It’s not uncommon on the blogs I read to see people objecting to some kind of government action as inconsistent with libertarianism. As a mild example consider this post critiquing the idea of letting bankruptcy judges modify mortgage obligations. More extreme examples are easy to find and usually characterized by strident, but unsupported, declarations that such and such is in principle unacceptable government intervention. Now I happen to agree it would be a mistake to hand bankruptcy judges the general power to renegotiate mortgages¹ but the problem is that referencing libertarianism does nothing to support this argument nor virtually all of the other arguments it is invoked to support. You can no more justify specific governmental interventions by saying you are a libertarian than you could justify federal funding for giving beanie babies to the poor by saying you are a democrat.

Before we can see this we first need to eliminate the spectre of principled libertarianism from the discussion. Many self identified libertarians seem to take the position that the government is absolutely forbidden from interfering in certain vaguely defined kinds of private behaviors no matter what the consequences. However, it’s no accident that, apart from Ayn Rand’s Dexedrine fueled rantings², the deontological restrictions on acceptable government are always left vague or unexplored. Given any supposed inviolable libertarianesque restriction on governmental behavior it’s easy to create a hypothetical where the impact of this principle is so repugnant no one would endorse it. You think the government ought not to ever seize private property solely to distribute the benefits more broadly? What if that property was billions of doses of the only cure for a devastating global plague and the owner was dead seat on destroying them? Would anyone really oppose government seizure of property in that circumstance?

Sure, some people will bite the bullet and endorse deontological moral theories but the rules they endorse don’t resemble the sort of governmental restrictions libertarians have in mind. Given the consistent failure of anyone to articulate a remotely attractive inviolable set of libertarian restrictions on the government we can dismiss any supposed principled libertarian objection to governmental action unless it comes with an attractive articulation of those inviolable restrictions. In other words you can’t just insist that there is some unstated but intuitively compelling rule out there which prevents the government from doing what you find objectionable and expect others to just take it on faith.

Once we accept that in theory severe enough consequences can justify what libertarians would otherwise see as objectionable government interference the whole argumentative structure shifts. The libertarian can no longer say, “that policy would violate personal property it’s unacceptable,” he admits that sometimes the government must do just that. Instead he must argue that the consequentialist benefits of the policy aren’t sufficient to balance the harms to liberty. Indeed, it would be perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to say, “I think that 2 accidental deaths per thousand people is a reasonable price to pay to be free of gun regulations but not 3 per thousand.”³. However, this kind of argument is never made since it saps the appeal to libertarianism of all it’s appeal. Whatever valuations you place on liberty seem arbitrary and the argument is mired in the same kind of consequentalist quibbles that an purely pragmatic objection would face.

Of course a sophisticated libertarian would instead say that libertarianism is a formula for producing good policy outcomes. On this view it’s not that protecting liberty necessarily has some kind of intrinsic value but that when liberty is protected good consequences tend to result. This kind of libertarian tends to emphasize the effectiveness of private property and the market economy in creating wealth and alleviating suffering and try to parlay this into an argument against whatever policy they are currently opposing. That argument might be enough to suggest we should default to a libertarian approach but it isn’t enough to counter specific claims that this policy will lead to beneficial results. After all it’s only in most cases that the libertarian approach is superior but the other side has given specific arguments to the effect that in this case government intervention would be beneficial. If the argument in favor of this specific policy is valid then it should be enacted as one of the few exceptions to the superiority of the libertarian approach. If the argument is shown to be invalid then the reference to libertarianism does no extra work in rejecting the policy. All that being a libertarian does for the author or audience is arm them with the conviction that there is probably a flaw in the arguments for some governmental intervention. It doesn’t resolve them from the responsibility to pinpoint those flaws.

Perhaps the best case that someone could use to bring a general libertarian philosophy to bear on a specific question of policy is to argue that people are irrationally biased toward governmental intervention and against the, usually better, libertarian solution. If the libertarian can convince us that we lack the facilities to rationally evaluate arguments for this policy he can leave us with nothing but the raw general preference for libertarian solutions to guide us. In other words if we are no better evaluating specific policy arguments in our native language than in esperanto we might as well follow the same strategy in both cases and always guess the more libertarian solution is better. Unfortunately, at best this gets us a vague, “well it’s more likely than not that intervention will be bad,” which is far weaker than the conclusion the libertarian in the debate desires. Moreover, it’s simply implausible to believe that we can somehow rationally evaluate the argument that on average the libertarian policy tends to be superior but can’t gain any greater information about the better solution in any specific case. After all if we can’t tell what policies tend to work and which don’t how did we ever conclude that the libertarian policies were preferable in most instances in the first place?

Ultimately one should be a (sophisticated) libertarian only if in most cases the arguments for the libertarian style solution are compelling. One justifies being a libertarian by reference to many specific arguments for the superiority of the libertarian solution. You can’t justify rejecting an argument for a specific government intervention because you are a libertarian.