The Fall of the Libertarians

The great free-market revolution that began with the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s has finally reached its Thermidor, or point of reversal. Like the French Revolution, it derived its energy from a simple idea of liberty, to wit, that the modern welfare state had grown too large, and that individuals were excessively regulated. The truth of this idea was vindicated by the sudden and unexpected collapse of Communism in 1989, as well as by the performance of the American and British economies in the 1990s.

Yet the revolution entered a Jacobin phase with the election of Newt Gingrich's Congress in 1994, even as the Clinton-Blair left shifted gears and scrambled to occupy the old center. For many on the right, Mr. Reagan's classical liberalism began to evolve into libertarianism, an ideological hostility to the state in all its manifestations. While the dividing line between the two is not always straightforward, libertarianism is a far more radical dogma whose limitations are becoming increasingly clear. The libertarian wing of the revolution overreached itself, and is now fighting rearguard actions on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology.

The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S. involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the '90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel him--a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac. Contrary to Mr. Reagan's vision of the U.S. as a "shining city on a hill," libertarians saw no larger meaning in America's global role, no reason to promote democracy and freedom abroad.

Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So it is not surprising that Americans met this challenge collectively with flags and patriotism, rather than the yellow ribbons of individual victimization.

The second area in which libertarians have overreached themselves is in biotechnology. Here they join hands with the New York Times and important parts of the American left in opposing restrictions on human cloning currently under debate in the U.S. Senate. Many libertarians oppose not just a ban on research cloning of human embryos, but on reproductive cloning as well (that is, the production of cloned children).

Libertarians argue that the freedom to design one's own children genetically--not just to clone them, but to give them more intelligence or better looks--should be seen as no more than a technological extension of the personal autonomy we already enjoy. By this view, the problem with the eugenics practiced by Nazi Germany was not its effort to select genetic qualities per se, but rather the fact that it was done by the state and enforced coercively. There is no cause for worry if eugenics is practiced by individuals. The latter could be counted on to make sound judgments about what is in their own and their children's best interests.

Even if one does not share the view of religious conservatives that embryos have the moral status of infants, and are therefore entitled to the same legal rights, there are reasons to be skeptical of arguments that say that genetic engineering is just another choice. To begin with, the community of interest that is presumed to exist between parents and children cannot be taken for granted, which is after all why we have laws against child abuse, incest etc. A deaf lesbian couple recently sought to implant an embryo to produce a child who they hoped would also be deaf. Children do not ask to be born, of course, but it is a stretch to assume the informed consent of a child to be born deaf, or a clone, or genetically redesigned in a risky experiment.

The fact that parents' interests may not coincide with a child's constitutes a "negative externality," that is, a harm inflicted on a third party to a transaction, of a sort that is usually considered legitimate grounds for government intervention. But it is just one of a broader class of potential externalities where an individually rational decision may harm society. We already have a clear example of this in China and India, where cheap sonograms and abortion have allowed parents to produce a fifth more boys than girls--a recipe for social instability when these boys come of age and find no mates.

Libertarian advocates of genetic choice want the freedom to improve their children. But do we really know what it means to improve a child? It is hard to object to therapeutic aims, such as the elimination of genetic tendencies toward diseases. But would a child be "improved" if parents were able to eliminate genetic propensity toward gayness? Would the child of an African-American couple be "improved" if she could be born with white skin? Would boys be better human beings if they were born with less of a propensity for aggression? The possibilities for politically correct, or incorrect, parental choices are endless. Parents, of course, try to improve their children in all sorts of ways today, through education, resources and upbringing. But the genetic stamp is indelible, and would be handed down not just to one's children but to all of one's subsequent descendants.

It is in this respect that the cloning bills before the Senate take on significance. Cloning itself may not be a large issue, since there are few who would want to clone children at present. But it is the first step in a series of technologies that may lead to genetic engineering of humans. Research cloning of embryos to extract stem cells may show great medical promise, but it too involves the deliberate creation of something unquestionably human, even if that something doesn't have the moral status of an infant. It is a line that we should cross only with trepidation. During the stem cell debate, proponents of stem cell research promised that it would not be crossed at all, and have already managed to slide down that particular slippery slope.

The liberalism of the Founding Fathers was built on natural rights. Political rights were seen as a means of protecting those rights which inhered in us as members of a human species that sought certain common natural ends. Thomas Jefferson, toward the end of his life, observed that political rights should be enjoyed equally because nature had not contrived to have some men born with saddles on their backs and others born "booted and spurred" to ride them.
We are at the beginning of a new phase of history where technology will give us power to create people born booted and spurred, and where animals that are today born with saddles on their backs could be given human characteristics. To say, with the libertarians, that individual freedom should encompass the freedom to redesign those natures on which our very system of rights is based, is not to appeal to anything in the American political tradition. So it is perhaps appropriate that the liberal revolution of the 1980s and '90s, having morphed from classical liberalism to libertarianism, should today have crested and now be on the defensive.