The Limits of Libertarianism
- wenzpeter
- 5 days ago
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The Appeal of Libertarianism
Peter S. Wenz
Libertarians paint an attractive picture of a society based on respect for everyone’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Libertarians believe that the smallest possible government, one that does no more than protect these rights, will result in a society where everyone has maximum freedom. Free-market activity, which respects everyone’s freedom, will provide people with everything that they deserve and undermine all complaints about inequality. If this libertarian vision is accepted, only a very small government is consistent with justice, and a progressive agenda that requires a larger government must be condemned as unjust.
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The Pilgrims and others who sailed to North American on the Mayflower seem to have shared the libertarian belief in natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on September 16, 1620, with 102 passengers, 32 of whom were children, and a crew of about 30. Only 41 of these passengers were Puritans (Pilgrims) who were seeking safety for their religious practice from English persecution. The others, called strangers by the Pilgrims, sought opportunities in the New World.
September was a poor time for departure, as they all knew quite well. But the group had run out of money, and one of the Pilgrims, William Brewster, who was sought by English authorities, was already hiding on the ship. Fortunately, the skipper of the Mayflower, Christopher Jones, was also a shipbuilder and knew that the ship could make the journey in the rough seas of autumn. The ship Mayflower was favorable in another way as well. It had been used in the wine trade, which made her a “sweet ship.” Sailors commonly threw garbage into the hold of ships rather than overboard, creating putrid and unhealthful conditions on the ship. But the Mayflower had the advantage of leaks from wine caskets over the years which neutralized the smell and improved the ship’s healthfulness. As a result, only one person died of illness on the rough, 66-day voyage.[i]
During the voyage another person almost died when he fell overboard, according to the account of Pilgrim William Bradford.
After they had enjoyed fair winds and weather for a season, they were encountered many times with cross winds and met with many fierce storms with which the ship was shroudly shaken, and her upper works made very leaky; and one of the main beams in the midships was bowed and cracked, which put them in some fear that the ship could not be able to perform the voyage….
In sundry of these storms the winds were so fierce and the seas so high, as they could not bear a knot of sail, but were forced to hull for divers days together. And in one of them, as they lay thus to hull in a mighty storm, a lusty young man called John Howland, coming upon some occasion above the gratings was, with a roll of the ship, thrown into the sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of the topsail halyards which hung overboard and ran out at length. Yet he held his hold (though he was sundry fathoms under water) till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then with a boat hook and other means got into the ship.[ii]
Near the very end of the voyage there was nearly a mutiny among the passengers. Some of them were supposed to be indentured servants to others on the ship. According to the laws of England, they were supposed to work free for seven years to pay off their debts. But the Pilgrims had not received a royal charter for their venture, only the assurance that if they attempted their voyage the authorities wouldn’t try to stop them. In the opinion of some passengers, this placed the entire venture outside the laws of England, including the laws of indentured servitude. William Bradford wrote that some of the strangers proclaimed: “When they came ashore, they would use their own libertie, for none had the power to command them, the patent they had being for Virginia and not New-England, which belonged to another Government, with which the Virginia Company had nothing to doe.”[iii] Absent a set of applicable laws, the strangers assumed that people are at liberty to do as they please.
Pastor John Robinson had foreseen the possibility that the colony would need a fresh set of laws in the New World and had therefore sent a letter along with the Pilgrims recommending a democratic form of government to pass legislation as needed. Following this advice, the near mutiny was ended when all 41 of the passengers who were adult males signed the Mayflower Compact, which reads:
Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.[iv]
As the Compact makes clear, its signers didn’t imagine they had left God or God’s laws behind, nor did they want to antagonize the Crown. Yet, they pledged to treat one another as equals and abide by the results of democratic decision-making.
The ship landed first at the tip of Cape Cod, a peninsula that extends out into the sea from the southeast corner of what is now Massachusetts and then curls north. After exploring the peninsula, the party decided to establish themselves on the mainland, a place now called Plymouth, where they found a small brook with fresh water and a hill where they could build a gun platform for protection against Indians, a few of whom had already attacked them on Cape Cod.[v] As it turns out, the area was genuinely unoccupied. The Patuxets, who had lived in the area, had all died of the plague in 1617.[vi]
The group decided that each family would build its own house, but that they would all work together to construct a common house where their supplies would be stored.[vii] Although many passengers brought furniture for their houses with them on the Mayflower, the houses themselves were constructed primarily of wood from trees in the vicinity.
English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was fascinated with experiences like the Pilgrims’. Writing two generations after the Pilgrims established Plymouth, Locke centered his philosophy around the possibility of people with European technology moving to an uninhabited, undeveloped area rich in natural resources. Although he rejected the Pilgrims’ religious intolerance, he embraced the idea that people outside the jurisdiction of any established state have rights. These are natural rights; rights that don’t emanate from the state, but that the state is established to protect. They are the rights to life, liberty, and property.
The right to life is obvious; it’s common sense that people shouldn’t gratuitously kill one another. This right includes the right to defend oneself, as the Pilgrims did when they were attacked by Indians on Cape Cod.
The right to liberty was asserted by the strangers who declared themselves free of indentured servitude when they discovered that they were no longer under English jurisdiction. Outside the jurisdiction of any state, in what Locke called “the state of nature,” Locke thought people have a natural right to liberty. Of course, human beings can interfere with one another’s life and liberty, so Locke thought also that people should get together to form a social contract which, like the Mayflower Compact, specifies how people may legitimately limit one another’s liberty in ways that are mutually advantageous.
Finally, Locke thought that people have a natural right to property. Whatever people make with their own effort from un-owned materials becomes their property by natural right. For example, the houses that people built at Plymouth with materials drawn from the unoccupied forest nearby belonged to whoever did the work to construct the house. Locke justifies this view of property by noting:
Every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever he removes out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property…, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself…. If the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labor put a distinction between them and common…; so they became his private right.
[Similarly,] the fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure and is still a tenant in common, must be his….[viii]
The residents of Plymouth showed some respect for property in this sense. Robert Cushman was an agent of the Pilgrims who lived in England. In 1621 he visited the colony and recalled later, “We found, traveling abroad, some eight bushels of corn hid up in a cave, and knew no owners of it, yet afterwards hearing of the owners of it, we gave them (in their estimation) double the value of it.”[ix] Cushman and his Pilgrim companions assumed that the corn, because it is an agricultural crop produced through human labor, belonged to whoever produced it. They didn’t need any state, law, or government to validate the Indians’ ownership. The corn belonged to the Indians by natural right.
Locke believed that land could also belong to individuals by natural right if they improved it with their labor, so long as enough and as good land was left for others, as he believed was certainly the case in the wilderness of North America. Part of his justification was that land itself does little to meet human needs and wants.
It is labor indeed that put the difference of value on everything; and let anyone consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common without any husbandry upon it, and he will find that the improvement of labor makes the far greater part of the value…. Of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labor; nay…, in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labor.[x]
Locke applied this view to the Pilgrim’s America: “I ask whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.”[xi]
Because land that is un-owned and lying fallow yields what people want and need only after the application of human labor, the people whose labor improved the land to make it productive own it, according to Locke, just as they own individual items that they have taken from un-owned nature, such as acorns and apples, and products that they have constructed from un-owned materials, such as houses and barns.
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Contemporary libertarians agree with Locke that governments derive their legitimacy from their protection of the natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The Libertarian Party adopted at its first national convention in 1972:
We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state, and defend the rights of the individual….
We … hold that the sole function of government is the protection of the rights of each individual: namely (1) the right to life – and accordingly we support laws prohibiting the initiation of physical force against others; (2) the right to liberty of speech and action – accordingly we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form; and (3) the right to property – and accordingly we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain, and support laws which prohibit robbery, trespass, fraud and misrepresentation….[xii]
We further hold that the owner of property has the full right to control, use, dispose of, or in any manner enjoy his property without interference, until and unless the exercise of this control infringes the valid rights of others.[xiii]
The platform opposes “all efforts of government to redistribute wealth….”[xiv]
It would be wrong for people to restrict one another’s liberty beyond what’s needed to avoid harm to others. In contrast to Puritan beliefs, the 1972 Libertarian Party Platform calls for “the repeal of all laws creating ‘crimes without victims,’… such as laws on voluntary sexual relations, drug use, [and] gambling….”[xv] So, if some people decorate the insides of their new houses with lewd pictures, it would be wrong for neighbors to barge in and destroy the pictures in the name of moral purity; people have a natural right to liberty. For the same reason, people should be free to grow and smoke marijuana if they wish. The only justification for interfering with personal pursuits is to stop people from harming others, and the private consumption of marijuana would presumably not harm others in the settler society.
Finally, people would hold as private property whatever they create from their own efforts, unless by contract entered into freely without force or fraud they had agreed that another person should be the owner. This is a natural right to property which is based on the work people expend to produce what they own.
If anyone violates these rights, even by accident, the injured party has a natural right to compensation. For example, if you accidentally damage the roof of someone’s house while gathering freely available coconuts, you owe the owner of the house the cost of repair. But if you have not harmed or in some way promised your property to someone else, then you don’t owe anybody anything. The woman growing marijuana and then getting stoned all the time may have a leaky roof as a result of inattention. That’s her problem. Anyone who wants to help her is free to do so, but she has no right to receive help from anyone who hasn’t volunteered it. In fact, forcing you to help her would be like slavery because you would be forced into labor against your will to produce property that you wouldn’t own; it would still be her roof.
In sum, your natural rights to life, liberty, and property mean that all human interactions should be on a voluntary basis. You have no right to force others to help you stay alive, to provide you with friendship or fun, or to share their property with you, although they are free to do all of these things and more by mutual consent. Your only rights are to be left alone by others, and your only duty to others is to leave them alone, unless and until you and they have freely agreed to a different arrangement.
Because even in a relatively small society some people will not abide by these rules, governments must be established to track, catch, and punish transgressors. These government services cost time and money, so the only involuntary payments required of people is to pay for the services of this minimal state. Any state larger than this, especially one that takes money from some people and gives it to others, is violating the natural right to property that it was established to protect. If poor people want more than they have, they should work for it, unless they can find someone who will voluntarily give them what they want.
The free market – exchange without force or fraud – is the best way for poor people to get more of what they want because rich people will pay poor people for goods and services. The voluntary exchange of money for work will result in everyone having what they need, if not everything that they want, without anyone being forced to do anything.
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These are the basics of libertarianism. John Hospers, a 20th century philosopher, claims that libertarianism offers practical solutions to contemporary problems. Hospers writes, “liberty (or freedom) is the absence of coercion by other human beings.”[xvi] He claims that all people have a natural right to such liberty. The right is infringed by any “direct physical interference with another man’s person or property, or the threat of such physical interference.”[xvii] It’s important to Hospers that the interference is physical, because he doesn’t want to rule out competition in a free market, which may also interfere with another person’s property. Free-market competition is legitimate, even if it bankrupts competitors, so long as it isn’t conducted through physical force or the threat of such force. In a free market, people own what they have themselves produced and whatever they receive through voluntary exchange with others. They may exchange their labor for money or for goods, or they may exchange their goods for money or other goods. In no case, however, is physical coercion or its threat involved. The free market preserves everyone’s freedom because all activity is voluntary.
Property rights in real estate, clothes, books, jewelry, and so forth are central to human liberty, Hospers claims, so they are as natural as the rights to life and liberty. Depriving people of property, he argues,
is depriving them of the means by which they live – the freedom of the individual citizen to do what he wishes with his own life and to plan for the future…. Property rights are what makes long-range planning possible – the kind of planning which is a distinctively human endeavor, as opposed to the day-by-day activity of the lion who hunts, who depends on the supply of game tomorrow but has no real insurance against starvation in a day or a week. Without the right to property, the right to life itself amounts to little: how can you sustain your life if you cannot plan ahead? And how can you plan ahead if the fruits of your labor can at any moment be confiscated by government?
Indeed, the right to property may well be considered second only to the right to life. Even the freedom of speech is limited by considerations of property. If a person visiting in your home behaves in a way undesired by you, you have every right to evict him; he can scream or agitate elsewhere if he wishes, but not in your home without your consent.[xviii]
The rights to life, liberty, and property are natural rights, not grants from the state. Governments exist to protect our rights.
A proper government is one that protects the rights of its citizens from violation. If someone attempts to assault or maim you, the government (a) steps in to protect you if there is any foreknowledge that you are in danger and (b) attempts to seek out, try, and punish the assailant afterwards, so as to keep him (and others) from doing similar deeds in the future…. If someone takes away your belongings, the government intervenes to catch the culprit and, if possible, makes restitution to you through the courts.[xix]
The state has no other functions than protecting rights in these ways. However, to do this work, the state needs power, and that creates the possibility of the state overstepping its bounds and using its power to violate the rights it’s supposed to protect. In Hospers’ view,
Governments have been the chief violators of man’s rights. They make thieves, murderers, and rapists look saintly by comparison. Government and government alone foments wars, sends men to death camps and labor camps, devises and uses nuclear bombs, arrests individuals in the dead of night and takes them to where they are never heard from again and – most frequently of all – systematically plunders them of what they have labored to earn.[xx]
Hospers puts in the category of plunder all taxes beyond what is necessary for the state to protect human rights. He objects to the government supplying any “free services,” because “there are in reality no such things as free services. All man-made goods and services are the result of human expenditure of time and effort.” When people demand that the government provide something free, they are actually asking the government to violate someone’s property rights.
The same applies to taxing the rich more than others. In a free market, people get rich only by serving others, by providing goods or services that others voluntarily buy. Since the payment is voluntary, customers must think that they’re getting a good deal, or at least a deal that’s better than any alternative use of their money. Hospers writes, “I may dislike the latest rock-and-roll singer who gets a million a year, but not one penny of his income comes out of my taxes; and on a free market I am in no way forced to buy (or listen to) his product.”[xxi] Because the rock star relies on voluntary purchases, it’s unjust for the government to tax away his income simply because it’s unusually high. That income didn’t come at the expense of anyone unwilling to pay.
Hospers believes that people who earn a lot of money are typically entrepreneurial innovators who develop and market products that people want. As such, they are society’s benefactors. Innovators are responsible for our high standard of living. In centuries past people worked hard all day merely to keep themselves alive. But then innovators invented machines that allow people to produce more with less effort. “The difference between today and other ages is the amount that can be produced per man-hour of work – and it is the machine which has made this production possible.” For example, “grain that used to be threshed by hand can now be done several thousand times faster with a combine….”[xxii]This frees up human labor time to make products that innovators invent and entrepreneurs produce for the masses, products that even emperors could not obtain in ages past, such as automobiles, vaccines, televisions and, more recently, personal computers and cell phones. We are all the beneficiaries of these inventors and entrepreneurs. Taxing away the profits of productive people who have unusually high incomes is therefore completely unjust. Progressive taxation violates the natural right to property.
Hospers believes that many people favor soaking the rich with high taxes because they believe mistakenly that rich people become rich by impoverishing others.
They apparently believe that because some men are rich, others must therefore be poor. Now this is the case when a bandit takes away some of your possessions – he has more, and as a consequence you have less. Bandits do not create wealth; they only cause the same amount to change hands. The same happens when the tax-collector takes away by force some of what you have earned; the government too is not creative – it takes away from you to give to others. But the capitalist in a free society in not like that…. You pay him for a product or a service that did not exist, or did not exist as efficiently or in the same form, prior to his creative endeavor; his product (e.g., a car) or service (e.g., railroad transportation) is good enough in your eyes so that you voluntarily pay some of the money you have earned in exchange.[xxiii]
Besides providing goods or services that people want enough to pay for voluntarily, the rich, successful entrepreneur who earns a million dollars a year
has created many jobs for people and bought equipment and so on (which in turn requires jobs to produce) to keep the product going. A million dollars made on the free market means that a great deal of money has filtered down to a very large number of people in the economy…. By contrast, a million dollars earned in government jobs means a million dollars milked from the taxpayer, which he could have spent in other ways.[xxiv]
It is certainly unjust, Hospers maintains, to tax away entrepreneurial profits to give money to people who are less productive. What is more, it could be self-defeating. Hospers notes:
Freedom of production and trade is the essence of the capitalistic system. Equally important is the freedom of individuals to keep the fruits of their labor: if people were free to produce and trade, but not free to keep what they had earned, there would be no incentive to produce and the system of economic liberty (capitalism) would not function.[xxv]
On this understanding, the entire system that has sparked innovations which have improved the lot of humanity is jeopardized when government taxes the rich to give to the poor.
[i]. Duane A. Cline, “The Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony: 1620,” (2006) Found at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mosmd/, pp. 11-12 of 31. Accessed 6/17/2009.
[ii]. Cline, p. 13 of 31.
[iii]. Found at Duane A. Cline, “Upper Level Compact Study of the Mayflower Compact,” (1999). Found at
[iv]. Found at Cline, (1999), p. 2 of 6.
[v]. Cline, (2006), pp. 18-19, of 31.
[vi]. Cline, (2006), p. 23 of 31.
[vii]. Cline, (2006), p. 19 of 31.
[viii]. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), pp. 17-18 (sections 26-28).
[ix]. In Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback, eds. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), p. 55.
[x]. Locke, pp. 24-25 (Section 40).
[xi]. Locke, p. 23 (Section 37).
[xii]. “1972 Libertarian Party Platform,” found at http://www.lpedia.org/1972_Libertarian_Party_Platform, p. 2 of 8.
[xiii]. “1972 Libertarian Party Platform,” p. 4 of 8.
[xiv]. “1972 Libertarian Party Platform,” pp.4-5 of 8.
[xv]. “1972 Libertarian Party Platform,” p. 2 of 8.
[xvi]. John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (New York: Authors Choice
Press, 1971, 2007), p. 10. Emphasis in original.
[xvii]. Hospers, p. 52.
[xviii]. Hospers, pp. 62-63. Emphasis in original.
[xix]. Hospers, p. 59.
[xx]. Hospers, pp. 59-60.
[xxi]. Hospers, p. 220.
[xxii]. Hospers, p.97. Emphasis in original.
[xxiii]. Hospers, p. 223. Emphasis in original.
[xxiv]. Hospers, p. 221.
[xxv]. Hospers, p. 104. Emphasis in original.
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