[Absolutely. There's an interesting book review in the NY Times today focusing on the history of the American libertarian movement and its patron saint Ayn Rand, who ranks with Barbara Cartland as a philosopher and author of romance novels. What a wacky bunch. Not to be snooty, but does the left *really* need a destabilizing libertarian component in the Great Progressive Coalition? Libertarians' influence to date, as described below, has given rise to "libertarian paternalism," where "the market will be allowed to work its efficient magic, but government will step in to correct the market’s failures." To me that sounds suspiciously like something that has long been identified by a different name, "lemon socialism" -- that's where the private sector engages in orgies of destructive creation, and the public sector gets to pay the tab (see also the Savings & Loan Crisis of the 1980s). From a review of "Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement" by Brian Doherty:]
... Doherty [a senior editor at Reason magazine] merely catalogs the [libertarian] movement’s failings rather than grappling with them. He relates that Rand “notoriously testified” before the big-brotherly House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, when the committee was investigating Hollywood, where Rand had worked as a screenwriter, but the episode receives only two paragraphs. He skates over other questionable matters, too: for instance, that Friedman advised the murderous Pinochet regime in Chile; that Merwin Hart “infected his free-market thought with anti-Semitism”; and that Rothbard supported Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president in 1948 (because, Doherty casually observes, “he admired Thurmond’s states’ rights position”). The book fails to ask why people who claim to love freedom have so often had a soft spot for those who would deny it to others. Libertarianism has now arrived at an interesting juncture. The moment for its grandest ambitions seems to have passed. President Bush is no longer talking about privatizing Social Security, and his free-market approach to rebuilding Iraq has proven disastrous. The libertarians at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, are struggling to persuade people that global warming — the archetypal free-market failure — is a hoax. Yet in an irony worthy of Rand’s collective, the solution to climate change will probably have a libertarian tinge. The global warming debate is coalescing around a “cap and trade” solution in which energy-efficient companies would be rewarded by the market. In fact, across a range of major issues — energy policy, health care, retirement savings — a hybrid form of laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism seems to be ascendant. The market will be allowed to work its efficient magic, but government will step in to correct the market’s failures. “Libertarian paternalism” is the name two University of Chicago professors, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, have devised for one version of this philosophy.
Many of the purists who populate “Radicals for Capitalism” would surely hate an idea like libertarian paternalism. But they also might understand that they helped to make it possible.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/books/review/leonhardt.t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin>
Carl
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