S6:E18 How Libertarianism Invaded Evangelicalism
Modern evangelicalism sometimes incorporates pieces of different ideas. Things that are in the air. Social messages. Political stances. But has evangelicalism been enchanted by libertarianism?
In this episode, we cover a brief history of libertarianism. What is it and who are some of the main thinkers? We discuss Murry Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Nozick.
What do libertarians believe?
What is a libertarian? Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi define libertarianism by six characteristics. Libertarians are defined by a love of private property, they are skeptical of authority, and they like free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty. We will define each of these throughout the episode.
Our special guest for this episode is Andrew Koppelman, law professor at Northwestern University. He’s the author of the book Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
Sources
- Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. by Andrew Koppelman
- The Individualists by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi
- The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
- Matthew 25
- The Road to Serfdom cartoon version
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (for the Dust Bowl section in book 2)
- 99% Invisible episode The Infernal Machine for information on anarchists
- Teddy Roosevelt’s first address to Congress
- Dark Money by Jane Mayer
- EPA.gov article about The Clean Air Act
- NPR story about law enforcement throwing protestors in unmarked vans
- Listen America! by Jerry Falwell
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (I could only stomach maybe 1/4 of it. I promised myself if she wrote “Rearden Steel” one more time that I would stop reading. She did. So I did.)
Discussion Questions
- What is libertarianism?
- How have you seen libertarianism crossing over into evangelicalism?
- Does libertarianism counter the story from Matthew 25?
- What is the impact of Ayn Rand? Have you read her books?
- Why did Atlas Shrugged suddenly become the “it” book among Republicans in 2020?
- Is there any place for selfishness in the Christian walk?
Transcript (note: this was generated by AI and may not be correct)
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. To do that story, I also have to cover how Republicans changed in that era. Because the Republican Party of Eisenhower is not the same as the Republican Party of Reagan, which is not the Republican Party of today.
This episode can stand on its own, but when you’re done, feel free to go back and start at the beginning of Season 6. This is How Libertarianism Shaped the Republican Party. In Matthew 25, there’s an image of Jesus arriving with the angels and sitting on his throne. There are people on his right and on his left.
The sheep and the goats. He has really nice things to say about the people on the right. They’re going to inherit the kingdom. That guy you saw who was naked, what did you do?
Nick Staron: Here, take this jacket.
Chris Staron: You clothed me. When you saw me hungry, I just made soup. You fed [00:01:00] me. When you saw that I was thirsty, have some of my water.
You gave me something to drink. And the people in this story are like, wait a second, when did we see you naked or hungry or thirsty? What you do for the least of these brothers and sisters, you do to me. What you do for the poor, for the needy, you do for Jesus. These are the people who inherit the kingdom of God, the sheep we talked about earlier.
The goats on the other hand, they didn’t do this stuff. Get out of here, you bum! And they, well, things don’t go well for them. These will go away into eternal punishment. Eternal punishment. It’s a heavy story. But, that is God’s standard for us. We are to take care of the less fortunate. But how? For a long time, we [00:02:00] humans have been looking for ways to bend that standard.
We’re also torn between accomplishing these goals alone, or as a society, or both. These are huge questions. So to lighten it up, I decided to take these puzzles into the real world. Okay. Oh, wow. Look at all of those .
Well, we are here looking at Henry’s Fork in Idaho at the Harriman State Park. We’ve got this beautiful river here and we’ve pulled over.
We’re on a guy’s trip weekend. We were supposed to go biking in Yellowstone. Didn’t get to make that happen. So we thought we’d pull over Look at this beautiful view and talk about libertarianism.
Nick Staron: Is that the cold chill I just got or the snow we’re standing on?
Chris Staron: That’s right. You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church.
We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Starrin with my [00:03:00] friends and this is Truce.
Okay, so, word of warning. We will not be able to cover every libertarian. Instead, we’re going to talk about just a few. Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. Four people in, hopefully, less than an hour. And thankfully, I’m not alone in this exercise.
Andrew Koppelman: I’m Andrew Koppelman. I teach at Northwestern School of Law.
Chris Staron: His most recent book is Burning Down the House. I used multiple sources for this episode, and his is by far the best introduction to this topic. Friedrich Hayek. He’s also written about the litigation over Obamacare and defending religious liberty in the Supreme Court. Okay, so what is Libertarianism?
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarianism is the idea that human liberty can [00:04:00] be maximized by shrinking government. The weaker and smaller government is, the freer we are. That’s the basic idea of Libertarianism.
Chris Staron: According to historians and also Libertarians, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, There are six defining characteristics of libertarianism.
Number one,
Announcer: private property.
Chris Staron: That one’s pretty easy. But for some libertarians, that also means not just your 40 acres and a mule, but also your body and your labor. Your body is your labor. Your property as is the work you do. Number
Announcer: two,
skepticism of authority.
Chris Staron: Does the government have power to do things like run a post office, build roads, compete with private businesses?
Maybe? No. Maybe yes. Or maybe, maybe, depending on who you ask.
Announcer: Number [00:05:00] three,
Chris Staron: free markets. Can I trade without barriers? Like let’s say that I made a bunch of cookies and I want to swap them for a plant that you own. Libertarians generally think that the government should stay out of that. I should be able to sell you a cookie.
Mm, and even go beyond that. If I wanna sell cookies to Japan or Brazil, I should be able to do that without taxation. Or tariffs, and there’s wiggle room here depending on which kind of libertarian you are. Like if my cookie factory is poisoning a river, some think that the government should intervene, others don’t.
Number four, spontaneous order. It’s less complicated than it sounds. Essentially, if there needs to be a system in place, it’ll happen on its own. We don’t need a government puppeteering or rationing. For example, rather than a government telling us how much corn or [00:06:00] bananas to grow, the market will sort itself out.
Farmers will adjust to demand and prices without government telling them how much of which crop to grow and how much to charge. Number
Announcer: 5.
Individualism.
Chris Staron: As Zwolinski and Tomasai put it, each of us is morally significant with our own life to live. We all have the same value. You can’t sacrifice one person for the greater good because we all have the same value.
This gets into tricky territory though. Some libertarians take this to mean that There are no protected groups. In their logic, Black people are not discriminated against. Maybe individual Black people are, though. Or maybe a less charged example would be, Congress doesn’t make laws, but individual lawmakers do.
Libertarians may not like protected groups. 6. Negative [00:07:00] Liberty This is actually an interesting distinction. Libertarian thought is about wanting to be free from. That’s the negative part of negative liberty. They want to be free from government. Taxes, tariffs, police, etc. This is different from freedom to.
Freedom to own a gun, do drugs, or drink unpasteurized milk. Though, because nothing is easy. Some libertarians have argued for those things. To recap, and I know this is a lot of stuff. Libertarians are defined by a love of property. They are skeptical of authority. They like free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty.
According to Zwolinski and Tomasi, libertarians see these six things as moral absolutes. Okay, so we could pretty much stop there. Because we’ve covered a lot of stuff in just a few minutes. But we’ve got a long way to go. [00:08:00] Let’s turn the clock back a few hundred years and see where this all started.
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarians tend to reach back to John Locke, a philosopher who did his most important work in the 1680s.
Chris Staron: John Locke, a name you may remember from high school history class. Okay, so I’m aware that you know who that is, and I know who that is, but Just in case someone else doesn’t remember,
Andrew Koppelman: John Locke wrote in the 1680s in order to justify resistance to the King of England.
He was British,
Chris Staron: and people in England were upset about the policies of the King.
Andrew Koppelman: The dissent against the King eventually led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which oosted the King and put a new regime in place. Locke’s task was to show. that there were limits to the power of government. There had to be limits to the power of government, otherwise the divine right of kings meant that the king could do anything that he [00:09:00] wanted.
Chris Staron: We Americans owe a lot to John Locke for inspiring our founding fathers and our Constitution. For arguing that we, no matter how lowly, Have rights. And when Locke refers to property, it isn’t just, you know, your 40 acres, or in my case, my little apartment. It’s deeper than that.
Andrew Koppelman: Locke thought that if we imagine ourselves in a state of nature, a primitive condition where there is no government.
Chris Staron: Okay, so this is where a show with a larger budget would play a song by John Lennon. You may say I’m a dreamer, but that’s not gonna happen here. No government, no property divisions. In this imaginary world, so. We’re basically in the Garden of Eden.
Andrew Koppelman: Let’s just say that I see apples growing on a tree. And I pick a bunch of the apples and take them back to my home.
Well, those apples are now not like any other apples. The way that Locke puts it is, I’ve mixed my [00:10:00] labor with those apples. And so, if somebody else tries to take the apples away from me after I’ve picked them. pick them, he is trying to get the benefit of my pains, which he hasn’t got any right to. Let him go and pick his own apples.
Chris Staron: In his book, Andrew distills Locke’s ideas down to two main points. One, people are entitled to be rewarded for their work. If I pick those apples, I should be able to eat them, or sell them, or trade them. And two, the institution of property, even though it produces inequalities, is generally good for everyone.
Andrew Koppelman: And Locke thinks that the reason why we form governments is because if we have disputes over property, If we have any kind of disputes, we’ve got to have some higher authority to adjudicate those disputes. Life in the state of nature is dangerous and inconvenient, and so in order to get along with each other, we’ve got to have government in order [00:11:00] to secure the rights that we already have, such as the right to property.
Chris Staron: Like, if someone is going to steal my apples, we need someone to decide what to do with that.
Andrew Koppelman: At a minimum, a police force and judges to adjudicate decisions. And so, some libertarians think that this means that that’s the only thing that government can legitimately do.
Chris Staron: By the way, Locke was not a libertarian.
Because such a thing didn’t exist back then, and he wouldn’t have fit our six points from a few minutes ago. But his ideas became the basis for modern libertarianism. In music terms, it’d be like the backbeat that somebody samples and then turns into their own thing. No longer should people believe that the king and queen can do whatever they want.
We have rights to our property, including our bodies, and our labor. And get this, John Locke was a Christian.
Andrew Koppelman: But even absent the [00:12:00] Christian framework, you could say, even if we’re just in a state of nature trying to arrive at terms of cooperation with one another, we are not going to arrive at terms of cooperation that require us to starve to death.
We must be able to agree to allow one another to take bits of the world.
Chris Staron: In our apple scenario, that idealized petri dish of a world that we were imagining, this is key. We’re imagining that there is plenty to go around.
Andrew Koppelman: But if that’s the purpose, if the purpose is that we get to have property because we need it in order to preserve ourselves, then that is key.
already parts company with the libertarians, because it means that the social contract cannot be such that people are going to be deprived of what they need to stay alive.
Chris Staron: John Locke would not have been cool with me hoarding all the apples in all the trees for hundreds of miles [00:13:00] around. Leaving you with nothing to eat.
Andrew Koppelman: Locke thought that you could justify appropriating things in nature as long as you left as much and as good for other people. If I pick the apple, but there’s plenty of other apples on the tree, nobody else gets to complain. But, if you end up with a state of affairs where all the property is taken and people are starving, You have thwarted the whole purpose of having property in the first place.
So, fundamental divide between Locke and the Libertarians, number one, is that the purpose of property for Locke is in order to enable comfortable self preservation. And so that means that if the political system doesn’t deliver, The means of self preservation, it is not doing its job.
Chris Staron: Let’s try this from a different angle.
Let’s go back to my friends out there near a frozen river in eastern Idaho. There’s this example in [00:14:00] libertarian philosophy of an oasis in a desert. Let’s say I own this oasis in the desert and then you guys come out of, I don’t know, that forest out there and you’re thirsty and you want some water. John Locke, who was writing in the 1600s, would argue that there must be as much and as good for everyone.
So in an ideal world, We’d all have access to water. So he seems like a decent guy, right?
Nick Staron: Yeah, yeah, if I was definitely thirsty at this point, I would appreciate his philosophy. Yeah, you’d
Chris Staron: want to come across John Locke.
Nick Staron: Yeah, that’d be nice. Yeah.
Chris Staron: John Locke is a friend to thirsty hikers, and his philosophy became a major inspiration for libertarian thought.
But ideas don’t stay the same. Put. They get repurposed, stretched, twisted, and become new things. When we return from the ads, we’ll see just how far Locke’s ideas were taken, to the point where some philosophers think, maybe you should be [00:15:00] willing to die to defend my right to hoard apples for myself, or my frozen river.
And we’ll return to Henry’s Fork to see how these ideas play out. Stay tuned. If you like the show, take this time to share it on social media.
Welcome back. This is the Truce Podcast. Did you have a good break? How you feeling, Andrew?
Andrew Koppelman: Yeah, yeah, I’m very comfortable.
Chris Staron: Great. Now that we’ve touched on John Locke, let’s jump forward a few years to the 1800s, when Locke’s ideas about property and labor were taken to greater lengths, used as the backbone for a new thing.
Libertarianism.
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarianism really begins simultaneously in Europe and the United States in the 1800s.
Chris Staron: And at this stage, it looks very different over the pond than it does in the United States. In Europe, it had two adversaries. The first was [00:16:00] feudalism.
Andrew Koppelman: The old privileges that the aristocracy has. In England, there is a huge struggle against
Chris Staron: Which uses tariffs to prevent cheaper grain from being imported.
Which is not great for the consumer because that allows local grain producers to jack up the price.
Andrew Koppelman: Which is great news for the aristocracy who own a A lot of land because it maintains the price of the wheat that their land produces and keeps them rich, but keeps laborers poor because food is very expensive.
Chris Staron: Free trade between England and other nations would likely have made this cheaper. It would have introduced competition. European libertarian enemy number one, a lack of free trade. Then there’s the second adversary, socialism. Central economic planning where the government controls the means of production, and the people keep the profit.
For example, if I’m the government, and we’re organizing things centrally, [00:17:00] I as the government need to plan how much of everything gets made. Let’s say that today I’m looking at dog toys. Last year there were, I don’t know, 10, 000 squeaky toys sold in my country. I’m gonna order the factory to make 10, 000 dog toys for next year.
But then There’s a puppy craze that I didn’t expect. Nobody expected it. Next year, a lot of dogs are going to go without toys. Because no matter how good I am at centrally planning all the items in the economy, these guys argue I’ll never have enough information to get it all right. So Bandit and Patches and Dog the Biscuit Hunter are going without toys next year.
European libertarians did not like central control.
Andrew Koppelman: The best intellectual response to that in Europe is the Austrian economists, people like Ludwig von Mises or his student Friedrich Hayek, [00:18:00] who show quite elegantly that the only way to coordinate production, the only way to figure out efficiently how to invest productive resources is a market.
Chris Staron: Remember the six things that define most libertarians? One of them was free markets. Free markets. Instead of centrally planning things or setting tariffs, we’ll let the market figure it out.
Andrew Koppelman: Because markets give signals to everybody in the economy very quickly about what commodities are wanted and how urgently they are wanted.
The price system is really terrific. for that.
Chris Staron: That’s roughly what happens in Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s. Libertarians oppose feudalism and socialism. In the US, early libertarians were focused on opposing something else, slavery. Remember what Locke was all about, protection of property and labor.
And property could mean your own body. [00:19:00] And slaves were not seeing the fruits of their labor or controlling their own bodies. Those ideas didn’t stop there.
Andrew Koppelman: And that idea of freedom is what leads the Supreme Court to then, on the basis of the Civil War amendments, strike down slavery. Maximum hours laws, wage laws, laws that prohibit employers from firing people who join unions, things like that.
Chris Staron: Again, protecting your property, in this case your body, and your labor. Both the European and American versions came out of Liberalism. I know that sounds confusing.
Andrew Koppelman: Liberalism is used in contemporary political discourse to describe ideas associated with the Democratic Party. But in political philosophy, it stands for a much bigger idea.
Liberalism is the novel idea that what we should be aiming at is individual liberty, giving people the freedom to live as they like. Libertarianism [00:20:00] is the claim that this freedom of people to live as they like will be achieved by shrinking government.
Chris Staron: Doing away with things like regulation, workplace safety, food standards, pollution laws, that kind of thing.
And something we haven’t talked about yet. Redistribution. Taking money via things like taxes from the middle and upper class, and funding things for those in need, or the country in general.
Andrew Koppelman: Things like social security, the earned income tax credit, but actually even free government. public schools for children whose parents are too poor to pay for the education themselves.
On a libertarian account, all of that has to go because government should only be protecting persons and property and nothing else.
Chris Staron: Let’s meet our first notable libertarian. Friedrich Hayek. Hayek was of the Austrian school we talked about a moment ago, from Europe, so he was concerned about socialism.
One of his biggest [00:21:00] contributions was his book The Road to Serfdom, which was published by, can you guess? The University of Chicago. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, This podcast could literally just be about the impact of the University of Chicago. Leopold and Loeb went there. It was the hub of modernist theology.
It was funded by the Rockefellers. And soon we’ll cover how it was the home of Milton Friedman. Something to look forward to. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. And both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan carried out his ideas. And there’s another interesting connection. Hayek got some of his funding from the Volcker Fund, the libertarian think tank where R.
J. Rashtuni worked. The Christian Reconstruction guy, the father of modern homeschooling in the U. S. Remember him? I got red string and pushpins all over my walls, baby! Okay, so back to his book. It was so popular, especially with big businesses. that it was reworked into a comic strip and distributed to employees of General Motors.
Andrew Koppelman: The [00:22:00] road to serfdom is really a response to the program of the British Labor Party in World War II. The book is published in 1944. The British Labor Party has proposed to nationalize the means of production.
Chris Staron: Hayek’s response is essentially, It’s fine to do central planning while the war is going on, when the government needs to ration things like steel so it can build bombs and planes, or cloth to make uniforms and blankets.
But in peacetimes, you don’t want all that central control, otherwise you end up with the dog toy problem from earlier, because no system of central control is going to be efficient enough to anticipate everyone’s needs and adapt. If we go with central control, some dogs will go without.
Andrew Koppelman: And so government shouldn’t direct the economy.
Government should step back and allow the market to operate. And individual consumers will tell you what they want [00:23:00] by sending price signals. If some new product arises that the consumers want, let’s say, The television set, or dog toys, they will buy it, and producers will then respond to these incentives by producing more of these things, and competition among these producers will cause the product to become cheaper, and it will also produce increases in quality, which is exactly what happened.
Chris Staron: To oversimplify Hayek, free markets work better than central control.
Andrew Koppelman: Now, all of this is a response to the program of the British Labor Party. Hayek was a huge hit in the United States because there had been a lot of people business people who had been opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Chris Staron: It is entirely possible that by the end of this season, you’ll be sick of hearing about the New Deal. But in the U. S., it was a real turning [00:24:00] point.
Andrew Koppelman: The problem with using Hayek in order to beat up on Franklin Roosevelt is that Roosevelt’s program was nothing at all like the British Labor Party. He tried out something like this.
central direction of the economy in his first couple of years in office in 1933 and 1934 and was thwarted by the Supreme Court in his early efforts.
Chris Staron: As the U. S. was burdened by both the Depression and the Dust Bowl. which destroyed a lot of crops due to bad farming practices. In the 1930s, the federal government literally told farmers how much of each crop they could grow and would penalize people for going over those limits, which they felt was necessary in order to get prices under control.
And guess what? It worked.
Andrew Koppelman: But he very quickly pivoted away from that. Toward more redistributionist programs like social security and so there was this category mistake right [00:25:00] from the beginning that When libertarians talk about the New Deal and a philosophy of government that is reconciled to New Deal programs, they talk about it as if we were talking about communism.
And I would say if you cannot tell the difference between Joseph Stalin and Dwight Eisenhower, you need new glasses.
Chris Staron: Hayek is not on the extreme end of libertarianism. He thought there was a role for government. Hayek, unlike others, could look at someone who was not thriving in life and understand that it might not be laziness that got them there.
Some libertarians swing that way. It could be that industry left, or they got sick or injured, or dumb luck like a hurricane that destroyed their business. To quote
Andrew Koppelman: Andrew’s book, Hayek’s view did not entail minimal government. It rather imposed strict conditions on intervention in the economy.
Chris Staron: Hayek didn’t [00:26:00] like stuff like social security, but he was okay with things that the private sector is not going to be able or willing to carry out.
Things like roads, police, courts, education, social services, and basic scientific research. In his mind, let the market do it. That is Hayek in a nutshell. Let’s take what we’ve learned and return to the Henry’s Fork River. To see how these ideas play out in our Oasis scenario. We’re looking at this cold river and we’re very cold.
We’re going back to that example of a desert and a body of water. And I haven’t owned the rights to all of this water in this example. Friedrich Hayek would argue that property ownership at that point is stretched pretty far. I have a monopoly on the water and you guys are about to die of thirst because I own all the water.
And therefore, there should be some kind of body that would give you rights to access that water. Andrew said this better than I could.
Andrew Koppelman: Hayek would say [00:27:00] the whole point of having a free market economy is because it makes everybody better off, and if you haven’t done that, then you haven’t done what free market economies are for.
Chris Staron: That means that, in terms of our example with the water, Friedrich Hayek wouldn’t want you guys to die. In order to respect my property rights. So does that sound fair?
Dave: Yeah.
Chris Staron: As one of the people who would be dying in this situation?
Dave: Yeah. I’d appreciate that water.
Chris Staron: Even though he was a libertarian and he believed in property rights, there was an extreme limit to that.
He wasn’t going to push it to the point where you guys would die of thirst.
Nick Staron: Very thoughtful.
Chris Staron: Thank you,
Nick Staron: Friedrich.
Chris Staron: So far, both examples, Locke and Hayek, are pretty generous. If there’s not enough to go around, something has to give. That is not the philosophy of every libertarian thinker. Bringing us to the third figure of our episode, Murray Rothbard.
Andrew Koppelman: Rothbard [00:28:00] was a writer. It gets started in the 1920s. 50s. He works for libertarian think tanks and he is trained as an economist and he is essentially an anarchist.
Chris Staron: Anarchism is also a broad term that means a lot of different things. In the 1800s, groups of anarchists were responsible for a number of dynamite bombings in the United States.
President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. Leaving his Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, to say this at his first address to Congress as President.
Teddy Roosevelt: President McKinley was killed by an utterly depraved criminal belonging to that body of criminals who object to all governments, good and bad alike, who are against any form of Popular liberty if it is guaranteed.
Even the most just and liberal laws who are [00:29:00] as hostile are to the operat exponent of a free people’s sober will As to the tyrannical and irresponsible, desperate.
Chris Staron: Not every anarchist was a murderer. This is yet another big umbrella. Murray Rothbard, as best I can tell, didn’t carry over the same murderous spirit.
Andrew Koppelman: Anarcho capitalism, the idea that’s associated with him, supposes that no governments are legitimate.
Chris Staron: In Rothbard’s ideal vision, Instead of governments as we know them,
Andrew Koppelman: In the state of nature, people would form mutual protective associations, and the mutual protective associations, if there weren’t a state, would enter into consensual arrangements with one another.
Because it’s in nobody’s interest for there to be warfare, and so systems of cooperation, and even courts, would arise [00:30:00] just out of consensual transactions. And so he imagines a civilized world in which there are these multiple centers of armed power in the same geographical area.
Chris Staron: Again, not government sponsored, and Not relying on mandatory taxes.
Andrew Koppelman: That live peacefully with one another.
Chris Staron: So far, this is kind of optimistic, right? Trusting people without compulsion? To live at peace and avoid war? It sounds nice in that petri dish imaginary world just after the Garden of Eden. But, it isn’t practical when it gets into the real world.
Andrew Koppelman: Now this is already ridiculous, because we actually have seen places in the world where there are multiple centers of armed power in the same geographical area.
We call them warlords, and they have trouble getting along with one another, and we see what happens in failed states.
Chris Staron: According to Andrew, the closest example we’ve seen in modern times This is
Andrew Koppelman: [00:31:00] organized crime in the United States in the 20th century, where the, the Mafia Commission organized a number of large quasi monopolistic gangsters, uh, and tried to adjudicate disputes between them because there were enormous gains to be had if they would just avoid violence with one another.
Chris Staron: The same is true for drug cartels in South and Central America that cooperated for a number of years. Until they didn’t. These are non governmental organizations who offered protections without charging direct taxes.
Andrew Koppelman: This actually worked sometimes for years, but this equilibrium was punctuated periodically by wars and assassinations if the balance of power shifted.
I imagine many of the people listening to this have seen The Godfather, which is just a story about what happens when the peace is temporarily broken and [00:32:00] eventually a new equilibrium is reached. But on the way to the new equilibrium, There are a lot of people killed, so this is not as happy a story as Rothbard imagines.
Chris Staron: There are a lot of downsides to Rothbard’s vision, because it leaves the little guy exposed, totally reliant on the powerful to take care of them and stick to their word. In a democratic republic, we can vote people out of office if they misbehave. In a loose confederation with warlords, there’s none of that.
It also overlooks the reality that even if the United States was to shut down the government and go to this freewheeling system, the rest of the world is not likely to follow, leaving a disorganized landmass surrounded by governments that can finance and coordinate a military. It’s simply not practical to maintain the rights of citizens this way.
According to Andrew, it will ultimately [00:33:00] degenerate into feudalism, where a series of elites controls the rest of civilization. Rothbard stuff seems kind of fringy, right?
Andrew Koppelman: But Rothbard is enormously influential, you know, when the Libertarian Party forms in the early 1970s, the Libertarian Party forms because people have less respect for government than they had in the past, largely owing to the Vietnam War, and Rothbard first becomes a prominent public intellectual in the 1970s.
These are the central ideas that the party organizes around.
Chris Staron: Though there is still disagreement in the Libertarian Party. Not everyone is pro Rothbard.
Andrew Koppelman: Some of them believe in an absolutely minimal state, and some of them believe in no government at all. And they remain divided on that question. The other ways in which Murray Rothbard influenced contemporary thinking is, for anybody who took a political [00:34:00] philosophy class in college, you may have read Robert Nozick’s book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Nozick was a protege of Rothbard. Rothbard. Anarchy, State, and Utopia imagines Rothbard’s state of nature and tries to figure out how a state could legitimately emerge from Rothbard’s system of mutual protective associations and he ends up concluding that you would end up with a minimal state, but nothing more than a minimal state that protected persons and property.
Chris Staron: Even Rothbard’s students, like Nozick, don’t agree on his work. There is a lot at play here. Before we get too deep into the legacy of Murray Rothbard, Let’s return one more time to my road trip with my friends. To see how his ideas would play out in our Oasis scenario. Together, Andrew and I are going to walk you through what Rothbard would argue.
Andrew Koppelman: So, you’ll recall I began with the crude libertarian story based on a reading of Locke that everybody’s just got a right in the state of nature to appropriate property. [00:35:00] It’s an absolute right. Doesn’t depend on whether there’s as much and as good left for others. Back
Chris Staron: at Henry’s Fork, we’re looking at this ice cold water.
Murray Rothbard would argue that you guys coming out of that distant forest, you’re thirsty and you need some water. And I have a monopoly on the water.
Andrew Koppelman: It’s mine. If I decide that I am going to make it into a sacred shrine and not let anybody drink from it and only drink the bare minimum from it myself, I’ve got a right to it.
Chris Staron: And that could be by force. It could be with my own private, Army, keeping you out of my water. He would also say that you guys would respect my property rights so much that you’d be willing to die out there in the woods in order to respect my property boundaries.
Dave: Oh, wow.
Chris Staron: That’s pretty unreasonable. Yeah.
No, thank you. We live in a finite world, not an endless Garden of Eden. There’s only so much land, so much water, so much soil to go around, [00:36:00] which would eventually, under Rothbard, lead to monopolies, like my control over Henry’s Fork, and my three friends who desperately want a drink of water, would be out of luck.
Now he also has this idea that if we were to enter into a contract, About this water that you guys can have so much water, but maybe I don’t tell you that this water is contaminated with something he would argue that I would have the right to enter into contract fraud because buyer beware, a contract is something that you only agree to.
If you completely understand all of the elements. And if you guys sign up for something that is harmful for you, or it doesn’t work out, then you’re Buyer beware. Again, this is an extreme vision of libertarianism, but also an influential one, as we’ll see in just a few minutes. If I, I’ve got jugs of water that I’m gonna give you guys who are thirsty, and I know that that water is laced with mercury or, or some kind of [00:37:00] bacteria, you, it would be up to you guys to have done the research to know that that water was poisoned.
Nick Staron: Which is a pretty miserable way to live considering how many products and things you interact with in a day to assume that you had the knowledge of every manufacturing process of every little thing you consumed, forget it. Like, you know, every time you pulled up to a gas station to fill up your car, you’d have to know that that gas station was safe.
Chris Staron: Yeah, and the argument of, uh, that sort of extreme vision of libertarianism would, would say that, oh, the market will inform people. They’re, they’re, the word will get out that if a pharmaceutical company is selling drugs that will kill you, that as a society will come up with ways to know that that, that is poisonous medication and you shouldn’t buy it.
Nick Staron: Except there’s just so many things in this world that could kill you that everybody would just be wiped out by the time we all figured out what was doing it.
Chris Staron: In reality, we can’t always know what’s in a product. This goes back to the food purity movement at the beginning of the 20th century, where food manufacturers were putting sawdust in bread and formaldehyde or [00:38:00] chalk in milk to thin it out.
Somebody who really likes Rothbard would argue that word would get out about these bad practices and we’d simply stop buying their products. Eventually, we stopped buying them. They’ll go out of business. The problem is that that approach leaves a lot of people poisoned before we figure this stuff out, and we’d have to do it for every single product and manufacturer.
Andrew Koppelman: While under the English common law going back to the middle ages, this would have counted as fraud. And the courts would have voided this transaction because I defrauded you. For a libertarian, it’s a contract you entered into. You decided to enter into it. And so, all sorts of things that government now protects us from, workplace safety regulation and consumer product safety, really could be understood as different ways of policing fraud.
That when I buy the products, I don’t know that this particular toy was a choking hazard to my child. [00:39:00] Or in my workplace, I wasn’t, you know, the worker didn’t know that this workplace was dangerous in these various ways.
Chris Staron: Then, too bad! You should have known. This requires all people to be educated on a tremendous number of subjects and to have ready access to good, qualified expert advice about everything.
Not everyone is capable of getting that kind of expert opinion, or even has the time, but that kind of protection you. requires a government.
Andrew Koppelman: But the libertarians, at least the most extreme ones, like Murray Rothbard, want to rethink the role of government from the bottom up and end up with something quite minimal.
Chris Staron: Or in Rothbard’s case, non existent. But his followers might argue, That’s okay, because he has this theory of non aggression.
Andrew Koppelman: So in Locke, the primary commitment was people’s obligation to preserve themselves. Because God wants [00:40:00] us to preserve ourselves. Murray Rothbard’s primary idea As you can see, we’ve got an obligation not to aggress or disrespect one another’s persons and property.
He didn’t have a very good account for why we should have this, but he thought that there was this basic obligation to respect one another’s property. That’s why if somebody’s got the only Oasis in the desert and my family is dying of thirst, I still have an obligation to stay away from his Oasis to respect his property because that non aggression obligation, that obligation to respect his property overrides my obligation to my family.
It overrides everything. Absolutely everything and we can legitimately form mutual protective associations in order to protect ourselves. What we’ve got a right [00:41:00] to. So if the guy who owns the oasis in the desert Surrounds it with armed guards with machine guns He’s just doing what he’s got a right to do.
If I try to slip past The armed guards in order to get some water for my dying children. I am doing wrong I am aggressing against his property and he’s legitimately defending himself and And so If he catches me trying to take some of his water, he is entitled to whatever aggression is necessary in order to defend his person and property.
Chris Staron: Even with the principle of non aggression, you can see how this still kinda leads to aggression. But aggression that favors the property owner over those who might need that property. Sometimes when we talk about philosophy or economics, there are some of us who say, So what? Nobody’s actually going to do this.
It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s quite [00:42:00] another to enact that idea in the real world. Well, Rothbard has had significant influence with powerful people.
Andrew Koppelman: He persuaded a wealthy industrialist named Charles Koch to start a variety of libertarian organizations to promote libertarian ideas. It’s likely that we would not be talking about libertarianism today if Koch, who is not fabulously rich, had not spent millions and millions of dollars on institutions like the Cato Institute to promote libertarian ideas.
Chris Staron: Charles Koch, also known as one of the Koch brothers. The family will come up again in this episode, and in a few episodes, and then later this season. His money comes from oil. Fred Koch, his father, was a founding member of the conspiracy theory spreading group the John Birch Society, which we’ll cover in the next episode.
Where the left has its billionaires in the form of George Soros or Mark [00:43:00] Cuban, the far right has the Koch family. It makes sense that someone like Charles aligns with Rothbard. As a very wealthy man, he can afford the protection of a private police force. Not to mention, he would save a lot of dough if there was no tax on his money.
Though, as I’ve noted in a previous episode, the ultra wealthy don’t actually pay that much in tax in the first place. Among other things, Koch funds the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Enterprise Institute. He also has ties to Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy, which we’ll cover later this season, that ties evangelicalism to the far right.
Though he is not, as far as I can tell, a member, he did get an award from them. Koch is not the only Rothbardian. He’s just one example of a notable funder on the far right who aligns with his ideas. So far we’ve met John Locke, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard. All of them influential. In the [00:44:00] midst of all these dudes, we need to talk about a woman.
One who brought so many people around to libertarianism in the United States. In fact, you might already know her name, Ayn Rand. Her books, including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are massive. Not particularly well written, they’re ranty and steamy, and have achieved remarkable notoriety. Her books don’t fall in line with any of the guys we’ve already covered.
For starters, she’s not like Rothbard, in that she advocates for a government, Albeit a small one. Something limited to courts, police, and the military, but she was not okay with the social safety nets of Hayek. Ayn Rand grew up in Russia. She
Andrew Koppelman: lived through the Russian Revolution, and then she escaped from Russia in the 1920s.
What she saw. In the Russian Revolution and its aftermath was horrendous oppression and incompetence. And when she came to the United [00:45:00] States and she saw what Roosevelt was doing with the New Deal, she thought that she was seeing the same thing operating. And so she becomes more and more afraid that what the liberals are trying to do is going to bring us to Stalinist Russia.
And she never really gets over this. In the 1960 election, she says that if John F. Kennedy wins the presidency, there may never be an election again. So, you know, very silly stuff. And in her novels and then later in her prose writings, she advances the idea that it is only the wealthiest capitalists who produce wealth with their genius and all of the rest of us are dependent on them and government intervention that interferes with the activity of the capitalists is pure parasitism that tries to enslave the most [00:46:00] productive people for the benefit of the weak and useless.
Chris Staron: Atlas Shrug lifts up wealthy capitalists as the people who make the world work. And as Andrew said, it depicts others as trying to pull them down. Because if you’re not rich, you’re probably lazy. These books were all the rage in the GOP in the lead up to the 2020 election, despite Rand’s avid atheism.
Actually, that’s too soft a term. She really hated religion.
Andrew Koppelman: Among the libertarian writers, she sells more copies than anybody else.
Chris Staron: Atlas Shrugged has sold more than 10 million copies, and sales surge every few years. Rand’s influence on libertarian thought in the U. S. Almost can’t be overstated.
Andrew Koppelman: The capitalist vision, and the idea that unregulated capitalism is justice, is more starkly presented in Atlas Shrugged.
The idea that there are [00:47:00] The productive people. And on the other hand, there are the moochers and looters and parasites who want to use government to take away from the productive people.
Chris Staron: This is no small idea. And I’ve heard the same kind of fear a bunch over the years, even from Christians, that if you’re not rich, it must be because you’re lazy.
Speaking of how our ideas have bled over into the evangelical world, In 1991, the Library of Congress released the results of a survey asking Americans which books had the most influence on their lives. Number one was the Bible. Number two was Atlas Shrugged.
Libertarianism is not necessarily Republican or Democrat. And it’s certainly hard to call it biblical when you run it through the literal test of episode one. So, let’s just be honest, the Bible doesn’t advocate for [00:48:00] libertarianism. And for that matter, it also doesn’t advocate for socialism, capitalism, or communism.
So why talk about libertarianism in a season about evangelicals and the Republican Party? Because this philosophy continues to make inroads in both.
Andrew Koppelman: It has become predominant in the Republican Party because the Republican Party since the 1930s has been the opponent of big government, has been the party that is opposed to regulation and redistribution.
It is now somewhat in eclipse in the age of Trump. Shoving peaceful protesters into unmarked vans isn’t quite libertarian.
Chris Staron: As well as increased policing.
Andrew Koppelman: And high tariffs, which libertarians don’t like.
Chris Staron: Because Tariffs get in the way of free trade.
Andrew Koppelman: On the other hand, uh, Trump is quite opposed to regulation.
Trump proposes to dismantle modern [00:49:00] regulatory state, which libertarians want to do, about dismantling or revising Obamacare. The only programs that are out there to reduce the size of, which are politically possible to reduce, are programs that
Chris Staron: benefit the poorest people. That’s not to say that Republicans are the only ones influenced by libertarianism.
Democrats have been acting in Hayekian ways for decades. One
Andrew Koppelman: of Hayek’s ideas that I think became increasingly influential in the Democratic Party is the idea of the great thing about a free market economy. Is that there are gains from trade. It makes everybody richer. And so the party of Clinton and Obama was quite strongly in favor of free trade.
Clinton shepherded the North American free trade agreement because he thought it’s going to make Mexico richer. It’s going to make. [00:50:00]
Chris Staron: Something that was embraced at the time by Democrats and Republicans, though there were fights over how to prepare Americans for the loss of factory jobs that would go to Mexico.
That is just one way that Hayek’s free markets impacted recent history. Another.
Andrew Koppelman: I don’t think that anybody noticed, I didn’t even notice until I started closely reading Hayek, that the basic idea of Obamacare was devised by Friedrich Hayek in 1960. Hayek wrote a book called The Constitution of Liberty in 1960.
Hayek had taught at the London School of Economics for many years, and so he’s quite focused on developments in Britain. Britain had the National Health Service, where you had doctors on the government payroll, and if you get sick in Britain, you go to a doctor that’s on the government payroll. This is something the United States has in one niche of our economy.
The veterans department works [00:51:00] that way, and veterans hospitals work that way. But in general we rely on other means. Hayek said, again with reference to Britain, you really would provide health care better if you just gave people vouchers, if they couldn’t afford adequate health insurance themselves, to buy health insurance on the private market.
Now, of course, you would have to require the insurers to cover everybody, even people who were sick, and you’d have to subsidize for pre existing conditions. You’d have to require everybody to have health insurance, so that they didn’t wait until they were sick in order to buy insurance, because money has to be in the insurance pool.
Everything that I’ve just described is important. is, in fact, how Obamacare works.
Chris Staron: Again, a government program that was proposed by Democrats, following Hayek’s lead. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, wasn’t loved by some when it was proposed because it wasn’t fully funded health care. It was [00:52:00] also opposed by the Moroth Bardian crowd, including Charles Koch, for getting the government involved at all, or using taxes to subsidize it.
Which Rothbard would have seen as an act of aggression.
Andrew Koppelman: The libertarian objection to Obamacare, which was essentially that we were raising taxes in order to provide medical care for people who needed it, the taxes were being imposed on people who hadn’t done anything wrong and so that was wrong, is just a fundamental misunderstanding of Lockean social contract theory, which purportedly is the basis of libertarianism.
Chris Staron: Even though the program follows the plans of a libertarian, Hayek, not all Libertarians may be on board with it. That’s how wildly diverse Libertarian thought is. Bringing us back to Charles Koch, that wealthy oil magnate.
Andrew Koppelman: He organized the opposition to Obamacare largely by disseminating misinformation.
and misleading people about what [00:53:00] the consequences would be. Various libertarian tropes got used. This is distributing to the unworthy, this is distributing to the moochers, this is a government takeover of a big part of the economy. Koch was opposed to it because Koch is broadly Rothschildian. Bardian in his orientation, and he is opposed to any expansion of government at all.
And Obamacare was a massive new redistributive program. That’s fundamentally what it was doing. It was providing health care to people who the economy was not providing health care to. The other big political intervention of Charles Koch, with world historical implications, is his opposition to any government action at all to deal with climate change.
Chris Staron: From healthcare to the environment, libertarians may not agree. But the effect of the libertarians on [00:54:00] republicanism and on evangelicalism is everywhere. If you’re looking for it, from climate denial to fear about health care, worries about wearing an N95 mask if the government tells you to. In a future episode, I’ll demonstrate how people like Jerry Falwell quoted libertarian Milton Friedman in their books as if it was gospel.
Soon, we’ll also discuss two critical pieces of what drove some evangelicals to follow the Republican Party. No surprise, it has to do with taxes, In the 1970s and early 80s, evangelicals with large followings like Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Patton Robertson, and others pushed back against government involvement in the lives of Americans.
That would manifest in things like fighting the teaching of sex ed in public schools. They were also upset that the federal government would force integration of those schools instead of leaving the decision to parents. And when the Carter administration threatened to take away their tax exempt status, they revolted.
I guess you could say that they thought the Carter administration was using taxation as [00:55:00] aggression. Even if they didn’t have the words for it, and they did, judging by their writings, they justified their opposition to the government with libertarianism. Even as they hosted rallies about how they loved the United States, They spread fear about the U.
S. and what it would do to their families. As we covered last season, Christians at the turn of the 20th century were involved in creating a bigger government, one that restricted alcohol consumption, taught required curriculum in schools, honored workers rights, progressive taxes, and so on. Mandatory food purity, and much more.
But three quarters of the way through the century, they switched, wishing for a smaller government. Less taxation. Less involvement in the affairs of their children. They became more libertarian, vacillating between Hayek, Rothbard, and Rand. We’ll continue to see that. As the season continues.
Andrew Koppelman: As American politics has become more tribal, ideas [00:56:00] cluster together as part of the identity of a tribe that really have nothing to do with one another.
If you tell me what you think about abortion, I will tell you what you think of tax cuts. Ideas that have nothing at all to do with one another. You know, in the age of Trump, Christianity has become. Very strange. You see a variety of Christianity in the United States that basically is inclined to regard the Sermon on the Mount as the creed of wimps and losers.
And that is highly ideologically compatible. With an Ayn Rand vision of the world that sees the producers trying to fight off the moochers and looters.
Chris Staron: Bringing us back to where we started today with Matthew 25, where Jesus rewards those who gave a cup of water or clothes to the least of these and [00:57:00] punishes those who don’t.
Some evangelicals today take the Rothbardian approach. Protect your land. Get what’s yours. Or the Randian approach, where God rewards the winners and the less fortunate must be lazy. Some libertarians would argue that they’re okay with helping others. They just want the option to do it on their terms.
rather than have the government do it for them. And some go as far as saying that instead of the government being in charge of taking care of the least of these, it should be churches. Despite the reality that, according to maybe every ministry leader I’ve ever met, churches are generally overwhelmed as it is.
Regardless of the method, it’s worth noting that this warning is very clear in the Bible. If a thirsty person comes onto our property looking for water, Jesus clearly wants us to give him a drink. Not to send in our private police force or expect a thirsty person to die, rather than encroach on our property rights.
The Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of [00:58:00] Jesus are not the beliefs of losers. We call it that to our own detriment. Instead, these teachings are Christianity, they’re a huge part of loving the Lord and loving your neighbor. We’ll end on this big question. Is the Bible still number one in our hearts?
Or has Atlas Shrugged taken its place?
Special thanks to Andrew Koppelman. He was so well spoken and friendly and patient with me, even when we had technical difficulties. His book is Burning Down the House. I used several resources in researching this episode, and his was by far the easiest to read. If you’d like a more thorough exploration of the history of libertarianism, I recommend The Individualists, Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasai.
There is a lot [00:59:00] of content that I had to cut out of this episode. Patrons of the show can hear plenty more with Andrew and also the closing thoughts from my group of friends at Henry’s Fork. Visit trucepodcast. com slash donate for more information. Truce is listener supported and is a for profit company.
That is partially because I could not do episodes like this where I’m critiquing the ultra wealthy like Charles Koch if I relied on big donors. Instead, I want to run this show through small donors like you. who statistically likely wouldn’t benefit from a tax write off anyway. The vast majority of Americans don’t.
That way, if one person threatens to withdraw their contribution, they can’t hold me hostage. I want we the people to support this show. If you want to join us, visit trucepodcast. com slash donate. As always, I’m indebted to my friends who gave their voices for this episode, including Chris Sloan, Bob Stevenson, and Jackie Hart.
Truce is a production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again [01:00:00] soon. I’m Chris Starin, and this is Truce.
