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Some time ago, I stumbled on a Susan Lee OpEd in Opinion Journal titled Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll:   Libertarians have more fun — and make more sense.  Susan’s message is predominately targeted towards “Reagan Democrats” — social liberals searching for a policy basis with greater economic integrity.   Hence, she focuses much of her article talking about the social divergences between libertarian and conservative thought:

Libertarianism is simplicity itself. It proceeds from a single, quite beautiful, concept of the primacy of individual liberty that, in turn, infuses notions of free markets, limited government and the importance of property rights.

…But perhaps the single distinguishing feature between conservatives and libertarians is that libertarians are concerned with individual rights and responsibilities over government–or community–rights and responsibilities. Consider how conservatives and libertarians divide over cultural issues or social policy. Libertarians are not comfortable with normative questions. They admit to one moral principle from which all preferences follow; that principle is self-ownership–individuals have the right to control their own bodies, in action and speech, as long as they do not infringe on the same rights for others. The only role for government is to help people defend themselves from force or fraud. Libertarians do not concern themselves with questions of “best behavior” in social or cultural matters.

I’m broadly a libertarian but there are a few shifts away from Libertarianism (with a capital L) that I’ve made over the years.   I wanted to work in some of the “I’m not a formal Libertarian” manifestos that have been posted recently on some of my fav blogs.   Some of the reasons I’m not a (L)ibertarian:

• Being realistic — no matter how ideal the libertarian system is, in practice, we need a way to get there and compromises need to be made.   For example, zoning laws in cities like SF and NYC will not go away overnight:
  

  Pragmatic libertarians do not worry that their acceptance of a broader role for government concedes some vital principle. Radicals charge that anything short of complete ideological consistency creates openings for the statist impulse to take root and then run rampant. It’s a concern that might make some sense if we were currently living in a libertarian polity and were worrying about setting dangerous precedents. But, hey, here’s a news flash: That libertarian polity is nowhere in sight! There’s no need to worry in our day and age about giving away the store to the collectivists; they run the store already, folks, and our job is to convince them to give it back.

• Foreign Policy — live & let live works well within our borders provided that we are amongst like minded folks who also value their own lives and freedom.   The founding fathers never dealt with issues like suicide bombers, WMD, bio-plagues and the like.   All of which spell out a need for a more invasive domestic AND foreign policy than a Libertarian can typically stomach.  Externally, as tech brings us closer together, we need to do more proselytizing and often with preemptive, assertive force.   People who don’t share our ideals about life / liberty / property can do far more to us than they could before.
• Economic Externalities — They exist.   And often.   And while I think tech can generally solve these externalities in the (very) long run, often, the most expedient solution is to lay in some governmental regulation.   Pollution, water rights, helping the disabled, etc. and so on.  Perhaps the ultimate externality is the information externality — acquiring data to make decisions costs $$$ and there are things that government can do (for ex., uniform health standards regulation of restaurants) that dramatically improves market efficiency in the here and now.   Libertarians tend to oppose government regulation because it is axiomatically bad. I object to excessive government regulation because as a practical matter it stifles economic activity. But that, in turn, means that I favor government regulation when I think it promotes healthy economic activity; libertarians tend to oppose that, too, because axiomatically all government regulation is wrong. …But their point of view is controlled by the need to be consistent about opposing government regulation, so their attempts to come up with alternatives often end up seeming truly bizarre to me. In fact, speaking as an engineer they are “inelegant”; I would go so far as to call them “kludgey”. Truly Libertarian solutions to solve health standards enforcement, for example, often rely on things like ubiquitous subscriptions to Consumer Reports or heavy brand recognition. While these solutions do allow some level of health & sanitary standards to be reached without government coercion, they do so at the expense of raising the general informational cost of launching a restaurant.  Thus there would be fewer restaurants and this would be a disservice to my tastebuds.
• Transactional Friction.   In general, as you add friction to the market, the need for government to enforce social norms becomes more apparent.   The Libertarian response to things like neighbors who crank up the stereo too loudly is to say “why not just sign a contract with your neighbor” (the Coase solution) or “well, you’re free to move to a quieter community.”   This is a pain — I’d prefer a municipal noise ordinance.
• “Human Needs” — Libertarian solutions for social integration are almost always predicated on transactions and property rights which in turn requires a pretty theoretical extreme for how folks actually economically behave.   One example, provided by Virginia Postrel, describes a game theory situation where experimental subjects do NOT behave as economic theory should have predicted:
  

  About half the subjects that we observed played according to the way the game theory said people should play, and about half didn’t,” said Kevin McCabe, an economist and director of the Behavioral and Neuroeconomics Laboratory at George Mason University.The Player 1’s who do not follow the presumably rational strategy often wind up better off. Even without communicating with fellow players, they are able to cooperate for mutual benefit.

  Why do people react differently to the same situation? And why do so many people give up money to punish anonymous cheapskates?

  Clearly there are other human motivations and needs that are being exercised here. Fairness, dignity, and disgust do move people in the real world — even to the detriment of their economic well being.   When enough people use these motivations which run counter to economic ones, it becomes politically significant.   And our tools for explaining the polity need to internalize these motivations.

  Another example is the way the Libertarians view the Commons tragedy:

  In most cases the problem is that the libertarians making these proposals are interpreting “the commons” much too literally, and think they can eliminate the tragedy by eliminating the commons itself. They assume that the tragedy arises from common ownership and thus the tragedy can be averted by elimination of common ownership. It doesn’t work that way, and all they do with their proposals is to alter how the tragedy manifests. “The commons” exists as a practical matter of situation; it has nothing to do with legal ownership, public or private, broad or concentrated, and altering who owns something doesn’t magically make the commons vanish.

  The problem is, as some might argue, is that there are critical commons that are necessary for the maintenance of civil society. Parks, squares, town centers, even – gasp – a modicum of city planning to create pedestrian zones are important for providing the sense of community that allows us to get by with minimal legislation in other facets of our lives.  Human recognition requires simply that we know and recognize others and the ground for recognition is more often than not a type of commons.

  Recognition is why problems like disenfranchisement aren’t just individual psych problems but actually bubble all the way up to being issues for the polity.

Wow… well after all of that, why do I still title this post as “Am I a libertarian…”?  Well, it’s a direction I think we need to and can move farther towards.   Despite all the inadequacies of the libertarian state I describe, I do NOT view the present state of affairs as the natural conclusion.   As such, imperfections of libertarian thought need not doom us to a nanny state.

Call me a “small-l” libertarian.