The Market Tells Us What People Value, Not What They Should Value
Susan Lee, of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board, accuses libertarians of an “annoying optimism,” but her article “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” (February 12) is enough to make even the most sanguine libertarian glum. It’s a little discouraging at this late date to see libertarianism yet again described as a brand of moral relativism. But that’s how Lee describes it. While sympathetic to the freedom philosophy, she peddles a time-worn and faulty syllogism: Libertarians put certain matters beyond the reach of the state; morality (excluding rights violations) is one of those matters; ergo libertarians believe there is no objective morality. “It is . . . a postmodern attitude,” Lee writes.
Really? That would be news to my libertarian friends who are Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Aristotelians, Kantians, and Objectivists. Although there certainly are libertarians who embrace moral relativism, libertarianism is not intrinsically relativist. Toleration is not relativism.
She writes, “Libertarians are not comfortable with normative questions. They admit to one moral principle from which all preferences follow; that principle is self-ownership. . . . By contrast, conservatives are comfortable with normative issues. Conservative thought works within a hierarchical structure for behavior that has, at its top, absolute and enduring values. These values are not the result of the agnostic process of the free market.”
With all due respect, this is pish-posh. Libertarians aren’t typically uncomfortable with normative questions—they just don’t want politicians arbitrating them. Nor do they necessarily deny the existence of absolute and enduring values—they just don’t want the police enforcing them. No libertarian is obliged to believe that values are nothing but “the result of the agnostic process of the free market.” They are only obliged to believe that as long as a person respects the rights of others, he may choose his own values, however misguided he is. The market tells us what people value, but not what they should value.
Lee mistakenly merges ethics and politics. Ethics is concerned with right and wrong politics with the conditions under which government may legitimately use physical force. The disciplines overlap, but they don’t coincide. It is perfectly coherent to believe in an objective moral code, to teach it to one’s children, to urge it on one’s neighbors, and to think that it shouldn’t be inflicted with a nightstick.
Somewhere Ludwig von Mises wrote that classical liberals aim to exclude the state from morality and religion not because they are unimportant, but because they are very important. It’s a simple point, actually. How long is it going to take the rest of the world to get it?
When is philanthropy not really philanthropy? James Payne examines a case in point.
The U.S. Defense Department wants to track Americans’ electronic activities and troll for possible terrorist patterns. David Brown warns that’s not all we should expect from Total Information Awareness.
A doll maker won success in an unlikely way: by getting girls to become interested in history. Andrew Morriss offers an eyewitness account.
It’s widely believed that a society cannot begin to get rich until it is educated—by the state. Christopher Lingle calls that nostrum into question.
As laws proliferate a new kind of “entrepreneur” comes on the scene: lawyers who can get rich by forcing settlements on businessmen guilty of no wrongdoing. Steven Greenhut reports on an ominous legal fashion in California.
A jury ordered the tobacco industry to pay big damages to smokers in Florida. The news made ex-smoker Ted Roberts think about his former “addiction” to nicotine and what this all says about our society.
When environmentalists proclaim that industry should turn waste byproducts into resources they are merely discovering what Victorian businessmen knew well. Pierre Desrochers shines the spotlight on profit-driven ingenuity.
If you wander into a typical college economics class you may think that calculus, not economics, is being taught. That’s the problem, Brandon Crocker writes.
This entrepreneur built an entertainment empire, launched the careers of many singing stars, and changed the culture in more ways than one. Larry Schweikart charts the career of Berry Gordy Jr.
It’s taken for granted today that democracy is good and that the United States should spread it. Norman Barry points out a few problems with everyone’s favorite political scheme.
As for our columnists, Lawrence Reed reminisces about Prague Spring; Doug Bandow sees ominous developments in health-care policy; Thomas Szasz exposes the fraud of health insurance; Burton Folsom tells the sordid tale of the progressive income tax; Donald Boudreaux says the market makes us smart; Charles Baird wonders why no one cares about union corruption; and Jerry Taylor says to those who think people sell us oil because they like us, “It Just Ain’t So!”
Our reviewers have kept busy pondering books about American power, American law in the twentieth century, the history of American psychiatry, reparations for black Americans, white nationalism, and the conflict between Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall.
—Sheldon Richman
