Dispatch from Within the Vast Libertarian Conspiracy

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So, you want to know about the Vast Libertarian Conspiracy (VLC) do you? Well, I’ve been operating on the inside for years. Rubbing shoulders with some of the top dogs, without ever really committing to one of the many shell organizations it uses as its public face. Now, I’ve gathered enough materials to go public. I know all the dirty secrets, all the little quarrels. I know where the bodies are buried. And I’m ready to spill my guts.

My investigation began with a simple question: what, exactly, is a libertarian? From my standpoint at <redacted Virginia university>, this seemed obvious — libertarians were a bunch of academic types who subscribed to political philosophies which boiled down to respecting voluntary action over coercion, usually by elevating the role of property rights. Usually they’re also a bunch of socially liberal atheists who are perfectly happy with seeing traditional norms disrupted by the tide of modernity.

But the truth turned out to be a little more complex than that.

There are many divides within the VLC. My first mistake was to recognize only the intellectual ones — consequentialists sneering at “first principles” natural rights libertarians. Both regarding contractarian and Burkean libertarians with suspicion. But there is also what you might call a class divide. There are the academic libertarians, among whom I was immersed, but then there’s the so-called Tea Party libertarians; normal folk without much interest in political theory who simply feel strongly about having lower taxes and less regulation. I suspect these actually constitute a larger group, but it is difficult to tell from where I am sitting, in a place where academic libertarians seem to form a crowd that extends into the horizon.

Then there’s yet another group which we might call Internet libertarians. Many of them started out with Tea Party inclinations and then went online and started reading political and economics blogs, listening to EconTalk, perhaps reading the articles at the Library of Economics and Liberty website or Mises.org. As a result many of them stand on some middle ground between academic and non-academic; most of them are either professionals in fields unrelated to policy or students (college or high school).

Another division is the so-called “thick and thin” libertarianism. Thin means thinly specified — you’re free to do with you want and we won’t judge you for being a pornstar/prostitute/racist/libertine. Yet sometimes you encounter a libertarian who is also willing to say, you know, maybe X isn’t a good idea. It turns out that expressing “X isn’t a good idea” is itself not a very good idea, at least among libertarians who want to keep things nice and thin and perhaps only tacitly acknowledge what they actually think people should do with their liberty.

The Conspiracy (always with a capital C, out of respect) is run primarily by the academics. And it has perpetrated some truly unfathomable evils. For example — endowing chairs at universities. Having seminars. Putting out white papers. Running high-profile book discussion groups. And other sinister activities. Are we really going to let the Kochtopus continue to fund these stains upon the honor of America?

Of course there’s a policy side as well, but they are careful to keep outsiders like me away from this sensitive area. From what I’ve gathered, they pursue underhanded tactics like talking to congressional staffers and submitting public comments about bills under consideration; activities completely unlike every other policy group in Washington.

The conclusion that I have rapidly arrived at is that there is no essential definition of “libertarian” at all. As with all -isms, there is an assortment of more or less consistent ideologies which agree more or less on their starting premises and conclusions, that have been lumped together because of the strong mutual associations formed among those who hold them. Many of the members of this community are sympathetic to fragments of a wide assortment of the ideologies without entirely holding any one of them.

When the word “libertarians” or “libertarianism” get dragged through the mud in some publication like Salon, the members of this community take it very personally. But as a double-agent in their midsts with something of an outsider’s perspective, I think that this is unhealthy. Every political community is big enough that there are segments which can be used to smear the whole. That’s just how interlocking networks work, once enough people start affiliating with a specific label. Any label that could be used to describe Milton Friedman, Deirdre McCloskey, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen is going to have a very broad range of possible characterizations.

I should stop here. I fear I’ve already said too much. If this can be traced back to me they will come after me, and deal with me in a manner fully consistent with the Non-Aggression Principle.