I'm Not Libertarian, or: Said What About the Market?

I had a brief stint where I considered myself a Libertarian.  Or maybe just coasting near Libertarianism.  Stop judging me.  It was the early 2000s and I was experimenting in college. 

There are definitely parts of the Libertarian ethos that I still agree with.  The idea that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they don’t harm other people.  The idea that the default state for all humans is freedom, and regulations impinge upon that freedom. 

What ultimately soured me on Libertarianism, though, is the automaton-like devotion to the “Free Market”.  I get it, they want everyone and everything to have maximum freedom, but the idea that everything should be decided/resolved in the market is absurd. 

First, to say that the market could ever be completely “Free” is to ignore all of the ways the market is inherently irrational (such as with Veblen Goods) or directly manipulated (through Monopoly or Oligopoly, high frequency trading, interest rate targeting etc.).  There are a number of ways in which the market is made unequal in terms of individuals access or participation therein.  Similar to asking the question whether a child in Greenwich, CT and a child in rural West Virginia have equal opportunities in life, at some point a Libertarian has to address the question of whether people who don’t have the same opportunities are equally “free”. 

Let’s set all that aside and pretend for a moment that the market is a place of equal opportunity such that “voting with your dollars” might actually be possible.  Let’s next examine a few scenarios to see how viable this might actually be. 

Imagine a petrochemical company opens a new plant on the shore of a small lake in New Hampshire and they’re going to produce some chemical that will be used in the manufacture of iPhones.  Since we’re in Libertariland, there are no regulations on this company in terms of how they treat said lake, so they immediately start dumping their by-products into the water, poisoning the local water supply.  How should the locals respond?  To follow the “vote with your dollars” ethos, they should boycott the company’s products. 

Given that the citizens don’t buy petrochemicals directly to begin with, they’d instead need to boycott the down-stream product, the iPhone.  The population of this small community, though, doesn’t control enough of the market share to impact the iPhone sales.  They’ll therefore need to bring national attention to their plight and hope everyone stops buying the iPhone.  Assuming they get national attention, it doesn’t mean anything will happen (see Flint’s continuing water crisis). 

Again, for the sake of argument, let’s say they’re successful, and the country stops buying iPhones.  We know from historical boycotts that it takes effort over sustained periods for companies to get the message.  It may even be the case that the production is months to years out already.  How long would it take for the petrochemical company to feel any pain and change their ways?  How many citizens would be harmed by the poisoned water in the meantime?  Is that outcome acceptable to a Libertarian? 

We could tell a similar story about airbags in cars.  Instead of regulations that say companies must have airbags, the companies could put them in at will and consumers could purchase cars without them at their own risk.  Given consumers, especially lower income consumers' (there’s that equality of access problem again) penchant for purchasing lower price options above all else, we’d be forcing people into risking their lives based on an unequal distribution of income/economic opportunities.  This is, by the way, the same reason why United won’t be too effected by their recent scandal. 

One last, far more blunt example.  There is no mechanism in the market to prevent someone from selling another human being.  Yes, if you morally disagree with slavery, you don’t have to buy one.  But what about other, less discerning people?  Even by conservative estimates, there are between 700K and 4 Million slaves on Earth presently.  What would liberating these people entail and how would you begin to use the market to do so? 

All of the above scenarios can be resolved much more quickly and effectively through regulation, the Libertarian’s arch enemy.  Still, to pretend that we are the sum of our consumer choices and they should define our interactions and in turn act as our regulatory measure is a severe and cynical mischaracterization. 

No, instead, we can do what we’ve done in this country from its inception: elect representatives that will watch out for our interests and pass regulations on our behalf.  To set policy proactively and enforce it, rather than vote reactively with our dollars.  To define collectively, as a society, how our society will operate.  Is our system perfect?  Far from it.  There’s strong evidence, for example, that regulation by far favors the desires of the rich.  There is work to be done for sure, but we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the petrochemical-laden bathwater.  We should work to make changes that ensure equality of opportunity and freedom for everyone in a way that the market alone just doesn’t seem capable of doing in a holistic way.