What Libertarians Get Wrong About Human Nature
By: Lauren Reiff
Tags: Philosophy, History, Society, Economics, Politics

One of the limitations of the libertarian philosophy is its distinctly (and arguably, solely) economic focus at the expense of loosely-grouped “societal concerns”. For the libertarian, such concentration is exacted on economic liberty because to dabble in “societal concerns” has immoral connotations attached to it. For the libertarian, if the state were to exert any kind of distinguishable influence on society this should be roundly treated as sin.

Thus, to use an example from conservatism: To promote so-called “family values” would be perceived as undue overstepping of the ritual freedom of the individual to choose how they want to live. The government should be hands-off when it comes to matters of society, libertarians postulate. It is not their business! In addition, libertarians tend to voice skepticism towards the concept of “promoting a general welfare”. This constitutional clause, they would surely argue, arises naturally from each individual making the choices that they think are best. And through an Invisible-Hand-esque process, the ideal society is cobbled together, organized piece by individual piece.

After all, isn’t this the underlying supposition being made? That if government did nothing but allow freedom and adopt a stance of neutrality towards any and all matters of society, that society would find itself divinely ordered? It’s a bit of a romanticized notion on par with the equilibrium models that the abstract world of high finance is fond of using. Libertarianism as a political philosophy is almost entirely underpinned by free-market theory because its logic is inherently economic in nature. You might ask, so what’s wrong with that? Well, if a political philosophy derives its logic solely from an economic theory, it would suggest that humans are solely transactional. And there’s a problem with that.

It is not a lack of liberty that causes societies’ ills in a lot of cases; it is moreso what is being done with that liberty that is the problem.

The libertarian logic tends to assume that if you get economic liberty squared away, society will automatically be on the road to total optimization (to borrow a term from economics). This could be partially true if we were truly rational maximizers, but we’re not. Or, if it were true we derived meaning from economic optimization, say. But that’s frustratingly not the case either. We’re individuals with souls that derive value from the institutions and social networks that make up our human experience — that act as society’s building blocks.

Libertarian’s exclusive focus on liberty — as the fountain out of which everything else good and true will flow — is not only false but inadequate as a societal prescription. Liberty is magnificently great and noble, but it isn’t a panacea. Consider the current murmurings in our culture about societal decay — the repeated remarks that we’ve lost our moorings or that we’re increasingly isolated and unfulfilled in life. These are legitimate concerns and they appear to be corroborated by various studies on rising rates of mental illness, declining rates of religiosity, and surges in political polarization, to name a few. Libertarians don’t usually address vague issues of “societal decay”, because well, it’s “none of their business” — they’re ideologically opposed to getting their hands dirty with that question.

Conservatives are less resistant to such a prompt and might bring up the importance of things like virtue, beauty, community, truth, responsibility, and wisdom to sustaining the human soul. These are things that libertarians, in their narrow view of government’s proper purview don’t address. And so, the question warrants being asked: We talk a lot about societal decay in our day and age. Could this be amended, do you think, by the libertarian solution of slathering more liberty on everything? Interjecting more freedom? I’m skeptical.

It’s not a lack of liberty that causes societies’ ills in a lot of cases; it is moreso what is being done with that liberty that is the problem.

Libertarians don’t always consider how societies get their values other than supposing that maybe they arise out of a spare economic framework, which is a dubious explanation to put forth. You don’t get meaning out of markets. And it’d be wrong to reduce human life down to a transactional model.

Consider marriage. Does it abide by the ritualistic libertarian idea of economically-maximized self-interest? Not necessarily. In its contractual binding, it demands sacrifice. It can be emotionally messy and challenging. But nevertheless, marriage persists in Western societies as a union born chiefly of love. Love, you could say, is an ideal that is basic to human nature. Curiously, however, it doesn’t appear to mesh well with the abstract ideas of cold, economic logic that almost completely swallow libertarianism. This is a purposefully blunt thought experiment, because it’s obviously not the case that libertarians have anything against marriage. But in their rejection of deliberately upholding something like the institution of marriage (as the conservative might) they are implicitly discounting the grave importance of the basic units of society that give us purpose and belonging and an avenue to channel our nobler instincts.