Libertarian experimentation

Insights Newsletter
3 November, 2017

Why did the libertarian chicken cross the road?

None of your business! Am I being detained?

With jokes like these, it really is a mystery why libertarians do not have more friends.

Indeed, a recent Washington Post article even included ‘befriend a libertarian’ in a compilation of ideas on how to fix American democracy.

Sure, that piece was written by a libertarian. But in an age of deep political divisions in the United States, and creeping talk of anti-immigrant sentiment on home soil, maybe it’s time to give libertarians a chance.

As Katherine Mangu-Ward put it in the Washington Post piece, libertarians are the ‘gateway drug’ to transpartisan understanding.

They’ll agree with ‘the left’ on civil liberties and social liberalism, and they’ll agree with ‘the right’ on fiscal constraint.

Libertarians believe that the people who make up a government do not always know best. That might sound a little harsh, but consider a quotation in the induction pack for our new ministers.

“I literally didn’t have a clue. I didn’t even know what a submission was. Literally nothing.”

That was an actual quote from an actual minister in the United Kingdom.

Here is another.

“…sometimes I would write ‘yes’ on a bit of paper and things would happen, which was a bit of a revelation.”

It is likely those quotes were included to humanise the role for our incoming ministers. But if those quotations fill you with dread, or at least an inkling that perhaps society should not have such high expectations of government, you might just be libertarian.

Of course, ministers will also rely on expert advice. But you don’t need to be a keen political observer to realise that experts do not always know what is best for us.

Anyone following the Married at First Sight television fiasco would also question whether experts know us better than we know ourselves. The randomness of Tinder appears to have a better success rate for marital bliss.

For what it’s worth, libertarians do not have an official stance on the value reality television contributes to our cultural understanding.

As our new government already signals a hodge-podge of socially conservative ‘tough on crime’ policies, education reform that will have the teachers’ union dancing in the streets (according to a left-wing blog), and everything in between, perhaps a few more libertarians will come out of the woodwork.

At least experimenting with this gateway drug can’t do much harm.

Trust me, I’m an expert.

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