From The Philosophers' Magazine, Issue 21, 1st quarter 2003, pp. 44-47.
by Tibor R. Machan**

Libertarians uphold the sovereignty of each adult individual. Both left and right enlist government to regiment aspects of the individual's life. Libertarians sanction only laws that aim to keep everyone's sovereignty by protecting every individual's right to life, liberty, property and so forth.

In the USA the right tends to endorse the war on drugs, bans on prostitution, gambling, pornography and other vices. The right means craft people's souls via government's coercive powers. The left wants government regulation of the economy -- minimum wage laws, anti-trust crusades, progressive taxation and government efforts to equalize and redistribute wealth.

The left and right both want intrusive government. Ayn Rand noted that metaphysics has an impact here: The right's idealism and the left's materialism tend to dictate what is to be controlled. The libertarian sees the function of the legal system and authorities as, first and foremost, to protect individual rights. As the US Declaration of Independence states this rather cryptically, all men are created equal in having been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Libertarians believe that they flesh out this document more accurately, consistently and completely than do democrats, republicans, socialists, communist, communitarians or any other political faction in this society. Why? Because if we really do have the right to our lives, for example, then we, via the legal system, may and even should protect ourselves against all efforts on the part of either criminals, foreign aggressors or the legal authorities themselves as to how we ought to live. All paternalistic intervention, even for the sake of improving some aspect of our lives, are not tolerable -- bans on drug abuse and smoking in private places or regulation of employment. Adults are off limits as far as regimenting their lives, actions and goals is concerned.

Rights are principles identified in the field of political theory that spell out "borders" around us. To cross those borders those inside must provide those outside with permission. Just consider the right to private property, as we normally understand it. If it is your home, somebody else who wants to enter it must ask your permission. You are the one who is to make that decision. If you want to refuse permission you have the authority to do so, others do not. If you wish to sell it, that, too, is up to you and whoever is willing to meet your price.

If it is your life and you want to smoke, drink, take drugs, climb mountains or go skiing, provided no others' rights are violated by such actions, you need no one's permission (although they may be ethically objectionable). That is what is so fundamental about libertarianism. Individuals are the ones who are sovereign, not the legal authorities and not even the majority of the people.

People may offer you advice, write editorials directed at you, send you letters, try to talk with you -- in short, they may approach you in peaceful, civilized ways. But they have no authority to take over the governance of your life.

Even democracy -- meaning many, indeed, the bulk of the people -- does not void this individual sovereignty. The majority is composed of individuals, and if alone they aren't authorized to intrude on your life, together they aren't either. Democracy is a method, mainly, of selecting administrators of various, including governmental, tasks. One must authorize -- delegate authority to -- legal administrators to do certain things. Only then do they acquire proper authority -- as opposed to mere power -- to do them. If the authority was not given, then the officials lack it and must stay out of your life (educational, commercial, scientific, religious, or anything else) as well as your actions -- that is what having the right to liberty means.

I am free in the political sense if I can take various actions without interference by other people. (There are other senses of "freedom" but they are not relevant here.) If I want to pursue a life of productivity, creativity, art, science or education, I may embark on those pursuits and no one may prohibit me from doing so. If I need others for these pursuits, their consent is required.

The libertarian says that with the authority to run your life goes the risk that you may mismanage your life. It's up to you. Once you are an adult, you are in charge of your life and community with others must be voluntary on all sides.

Libertarians take the legal authority within a given jurisdiction as no more than a well empowered but strictly limited referee. It's only concerned with maintaining peace and the maximum absence of violence against individual rights, and with no one abridging those rights with impunity. Its function is to protect against and penalize violators of individual rights. As adults we all have equal status -- not economically, not in terms of our beauty, our background or how nice our parents are but in terms of our rights. "All men are created equal" does not mean that we are created equally wise, smart, wealthy, lucky or beautiful. It means that we are all equally in charge of our lives.

The question can be raised, of course, "Do people really have these rights?" That's the controversial political question. Many government officials at the 1996 Vienna Human rights conference, from Africa and Asia, protested the very idea of basic individual rights because, they said, those ideas do not apply to their society. And there is widespread agreement with this idea on the part of many people in university philosophy, political science and history departments. Is there an answer to that?

Certain matters stay stable or steady for human beings for as long as there is a human species, be this in 5th century BC, the 19th, 20th or 21st century AD. The fact of our mutual humanity will imply that some (few) principles of ethics and politics will be universalizable, apply throughout the human species. One such is that each individual human being is sovereign about his or her life.

That is the kind of universal position that the libertarian embraces. Not that all principles are like that, so widely universalizable. For example, how you should dress or keep clean or even rear your kids will change, based on technological, agricultural and other developments. The answers to various particular, special questions are not the same as they were 200 or 3200 years ago. They include a great deal of what makes up various different and equally valid, benign human cultures. But there are basic principles to which people elude when they say that certain values or principles of conduct do not change. The reason why the libertarian thinks this is right is that human beings do remain fundamentally the same throughout all those technological and related changes. No matter what the changes, our humanity remains intact. Underlying the idea of the (negative) rights to, for example, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- or property -- is the fact of our human nature understood as involving as a basic fact our creativity, our need to take initiative in life, and the corresponding moral responsibility we have for living our lives properly (whatever that comes to). For us, unlike for the rest of the animal world, there are very few instincts on which we can rely to guide us in our lives. We must discover how to live and flourish. That's why we need education -- we are not born with sufficiently detailed genetically built-in programs that guide us through life the way in which geese, cats or even the higher mammals are who do the right thing nearly automatically. We must learn that we have very few built-in measures that sustain our lives. We have to learn everything -- how to eat, talk, walk, drive and the many, many far more complex tasks that amount to living human lives.

Human beings have the capacity to get themselves going or to fail to do so. This is fundamental to them all. Unless they are thwarted in this task by governments, criminals or invading armies, they are free either to pay heed or fail to. And the right condition for their human lives is when others do not prevent this for them. Nature isn't always so accommodating but other persons can and ought to be. It is right for us all not to be intruded upon in our efforts to think through the problems that face us and to reach solutions to those problems. It is only such a community of others that is suitable to us all, when we unite on a voluntary basis.

By no means does this mean that community life is alien to us, quite the contrary. People flourish best among other people, but only if these other people do not thwart their freedom. We not only have the right to but definitely should form clubs, churches, associations, corporations and thus embark on the solutions of all of our problems and the attainment of our aspirations in the company of other persons. But only if this does not involve coercion, compulsion, the violation of these other persons' sovereignty.

Some chide libertarians, saying "much damage is done when we define human beings not a social beings -- not in terms of morally serious roles (citizen, marriage partner, parent, etc.) -- but only with reference to the watery idea of a single, morally empty capacity of 'choice.' Politics becomes empty; citizenship, too." (George Will, "What Courts Are Teaching," Newsweek, December 7, 1998, p. 98.) Of course, human beings are "social beings." But does this mean what Marx meant by it, that "The human essence is the true collectivity of man." No, it means we live and flourish most in the company of others if we do so, as adults, by our volition. The social options available are numerous and we are responsible for making and promoting the right choice about the kind of social unions in which we will partake.

F. A. Hayek made this point as follows:
That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values -- indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values -- is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and the earn moral merit. ("The Moral Element in Free Enterprise," in Mark W. Hendrickson, ed., The Morality of Capitalism (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1992), originally written for The Freeman, 1962.) And Hayek also argues that The growth of what we call civilization is due to this principle of a person's responsibility for his own actions and their consequences, and the freedom to pursue his own ends without having to obey the leader of the band to which he belongs. "Socialism and Science," in Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt R. Leube, eds., The Essence of Hayek (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 19840. P. 118.

Yes, human beings are properly held responsible for assuming various social roles in life -- in their marriages, families, polities, etc. - but this responsible is empty if not freely chosen by them but imposed by others. What some cavalierly and callously regard a "morally empty capacity of 'choice'," is, in fact, the categorically indispensable prerequisite of the moral life. No guarantee exists that free men and women will also be morally good. Yet, it is more likely that they will discover what the right thing to do is if they are free. More so than if they are regimented around by others who have their own lives to attend to and, in any case, ought to mind their own business.

When government tells us what the minimum wage ought to be, how to run our business, what requirements we should meet to become doctors, psychologist, chiropractors, government is addressing an area that we should address in our voluntary cooperative groups. Not addressed by means of petty or major tyrannical policies by people who wield guns. That is a fundamental notion concerning public policy, according the libertarian. Based on it and various details we learn from all fields of knowledge we learn, also, peaceful ways of dealing with, for example, cloning, education, drug abuse, child raising, mental health, diseases and all kinds of issues with which life confronts us. There are numerous issues not covered by libertarianism and left for other fields than politics to address. But there is at least one point implied by libertarianism for all areas of social life: Coercion is not suited for any of it. You have to fill in a lot of details in order to learn the implications of the fundamental principles of physics for dealing with a particular area of the physical world. Similarly, in politics the basic principles do not tell us everything. They provide a basic framework within which we are required to solve our problems. That means that if we are going to solve problems in society, the only thing that is utterly forbidden is for me to violate your right life, liberty and property.

Within that broad framework I can consult with you, we can get together and find all sorts of solutions from biology, chemistry, zoology, and physics and embark on solving our problems. We may never, however, use coercion, the violation of basic individual rights. Only within a framework of voluntary association may we address human problems, according to libertarian political philosophy. Once you adhere to that, there is, of course, still a whole lot of work to be done so as to flourish in life. Because simply being free of the intrusions of others is not enough to live right -- it is just a precondition. You have do useful, productive, creative, and imaginative, as well as many other proper things, once free.

The libertarian, as such, does not have an answer as to how to solve all human problems -- the ever-developing special disciplines and professions are for that -- only to our political question: "How should we treat each other in a community?" The libertarian answers: "With full, uncompromising respect for one another's basic and derivative rights. No violation of those rights is proper and should be permitted." That prominent and widely championed objective of economic equality -- actually equality with respect to most matters of value to people -- is cannot trump the right to individual liberty, including the liberty to obtain and keep valuable stuff. Such equality is not attainable -- those imposing it by force will never be equal to those on whom it is imposed. But even when attainable, it is worthless if obtained via the violation of individual rights.

This should provide an initial idea as to what libertarianism amounts to and why it makes sense to many people.

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* Send your response to Tibor Machan's essay (no longer than 600 words) to TMP Open Debate, 38 Everett Road, Manchester M20 3DZ, or e-mail editor@philosophers.co.uk.
Please keep your response focused on only one or two specific points. Closing date for replies is 31 March, 2003. Contributions may be edited for length and clarity. The author and editors are unable to reply to contributions no selected for inclusion.

** Machan teaches, among other courses, business ethics at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, Orange, CA 92866. He has written and edited three-dozen books, including Classical Individualism (Routledge, 1998) and The Passion for Liberty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).