others. That has always been my position, and I ceased being an orthodox libertarian when I decided it could not protect that set of values adequately. But that’s another conversation.
The other kind of libertarian seems to me to come at it from a very different perspective: they do not want anyone telling them what to do. They have no problem telling others what to do, but since they are unlikely to wield power, they do not want anyone else wielding power either.
Obviously the two orientations can work together fairly amicably so long as power is not a temptation – but that commonness of purpose evaporates when power enters in. I think the Tea Party, insofar as it is libertarian, falls mostly in that second group. I await evidence I am wrong.
I think the Tea Party probably arose semi-spontaneously, building on pre-existing anger and unhappiness. I also think organizers were almost certainly involved to take ‘entrepreneurial advantage’ of the discontent, and insofar as they were Koch financed directly or indirectly, my critique stands.
I see the Tea Party focusing almost entirely on opposing government social programs, which are comparatively minor in their adverse impact on people and arguably on balance beneficial. Even Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek supported a income floor for example. But those are their targets and NOT a ballooning defense budget, subversion of civil liberties by both Democrats and Republicans, aggressive wars, no-bid contracts to our new aristocracy, secrecy in government under both parties, etc.
Based on their actions so far the Tea Partyers are a serious part of the problem and not at all a part of the solution in my mind. They are just the same old crowd that votes ultra right, tarted up in new outfits. I’d be curious how many opposed and how many sympathized with the Dixie Chicks when they were given the treatment for saying they disliked George Bush. I think you know the answer as well as I – and it’s not libertarian.

Gus,
Of course, the TP is not libertarian, not by a long shot.
I didn’t mean to convey an optistic impression of them, which I don’t have. My point simply is that they are what they are, which isn’t much by libertarian standards. I don’t fault them for not adhering to a libertarian line on a range of issues, because that’s not what they are about.
Still, anyone who is opposed to Obama”care,” bailouts, and higher taxes and regs can’t be all bad.
Also, I don’t get your “other kind of libertarianism,” which has people not having a problem telling other people what to do.
How is that libertarian? It’s a kind of libertarianism I’ve never heard of.

Bill-
I’ve met them. They are personally quite authoritarian. For example, I have heard slavery defended four times in my life. Once by a drunk Arkansas Republican relative. Twice face to face (once at a Institute for Humane Studies conference) by people who called themselves libertarians. Once in print by Robert Nozick.
The latter three qualified their comments by emphasizing it be “voluntary.” That someone could even imagine “voluntary” slavery, let alone, as two of the defenders demonstrated in their attitudes, that they’d like owning slaves (so long as it was voluntary) indicated a kind of libertarianism that had no trouble exercising authority over others (so long as initially it was voluntary). This is the kind of attitude that is so removed from the actual lives that people live as to say that authoritarian bosses are no problem – so long as it is “voluntary.” Power is great so long as they can rationalize how they got it because they have next to no empathetic awareness of lives that may be different from their own.
The same kind of person is unable to see any problem at all with even the most abusive employment relations so long as they are “contractual.”
In my judgment these people are against power because they do not have it. For another example think of “Instapundit” – a prominent right wing blogger which Reason magazine considered to be a libertarian – and had no trouble with torture and other excesses.
The best libertarians are kind thoughtful and generous people, and I’ve met many who do not resemble the left wing stereotype. But I’ve also met plenty of this other kind. I think they disproportionately are often tilted towards a certain style of Objectivism – as was made clear in a discussion on this blog concerning Rand and Objectivism and people not using their property the “right” way. .

Gus,
Your four examples don’t quite qualify as a school. Where on earth did Nozick write about it? Not, I assume, in A,S&U.
The drunkard GOoPer and two IHS has beens wouldn’t float anyone’s boat. As for RN, Roy Childs blew his general theory out of the water in the JLS, in “The Invisible Hand Strikes Back” (1977/?).
Btw, I don’t regard Objectivists as libertarians, and would point out that Rand didn’t regard herself as one, calling us “hippies of the right.”

I find it impossible to lend either credibility or respect to the Tea Party movement as it is currently and publicly constituted. While it offers a for-against (mostly the latter) stance on important issues, and even has my agreement for the stance on some issues, it retains one basic problem.
The people who identify with the movement do so on an emotional basis. The strength of the movement is based on stoking and increasing the emotional basis.
I ask, rhetorically but responses welcome, what would we rather have? Elected government representatives who oppose proposed legislation, debate against bills in progress, or criticize existing laws by offering fact-based evidence to support their opposition. Or, government run by those who angrily shout the loudest and the longest, browbeating their opponents into leaving the field.
Right now, I cannot imagine a Tea Party-backed candidate for office being, on balance, the former. I hear (on NPR, mostly) plenty of TP-backed candidates who clearly hold nothing but contempt for the former, and expect to rule the roost as the latter.
I would happily be proven wrong about any of those candidates. I do not, however, wish to risk being right. As such, lacking sufficient facts and evidence proving me wrong, I plan to automatically vote against any TP-backed candidate.

Bill-
It is in Anarchy State and Utopia, though I’ve long since parted with my copy. But it’s there and some googling will enable you to find discussions of it.
I am not talking about a school of libertarian thinking – superficially both groups agree. I am talking about a disposition that leads them towards a libertarian conclusion. Earlier on this blog I had speculated that what makes a normal person tend towards conservative or liberal positions is whether they tend to empathize with very concrete cases “my friend George” or expand to more abstract cases “starving Pakistanis.” Both are needed in my view to balance each other out – but that’s a different issue. http://blog.beliefnet.com/apagansblog/2010/08/empathy-and-political-beliefs.html
If I am on sound ground in that surmise, (and the David Koch and cancer case may fit it pretty well) what makes libertarianism interesting is that it appeals to both kinds of motivations – those who are primarily oriented towards me and mine, and those with a broader view that no one should be coerced. Both attitudes can fit within an ideology of individual rights, but why they are attracted differs.
Of those who are most concretely empathetic, some will be very narrowly so – themselves and their circle or family, and screw the rest. These folks are often authoritarians I think. I m not saying every conservative or libertarian coming from a more conservative direction is authoritarian, I am saying that a nontrivial number are.
You obviously do not like the Institute for Humane Studies, but some thirty or forty years ago, when I encountered these worthies, it was a primary libertarian intellectual organization, maybe THE primary one. I only added the drunk GOPer case to fill out the range of people who I have heard advocate slavery – I thought I made it clear she was not because I emphasized the others, the libertarians, wanted it to be “voluntary.” But to hold such a position a person has to be pretty blind to the conditions that would motivate someone to sell themselves into slavery – for example, to pay medical bills from treating a seriously ill loved one. Such a person is not able to much care about others – and so is prone to treat them as objects and resources, given the power. I could tell other stories on this issue, but I think the slavery issue captures what I am getting at.
While Rand despised libertarians, many were very strongly influenced by her do, as you know. She influenced me at one point, though I never called myself an Objectivist, never endorsed her version of selfishness, and was never an atheist. As for libertarians more closely linked, who in my view fall into the authoritarian category, how about Murray Rothbard? I knew him, and if you were a part of his circle and ever disagreed – watch out! Again, not everyone influenced by Rand is like this – people are complex and why they find a thinker important varies, but as a debate in this blog demonstrated in their own words, a number are. See http://blog.beliefnet.com/apagansblog/2010/03/individuality-freedom-and-superiority-returning-to-ayn-rands-problems.html
But again – I am describing the psychological predispositions that attract people to a position, not the ideology they profess. I am not arguing for schools of thought but for why someone is attracted to a school of thought.

Gus,
I was reading the New Yorker article today and encountered your name.
I had to call a friend who teaches political science at the University of Maryland.
I asked him if the class we took at the Universuty of Kansas in 1970, “Topics and Problems in Anarchist Theory” was taught by someone sharing your name. He more or less confirmed.
Was that in fact you?

Yes it was. Back then I was still an anarcho-libertarian with increasing “leftist” sympathies. I was still quite fond of Rothbard’s work – I think we were still friends, as I think my tendency to think on my own only later became an issue – after I entered the PhD program at Berkeley.
Boy that was a long time ago. Everything seemed so much simpler back then!
I hope I gave you a good grade!
g.

Hey Gus,
Reading the New Yorker article instantly brought me back to your classroom at Whitman College. Indeed, your passing comments about once being involved in the Libertarian party became much clearer. Thanks for a great class in Environmental Policy. I still remember Anderson and Leal and how much I thought their argument about Free Market Environmentalism both excellent in specific instances and numbingly insane as a broader approach to environmental policy.
I would also like to thank you for a healing circle I once attended at your place in Walla Walla. It is truly one of my most memorable college experiences.

Wow. Reading that article took me back; back to a time when libertarianism was a movement for thinkers. Perhaps it is still is, somewhere.
I find that both Rand and Rothbard, while important, I am increasingly finding them baleful in their influence. Prior to Ron Paul and the TP, there was less dogmatism. Now it’s either Rothbard or nothing.

Murray Rothbard once described to me libertarian allies of his as apparatchiks or some similar Leninist term. One was either ally, potential ally, or enemy. I didn’t last because I asked questions he was uninterested in exploring. I am afraid his influence drive a great many people who were attracted by insights from the “Austrian School” out of his movement, and others simply subordinated themselves to him.
Of course in something as complex as libertarian thought there are exceptions, and I’ve been privileged to know some. But in my experience (personal with Rothbard, on the fringes of her group with Rand) neither Rothbard nor Rand had any patience with disagreement or any intellectual curiosity about views different from their own.
Both were authoritarians arguing for freedom.

One point about the article–and Koch empathy. Koch was in a plane crash, and 34 people died–but he was saved. Koch took this to mean that God was pointing out to Him that He was saved for a purpose–haha–like god was going to waste 30 someodd people just to make Koch feel special–. That’s an interesting way to look at it.