Life in Hell

I'm in the eighth circle of libertarian hell along with Reihan Salam. I had thought this was the place where I wander into the drugstore and just assume that CVS wouldn't sell me any aspirin that's actually poison because it would be bad for the brand's reputation. In fact:

Eighth Circle—The Fraudulent: The Malebolge of public intellectuals—those who have a sphere of influence greater than most of us, and are negligent in their exercise of it by contributing to the darkness and confusion. This sphere contains everyone from know-nothing idiots like like Lou Dobbs of CNN and Bob Herbert of the NYT, to people who are really smart enough to know better yet resolutely avoid any systematic examination of their moral premises, like Matthew Yglesias and Reihan Salam. This circle is guarded by, who else, Friedrich Hayek.

I'll have to plead guilty to resolutely avoiding any systematic examination of my moral premises. I spent some time doing this in college and it genuinely didn't seem to lead anywhere productive.

Comments

Examination of their moral premises: Liberty is like apple pie, everybody likes liberty, I like liberty, therefore liberty stands above all things.

Posted by Meh | July 1, 2007 3:39 PM

I guess you should start bleeeting the libertarian mantra "Liberty good; coercion* bad" if you want to at least make it to purgatory.

*Coercion is only bad when the government or individuals engage in it. If the market is doing the coercing, however, this is good--for example stopping poor folks from consuming "too much healthcare."

Posted by David | July 1, 2007 4:00 PM

Rorty-an.

Posted by Sam Penrose | July 1, 2007 4:03 PM

I used to be a libertarian, but then I grew up.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 1, 2007 4:09 PM

Wow, the implication of putting you in the eighth circle, below the seventh, is pretty staggering:
The seventh circle is
those who unquestionably do active violence to human freedom...these are the ones who do the actual trigger-pulling.
While the eighth circle is, well, you. So, say, the Venezuelan plice captain who rounds up protestors is not as dangerous to human freedom as a mid-20s indie-rock fan with a blog. Did you know how great your power was?

Posted by SDM | July 1, 2007 4:37 PM

What bullshit.

MY refers to himself as "authoritarian" on certain issues all the time. He acknowledges his unsavory side a lot more often than those deranged ferret-worshipping utopianists that call themselves "libertarians."

Posted by SAO | July 1, 2007 5:02 PM

Come on! Everyone knows that MY is going to end up in the Circle of Perpetual Typos. I believe it is the Thrtennth Crcle [sic].

Posted by space | July 1, 2007 5:28 PM

That would be sort of vaguely amusing if it weren't so stupid. While it _would_ be like hell to be stuck with Lou Dobbs I can only think an idiot would put him in the same boat as Bob Herbert.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | July 1, 2007 5:32 PM

Matt is so right about not examining your moral premises too closely. One of the things I've noticed when I have gotten into arguments with, for instance, conservative Catholics, is that they are so convinced that they must be right about some very extremist positions because they logically follow from their moral premises and the positions of their opponents must be wrong because we don't share the consistent, rigorous moral principles and thus our positions will inexorably lead to moral catastrophe.

There are, of course, all sorts of objections to this, from the fact that the positions taken by these folks are morally noxious themselves (e.g., opposing the use of condoms by women married to HIV-positive men in Africa), to the fact that the supposed moral seriousness of conservative Catholics didn't stop them from in the past, supporting all sorts of evil, including protecting priests accused of sex abuse and, farther back, supporting the Nazis.

But the more fundamental objection is that consistency is not the only moral virtue. Emerson's quote about a foolish consistency comes to mind. Muddling along, as Matt recommends, may come with a slight risk of sliding into some offensive position, but it has great virtues. But it drives the right wing crazy.

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 1, 2007 5:36 PM

I'll have to plead guilty to resolutely avoiding any systematic examination of my moral premises. I spent some time doing this in college and it genuinely didn't seem to lead anywhere productive.

Well, there's your Libertarian Mortal Sin right there: assuming that self-examination should be productive in the first place.

Posted by latts | July 1, 2007 6:05 PM

Dilan Esper: some might say that "drives the right wing crazy" is a feature, not a bug...

I've examined my moral premises in some detail and I'm even fairly self-consistent. The problem Libertarians have is that my set of premises is large and complex and represents competing impulses that trade off against each other.

For them, that is "inconsistency," where for me, their quest to derive the guiding force for a soulful life from as few moral premises as possible smacks of a flight into utopianism.

I don't think this is something likely to be resolved any time soon.

Posted by Meh | July 1, 2007 6:12 PM

The ideologues definition of ideological consistency is agreeing with them about everything. This seems to be very prevalent among libertarians, especially Ayn Rand-style, high-school mentality libertarians (less so Dan Drezner-style libertarians that can admit, for instance, that Denmark has a well-functioning, robust, capitalist-style welfare state).

Posted by Reality Man | July 1, 2007 6:27 PM

It's much easier to imagine circles of hell filled with increasingly doctrinaire libertarians. I'm sure that Megan McArdle is a nice person, but the threat of being eternally berated by Jane Galt's anecdoterie is the kind of thing that would have me begging for absolution.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 1, 2007 7:50 PM

Anything that places a good-hearted technocrat like DeLong in the 9th Circle of Hell has some serious, serious moral errors involved in its construction.

Posted by NBarnes | July 1, 2007 8:21 PM

“I spent some time doing this in college and it genuinely didn't seem to lead anywhere productive.”

Wow. Any stronger indictment of either your personality or your education could hardly be imagined.

At least you're honest about it. For whatever that's worth.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | July 1, 2007 8:40 PM

An internet libertarian who turns out to be a douchebag with a large vocabulary, but a complete lack of perspective about the historical references he attempts to make? Simply shocking.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 1, 2007 10:10 PM

If you really want to see the pure lunacy of classic libertarianism in full swing, consider McIntosh's http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2006/07/03/iuc-dmu-and-redistribution-you-can-t-get-there-from-here -- in which he earnestly announces that ALL economic redistribution from the rich to the poor "makes no sense from a utilitarian standpoint", because an EXCESS of it will reduce society's total productivity enough to do more harm than good. Some of his commentors then gleefully add that, since we can't measure EXACTLY how much more useful a certain added sum of money is to a poor person than to a rich person, that means that it can't be regarded as more useful to the poor person at all.

That is, "classic" libertarianism turns out to be based on literal mental infantility. What dimension have all these innocents escaped from?

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | July 1, 2007 10:16 PM

"I'm sure that Megan McArdle is a nice person"

I'm not. Do you actually have any evidence for this? I must say I'm skeptical.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | July 1, 2007 10:42 PM

Well, she's certainly nicer than McIntosh.

Incidentally, a very small amount of poking around reveals that McIntosh (who turns out to be a sprig of 21 years, who was first inspired to become libertarian by -- you guessed it -- St. Ayn) is capable of hallucinatory political analysis in quite a few ways. Consider his following passage from http://www.neolibertarian.net/articles/mcintosh_20060118.aspx :

"...I would recommend two reforms to Congress: 1) Impose hard limits of no more than six years for each representative. 2) Stagger the federal election cycle so that there is partial turnover each year in both houses, rather than having all seats go up for election at once. The benefits of this second measure may not be obvious, but there would likely be several: for one, when faces are constantly coming and going from the legislature, it's more difficult at the margins for reputation and trust to be built up. For another, staggering the election cycles would likely have a cooling effect on the political atmosphere since the impact and importance of each election cycle would be lessened. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, if one party or the other managed to displease voters at the national level, the lag time between offense and punishment would be decreased, making the system as a whole more dynamic and responsive."

Now, note the tiny contradiction between his second argument and his third one. Also note the tiny facts that (A) we ALREADY have staggered terms in the Senate; and (B) replacing 2-year-interval elections of the entire House with staggered terms there would of course SLOW "the lag time between [a party's] offense and punishment" (exactly as he stated in his second point, just before his sudden takeover by another of the Three Faces of Eve).

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | July 1, 2007 10:50 PM

"I'm not. Do you actually have any evidence for this? I must say I'm skeptical."

She loved her dog. I'm easy.

Posted by bob mcmanus | July 1, 2007 11:52 PM

Congrats! You go boy!

It's ALL relative. Rejection of relativism is the only true evil. :-)

Posted by artappraiser | July 2, 2007 1:49 AM

""I'm not. Do you actually have any evidence for this? I must say I'm skeptical."

She loved her dog. I'm easy."

Well, even Hitler loved his dog. Probably his mom, too. I'm not sure this is such a good bit of evidence.

Posted by matt (not the famous one) | July 2, 2007 8:20 AM

Well, even Hitler loved his dog.

OMG, it's a Dogwin's Law violation . . .

Posted by rea | July 2, 2007 10:36 AM

"This circle is guarded by, who else, Friedrich Hayek."

And the circles in Dante's hell were guarded by drooling, barely-cognizant demon-spawn.

Posted by Christmas | July 2, 2007 11:06 AM

Note also that his Second Circle of Libertarians' Would-Be Hell is "guarded by Thomas Sowell", he of the America-needs-a-military-coup-real-bad philosophy.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | July 2, 2007 7:55 PM