The crises laid at the feet of laissez faire are the crises of markets that are nothing if not fettered. When critics confront us with corporate malfeasance, structural poverty, or socioeconomic marginalization, we should be clear that market principles do not require defending big business at all costs, and that much of what our critics condemn results from government regulation and legal privileges. As a model for analyzing the political edge of corporate power and defending markets from the bottom up, we twenty-first-century libertarians might look to our nineteenth-century roots—to the insights of the American individualists, especially their most talented exponent, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939), editor of the free-market anarchist journal Liberty.

Conventional textbook treatments portray the American Gilded Age as one of relentless exploitation and economic laissez faire. But Tucker argued that the stereotypical features of capitalism in his day were products not of the market form, but of markets deformed by political privileges. Tucker did not use this terminology, but for the sake of analysis we might delineate four patterns of deformation that especially concerned him: captive markets, ratchet effects, concentration of ownership, and insulation of incumbents.

Types of Distortion

Captive Markets. Legal mandates and government monopolies produce captive markets in which customers are artificially locked in to particular services or sellers that they wouldn’t otherwise patronize because political requirements enforce the demand. For example, the car insurance market is shaped by laws requiring insurance and regulating the minimum service that must be purchased. Captive markets legally guarantee privileged companies access to a steady stock of customers, corralled by the threat of fines and arrest.

Ratchet Effects. Legal burdens, price distortions, and captive markets combine to ratchet up fixed costs of living far higher than would prevail in freed markets. To get by, people are constrained by the necessity of covering these persistent, inflexible costs—by selling labor, buying insurance, taking on debt—under artificially rigid circumstances. Ratchets keep many chasing the next paycheck, creating permanent states of financial crisis for the poor.

Concentration. Confiscation, regressive redistribution, and legal monopolies deprive workers of resources while concentrating wealth and economic control within a politically favored business class. Struggling to cover ratcheted fixed costs, workers are dispossessed of the means to make an independent living and enter markets where ownership of land, capital, and key resources are legally concentrated in the hands of a few. Workers therefore depend on relationships with bosses and corporations far more than in freed markets, deforming economic activity into hierarchical relationships and confining rental economies.

Insulation. Captive markets and bailouts protect big players, while legal monopolies, regulatory barriers, and anticompetitive subsidies inhibit substitutes and competition from below. Government support props up big businesses, stifling the market and social pressures that might otherwise be brought to bear. Insulated businesses can treat employees and consumers with far less consideration or restraint; meanwhile, intervention shuts out alternative solutions by blocking smaller, grassroots, or informal competitors.

Tucker’s Big Four

We can, then, turn to Tucker’s central idea: In “State Socialism and Anarchism” (1888), Tucker argued that “Four Monopolies” fundamentally shaped the Gilded Age economy—four central areas of economic activity where government ratchets, concentration, and insulation came together to deform markets into “class monopolies,” regressively reshaping all markets as the effects rippled outward.

The Land Monopoly. Land titles in nineteenth-century America had nothing to do with free markets. All unoccupied land was claimed by government, whose military seized land from Indians, Mexicans, and independent “squatters.” Government ownership and preferential grants monopolized access, excluding free homesteading. (The “Homestead Act,” which supposedly opened Western lands to homesteading, really imposed rigid legal limits on homesteaders that only certain medium-sized commercial farmers could effectively meet. Smaller farms and nonfarmers were excluded.) Tucker identified this concentration of land titles in elite hands as a “land monopoly,” creating a class of privileged landlords by depriving workers of market opportunities to gain freeholds and escape rent.

Since 1888 the land monopoly has dramatically expanded. Governments worldwide have nationalized oil, natural gas, and water resources; in the United States mining rights and fossil fuel exploration are largely accessed through government licenses, due to government’s ownership of 50 percent of the American West. The cost of land is ratcheted and ownership concentrated through zoning codes, eminent domain, municipal “development” rackets, and local policies to keep real estate prices permanently rising. Freed land markets would feature more individual and widely dispersed ownership; land would be less expensive and more often held free and clear; vacant land would be more readily open to homesteading; and titles would be based as easily on sweat equity as on leveraged cash exchanges. Many people would no longer need to rent; those who chose to rent would find that competition had dramatically improved the prices and conditions available on the market.

The Money Monopoly. For Tucker the most damaging of the Big Four was the Money Monopoly, “the privilege given by the government to certain individuals . . . holding certain kinds of property, of issuing the circulating medium,” politically manipulating the money supply, prohibiting alternative currencies, and cartelizing banking, money, and credit. Tucker saw that monetary control not only secured monopoly profits for insulated banks, but also concentrated economic ownership throughout the economy, favoring the large, established businesses that large, established banks preferred to deal with.

Tucker identified the Money Monopoly as an economic force in 1888—before the Fed and fiat currency, the FDIC, Fannie, Freddie, the IMF, or trillion-dollar bailouts to banks “too big to fail.” Today regulatory cartels and political mandates have also captured insurance, alongside credit, savings, and investment, as a Money Monopoly stronghold, forcing workers into rigged markets while shutting out noncorporate, grassroots forms of mutual aid.

Ideas and Extortion

The Patent Monopoly. Tucker condemned monopolies protected by patents and copyrights—“protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort . . . a reward enormously in excess of . . . their services.” Since copying an idea does not deprive the inventor of the idea, or any tangible property she had before, “intellectual property” meant only a legal monopoly against competitors who could imitate or duplicate the monopolists’ products at lower cost.

“Intellectual property” (IP) has grown vigorously since 1888, as media, technology, and scientific innovation made control over the information economy a linchpin of corporate power. Monopoly profits on IP are the effective business model of Fortune 500 companies like GE, Monsanto, Microsoft, and Disney, which demand virtually unlimited legal power to insulate themselves from competition. Copyright terms quadrupled in length, while massive, synchronized expansions of intellectual protectionism became standard features of neoliberal “free trade” “agreements” like NAFTA and KORUS FTA (United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement). In a freed market such business models would fall—and with them, the ratcheted costs consumers pay for access to culture, medicine, and technology.

The Protectionist Monopoly. Tucker identified the protectionist tariff as a monopoly in the sense that it insulated politically favored domestic producers from foreign competition, and thus ratcheted up daily costs for consumers.

With the rise of multinational corporations and neoliberal trade agreements, tariffs have declined over the years. But the specific legal mechanism was less important to Tucker than the purpose of controlling trade to insulate domestic incumbents. In 1888 that meant the tariff. In 2011, it means a vast network of political controls used to manage the “balance of trade”: export subsidies, manipulation of exchange rates, and multigovernment agencies like the World Bank and IMF.

Metastatic Monopolization

Tucker’s Big Four have only grown more pervasive since the 1880s. But the past century has also seen the metastatic proliferation of government regulatory bodies intended to restructure new transactions and capture new markets. Among today’s Many Monopolies, five are especially pervasive:

The Agribusiness Monopoly encompasses the New Deal system of U.S. Department of Agriculture cartels, surplus buy-ups, subsidized irrigation, export subsidies, and similar measures ratcheting up prices, distorting production toward subsidized crops, and concentrating agricultural activity in large-scale, capital-intensive monoculture. These, inevitably enacted in the name of “small farmers,” invariably benefit large factory farms and agribusiness conglomerates like ADM and Tyson.

The Infrastructure Monopoly includes physical and communications infrastructure. Governments build roads, railways, and airports through eminent domain and tax subsidies, and impose cartelizing regulations on most mass transit. Restricted entry secures monopoly profits for insulated carriers; confiscating money and property to subsidize long-distance transportation and shipping creates tax-supported business opportunities for agribusiness, big-box chain retailers, and other businesses dependent on long-haul trucking. Incumbent telecommunications and media companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon accumulate empires by cartelizing bandwidth; control of broadcast frequencies is concentrated through the FCC’s political allocation; and ownership of telephone, cable, and fiber-optic bandwidth is concentrated through local monopoly concessions for each medium.

The Utility Monopoly grants control over electricity, water, and natural gas to massive, centralized producers through comprehensive planning, subsidies, and regional monopolies. Household generation, polycentric neighborhood systems, or off-the-grid alternatives are crowded out or regulated to death.

Regulatory Protectionism

Regulatory Protectionism may be the most widely dispersed of the Many Monopolies. Like Tucker’s Protectionist Monopoly, it concentrates and insulates incumbent providers by creating hurdles for would-be competitors. Established businesses stifle competition from below by lobbying for regulatory red tape, extortionist fees, and complex licensing for everything from taxi-driving to hairdressing. Industry standards, which would otherwise be set by social convention and market experimentation, are removed from competition and determined by political pull. High compliance costs insulate incumbents who can afford them from competitors who cannot, shutting the poor out of entrepreneurial opportunities and independent livelihoods.

The Health Care Monopoly is a ripple effect of other monopolies but merits special notice because of the all-consuming growth of the medical sector and because health care and insurance so profoundly shape decisions about jobs, money, and financial planning. The central economic fact of health care is a crippling ratchet effect. Patent monopolies ratchet up drug costs and insulate profits for Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. The FDA and medical licensing provide a form of regulatory protectionism, constraining the supply of doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals, concentrating profits and further ratcheting costs. A medical need can become a catastrophic cost, effectively requiring comprehensive insurance. Workers once got insurance through fraternal mutual-aid societies, but money monopolies have now thoroughly corporatized the insurance market through subsidies, mandates, and regulatory control. Workers now are tethered to their employers by the cost of insurance “benefits,” while facing the persistent danger of lost coverage, denied claims, and crippling debt.

Tucker’s analysis of the Four Monopolies controlling the Gilded Age economy, supplemented with the new Big Five that our own era has introduced, goes a long way toward showing why existing markets work the way they work and fail for the people they fail for. It may also inspire some objections from today’s libertarians.

The Many Monopolies deform markets toward stereotypically “capitalistic” business, but government intervenes in more than one direction. What about regulations or welfare programs to benefit poor people, or constraints on large, consolidated firms? These exist, but do not necessarily achieve their supposed aims. As shown in Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism, the Progressive regulatory structure and antitrust law, far from curbing big business, form the core of regulatory protectionism, cartelizing and insulating big business. There are also issues of priority and scale. While I object to SBA loans or TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) as much as any free-marketeer, in this age of trillion-dollar bank bailouts, even when government puts fingers on both sides of the scale, one finger is pushing harder than the other.

What about the explanations market economists offer for corporate firms’ greater efficiency, based on division of labor, economies of scale, or gains from trade? Wouldn’t large corporations outcompete smaller rivals, even without subsidies and monopolies?

But Tucker didn’t reject the division of labor, gains from trade, or large-scale production. Rather he suggested labor, trade, and scale organized along different lines. Independent contracting, co-ops, and worker-managed shops are forms of specialization and trade no less than centralized firms. Scale can be internalized through central management, or externalized through polycentric trade. A corporate economy is only one among many possibilities for dividing labor and exchanging values. The question is whether it predominates because of economic forces that would persist in markets free of structural privilege, or because of predicaments that would dissipate when competitors are free to offer alternatives with less centralization, less management, and more trade and entrepreneurial independence for ordinary workers.

If Tucker’s analysis proves anything, it proves there are many places in economic life where ordinary people are given a hard shove toward spending money they’d rather not spend with trading partners they wouldn’t otherwise keep. The most pervasive, far-reaching government interventions foster economic concentration, commercialization, hyperthyroidal scale, and the consolidated hierarchy needed to manage it—not because they grow naturally in market economies but because they grow out of control in the hothouse of socialized costs and inhibited competition.

The Belt and the Bones

For most of the twentieth century American libertarians were seen as defenders of “capitalism” (though see Clarence Carson’s doubts about that word in the 1985 Freeman article “Capitalism: Yes and No”). Most libertarians, and nearly all their opponents, seemed to agree that libertarianism meant defending business against the attacks of “big government,” and the purpose of laissez faire was to unleash existing forms of commerce from political restraints.

This was almost a complete reversal from the attitude of traditional libertarians like Tucker, which we might call “free-market anti-capitalism.” He was one of the best-known defenders of free markets in nineteenth-century America, happily summarizing his economic principles as “Absolute Free Trade . . . laissez-faire the universal rule.” For Tucker, then, libertarianism meant an attack on economic privilege by removing the political privileges that propped it up, dismantling monopolies by exposing them to competition from below.

The Many Monopolies are pervasive and fundamentally shape the everyday reality of the corporatist economy. So why then have not only the opponents but also the advocates of free markets so often missed Tucker’s analysis, with Progressives constantly laying the blame for inequality, exploitation, and corporate power on “unregulated markets,” while “pro-capitalist” libertarians respond by making excuses for the economic status quo? Paradoxically, it may be that Tucker’s approach is forgotten partly because of the very depth and pervasiveness of the problems it identifies.

The interventions twentieth-century libertarians were most likely to identify and oppose—progressive taxes, welfare, environmental regulations—are surface interventions, economically speaking. While aiming to reform or restrain the corporate state-capitalist economy, they take its basic features—concentration, insulation, ratcheted costs, and corporate power—for granted, attempting only to contain their most unsightly downstream effects. Countervailing “Progressive” regulations are like a belt put on capitalism. A man may need a belt or he may look better without, but his body remains the same with or without the restraint.

The political means that consolidate the Many Monopolies do more than interfere in the outcomes of preexisting market structures. State-capitalist privileges shape basic patterns of ownership, access, and cost for essential goods and factors of production. They fundamentally restructure markets, inventing the class structures of ownership, ratcheted costs, and inhibited competition that produce wage labor, rent, and the corporate economy we face. These primary interventions are no belt for state capitalism to wear or take off; they are its very bones. Without them, what’s left is not a different look for the same body—it’s a totally different organism.

Because you wear a belt on the surface, it’s easy to see and easy to imagine how you might look without it. Twentieth-century libertarians rightly condemned how the belt was hitched by government coercion—but rarely noticed that however much the anti-business belt constrains the state capitalist economy’s natural shape, without the belt it is still a political product shaped by intervention to its pro-business bones. The Monopolies that create capitalists, landlords, and financiers and uphold corporate power are so deeply embedded in the existing economy, so entrenched in consensus politics, it is easy to mistake them for business as usual in a market society.

We might say—with apologies to Shulamith Firestone—that the political economy of state capitalism is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear to be a superficial set of interventions, a problem that can be solved by a few legal reforms, perhaps the elimination of the occasional bailout or export subsidy, while preserving intact the basic recognizable patterns of the corporate economy. But there is something deeper, and more pervasive, at stake. A fully freed market means liberating essential command posts in the economy from State control, to be reclaimed for market and social entrepreneurship. The market that would emerge would look profoundly different from anything we have now. That so profound a change cannot easily fit into traditional categories of thought—for example “libertarian” or “left-wing,” “laissez-faire” or “socialist,” “entrepreneurial” or “anti-capitalist”—is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: Radically free markets burst through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolutionary, we would use it.

How indeed?

Two years in, if there’s any noticeable difference between Bush’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, and Obama’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, I’d like to know where to find it. The difference between me and Dionne is that Dionne is apparently surprised by this outcome—why hasn’t Obama done better? At issue is what used to be called “Good Government”—the problem of ensuring that a centralized managerial State, with expansive powers to intervene in all matters economic, social, or hygienic, will be run cleanly, and competently, by qualified experts. Dionne insists that financial market meltdowns, oil spills, and coal-mine disasters reveal the catastrophic results of a few years of Bush-era government neglect. Those of us who remember the Bush administration may have a hard time accepting the claim that it was an era in which government was not doing enough; and we see these headline-grabbing catastrophes as only the tail end of a decades-long crisis—a bipartisan, politically created crisis of institutional incentives and industry “best practice-ism,” generated, nurtured, and protected by government itself.

So when Dionne reviews a few headlines—the financial-market meltdown, the Gulf oil spill, the coal-mine explosion at Upper Big Branch—he suggests that “It’s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful ‘big’ government.”

Really? Let’s try.

“Deregulated” Wall Street collapsed in 2007 after years of unsustainable bubbles and malinvestment by a handful of immensely powerful big players. The real crisis was not just the “crunch,” but the shell game and misallocation that preceded it. The shell game flourished through a private-public partnership between government central banking, cartelized financial industry incumbents, and the industry-connected regulatory enforcers of the government money monopoly. The crash certainly revealed powerful corporations acting recklessly. But how did they get so powerful, and why were they willing to take those risks? Because government has, for decades, as a matter of policy, encouraged their dominance, invited their investments, subsidized their loan markets, put them near the inflation spigot, and subsidized their risk-taking with the promise of tax-funded bailouts. In a freed market, “deregulated” Wall Street’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

British Petroleum (BP), as a corporation, exists because governments created it—the Shah of Iran granted a company owned by the government of the United Kingdom a monopoly concession. The UK government kept its ownership stake until the 1980s. Like all other Big Oil companies, BP extracts the oil it sells mainly from government-controlled land and sea, through monopoly concessions, bureaucratic bidding processes, and politically granted leases. Oil companies use government protection, liability caps, and escrow funds to insulate their businesses from paying the economic and social costs of their actions. In a freed market BP’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

Massey and other Big Coal companies also depend on government leases and use government permits to absolve them of the environmental costs they inflict on their neighbors—including the damage that mountaintop removal mining causes to downstream property owners. They also rely on a regulatory structure that has taken control over workplace safety disputes out of the hands of workers and given it to a politically appointed, industry-dominated bureaucracy, the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Where miners’ unions reacted to unsafe conditions by walking out and crippling production until issues were resolved, the MSHA issues an ineffectual fine and tells workers to keep on working in hope and faith. In a freed market Massey’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

Dionne may present his article as a commentary on recent news, but the headlines are only carelessly chosen illustrations for a message that seems copied out of a children’s civics textbook circa 1948. Elected government’s task is to “stand up for the many against the few,” to “make sure that corporations are properly supervised,” and to “protect those with weaker bargaining positions . . . against the harm that those in stronger bargaining positions might inflict.” Our problem is simply that we do not trust the political means enough. According to Dionne, if we are ever to solve these politically created crises, we need to know “that government in a free society is not a distant force but, rather, something that all of us influence and shape.”

To be sure, government is not very distant from the downtown offices of the Washington Post. For the rest of us, though, access is somewhat more limited, and not “all of us” have the same influence in shaping government policy. That is done by political insiders and economic incumbents: As scholars like Gabriel Kolko and Butler Shafer have repeatedly shown, government regulatory bodies from the FTC to the MSHA to the SEC have consistently been captured by the incumbents in the industries they are supposed to regulate, systematically rigging government regulations in such a way as to build up cartels, exclude competition, and protect businessmen from liability for harmful practices.

Even with the record of regulatory capture and industry-driven policy, Dionne, like many Progressives, simply insists that politicians need even more trust and fewer restraints on action to give them the independence to do the right thing. You might call this kind of Progressivism a theory of trickle-down politics: When government devotes the overwhelming majority of its power and resources to foolish or destructive programs directed by concentrated interests—subsidies, bailouts, anticompetitive regulations, or an ever-growing military-industrial “National Security” complex—the proposed solution is to give that same government even more strength and greater resources to dispose of, hoping that some of the surplus will eventually make it through the net of insider control to reach programs that offer a pittance to the little guy.

Individualists know that when you reward the institutions that created crisis, you are going to get more crises. Greater regulatory powers will only make government more attractive to industry incumbents; the more politics is involved in industry, the more that political pull pays off for the industrialists. The root causes of the crises we’ve faced in recent years are not problems of competence or corruption. They are problems of cartelization and capture. The solution is not more trust in government; it’s to realize there are things that just cannot be accomplished politically, which should instead be addressed through decentralized, peaceful social cooperation.

As he told the Courier-Journal: “I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism; I think it’s a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant; but at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. . . .”

Maddow responded: “I think wanting to allow private businesses to discriminate on the basis of race, because of property rights, is an extreme view.” Within a day Progressives were touting the interview as proof of a deep conflict between libertarian defenses of private property and struggles for racial equality. Meanwhile, compromising libertarians like Brink Lindsey reacted by discovering exceptions to libertarian principles—to make room, again, for federal antidiscrimination laws. The entire debate has played out as an argument over libertarianism and “extremism,” with Progressives and many nominal libertarians both condemning Rand Paul’s simplistic “extremism” about private property and libertarian rights.

I have little interest in defending Paul but it’s strange to treat him like some case study in the dangers of libertarian extremism. Rand Paul is a conservative, not a libertarian—let alone an “extreme” one. He’s said as much, in so many words, in repeated interviews. Now, you could simply say, “He may be no libertarian, but never mind Rand Paul—what about the issue?” Libertarianism opposes government control of private business decisions; taken to extremes, doesn’t that include laws against racist business practices—the civil rights movement’s crowning achievement?

Well, I do have something to say on behalf of “extremism.” Not on behalf of sacrificing the civil rights movement’s achievements to “extreme” stands on antistatist principle. Rather, “extreme” stands on antistatist principle show what the civil rights movement did right, and what it really achieved, without the aid of federal laws.

To be sure, uncompromising libertarianism does mean uncompromised property rights. That includes, if we’re to be “extremists,” a conscientious defense of businesspeople’s right to be awful, to discriminate against anyone for any reason, so long as they do it on their own property without violence. That ain’t Jim Crow as practiced in the South: State laws and Klan terrorism there enforced segregation on unwilling businesses. But Maddow’s correct—Jim Crow was also a social and economic system, and white businessmen colluded even without legal mandates. Woolworth’s lunch counters were segregated by company policy not by law. Rand Paul “abhors” that personally and wouldn’t eat there but thinks government shouldn’t intervene.

Maddow was baffled: “But isn’t being in favor of civil rights, but against the Civil Rights Act like saying you’re against high cholesterol but in favor of fried cheese?” She’s begging the question; you may as well ask how someone could be for patriotism but against the PATRIOT Act. But while mistaken, the question isn’t cheap rhetoric. It’s revealing of Maddow’s premises about law and social progress.

As she insisted later, “Let’s say there’s a town right now. . . . [T]he owner of the bowling alley says, ‘we’re not going to allow black patrons.’ . . . You may think that’s abhorrent and you may think that’s bad business. But unless it’s illegal, there’s nothing to stop that—nothing under your worldview to stop the country from resegregating.”

Unless it’s illegal anything could happen; nobody can stop it; a just social order can only form through social control. Private segregation should stop and only government can stop it; hence, Title II. Paul helpfully suggests you can loudly announce your personal abhorrence of racism, even without laws. Maddow rightly dismisses that as a response: Entrenched white supremacy was indifferent to personal outrage; it demanded concerted, political resistance.

But if libertarianism has anything to teach about politics, it’s that politics goes beyond politicians; social problems demand social solutions. Discriminatory businesses should be free from legal retaliation—not insulated from the social and economic consequences of their bigotry. What consequences? Whatever consequences you want, so long as they’re peaceful—agitation, confrontation, boycotts, strikes, nonviolent protests.

So when Maddow asks, “Should Woolworth’s lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated?” neither she nor Paul seemed to realize that her attempted coup de grace—invoking the sit-in movement’s student martyrs, facing down beatings to desegregate lunch counters—actually offers a perfect libertarian response to her own question.

Because, actually, Woolworth’s lunch counters weren’t desegregated by Title II. The sit-in movement did that. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott onward, the Freedom Movement had won victories, town by town, building movements, holding racist institutions socially and economically accountable. The sit-ins proved the real-world power of the strategy: In Greensboro, N.C., nonviolent sit-in protests drove Woolworth’s to abandon its whites-only policy by July 1960. The Nashville Student Movement, through three months of sit-ins and boycotts, convinced merchants to open all downtown lunch counters in May the same year. Creative protests and grassroots pressure campaigns across the South changed local cultures and dismantled private segregation without legal backing.

Should lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated? No—but the question is how to disallow it. Bigoted businesses shouldn’t face threats of legal force for their racism. They should face a force much fiercer and more meaningful—the full force of voluntary social organization and a culture of equality. What’s to stop resegregation in a libertarian society? We are. Using the same social power that was dismantling Jim Crow years before legal desegregation.

I oppose civil rights acts because I support civil rights movements—because the forms of social protest they pioneered proved far more courageous, positive, and effective than the litigious quagmires and pale bureaucratic substitutes governments offer.

Libertarians must change the terms of this rigged debate. The problem isn’t that libertarian views get “extreme,” but that some don’t take free markets far enough, forgetting they mean freedom not just for businesses and stereotypical forms of commerce but for every sort of consensual social experimentation, nonviolent social struggle, and people-powered solidarity free people can practice. The question is not whether to make our views less “extreme,” but how to make our “extremism” more thoughtful. Perhaps libertarianism, the nation, and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

How indeed?

Two years in, if there’s any noticeable difference between Bush’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, and Obama’s policies of corporate privilege, endless warfare, bailouts, executive power, and bureaucratic expansion, I’d like to know where to find it. The difference between me and E.J. Dionne is that Dionne is apparently surprised by this outcome — why hasn’t Obama done better? At issue is what used to be called “Good Government” – the problem of ensuring that a centralized managerial State, with expansive powers to intervene in all matters economic, social, or hygienic, will be run cleanly, and competently, by qualified experts. Dionne insists that financial market meltdowns, oil spills, and coal-mine disasters reveal the catastrophic results of a few years of Bush-era government neglect. Those of us who remember the Bush administration may have a hard time accepting the claim that it was an era in which government was not doing enough; and we see these headline-grabbing catastrophes as only the tail end of a decades-long crisis – a bipartisan, politically created crisis of institutional incentives and industry “best practice-ism,” created, nurtured, and protected by government itself.

So when Dionne reviews a few headlines – the financial-market meltdown, the Gulf oil spill, the coal-mine explosion at Upper Big Branch – he suggests that “It’s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful ‘big’ government.”

Really? Let’s try.

“Deregulated” Wall Street collapsed in 2007 after years of unsustainable bubbles and malinvestment by a handful of immensely powerful big players. The real crisis was not just the “crunch,” but the shell game and misallocation that preceded it. The shell game flourished through a private-public partnership between government central banking, cartelized financial industry incumbents, and the industry-connected regulatory enforcers of the government Money Monopoly. The crash certainly revealed powerful corporations acting recklessly. But how did they get so powerful, and why were they willing to take those risks? Because government has, for decades, as a matter of policy, encouraged their dominance, invited their investments, subsidized their loan markets, put them near the inflation spigot, and subsidized their risk-taking with the promise of tax-funded bailouts. In a freed market, “deregulated” Wall Street’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

Government-Fed Big Oil

British Petroleum, as a corporation, exists because governments created it – with a monopoly concession from the Shah of Iran to a company owned by the government of the United Kingdom (until the 1980s). Like all other Big Oil companies, BP extracts the oil it sells mainly from government-controlled land and sea, through monopoly concessions, bureaucratic bidding processes, and politically granted leases. It uses government protection, liability caps, and escrow funds to insulate their business from paying the economic and social costs of their actions. In a freed market BP’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

Massey and other Big Coal companies also depend on government leases and use government permits to absolve them of the environmental costs they inflict on their neighbors – including the damage that mountaintop removal mining causes to downstream property owners. They also rely on a regulatory structure that has taken control over workplace safety disputes out of the hands of workers and handed it to a politically appointed, industry-dominated bureaucracy, the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).  Where miners’ unions reacted to unsafe conditions by walking out and crippling production until issues were resolved, the MSHA issues an ineffectual fine and tells workers to keep on working in hope and faith. In a freed market Massey’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

Dionne may present his article as a commentary on recent news, but the headlines are only carelessly chosen illustrations for a message that seems copied out of a children’s civics textbook circa 1948. Elected government’s task is to “stand up for the many against the few,” to “make sure that corporations are properly supervised,” and to “protect those with weaker bargaining positions … against the harm that those in stronger bargaining positions might inflict.” Our problem is simply that we do not trust the political means enough. According to Dionne, if we are ever to solve these politically created crises, we need to know “that government in a free society is not a distant force but, rather, something that all of us influence and shape.”

To be sure, government is not very distant from the downtown offices of the Washington Post. For the rest of us, though, access is somewhat more limited, and not “all of us” have the same influence in shaping government policy. That is done by political insiders and economic incumbents: As scholars like Gabriel Kolko and Butler Shafer have repeatedly shown, government regulatory bodies from the FTC to the MSHA to the SEC have consistently been captured by the incumbents in the industries  they are supposed to regulate, systematically rigging government regulations in such a way as to build up cartels, exclude competition, and protect businessmen from liability for harmful practices.

Trickle-Down Politics

Even with the record of regulatory capture and industry-driven policy, Dionne, like many Progressives, simply insists that politicians need even more trust and fewer restraints on action to give them the independence to do the right thing. You might call this kind of Progressivism a theory of trickle-down politics: When government devotes the overwhelming majority of its power and resources to foolish or destructive programs directed by concentrated interests – subsidies, bailouts, anticompetitive regulations, or an ever-growing military-industrial “National Security” complex – the proposed solution is to give that same government even more strength and greater resources to dispose of, on the hope that some of the surplus will eventually make it through the net of insider control to reach programs that offer a pittance to the little guy.

Individualists know that when you reward the institutions that created crisis, you are going to get more crises. Greater regulatory powers will only make government more attractive to industry incumbents; the more politics is involved in industry, the more that political pull pays off for the industrialists. The root causes of the crises we’ve faced in recent years are not problems of competence or corruption. They are problems of cartelization and capture. The solution is not more trust in government; it’s to realize there are things the political means just cannot accomplish, which should instead be addressed through decentralized, peaceful social cooperation.

Dionne’s column began with a little joke – “Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated [sic] Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?” Ho, ho. But given what we actually know about how the Money Monopoly, the Natural Resource Monopoly, the Regulatory Monopoly, the trillion-dollar bailouts, and the bloody record of U.S. wars in the Middle East and Central Asia created each and every one of those problems, a better joke might be:

“Ever heard the one about the soft-hearted shakedown artist? He broke your legs, then the next day he came around to donate crutches.” Then a Washington Post columnist came along and shouted, “You see? Without Sammy the Bull, you couldn’t even walk!”

Brooks is certainly right that no “health care reform” proposal with any chance in mainstream partisan politics promises any fundamental change to the status quo. What we have had is a system where pervasive government regulation, subsidy, and mandated captive markets corral workers into an industry driven by sky-high costs, managed by bureaucratic pencil-pushing and corporate economizing (often at the expense of innocent people’s health or lives), and owned by a handful of uncompetitive, well-entrenched incumbent corporations. No mainstream “reform” proposal would have changed anything about that. The proposals mainly concerned themselves with introducing new government subsidies and new captive-market mandates to force yet more workers and money into the broken system.

But Brooks took all this as a sign that the health care debate was about fundamental “values.” I think it was a sign that conventional political debate was a superficial squabble over meaningless details. The real debate was about grammar.

Brooks sees “a debate about what kind of country we want America to be”: Although “many of us” thought “we” were in a regulatory sweet spot in which “we” could extend coverage to the uninsured but also lower costs, “we” were wrong; “we” cannot make gains without substantial costs. So “we” face a “brutal choice”—a tradeoff between economic “vitality” and “security.” “Vitality” for “America” means an “unforgiving nation” but also a more “vibrant” one; security means “a more decent society” but also one where “more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system” (emphasis added). We are told that “we all” have to decide what “we” want—for “America.”

Remarkably, among Brooks’s 800 words, supposedly on a debate about deeply held convictions, the word “I” never shows up in the author’s own voice. (The single “I” appears in a quotation.) Lost in this thicket of plural pronouns, “nations,” and “societies” is any notion that I might settle on different preferences from you, or that you might have a right to decide for yourself which preference to pursue. There is only one path for all, and “we” are left only with the engineering decision of which output to optimize for: “vitality or security.”

Mind Your Me’s and You’s

For the individualist, half of human decency in political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight. There is no right outcome in this debate except to reject the conventional political premise that “we all” need to decide on anything when it comes to health care. Life is full of tradeoffs. But the right question to ask is not which choice to take, but rather who should choose and who should bear the costs of the choice taken. And the answer is that each person should choose how much of her own resources she wants to devote to health care and to insuring against future disasters. These tradeoffs only become “brutal” when I am forced to take your risks or you are forced to fund my security.

Brooks might reply, “Ah, you claim to avoid the hard choice here with a free market. But really you are making a choice without admitting it. Free markets mean everyone is limited to her own resources to meet medical bills; but by definition poor people have no real resources to fall back on. So really you’re just advocating one option: a system that chooses vitality and growth over security and care for the vulnerable.” Indeed, Brooks insists that “The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young” and confusedly suggests that this is more or less the kind of “vitality”-oriented system that America has had and will continue to have unless government forces taxpayers to chip in for more extensive government “welfare policies” in health care.

That might seem true if the corporate health care system we face emerged from “the unregulated market.” But it didn’t. Government licensure controls who practices medicine, and where and how they practice it. Government prohibitions restrict which drugs are produced and where to get them because government thinks it knows better than you what drugs you should take and because it is engaged in a deliberate effort to raise drug prices through a system of patents. Federal tax loopholes and regulatory micromanagement make most full-time workers dependent on their bosses for health insurance and force most other workers to deal with government health insurance or none at all. There is a “market” of a sort here, but it’s far from a free market: It’s a rigged market, shaped by government regulation, funded by government subsidy, and owned by government agencies and government-privileged corporations.

The Meaning of a Freed Market

Pervasive confusion of the existing government-supported anticompetitive corporate health care market with health care provided by a genuinely freed market leads to two related confusions about what a real market in medicine would mean.

First is the widespread but ultimately ridiculous notion that free markets would require individual workers to rely only on personal savings or expensive corporate health insurance to cover high medical costs. In fact in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, freer medical markets actually offered many competitive, noncorporate means for working folks to get affordable, decent health care for themselves by pooling resources through free-market bargaining and free association. As the libertarian scholars David Beito and Roderick Long have discussed, “contract practice” agreements, organized by low-income workers and primarily negotiated through unions, mutual-aid societies, and fraternal lodges, provided reliable medical care for 20 to 50 percent of workers in English-speaking countries for about one day’s wages per year. These affordable arrangements were ultimately driven out, not by the ruthlessness of the free market, but rather by deliberate assaults by government and the government-privileged medical guilds.

Second, if we recognize the importance of freed markets to the prospect for a civilized solution to the health care crisis, it also quickly becomes obvious that there are many opportunities for “reform” that simply do not present the kind of tradeoff that Brooks wrings his hands over—specifically, “reforms” that get rid of the government interventions that cause costs to skyrocket in the first place.

There is a clash of fundamental values in the health care debate, but it’s not a clash within conventional electoral politics. The real debate is between
politics as a means of providing health care and a freer, more humane alternative: consensual social organization.

Brooks is certainly right that no “health care reform” proposal with any chance in mainstream partisan politics promises any fundamental change to the status quo. What we have had is a system where pervasive government regulation, subsidy, and mandated captive markets corral workers into an industry driven by sky-high costs, managed by bureaucratic pencil-pushing and corporate economizing (often at the expense of innocent people’s health or lives), and owned by a handful of uncompetitive, well-entrenched incumbent corporations. No mainstream “reform” proposal will change anything about that. The proposals mainly concerned themselves with introducing new government subsidies and new captive-market mandates to force yet more workers and money into the broken system.

But Brooks takes all this as a sign that the health care debate is about fundamental “values.”  I think it’s a sign that conventional political debate is a superficial squabble over meaningless details. The real debate is about grammar.

Brooks sees “a debate about what kind of country we want America to be”: Although “many of us” thought “we” were in a regulatory sweet spot in which “we” could extend coverage to the uninsured and lower costs, “we” were wrong; “we” cannot make gains without substantial costs. So “we” face a “brutal choice”–a tradeoff between economic “vitality” and “security.” “Vitality” for “America” means an “unforgiving nation” but also a more “vibrant” one; security means “a more decent society” but also one where “more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system” (emphasis added). We are told that “we all” have to decide what “we” want–for “America.”

No “I” to Be Seen

Remarkably, among Brooks’s 800 words, supposedly on a debate about deeply held convictions, the word “I” never appears in the author’s own voice. (The single “I” appears in a quotation.) Lost in this thicket of plural pronouns, “nations,” and “societies” is any notion that I might settle on different preferences from you, or that you might have a right to decide for yourself which preference to pursue. There is only one decision for all, and “we” are left only with the engineering decision of which output to optimize for: vitality or security.

For the individualist, half of human decency in political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight. There is no right outcome in this debate except to reject the conventional political premise that “we all” need to decide on anything when it comes to health care. Life is full of tradeoffs. But the right question to ask is not which choice to take, but rather who should choose and who should bear the costs of the choice taken. And the answer is that each person should choose how much of her own resources she wants to devote to health care and to insuring against future disasters. These tradeoffs only become “brutal” when I am forced to take your risks or you are forced to fund my security.

Brooks might reply, “Ah, you claim to avoid the hard choice here with a free market But really you are making a choice without admitting it. Free markets mean everyone is limited to her own resources to meet medical bills; but by definition poor people have no real resources to fall back on. So really you’re just advocating one option: a system that chooses vitality and growth over insecurity and suffering for the vulnerable.” Indeed, Brooks insists that “The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young” and confusedly suggests that this is more or less the kind of “vitality”-oriented system that America has had and will continue to have unless government forces taxpayers to chip in for more extensive government “welfare policies” in health care.

That might seem true if the corporate health care system we face emerged from “the unregulated market.” But it didn’t. Government licensure controls who practices medicine, and where and how they practice it. Government prohibitions restrict which drugs are produced and where to get them because government thinks it knows better than you what drugs you should take and because they are engaged in a deliberate effort to raise drug prices through a system of patents. Federal tax loopholes and regulatory micromanagement make most full-time workers dependent on their bosses for health insurance and force most other workers to deal with government health insurance or none at all. There is a “market” of a sort here, but far from a free market: It’s a rigged market, shaped by government regulation, funded by government subsidy, and owned by government agencies and government-privileged corporations.

Confusions Abound

Pervasive confusion of the existing government-supported anticompetitive corporate health care market with medical services provided by a genuinely freed market leads to two related confusions about what a real market in medicine would mean.

First is the widespread, but ultimately ridiculous notion that free markets would require individual workers to rely only on personal savings or expensive corporate health insurance to cover high medical costs. In fact in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, freer medical markets actually offered many competitive, noncorporate means for working folks to get affordable, decent health care for themselves by pooling resources through free-market bargaining and free association. As libertarian scholars David Beito and Roderick Long have discussed, “contract practice” agreements, organized by low-income workers and primarily negotiated through unions, mutual-aid societies, and fraternal lodges, provided reliable medical care for 20-50 percent of workers in English-speaking countries for about one day’s wages per year. These affordable arrangements were ultimately driven out not by the ruthlessness of the free market, but rather by deliberate assaults by government and the government-privileged medical guilds.

Second, if we recognize the importance of freed markets to the prospect for a civilized solution to the health care crisis, it also quickly becomes obvious that there are many opportunities for reform that simply do not present the kind of tradeoff that Brooks wrings his hands over–specifically, reforms that get rid of the government interventions which cause costs to skyrocket in the first place. For example, instead of levying massive new taxes to cover the rising costs of pharmaceuticals, freed medical markets would abolish the government interventions that drive up those costs–most notably FDA approval requirements and the monopoly pricing imposed through patents. Freed markets would both make it easier to cover costs that customers face and free up resources for other uses outside of the medical system.

There is a clash of fundamental values in the health care debate, but it’s not within conventional electoral politics. The real debate is between politics as a means of providing health care and a freer, more humane alternative: consensual social organization.”

Still, even if it is unrealistic to expect individualism to get much respect from people who are deeply invested in electoral politics, it’s not too much to ask them not to try to score political points by totally distorting our position. In any case, if they do, it’s worth taking the time to set things straight.

For example, consider “The Social Animal” by neoconservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (September 12). He begins by quoting Barry Goldwater’s argument (from The Conscience of a Conservative) that “Every man for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being. . . . Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”

Outmoded Notions?

Brooks says that Goldwater’s ideas seem to come from a vision of human life based on solitary, rugged individuals—“the stout pioneer crossing the West, the risk-taking entrepreneur with a vision, the stalwart hero fighting the collectivist foe.” Brooks protests that “a tide of research” in the human and social sciences has demonstrated that Goldwater’s old-fashioned individualist notions aren’t supported by the latest empirical evidence because, Brooks tells us, human beings are social creatures by nature, closely intertwined with each other in the fabric of a shared social life.

He then lays into a number of Republican policies that he considers too locked into the old Goldwater free-market framework—tax cuts, tax-funded education vouchers, and “federally funded individual choice” in health care. He suggests that individualistic free-market principles have kept modern conservatives from coming up with a convincing rationale for the federal government’s gigantic tax-funded bailouts for major investment firms and mortgage capitalists. (Apparently the failure to provide a convincing rationale for government bailouts of big business is supposed to be a problem for individualism, not a problem for the bailouts.) And he concludes that Goldwater’s legacy of unrealistic free-market individualism is now “the main impediment to Republican modernization,” which he believes has hobbled his fellow Republicans’ efforts to provide plausible responses to “the gravest current concerns,” which all trace back to the fact that “people lack a secure environment in which they can lead their lives.”

Maybe Brooks is right that Goldwater’s legacy is holding Republicans back politically. Individualistic ideas can be a tough sell, particularly since the obsessive focus on electoral politics as a panacea for every social ill ensures that genuinely individualistic ideas are almost never presented in the media or discussed in public forums. But whether he’s right or wrong about the best way for Republicans to “fully modernize,” I don’t care much about the Republican Party or its political prospects, or about Barry Goldwater’s reputation. I do care about the prospects for individualism and truly freed markets. And Brooks’s case against them commits a series of serious and misleading errors.

Brooks ultimately condemns free-market policies because they smack of individualism, and he condemns individualism because human beings are demonstrably social animals, who live interdependent lives and gain both utility and meaning through social networks, community, and shared projects. He points out that traditionalist conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke appreciated “the value of networks, institutions and invisible social bonds”—apparently believing that that sets them apart from individualist free marketeers. Of course human beings are social creatures, and networks, institutions, and invisible social bonds are all tremendously important to our shared lives and livelihoods. But to try to use that as an argument against individualism is nothing but a massive non sequitur. What individualist ever denied it?

Individualists, contrary to Brooks’s claims, don’t have any general objection to human sociality. We realize how much we all depend on one another in our everyday lives. That should be obvious enough from the fact that we believe in replacing government regimentation with freed markets and voluntary associations. But if it is not obvious enough, let’s make it as clear as we can.

A freed market is nothing more and nothing less than a form of spontaneous social collaboration. There are no markets without several people cooperating with each other to buy and sell, interdependent with others who work, invent, discover opportunities, and generally hustle to truck and barter. And there are myriad other ways for free people to choose individually to cooperate without cash exchanges, like family networks, charities, community organizations, fraternal lodges, or voluntary mutual-aid societies and workers’ unions.

Cooperation or Coercion

The debate between individualists and “modernized” collectivists has nothing really to do with whether or not human beings ought to live a social life; it has to do with the terms on which we associate to work and live together—whether our social combinations ought to be cooperative or coercive. Social combinations can only be truly cooperative if they are voluntary—if they are organized through persuasion and free agreement among everyone involved, rather than through force and coerced obedience by some to a few.

Apparently Brooks believes that we have only two options: Either we live as a mass of uncooperative but free solitary hermits and devil-take-the-hindmost “rugged individualists” or else we live as a network of cooperative but unfree “socially embedded creatures,” with government taxes and regulations shoving us down to make sure we stay good and embedded in the particular set of social arrangements that government favors—whether or not any of us would choose to make other arrangements with our fellows. But where does that leave the obvious third option—voluntary cooperation?

Individualism is not a philosophical rationale for antisocial attitudes or for indifference or hostility toward your fellow creatures. It is the collectivist, not the individualist, who sees human beings as naturally truculent creatures who don’t care enough about each other to get along peacefully and who need to have plans for collaboration forced on them from the top. Promising social harmony and security, collectivism delivers dissonance and violence.

Individualists believe in individualism precisely because we believe that human beings can and should be both social and civilized to each other at the same time—that community and social life don’t require shoving people around or bullying them into following one big plan. What Brooks fails to see is how—individually—we can peacefully, freely, and naturally form communities, institutions, and invisible social bonds as we make our way through the world.

Clearly, a consistent and principled libertarian cannot support efforts or beliefs that are contrary to libertarian principles—such as efforts to engineer social outcomes by means of government intervention. But if coercive laws have been taken off the table, then what should libertarians say about other religious, philosophical, social, or cultural commitments that pursue their ends through noncoercive means, such as targeted moral agitation, mass education, artistic or literary propaganda, charity, mutual aid, public praise, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, social investing, slowdowns and strikes in a particular shop, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action? Which social movements should they oppose, which should they support, and toward which should they counsel indifference? And how do we tell the difference?

In other words, should libertarianism be seen as a “thin” commitment, which can be happily joined to absolutely any set of values and projects, “so long as it is peaceful,” or is it better to treat it as one strand among others in a “thick” bundle of intertwined social commitments? Such disputes are often intimately connected with other disputes concerning the specifics of libertarian rights theory or class analysis and the mechanisms of social power. To grasp what’s at stake, it will be necessary to make the question more precise and to tease out the distinctions among some of the different possible relationships between libertarianism and “thicker” bundles of social, cultural, religious, or philosophical commitments, which might recommend integrating the two on some level or another.

The forms of “thickness” I am about to discuss should not be confused with two other kinds of commitments, one tightly and one loosely connected to libertarianism: those logically entailed by the philosophy itself (what I call “thickness in entailment”), such as opposition to private aggression, and those that relate simply to being a good person (“thickness in conjunction”), such as being a loving parent. As an example of the first category, it might be argued that libertarians ought to actively oppose certain traditional cultural practices that involve the systematic use of violence against peaceful people—such as East African customs of forcing clitoridectomy on unwilling girls or the American and European custom of judges and juries ignoring the facts and the law to acquit or reduce the sentence for men who murdered unfaithful wives or their lovers. Principled libertarianism logically entails criticism of these social and cultural practices for the same reason that it entails criticism of government intervention: because the nonaggression principle condemns any violence against individual rights to life, liberty, and property, regardless of who commits it, and not just forms that are officially practiced by government.

Between the tightest and the loosest possible connections, at least four other kinds of connections might exist between libertarianism and further social commitments, offering a number of important, but subtly distinct, avenues for thick libertarian analysis and criticism.

Thickness for Application

First, there might be some commitments that a libertarian can reject without formally contradicting the nonaggression principle, but which she cannot reject without in fact interfering with its proper application. Principles beyond libertarianism alone may be necessary for determining where my rights end and yours begin, or for stripping away conceptual blinders that prevent certain violations of liberty from being recognized as such.

Consider the way in which garden-variety political collectivism prevents many nonlibertarians from even recognizing taxation or legislation by a democratic government as being forms of coercion in the first place. (After all, didn’t “we” consent to it?) Or, perhaps more controversially, think of the feminist criticism of the traditional division between the “private” and the “political” sphere, and of those who divide the spheres in such a way that pervasive, systemic violence and coercion within families turn out to be justified, or excused, or simply ignored as something “private” and therefore less than a serious form of violent oppression. If feminists are right about the way in which sexist political theories protect or excuse systematic violence against women, there is an important sense in which libertarians, because they are libertarians, should also be feminists. Importantly, the commitments that libertarians need to have here aren’t just applications of general libertarian principle to a special case; the argument calls in resources other than the nonaggression principle to determine just where and how the principle is properly applied. Thus the thickness called for is thicker than logical entailment, but the cash value of the thick commitments is the direct contribution they make toward the complete application of the nonaggression principle.

Thickness from Grounds

Second, libertarians have many different ideas about the theoretical foundation for the nonaggression principle—that is, about the best reasons for being a libertarian. But whatever general foundational beliefs a given libertarian has, those beliefs may have some logical implications other than libertarianism alone. Thus there may be cases in which certain beliefs or commitments could be rejected without contradicting the nonaggression principle per se, but could not be rejected without logically undermining the deeper reasons that justify the nonaggression principle. Although you could consistently accept libertarianism without accepting these commitments or beliefs, you could not do so reasonably: rejecting the commitments means rejecting the proper grounds for libertarianism.

Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. Social systems of status and authority include not only exercises of coercive power by the government, but also a knot of ideas, practices, and institutions based on deference to traditionally constituted authority. In politics these patterns of deference show up most clearly in the honorary titles, submissive etiquette, and unquestioning obedience traditionally expected by, and willingly extended to, heads of state, judges, police, and other visible representatives of government “law and order.” Although these rituals and habits of obedience exist against the backdrop of statist coercion and intimidation, they are also often practiced voluntarily. Similar kinds of deference are often demanded from workers by bosses, or from children by parents or teachers. Submission to traditionally constituted authorities is reinforced not only through violence and threats, but also through art, humor, sermons, written history, journalism, child-rearing, and so on.

Although political coercion is the most distinctive expression of political inequality, you could—in principle—have a consistently authoritarian social order without any use of force. Even in a completely free society, everyone could, in principle, still voluntarily agree to bow and scrape and speak only when spoken to in the presence of the (mutually agreed-on) town chief, or unthinkingly agree to obey whatever restrictions and regulations he tells them to follow in their own business or personal lives, or agree to give him as much in voluntary “taxes” on their income or property as he might ask. So long as the expectation of submission and the demands for wealth to be rendered were backed up only by verbal harangues, cultural glorifications of the wise and virtuous authorities, social ostracism of “unruly” dissenters, and so on, these demands would violate no one’s individual rights to liberty or property.

But while there’s nothing logically inconsistent about a libertarian envisioning—or even championing—this sort of social order, it would certainly be weird. Noncoercive authoritarianism may be consistent with libertarian principles, but it is hard to reasonably reconcile the two. Whatever reasons you may have for rejecting the arrogant claims of power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats—say, for example, the Jeffersonian notion that all men and women are born equal in political authority and that no one has a natural right to rule or dominate other people’s affairs—probably serve just as well for reasons to reject other kinds of authoritarian pretension, even if they are not expressed by means of coercive government action. While no one should be forced as a matter of policy to treat her fellows with the respect due to equals, or to cultivate independent thinking and contempt for the arrogance of power, libertarians certainly can—and should—criticize those who do not, and exhort our fellows not to rely on authoritarian social institutions, for much the same reasons that we have for endorsing libertarianism in the first place.

Strategic Thickness—The Causes of Liberty

Third, there also may be cases in which certain ideas, practices, or projects are entailed by neither the nonaggression principle nor the best reasons for it, and are not logically necessary for its correct application, either, but are preconditions for implementing the nonaggression principle in the real world. Although rejecting these ideas, practices, or projects would be logically compatible with libertarianism, their success might be important or even necessary for libertarianism to get much purchase in an existing statist society, or for a future free society to emerge from statism without widespread poverty or social conflict, or for a future free society to sustain itself against aggressive statist neighbors, the threat of civil war, or an internal collapse back into statism.

To the extent that other ideas, practices, or projects are preconditions for a flourishing free society, libertarians have strategic reasons to endorse them, even if they are conceptually independent of libertarian principles.

Thus, for example, left-libertarians such as Roderick Long have argued that libertarians have genuine reasons to be concerned about large inequalities of wealth or large numbers of people living in absolute poverty, and to support voluntary associations, such as mutual-aid societies and voluntary charity. Not because free market principles somehow logically mandate some particular socioeconomic outcome; and not merely because charity and widespread material well-being are worth pursuing for their own sake (which they may be). Rather, the point is that there may be a significant causal relationship between economic outcomes and the material prospects for sustaining a free society.

Even a totally free society in which large numbers of people are desperately poor is likely to be in great danger of collapsing into civil war. A totally free society in which a small class of tycoons owns 99 percent of the property and the vast majority of the population own almost nothing is unlikely to remain free for long if the tycoons should decide to use their wealth to purchase coercive legal privileges against the unpropertied majority—simply because they have a lot of resources to attack with and the majority hasn’t got the material resources to defend themselves.

Now, to the extent that persistent, severe poverty, and large-scale inequalities of wealth are almost always the result of government intervention, it’s unlikely that totally free societies would face such dire situations. Over time, many if not most of these problems would likely sort themselves out spontaneously through free-market processes, even without conscious anti-poverty activism.

But problems of poverty or economic inequality are still likely to be extremely pressing for societies like ours, which are not currently free, but which libertarians hope to help become free. Certainly in our unfree market there are widespread poverty and large-scale inequalities of wealth, most of it created by the heavy hand of government intervention in the form of direct subsidies and the creation of rigged or captive markets. Those who now enjoy the fruit of those privileges will continue to exercise some of the tremendous advantage they enjoy in material resources and political pull to pressure government into perpetuating or expanding the interventions from which they benefit. Since libertarians aim to abolish those interventions, it may well make good strategic sense for them to support voluntary, nongovernmental efforts that work to undermine or bypass consolidated political-economic power. Otherwise we will find ourselves trying to fight with slingshots while freedom’s enemies fire back with bazookas.

Thickness from Consequences—The Effects of Liberty

Finally, there may be social practices or outcomes that libertarians should (in some sense) be committed to opposing, even though they are not themselves coercive, because 1) government coercion is a precondition for them and 2) there are independent reasons for regarding them as social evils. If aggression is morally illegitimate, then libertarians are entitled not only to condemn it, but also to condemn the destructive results that flow from it—even if those results are, in some important sense, external to the actual coercion.

Thus, for example, left-libertarians such as Kevin Carson and Matt MacKenzie have argued forcefully for libertarian criticism of certain business practices—such as low-wage sweatshop labor—as exploitative. Throughout the twentieth century most libertarians rushed to the defense of such practices on the grounds that they result from market processes and are often the best economic options for extremely poor people in developing countries. The state-socialist solution of expansive government regulation of wages and conditions would, it is argued, distort the market, violate the rights of workers and bosses to freely negotiate the terms of labor, and harm the very workers that the regulators professed to help.

The problem with trying to use free market economic principles in the defense of such labor practices is that those practices arose in markets that are far from being free. In Carson’s and MacKenzie’s view, while twentieth-century libertarians were right to claim that existing modes of production should not be even further distorted by expanded government regimentation, too many believed that those modes would be the natural outcome of an undistorted market. Against these confusions, Carson and MacKenzie have revived an argument drawn from the tradition of nineteenth-century free-market individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker, who maintained that prevailing government privileges for business—monopoly, regulatory cartelization of banking, manipulation of the currency, legal restrictions and military violence against union strikers, politicized distribution of land to connected speculators and developers, and more—distorted markets in such a way as to systematically push workers into precarious and impoverishing economic arrangements and to force them, against the backdrop of the unfree market in land and capital, to make ends meet by entering a “free” job market on the bosses’ terms.

On Tucker’s view, as on Carson’s and MacKenzie’s, this sort of systemic concentration of wealth and “market” power can only persist as long as the government intervenes to sustain it. Free-market competition would free workers to better their own lives outside traditional corporate channels and would allow entrepreneurs to tear down top-heavy corporate behemoths through vigorous competition for land, labor, and capital.

Thus to the extent that sweatshop conditions and starvation wages are sustained, and alternative arrangements like workers’ co-ops suppressed, through dramatic restrictions on property rights throughout the developing world—restrictions exploited by opportunistic corporations that often collaborate with authoritarian governments—libertarians, as libertarians, have good reasons to condemn the social evils that arise from these labor practices. Thus libertarians should support voluntary, state-free forms of solidarity—such as private “fair trade” certification, wildcat unionism, or mutual-aid societies—that work to undermine exploitative practices and build a new society within the shell of the old. There is every reason to believe that in a truly free market the conditions of ordinary laborers, even those who are very poor, would be quite different and much better.

I should make it clear, if it is not yet clear, that I have not attempted to provide a detailed justification for the specific claims I have made on behalf of “thick” commitments. Just which social and cultural projects libertarians, as libertarians, should incorporate into theory and practice remains to be hashed out in a detailed debate.

—Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in The Politics of Reality

Governments—local, state, and federal—spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the plight of the urban poor. Look around any government agency and you’ll never fail to find some know-it-all with a suit and a nameplate on his desk who has just the right government program to eliminate or ameliorate, or at least contain, the worst aspects of grinding poverty in American cities—especially as experienced by black people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and everyone else marked for the special observation and solicitude of the state bureaucracy. Depending on the bureaucrat’s frame of mind, his pet programs might focus on doling out conditional charity to “deserving” poor people, or putting more “at-risk” poor people under the surveillance of social workers and medical experts, or beating up recalcitrant poor people and locking them in cages for several years.

But the one thing that the government and its managerial aid workers will never do is just get out of the way and let poor people do the things that poor people naturally do, and always have done, to scratch by.

Government anti-poverty programs are a classic case of the therapeutic state setting out to treat disorders created by the state itself. Urban poverty as we know it is, in fact, exclusively a creature of state intervention in consensual economic dealings. This claim may seem bold, even to most libertarians. But a lot turns on the phrase “as we know it.” Even if absolute laissez faire reigned beginning tomorrow, there would still be people in big cities who are living paycheck to paycheck, heavily in debt, homeless, jobless, or otherwise at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. These conditions may be persistent social problems, and it may be that free people in a free society will still have to come up with voluntary institutions and practices for addressing them. But in the state-regimented market that dominates today, the material predicament that poor people find themselves in—and the arrangements they must make within that predicament—are battered into their familiar shape, as if by an invisible fist, through the diffuse effects of pervasive, interlocking interventions.

Consider the commonplace phenomena of urban poverty. Livelihoods in American inner cities are typically extremely precarious: as Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh writes in Off the Books: “Conditions in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty can change quickly and in ways that can leave families unprepared and without much recourse.” Fixed costs of living—rent, food, clothing, and so on—consume most or all of a family’s income, with little or no access to credit, savings, or insurance to safeguard them from unexpected disasters.

Dependent on Others

Their poverty often leaves them dependent on other people. It pervades the lives of the employed and the unemployed alike: the jobless fall back on charity or help from family; those who live paycheck to paycheck, with little chance of finding any work elsewhere, depend on the good graces of a select few bosses and brokers. One woman quoted by Venkatesh explained why she continued to work through an exploitative labor shark rather than leaving for a steady job with a well-to-do family: “And what if that family gets rid of me? Where am I going next? See, I can’t take that chance, you know. . . . All I got is Johnnie and it took me the longest just to get him on my side.”

The daily experience of the urban poor is shaped by geographical concentration in socially and culturally isolated ghetto neighborhoods within the larger city, which have their own characteristic features: housing is concentrated in dilapidated apartments and housing projects, owned by a select few absentee landlords; many abandoned buildings and vacant lots are scattered through the neighborhood, which remain unused for years at a time; the use of outside spaces is affected by large numbers of unemployed or homeless people.

The favorite solutions of the welfare state—government doles and “urban renewal” projects—mark no real improvement. Rather than freeing poor people from dependence on benefactors and bosses, they merely transfer the dependence to the state, leaving the least politically connected people at the mercy of the political process.

But in a free market—a truly free market, where individual poor people are just as free as established formal-economy players to use their own property, their own labor, their own know-how, and the resources that are available to them—the informal, enterprising actions by poor people themselves would do far more to systematically undermine, or completely eliminate, each of the stereotypical conditions that welfare statists deplore. Every day and in every culture from time out of mind, poor people have repeatedly shown remarkable intelligence, courage, persistence, and creativity in finding ways to put food on the table, save money, keep safe, raise families, live full lives, learn, enjoy themselves, and experience beauty, whenever, wherever, and to whatever degree they have been free to do so. The fault for despairing, dilapidated urban ghettoes lies not in the pressures of the market, nor in the character flaws of individual poor people, nor in the characteristics of ghetto subcultures. The fault lies in the state and its persistent interference with poor people’s own efforts to get by through independent work, clever hustling, scratching together resources, and voluntary mutual aid.

Housing Crisis

Progressives routinely deplore the “affordable housing crisis” in American cities. In cities such as New York and Los Angeles, about 20 to 25 percent of low-income renters are spending more than half their incomes just on housing. But it is the very laws that Progressives favor—land-use policies, zoning codes, and building codes—that ratchet up housing costs, stand in the way of alternative housing options, and confine poor people to ghetto neighborhoods. Historically, when they have been free to do so, poor people have happily disregarded the ideals of political humanitarians and found their own ways to cut housing costs, even in bustling cities with tight housing markets.

One way was to get other families, or friends, or strangers, to move in and split the rent. Depending on the number of people sharing a home, this might mean a less-comfortable living situation; it might even mean one that is unhealthy. But decisions about health and comfort are best made by the individual people who bear the costs and reap the benefits. Unfortunately today the decisions are made ahead of time by city governments through zoning laws that prohibit or restrict sharing a home among people not related by blood or marriage, and building codes that limit the number of residents in a building.

Those who cannot make enough money to cover the rent on their own, and cannot split the rent enough due to zoning and building codes, are priced out of the housing market entirely. Once homeless, they are left exposed not only to the elements, but also to harassment or arrest by the police for “loitering” or “vagrancy,” even on public property, in efforts to force them into overcrowded and dangerous institutional shelters. But while government laws make living on the streets even harder than it already is, government intervention also blocks homeless people’s efforts to find themselves shelter outside the conventional housing market. One of the oldest and commonest survival strategies practiced by the urban poor is to find wild or abandoned land and build shanties on it out of salvageable scrap materials. Scrap materials are plentiful, and large portions of land in ghetto neighborhoods are typically left unused as condemned buildings or vacant lots. Formal title is very often seized by the city government or by quasi-governmental “development” corporations through the use of eminent domain. Lots are held out of use, often for years at a time, while they await government public-works projects or developers willing to buy up the land for large-scale building.

Urban Homesteading

In a free market, vacant lots and abandoned buildings could eventually be homesteaded by anyone willing to do the work of occupying and using them. Poor people could use abandoned spaces within their own communities for setting up shop, for gardening, or for living space. In Miami, in October 2006, a group of community organizers and about 35 homeless people built Umoja Village, a shanty town, on an inner-city lot that the local government had kept vacant for years. They publicly stated to the local government that “We have only one demand . . . leave us alone.”

That would be the end of the story in a free market: there would be no eminent domain, no government ownership, and thus also no political process of seizure and redevelopment; once-homeless people could establish property rights to abandoned land through their own sweat equity—without fear of the government’s demolishing their work and selling their land out from under them. But back in Miami, the city attorney and city council took about a month to begin legal efforts to destroy the residents’ homes and force them off the lot. In April 2007 the city police took advantage of an accidental fire to enforce its politically fabricated title to the land, clearing the lot, arresting 11 people, and erecting a fence to safeguard the once-again vacant lot for professional “affordable housing” developers.

Had the city government not made use of its supposed title to the abandoned land, it no doubt could have made use of state and federal building codes to ensure that residents would be forced back into homelessness—for their own safety, of course. That is in fact what a county health commission in Indiana did to a 93-year-old man named Thelmon Green, who lived in his ’86 Chevrolet van, which the local towing company allowed him to keep on its lot. Many people thrown into poverty by a sudden financial catastrophe live out of a car for weeks or months until they get back on their feet. Living in a car is cramped, but it beats living on the streets: a car means a place you can have to yourself, which holds your possessions, with doors you can lock, and sometimes even air conditioning and heating. But staying in a car over the long term is much harder to manage without running afoul of the law. Thelmon Green got by well enough in his van for ten years, but when the Indianapolis Star printed a human-interest story on him last December, the county health commission took notice and promptly ordered Green evicted from his own van, in the name of the local housing code.

Since government housing codes impose detailed requirements on the size, architecture, and building materials for new permanent housing, as well as on specialized and extremely expensive contract work for electricity, plumbing, and other luxuries, they effectively obstruct or destroy most efforts to create transitional, intermediate, or informal sorts of shelter that cost less than rented space in government-approved housing projects, but provide more safety and comfort than living on the street.

Constraints on Making Income

Turning from expenses to income, pervasive government regulation, passed in the so-called “public interest” at the behest of comfortable middle- and upper-class Progressives, creates endless constraints on poor people’s ability to earn a living or make needed money on the side.

There are, to start out, the trades that the state has made entirely illegal: selling drugs outside of a state-authorized pharmacy, prostitution outside of the occasional state-authorized brothel “ranch,” or running small-time gambling operations outside of a state-authorized corporate casino. These trades are often practiced by women and men facing desperate poverty; the state’s efforts add the danger of fines, forfeitures, and lost years in prison.

Poor Shut Out

Beyond the government-created black market, there are also countless jobs that could be done above-ground, but from which the poor are systematically shut out by arbitrary regulation and licensure requirements. In principle, many women in black communities could make money braiding hair, with only their own craft, word of mouth, and the living room of an apartment. But in many states, anyone found braiding hair without having put down hundreds of dollars and days of her life to apply for a government-fabricated cosmetology or hair-care license will be fined hundreds or thousands of dollars.

In principle, anyone who knows how to cook can make money by laying out the cash for ingredients and some insulated containers, and taking the food from his own kitchen to a stand set up on the sidewalk or, with the landlord’s permission, in a parking lot. But then there are business licenses to pay for (often hundreds of dollars) and the costs of complying with health-department regulations and inspections. The latter make it practically impossible to run a food-oriented business without buying or leasing property dedicated to preparing the food, at which point you may as well forget about it unless you already have a lot of start-up capital sitting around.

Every modern urban center has a tremendous demand for taxi cabs. In principle, anyone who needed to make some extra money could start a part-time “gypsy cab” service with a car she already has, a cell phone, and some word of mouth. She can make good money for honest labor, providing a useful service to willing customers—as a single independent worker, without needing to please a boss, who can set her own hours and put as much or as little into it as she wants in order to make the money she needs.

But in the United States, city governments routinely impose massive constraints and controls on taxi service. The worst offenders are often the cities with the highest demand for cabs, like New York City, where the government enforces an arbitrary cap on the number of taxi cabs through a system of government-created licenses, or “medallions.” The total number of medallion taxis is capped at about 13,000 cabs for the entire city, with occasional government auctions for a handful of new medallions. The system requires anyone who wants to become an independent cab driver to purchase a medallion at monopoly prices from an existing holder or wait around for the city to auction off new ones. At the auction last November a total of 63 new medallions were made available for auction with a minimum bidding price of $189,000.

Besides the cost of a medallion, cab owners are also legally required to pay an annual licensing fee of $550 and to pay for three inspections by the city government each year, at a total annual cost of $150. The city government enforces a single fare structure, enforces a common paint job, and now is even forcing all city cabs to upgrade to high-cost, high-tech GPS and payment systems, whether or not the cabbie or her customer happens to want them. The primary beneficiary of this politically imposed squeeze on independent cabbies is VeriFone Holdings, the first firm approved to sell the electronic systems to a captive market. Doug Bergeron, VeriFone’s CEO, crows that “Every year, we find a free ride on a new segment of the economy that is going electronic.” In this case, VeriFone is enjoying a “free ride” indeed.

The practical consequence is that poor people who might otherwise be able to make easy money on their own are legally forced out of driving a taxi, or else forced to hire themselves out to an existing medallion-holder on his own terms. Either way, poor people are shoved out of flexible, independent work, which many would be willing and able to do using one of the few capital goods that they already have on hand. Lots of poor people have cars they could use; not a lot have a couple hundred thousand dollars to spend on a government-created license.

Government regimentation of land, housing, and labor creates and sustains the very structure of urban poverty. Government seizures create and reinforce the dilapidation of ghetto neighborhoods by constricting the housing market to a few landlords and keeping marginal lands out of use. Government regulations create homelessness and artificially make it worse for the homeless by driving up housing costs and by obstructing or destroying any intermediate informal living solutions between renting an apartment and living on the street. And having made the ghetto, government prohibitions keep poor people confined in it, by shutting them out of more affluent neighborhoods where many might be able to live if only they were able to share expenses.

Ratcheting Costs Up and Opportunities Down

Artificially limiting the alternative options for housing ratchets up the fixed costs of living for the urban poor. Artificially limiting the alternative options for independent work ratchets down the opportunities for increasing income. And the squeeze makes poor people dependent on—and thus vulnerable to negligent or unscrupulous treatment from—both landlords and bosses by constraining their ability to find other, better homes, or other, better livelihoods. The same squeeze puts many more poor people into the position of living “one paycheck away” from homelessness and makes that position all the more precarious by harassing and coercing and imposing artificial destitution on those who do end up on the street.

American state corporatism forcibly reshapes the world of work and business on the model of a commercial strip mall: sanitized, centralized, regimented, officious, and dominated by a few powerful proprietors and their short list of favored partners, to whom everyone else relates as either an employee or a consumer. A truly free market, without the pervasive control of state licensure requirements, regulation, inspections, paperwork, taxes, “fees,” and the rest, has much more to do with the traditional image of a bazaar: messy, decentralized, diverse, informal, flexible, pervaded by haggling, and kept together by the spontaneous order of countless small-time independent operators, who quickly and easily shift between the roles of customer, merchant, contract laborer, and more. It is precisely because we have the strip mall rather than the bazaar that people living in poverty find themselves so often confined to ghettoes, caught in precarious situations, and dependent on others—either on the bum or caught in jobs they hate but cannot leave, while barely keeping a barely tolerable roof over their heads.

The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling. When the state shuts that out, it shuts poor people into ghettoized poverty.