The Human Factor: Why socialism and libertarianism have the same problems

There are two portions to this note, the anecdote and the analysis.  The anecdote:

I was not always the strapping young Thomist with which my friends and readership are familiar.  There was a time, in fact, when I was a young libertarian.  When I was much younger than I am now, I attended what can only be described as a libertarian educational experiment.  This school was very much an example of libertarianism trying to put its best foot forward: the hired educators were not called "teachers", but "staff members"; the students voted on whether they would be hired or not; the baseline rules were that no-one could harm anyone else, for a rather broad definition of harm; and no-one was forced to take either a given class or a certain number of classes.  It was, in other words, complete educational liberty.  This would be great, if given to a mature and thoughtful human being; unfortunately, I was 12 or maybe a bit older, and spent most of my time playing Warcraft 2 on the school computer.

Now, it seems immediately that libertarianism demands a mature populace, and this is fine by libertarians, because they have rarely claimed otherwise.  Only the most devout and deluded supporter of the utterly free market would ever claim that corruption is removed from the political sphere simply by competition.  If anything, corrupt individuals compete in their corruption, using it to one-up the other guy.  Happily, for what I like to think of as the first phase of my time at the school, this was not a problem; the staff members were always very altruistic in their outlook, willing to risk a lower pay and possible inactivity to support the grand experiment.  In many respects, when the school was peaceful and educational, they were what helped it to be so.  But the immaturity of the populace was something expected of the populace as young; there was a change brewing, as surely as the Tides of Darkness brewed on the computer screen every morning.

Eventually, some few students decided (quite rightly) that the school should be providing for their interests.  They happened to be Wiccans, and their particular interest was "Women's Spirituality", a frightening phrase which since then to me always conjures up images of broomsticks, dead trees cracked by lightning and cackling, which they made no effort to subvert.  They spelled their gender with a 'y' instead of an 'e' (womyn), they wore what could be called Gothic clothing but was less charitably the sort of stuff you'd see if a Harry Potter convention crashed into a showing of Prince of Persia; they talked loudly about the power of women and whatnot.  Mind, this is not actually a personal judgment on them, just a depiction of the way they portrayed themselves to others.  As I was at the time a libertarian and am now a citizen of our politic, be it never so humble, this was and is not terribly shocking to me, and in point of fact they were often, perhaps generally, very nice people.  Sometimes they could be a bit coarse, but that's the way of our times, I learned.

What is interesting is not the way they expressed, but the way they worked the system.  There are a great many people today who fancy that to harm an animal should be given the same legal standing as harming a human, and they were one group of them, which I think is funny since they wore clothing.  If they were really religiously serious about it they'd all be Jains or something.  In any case, there was a rule proposed at the weekly legislative meeting (which no-one willingly attended because legislation is an utterly, utterly dull activity, and children are creatures of passion) that the "discrimination against animals" should be disallowed.  This was a vastly overreaching law, and one which taught me to pay attention in any pursuit to definitions used in legislature.  Among the effects:  One could not eat meat, wear animal-tested products, keep pets (including the school pet, which they wanted to set free!  Rats do not mind being in cages as much as people often impute to them) or call an animal anything they wouldn't call a person.

Needless to say, the kids, who liked their meat and their Birkenstocks and their school pets, took offense at this; but because of the fact that they proposed it suddenly and without warning, only their cronies (in the technical sense of the term, people who vote only out of private interest) were there, and so the rule passed.  This, of course, was not ideal.  Immediately when the rule had been promulgated, a special legislative session was scheduled without so much as a "let's give this a try" to repeal the ghastly law.  Immediately the kids got involved, because the law touched upon their private interest.  (Now, admittedly, this is evidence of the market correcting itself, but there's a curiosity even here I will mention later.)  After the bill had been repealed, immediately another bill was put on the books by the promulgators of the first, legislating something rather shocking even to most of the staff.  If I recall correctly, the staff didn't vote, but the students could; the initiative was that one of the feminist staff members (nice lady, well-liked, but rather political, as the scene evinced) would be elected "Grand Poobah", given the power to introduce bills without their being seconded, given the ability to veto decided votes, given the ability to decide in favor of a minority vote, and given the power to make, essentially, executive orders.

This appalled the libertarian conscience of the school.  To this day, I am unsure what they were thinking, whether they really believed anyone would allow it to pass.  I suppose because of their substantial feminist lobby, they thought they could.  But a lot of students turned out to the meeting, and it turned out that the founder of the school (for whom, among libertarians and among friends, I have great respect) threatened to quit if the bill had passed; if it had, I suppose, the experiment would be an utter failure, and les enfants terribles would have voted themselves into a tyranny.  The school would have quickly devolved into an inescapable mess, and shortly thereafter disbanded or turned into some kind of Wiccan yoga center or something.  I don't know.  In any case, the bill failed.  The school went on for quite some time, and although I do not know if it still runs, it apparently fared much better educationally once a few of the students took initiative.

Now, the analysis.

When I came to the school, I really told myself that I would take a math class, which my mom wanted.  Then I found out Warcraft II and Command and Conquer: Red Alert I were on the school's Pentium I.  No such math class happened; the time spent at that school was, during my inexhaustible reserve of free-time, spent either playing computer games or waiting in line to do so.  Occasionally I would go outside when the line was too long to play computer games, or something interesting was going on.  This is because children are selfish, imperceptive, foolish little beasts of passion even at their best moments when they have no interest presented to them to be otherwise.  This is to say that men are not naturally evil in toto, but they aren't naturally perfect either.  A bit more prodding from the staff members, perhaps, or a stirring reminder that schools are not simply for the purpose of passing time, might have provoked me to make a weak commitment, but libertarians, as a rule, are against forcing or urging maturity onto people.  Thus, as an educational institution, the school depended entirely on being composed of Huck Finn-types, kids who would make an education of their own lives if only given an opportunity, or Tom Sawyer-types, kids who'd spend their whole day either in society or trying to be so.  But kids aren't naturally either of these, though they might have elements of both.  In point of fact, the second one introduces recreational activity at this age of the sort provided by a computer, man reduces himself to a beast; the loss of his reason for a time is merely the first consequence.

So in the first place, the school had this problem, because it was a school run by libertarians; libertarians whom I continue to love very much, but nevertheless, libertarians.  This is what I'd call the bottom-up problem, which results from two factors: non-pedagogical lawmaking and insufficient integration of the family into the school's activities.  Were there more parental supervision, I don't doubt that I'd have taken that math class, because I'd be terrified of my mom catching me spending all day playing video games.  Were the laws not made simply to cause punitive retribution (as, for example, in the case of laws to punish new types of offenses that developed, such as preventing people from playing in the loft just because you were using it, or other minor but unique offenses) or prevent damage to property (having to get certified to use the computers, for example, which acted as the promulgation of the laws set by the "Corporation", or smaller interest group, governing the use of the computers) then perhaps, when a governmental philosophy developed, the individual citizens would get an idea of their duties.  All that the laws served to do, though, was create a minimal culture, a culture built around students satisfying their immediate or sufficiently powerful distant inclinations.  (A monthly field trip, for example.)  These inclinations, while I was there, never included actual classwork.

The lack of this remedy, and the perversion in some cases thereof, constituted the second, top-down problem.  Legislators are rarely saints; they are simply people with the patience and popularity to get elected. Their job is simply to legislate according to the common good.  This is tremendously boring and extremely slow work.  The Norse had to liven it up with drinking parties and fights to make it bearable.  In a libertarian society, there are no dedicated electors; there are simply the citizens, and most of them hate doing the necessary busywork.  Hence, no-one showed up at the school meetings as a matter of course.  Now let us say that someone passed a bad law which perhaps offended less than the amount of private interest the meat law did, or perhaps that the Grand Poobah initiative had been put forward first, when no-one had expected it.  In the first case, because people are so very lazy, the repeal would have taken a good deal longer if it had happened at all; in the second, the school would have disbanded.  Politics is a science and statecraft is an art, and the only thing that saved Cedarwood that time was a combination of bad Machiavellianism on the bad side and good statecraft on the good.  If the bad were less bad or the good were less good, things would have been different.

Or, to torpedo another libertarian axiom: the actor in the free market is not a mathematical quantity acting the second a bad thing happens, and sometimes seconds count.  When one hears, for example, the discussion of how a Rothbardian economy would deal with a clever con man, one is told that that person would be blacklisted.  But in the first place, since he's a con man, who would they blacklist?  Secondly, and more apropos, "a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."  Economic actors are not a wise, informed version of caffeinated chipmunks; they do not act instantaneously, or even all the time prudentially; and the market being composed of these people, it does not act quickly as a result.  Time does not slow down when one is making an economic decision or its necessary physical correlates.  Thus, by the time the con's been blacklisted, AND the other actors (who are living in an economy wherein trust is not always encouraged) have confirmed that despite their quarrel with this, that or the other company, they will corroborate the list, five more people have been conned.  Or in the case of Cedarwood, the Grand Poobah has already been elected, or the school pet is already running cage-less into the woods.


So far I've mentioned three problems: the top-down, the bottom-up, and the problem of economic actors as temporal.  What is vitally interesting is that these are the flip-side of a dualism one also sees in the enemy of libertarianism, socialism.  


In extremis, Marxist socialism, man is, as much as possible, reduced to a materialist understanding; he is defined as part of a class, reduced to his (material) property, and his individualism away from "The People" is drained away with the discouragement of any discussion of an immortal soul.  He is defined merely in terms of his praxis.  Thus, from the bottom-up, man has no liberty, and even if he wished to pursue a better life, an education, marriage to a woman he loves, religion of his choosing, he is forbidden all of these things; they are denounced as capitalistic, artificial constructs, ways of keeping power such that the classes are divided.


In extremis, Rothbardian libertarianism, on the other hand, man is thought of as some disembodied will, the one thing which cannot be enslaved by law; he can abrogate from any future labor contract at will, he is reduced to his ability to choose (and not the things he chooses, because the second one chooses, one self-determines, and the second one determines oneself, one can be enslaved by that determination; thus at any time one may abrogate oneself from any real commitment.)  Goods contracts, Rothbard claims, are respected, but here's where being bodily comes back and bites him in the posterior.  Since every goods contract involves some labor, labor being a bodily act, every labor contract is in fact a future labor contract, since there is no such thing as duration-less labor.  Since there is no such thing as a purely durationless act, or an act with no durationless correlates, there is no such thing as a "safe" contract, or a contract, goods or otherwise, from which one may not abrogate.  Government is viewed also, interestingly, as an instrument of force to prevent people from gaining power such that the people are unjustly united.


Both of these problems, as John Paul II said previously of Socialism, are anthropological in nature.  Human nature is such that we do not just tend towards society, we require it, precisely because we are materially finite; we need other goods and other people to truly be what our nature was to be.  Because we are sinful, as even many libertarians will admit, we need some form of government for policing; but we need government for more than just this, owing to the fact that law also has a pedagogical purpose and the fact that the affairs of a human society are too extended for one human actor or a system of human actors at the level of subsidiarity of industry alone to handle.  Although such actors are required and should be given liberty at that level to act, at the same time, the common good is more than simply a collection of private goods, and has its own level of governance required, which is more and different than the sort of governance required for industry.  


In fact, the common good may require someone to go against their immediate self-interest in favor of some more distant interest, even an interest which may not be recognized by the individual entrepreneur.  An example of this would be subprime loans, where investors cast the risk to the future from their mind and invested for the sake of instant gratification.  Another example would be, in Christian circles, Heaven: if you want to get to Heaven, you can't pay your workers an unjust wage (which is not the same sort of thing as the "Fair Wage" theory) and expect to get there, even if it makes you lots of money now.  Accordingly, the government may suggest or incentivize that businesses do a certain thing, as long as it does not imprudently interfere with entrepreneurial liberty.  I say imprudently because virtually everything a government does interferes somehow with entrepreneurial liberty; it is freedom, ultimately, which is desirable, not liberty for its own sake.  That much for libertarianism.  But one cannot have freedom without liberty, and that much for socialism.


But why, the reader may ask, the emphasis on anthropology?  The reason why extreme socialism and libertarianism have these problems is that they misunderstand two things: the way the body and the soul relate together, and the way human beings relate to their possessions, other human beings, and their government.  This is not to say that their ideas are in every case entirely wrong; Marx's critique of materialist capitalism, while economically woefully sloppy, was spot on anthropologically (if one forgives the fact that it is not the whole picture of free enterprise), and the libertarian critiques of socialism have been insightful and prescient on an economic level.  The difficulty with this latter, though, is that economics does not exist in a vacuum, and while badmouthing the other guy because he didn't bring a hammer to the construction site, one must take the greatest care that one is not diagnosing each problem of one's own as a nail.  Some things are more important than liberty: these things pertain not to liberty, which is the potency to good choice and therefore freedom in the realm of act, but freedom herself, more precious than gold.