What It Neans to Be a Libertarian by Charles Murray
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
PASS THE TORTS What It Means to Be a Libertarian Charles Murray Broadway Books, $20, 178pp. Jean Bethke Elshtain In this breezy, engaging manifesto, Charles Murray reveals himself to be a...
...The herselves own themselves, too...
...But that is their choice...
...Congress, in his scheme of things, becomes one big tort overseer...
...Some might uncharitably call this naivete...
...Here Murray derives "that elusive concept, a public good," and thereby distances himself from the "strictest libertarians" who hold that there is no such thing...
...But it falls short- way short-as a workable public philosophy...
...Sure, some people will retreat and remain aloof...
...In a free society this is never permitted...
...eliminate all extant civil rights regulations, but replace them with a constitutional amendment that does not permit any government at any level to "pass any law that requires discrimination by ethnicity, race, religion, or creed...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain In this breezy, engaging manifesto, Charles Murray reveals himself to be a regular boy scout, brimming over with can-do optimism...
...Jean Bethke Elshstain is the author of Democracy on Trial (Basic Books...
...And they will do so through engagements in social life "grounded in the neighborhood churches, lodges, service organizations, charities, and schools...
...So what else is wrong with this picture...
...He celebrates the very "stuff of life" defined as "being engaged with those around you in the core social roles of spouse-parent, son or daughter, friend and neighbor"-life stuff we have disastrously assigned to "the bureaucracies" that now do too much and do it badly by way of "feeding the hungry, succoring the sick, comforting the sad, nurturing the children, tending the elderly, chastising the sinners...
...For example: We also need a constitutional amendment to the effect that "Congress shall provide for the enforcement of laws against fraud and deceptive practice and shall provide for efficient administration of civil tort law...
...In fact, Murray's libertarian polity ironically depends on the passage of a small blizzard of constitutional amendments in order to get things cranked up right...
...We will always be mindful of our personal responsibilities...
...Because each of us "owns himself...
...no more regulation of workplaces, but ever more vigilant enforcement of liability...
...This is a heartfelt document and as clear a statement of a modified version of libertarian philosophy as one is likely to encounter...
...Life is not about coercion or the initiation of force...
...She teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School...
...If communities are to engage us, they must have vital tasks to do...
...So, to further this project, government must cease and desist in lots of arenas: No more regulation of products and services, but tighter enforcement of liability law...
...It radically understates the role government has always played in enabling and constraining the market...
...Sounds good...
...If I consume, I don't take away from anybody else...
...If we take away these vital tasks, communities become mere husks, hollowed-out debris...
...Most will put their shoulders to the wheel and do the right thing nearly all of the time...
...But, beyond that, government should stay out of the way...
...These tasks must be done by individuals in bracingly voluntaristic but overflow-ingly decent communities...
...that is what life is about...
...We are pretty much unfettered selves, in Murray's view, or, at least, in a genuinely free society we would be...
...no more regulation of terms of employment, but tighter protection against employer force and fraud...
...Most will not...
...So what's wrong with this picture...
...it understates our capacity for evil and underplays our calling to do good that goes much beyond Murray's rather anemic representation of a public good...
...Why is it wrong to resort to coercion...
...Well, for one thing, it is based on far too lofty and ambitious an account of human nature...
...Nonpublic goods exist in the zero-sum world much beloved by econometric types and their epigones in all of the social sciences...
...The one legitimate function of government is "exclusive possession of the police power" through criminal law and tort law...
...He wants "greater individual fulfillment, more vital communities, a richer culture...
...And so on...
...But such unfettered beings, through their untrammeled free choices, bind themselves to one another and to a decent and fair life...
...Working from a market model through which economic freedom generates "spontaneous order," Murray generalizes to the rest of life...
...We engage in "voluntary and informed" exchanges...
...The depth and breadth of Murray's optimism knows almost no bounds...
...Yet these self-possessing self-owners are called to social life, presumably because they recognize that there are goods to be derived from the free exchanges of self-owning beings that are available in no other way...
...However, that public good is unaffected by robust mutual consumption...
...For life "acquires texture not just from the hours one devotes to an activity but through an ongoing consciousness of engagement and responsibility...
...it traffics in edifying but politically unfeasible and philosophically simplistic nostrums...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 10
