Progressive Libertarianism
Part 1: The Historical Libertarian Tradition Was Not Right-Wing
The modern “libertarian” movement has been highjacked by right-wing extremists. Various right-wing factions have taken over the movement and reframed it as a far-right propertarian ideology. Members of these factions often identify as Misesians, Rothbardians, Hoppeans, or — more broadly — as “anarcho-capitalists.” This new right-libertarian ideology defines liberty in terms of property (propertarianism) and sees absolutely no positive role for government whatsoever. Additionally, right-libertarians tend to be antagonistic to the entire idea of democracy and often, quite inconsistently, sympathize with monarchy and fascism on the grounds that a truly propertarain society would be very hierarchical and authoritarian in nature. However, this right-libertarian movement is a thorough departure from traditional libertarianism. In fact, this whole ideology was really invented ca. 1960, over a century after libertarianism was established as a global movement.
Free-Market Libertarian Socialism & Geo-Libertarianism
Traditionally, libertarianism has been either left-wing or centrist in orientation. The term “libertarian” first emerged in conjunction with the philosophy of libertarian socialism, which questioned capitalistic property relations. In the United States, the term libertarian especially became associated with the free-market ideas of socialists and georgists such as Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Henry George, Thomas Hodgskin, Herbert Spencer, H. L. Mencken, and Albert Jay Nock.
There were two main tendencies regarding the theory of property within the American libertarian movement of the 19th Century. The first regarded themselves as “libertarian socialists,” by which they meant that they were anarchists who opposed the sort of government-established property rights associated with modern capitalism. The second regarded themselves as “Georgists” or “single-taxers,” wished to establish a form of public ownership of land, and are commonly known as geo-libertarians. This second group preferred limited government, usually of a republican sort, to pure anarchism, though they sometimes also identified as philosophical anarchists.
The free-market socialist camp rejected the idea of property rights being conferred by government fiat via pieces of paper called “titles” or “deeds.” This camp held that ownership rights ought to be linked to the principle of “occupancy-and-use.” If you homestead an abandoned piece of land — for instance, by building a little house and tilling/farming the soil — then that land and house become your private property as long as you are occupying the space and using it. This is what Thomas Hodgskin called the “natural right of property,” which he contrasted against “artificial property” granted by government fiat through titles and deeds. Since ownership rights are linked to occupancy-and-use within this model, there is no room for absentee landlord rights and rent-collection. Rent, in the estimation of the libertarian socialists, is a form of theft.
The geo-libertarian camp recognized the problems with “artificial property” but did not go the same route as the free-market socialists with regard to reforming property rights. Instead, they followed Proudhon in acknowledging that capitalistic property has its pros and cons and that a wholesale abolition of fee-simple property may be “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” As Proudhon put it, “Property is theft” yet also “Property is liberty.” The geo-libertarians followed the Lockean proviso and conclude that “artificial property” can be justified if the occupant pays a recompense or reparation to all other members of society which he excludes from the use of his land. In other words, the privilege of private property in land entails the obligation to pay a fee or tax to the community. This fee is commonly referred to as a “land value tax,” though it is actually not properly a tax but, instead, a collection of ground-rent. Land and natural resources are the common property, the birthright, of all citizens and you must pay a rental fee to the community for the privilege of temporarily monopolizing those common resources. This geoist model, then, is a form of collective ownership of land that strikes a balance between private ownership and public ownership, allowing private individuals to have their private property in land so long as they pay their rent to the community. If you are relying on legal privilege to deprive others of access to a piece of land, then you ought to have to pay for that privilege. If you don’t want to pay the tax/rent, then you just don’t get the government to legally recognize and enforce your “right” to exclusive use of that land.
The same principles that justify land value tax can also be applied to some other “taxes” as well. Carbon and emissions taxes are the most obvious example, since they are really not taxes but fines for damaging “the commons,” the air and water that belongs to everyone. The air, water, and natural resources of the planet are not your private property but the natural birthright of all mankind. They belong to everyone and you should rightly have to compensate others for the privilege of exclusive use of those resources, as well as for misuse and damage of them. It should be noted that geo-libertarians use the term “land” in the economic sense, meaning “all the natural resources of the planet,” so the geo-libertarians see emissions taxes as being a direct extension of the principles of the philosophy of land value tax. It should also be noted that classical liberals nearly universally advocated land value tax as well, so the geo-libertarians are direct heirs to the classical liberal tradition. A unique feature of the geo-libertarian tradition, however, is that it holds that the entirety of economic rent ought to go to the community and that any excess revenue should be used to fund a citizens’ dividend (or universal basic income) for everyone, not just to fund government programs.
As you can see, libertarians traditionally rejected the capitalistic form of private property that is associated with actually existing capitalism. The libertarian tradition, prior to about 1960, universally rejected the capitalistic idea of allodial property in land and wished to replace it with some sort of geoist or socialist alternative. Libertarianism was, therefore, historically a movement of the radical left. The original libertarians were left-libertarians.
Classical Neo-Liberalism & Centrist Libertarianism
In the early 20th Century, a number of libertarians and classical liberals met at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in order to address some of the shortcomings of classical liberalism/libertarianism and to forge a “new liberalism.” This meeting was called to discuss the ideas put forth by Walter Lippman in his book The Good Society. It was at this meeting that Alexander Rüstow coined the term neoliberalism. However, this classical neoliberalism ought not to be confused with the modern movements/tendencies of the same name. The new liberalism, or “neoliberalism,” that they espoused rejected dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire, recognizing that the government ought to have a role in creating the right rules and regulations to ensure that the market system functions optimally. A market system needs legal recognition of property rights by the government, courts and police to enforce contractual obligations, and a government-issued medium of exchange. Additionally, this new liberalism held that there ought to be some limited role for government when it comes to the provision of welfare. The new liberals shared a lot of ideas with social democrats and New Deal Liberals but rejected the idea of public-ownership of enterprises and held that government interventions ought to be done in a manner that is least intrusive in people’s lives and least disruptive to market processes. Among the intellectuals of this new liberal movement were Walter Eucken, Alexander Rüstow, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Compared to earlier libertarian theory, this classical neoliberal variety of libertarianism was less left-wing and more centrist in orientation.
Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek both came out of the geo-libertarian movement. Hayek only became interested in economics because of his devotion to Henry George’s land value tax philosophy, yet he became skeptical of the land value tax later in life, primarily due to technical concerns about how to properly assess land values. Friedman, on the other hand, remained a disciple of Henry George to the end. While their German “new liberal” counterparts would go on to become the architects of the social market economy, Friedman and Hayek would become known as great public intellectuals in the United States. We usually remember Friedman for his contributions to monetary theory and Hayek for his contributions to the socialist calculation debate. However, we tend to forget the role these men had in advocating welfare reform. Hayek and Friedman both advocated some form of minimum income guarantee alongside social insurance in order to guarantee universal access to healthcare.
Hayek didn’t lay out a specific proposal of what a minimum income guarantee and social insurance scheme for healthcare should look like but Friedman certainly did. Milton Friedman popularized the idea of a Negative Income Tax, which would eliminate poverty by applying a negative tax rate (or subsidy) to anyone below a certain income threshold. Alongside Martin Feldstein, Friedman proposed Universal Catastrophic Coverage — a social insurance scheme where the government would provide coverage for truly unaffordable healthcare expenses. This plan would not cover routine healthcare visits and would not necessarily overturn the existing healthcare system. Instead, there would be a deductible that varies depending upon one’s income level. If one is a billionaire, the policy would not cover anything and all expenses would have to be paid out through one’s ordinary health insurance or out of pocket. If one has no income, then all expenses would be covered and the plan would provide one with free healthcare. If one had a decent middle-class income, the plan would have a relatively high deductible and would not cover most healthcare expenses but would kick in to cover any truly expensive costs one might run into as a result of a car accident, cancer diagnosis, or other unforeseen tragedy. Since this social insurance scheme for healthcare would not cover all costs, it would be much cheaper than other healthcare reform proposals (e.g. Medicare-for-All).
While F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman are two of the most prominent names in libertarianism to this very day, their vision of the “Great Society” is largely forgotten by the right-wing infiltrators of the modern libertarian movement. They are known as advocates of free markets and libertarianism but very few people recognize that these men rejected laissez-faire, insisting that government must create the proper rules and regulations for markets to function optimally, and advocated social insurance schemes that amounted to a quite robust welfare state. It should also be noted that the current consensus seems to be that something like Friedman’s Negative Income Tax scheme would be nearly optimal from a redistribution standpoint. Ironically, the libertarian policies advocated by Milton Friedman, if they had actually been implemented, would have made the United States the most egalitarian country in the world.
According to the vulgar libertarians on the modern right, these centrist views are just “far-left socialism.” I recently heard the conservative media denounce Mitt Romney as a “socialist” for his policy positions, in spite of the fact that his positions are to the right of Friedman and Hayek’s suggestions. This should indicate just how far the American “libertarian” and “conservative” movements have moved towards an extremist far-right position. It is not surprising since Ludwig von Mises, their intellectual ancestor, once accused Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and other centrist libertarians of being “a bunch of socialists.” You have to be pretty far-right to think Friedman and Hayek are somehow the equivalent of Stalin and Mao!
Commercial Republicanism & Consequentialist Libertarianism
F. A. Hayek took a position that can be referred to as commercial republicanism. Unlike the modern right-libertarians who have a propertarian conception of liberty, whereby they attempt to reduce all rights to property rights, Hayek had somewhat of a civic republican conception of liberty. The modern right-libertarians root all rights in the supposed right of self-ownership: I own my body and the bodily labor I do with it, and, by extension, the products of said labor. If I till a vacant field (or purchase a field with money I have acquired through my own labor), then that field becomes my property. Any interference in my absolute property right over my self and my possessions is, in this right-libertarian view, a violation of my liberty. The civic republican position, on the other hand, holds that liberty is not the absence of interference per se but rather the absence of domination. I am dominated to the extent that another person has the power/authority to arbitrarily interfere in my affairs. Upon the right-libertarian/propertarian view, it would be a violation of someone’s liberty to shove them out of the way of traffic if they were about to unwittingly be run over, as interference is always a violation of liberty. Upon the civic republican view, however, such interference is not a violation of liberty because it is not arbitrary — not only do I have a reason to interfere but people could reasonably expect anyone to so interfere under similar circumstances.
The propertarian perspective of modern right-libertarians rules out democracy as being anything but an infringement upon freedom, since every law entails interference of some sort. The civic republican view, however, is compatible with democracy. Hayek’s adherence to a sort of republican conception of liberty is why he rejected the propertarian laissez-faire perspective. To Hayek, the law was not necessarily antagonistic to freedom but rather the framework of rules and social order that allows freedom to thrive. Laws can, and often do, violate freedom. Nevertheless, this is not a problem with the law or government as such but rather with particular laws that happen to be unjust. The criteria that Hayek has for a just law is that it must not be arbitrary and it must adhere to the principle of isonomy (that is, the law must apply equally to all). The rationale for this is that rules need to be uniform and determined beforehand, preferably through a democratic process, so that individuals and corporations can rationally plan around them. People must be told precisely when and how the government will interfere and the government must stick to the rules. Friedman’s ideas seem to fit well within this same commercial republican framework. For instance, Friedman saw a role for government with regard to monetary policy but held that the central bank ought to follow a rule-based approach rather than leaving things up to the discretion of planners.
Hayek’s commercial republican framework opens up the possibility of the government doing a great many things, including things such as providing citizens with a minimum income or access to healthcare. This centrist libertarianism of Hayek stands in stark contrast to the vulgar libertarianism of the modern rightwing. While propertarians claim to be the heirs of the historic libertarian tradition, they are really a modern aberration that was virtually non-existent prior to the 1960s.
Milton Friedman also employs a consequentialist libertarian framework and distinguishes his consequentialist libertarianism from the extreme propertarian position of modern right-libertarians. Government regulations can be justified within this framework if they have the consequence of increasing a person’s liberty relative to the absence of said regulation. One is freer within a society where theft and murder are legally prohibited and where laws are enforced than one would be within a society that does not prohibit theft and murder. While rules and regulations may constitute unjust interference in one’s personal freedom from the perspective of vulgar propertarian libertarians, these rules may actually have the result of making liberty possible and, therefore, can be regarded as prerequisites of freedom from a consequentialist libertarian perspective. Furthermore, the consequentialist libertarian does not necessarily value freedom as a natural right in itself but rather values liberty because he or she believes that maximizing liberty tends to increase the well-being of everyone in society.
This consequentialist libertarian approach led Friedman, like Hayek, to reject laissez-faire. Friedman held that certain regulations, like anti-trust laws, were necessary to ensure that markets function in a truly libertarian fashion. In his essay Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects, Friedman argued that there is a justification for certain government interventions in order to: create money and ensure monetary stability, subsidize the poor through the provision of a minimum income guarantee, impose regulations to prohibit corporations from becoming too large/powerful, etc.
Dialectical Libertarianism
Dialectical libertarianism is something like a modern synthesis of left-libertarianism and consequentialist libertarianism. Dialectical libertarianism makes the case that something like free-market libertarian socialist anarchism may be the ideal situation but that there are still good reasons why a radical left-wing libertarian ought to support more centrist policy proposals. The dialectical approach says that we must look at individual policies and institutions within the context of the entire system of which they are a part. Whether or not a policy or institution is truly libertarian is relative to the context.
“What is dialectics? Dialectics is the art of context-keeping. It counsels us to study the object of our inquiry from a variety of perspectives and levels of generality, so as to gain a more comprehensive picture of it. That study often requires that we grasp the object in terms of the larger system within which it is situated, as well as its development across time…. In social theory, the object of our inquiry is society: social relations, institutions, and processes. Society is not some ineffable organism; it is a complex nexus of interrelated institutions and processes, of volitionally conscious, purposeful, interacting individuals — and the unintended consequences they generate. A dialectical approach to social theory is one that recognizes that any given social problem will often entail an investigation of related social problems.” — Chris Sciabarra
When looking at any particular institution, regulation, or program and trying to determine whether it is “libertarian,” a dialectical libertarian will first try to put it in context. For instance, should government force a Christian bakery to bake a cake for a queer couple? If this question were asked without any further context, it would appear that government intervention here restricts the liberty of the Christian baker and, therefore, violates libertarian principles. However, there is a greater context to consider here. In our society, we have private companies that provide any number of services, from baking cakes to performing life-saving surgical operations. Furthermore, we have a system of law that takes legal precedents very seriously. If, as a baker, a man is allowed to deny service to another individual solely on the basis of the fact that the would-be customer happens to be gay, black, trans, old, etc., then this establishes a precedent for another man, as a doctor, to deny life-saving medical services to a person with a knife wound for the same reasons. Suppose you live in a small town where there is only one emergency room and all of the doctors there happen to be bigots. Are you more or less free in a system where the necessities of life can be denied to you solely on the basis of your sexual orientation, race, gender, or age? I would argue that you are less free, especially considering that some people (e.g. children) don’t have the ability to just move to a place where bigotry is less prominent. Thus, a principled libertarian could very well reach the conclusion that a Christian baker ought to be required by law to bake a cake for a gay couple if they offer that service to anyone else.
Using this context-keeping approach, dialectical libertarians distinguish between different types of government interventions. We often find that certain government interventions tend to increase human freedom in spite of the fact that government intervention, in itself, is formally anti-libertarian. A common reason for this is that some government interventions are simply correcting problems that were created by the government itself.
“Some forms of state intervention are primary. They involve the privileges, subsidies, and other structural bases of economic exploitation. This is the primary purpose of the state: the organized political means to wealth, exercised by and for the ruling class. Some, however, are secondary. Their purpose is stabilizing, or ameliorative. They include welfare state measures, Keynesian demand management, and the like, whose purpose is to limit the most destabilizing side-effects of privilege, and to secure the long-term survival of the system.
“The kind of ‘free market reform’ typically issuing from corporate-funded ‘libertarian’ think tanks and politicians involves eliminating only the ameliorative or regulatory forms of intervention, while leaving intact the primary structure of privilege and exploitation.
“The strategic priorities of real libertarians should be just the opposite: first to dismantle the fundamental, structural forms of state intervention whose primary effect is to enable exploitation; and only then to dismantle the secondary, ameliorative forms of intervention which serve to make life bearable for the average person living under a system of state-enabled exploitation. As Jim Henley put it, remove the shackles before the crutches.
Regulations that simply limit and constrain the exercise of privilege do not involve, properly speaking, a net increase in statism at all. They are simply the statist ruling class’s stabilizing restrictions on its own more fundamental forms of intervention.” — Kevin A. Carson
A great example of the primary/secondary distinction with regard to government intervention is the case of government-granted utility monopolies and associated price caps on utilities. Government first granted the utility company a monopoly in a local area (primary intervention), but monopolies naturally charge excessively high prices since they lack competitors; so the government also placed limits on their monopoly privilege by setting a cap on the price they can charge for their services (secondary intervention). The secondary intervention here actually makes the whole arrangement more libertarian relative to a situation where an unregulated monopoly is allowed to set prices however high it likes. If we were going to propose any sort of deregulation here, the dialectical libertarian would argue that we must first address the primary intervention rather than the secondary one. If we abolish the price cap prior to abolishing the government-granted monopoly privilege that makes that price cap necessary, then we will actually be creating an arrangement that is less libertarian overall.
The dialectical libertarian may be quite radical — he or she may even be an anarchist like the libertarian socialists who coined the term “libertarian”— yet they will recognize that a wide variety of regulations, interventions, and governmental institutions are actually relatively libertarian in the grand scheme of things. As a consequence, the dialectical libertarian will often find themself in agreement with centrists and social democrats on a number of policy issues, though their rationale for supporting the same (or similar) policies may be quite different.
It’s quite easy to justify a social safety net or welfare state from a libertarian perspective. It is not just about having the government intervene in cases of market failure. The dialectical libertarian knows that widespread unemployment, foreclosures, recessions, and unaffordable healthcare are all a direct result of bad government policy! The welfare state that addresses these problems falls in the realm of secondary interventions and is, therefore, something to be preserved (at least until the root cause of these problems is fixed). Yet, the libertarian will want a welfare state that is designed to be least disruptive of market processes. The simplest and least intrusive social safety net is the best. This is why many libertarians wish to replace means-tested welfare programs with simple universal cash transfers or with a simple minimum income guarantee.
Poverty is often a result of economic instability and high unemployment. It is well-known that high unemployment results from contractionary monetary policy that restricts the supply of money within the economy to less than the optimal level. If the sovereign monetary authority does not supply enough money for everyone within the economy to be employed, unemployment becomes unavoidable. Furthermore, bad banking regulations and easy credit policies can exacerbate the boom and bust cycle and lead to widespread foreclosures that result in homelessness. A number of libertarian theorists, like F. A. Hayek and George Selgin, have argued that a free banking system would tend to supply the optimum level of currency for markets to function efficiently. If the government has assumed a monopoly on the creation of money and failed to pursue a monetary policy that does the same thing as a free banking system would do, a dialectical libertarian may see the government as having an obligation to remedy the unemployment and poverty that it has created. First and foremost, the sovereign monetary authority or central bank ought to pursue a policy of nominal GDP level targeting in order to most closely mimic what would happen under true free-market conditions with a free banking system. If the central bank fails to do this, then the government has an obligation to resort to some sort of automatic stabilizer (such as that advocated by Claudia Sahm in Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals). Hayekian libertarians, of course, would want monetary and fiscal policy to be rule-based. Nothing should be left up to the arbitrary whims of officials at the central bank. This is why nominal GDP level targeting and the Sahm proposal are ideal short-term solutions from a libertarian perspective.
The dialectical libertarian will recognize that we had a real route to universal affordable healthcare on a free-market basis prior to government intervention about a century ago. There were lodge practices, company doctors, and mutual insurance schemes that were incredibly efficient at providing affordable healthcare to the masses. There were fraternal orders and friendly societies that would hire a doctor for their members. For a fixed monthly or yearly rate, you could go see the doctor as often as you needed with no fee at the point of service. These were not-for-profit schemes undertaken by voluntary associations. A decentralized system of direct primary care, concierge medicine, company doctors, and lodge practices kept healthcare prices low and ensured affordable access to healthcare for most people. But a number of special interest groups didn’t like this arrangement and lobbied to have the government destroy the affordable free-market healthcare system. In an effort to ensure that doctors made decent salaries, the doctors’ guild (American Medical Association), conspiring with the government, restricted the supply of doctors in order to drive up healthcare prices. They also sanctioned doctors who signed contracts with lodges and fraternal societies and were even given the government-granted privilege of revoking licenses of doctors that did sign lodge practice contracts. Private insurance companies also lobbied against the lodge practice/company doctor approach to medicine because they felt that doctors were unfairly competing with them in the provision of insurance — the monthly payments of members essentially constitute insurance premiums and the insurance companies felt that doctors should be prohibited from selling insurance without a license. The dialectical libertarian is aware of this history and, therefore, sees unaffordable healthcare as a problem that the government created. Some sort of secondary intervention that makes healthcare more affordable or accessible ought to be welcomed by libertarians, at least in the immediate future.
Unfortunately, the government did not just overturn the free-market solution for affordable healthcare — it destroyed the free associations that made it possible. The fraternal orders, friendly societies, lodges, and mutual associations that historically played a role in providing access to healthcare were the result of hundreds of years of social evolution. The socio-economic and cultural forces that created those institutions within the free market are no longer extant and, in all probability, impossible to re-create naturally. These institutions were generally cultural clubs tied to strong religious institutions. The religious culture that produced them is lacking in the modern era. It may very well be the case that the old free-market healthcare solution is no longer viable and we may have to settle for something else if we want affordable healthcare today. At the very least, assuming that a restoration of that old free-market solution is even possible, it will likely require government taking an active role in helping to foster and promote the restoration and proliferation of the sorts of associations that made it possible in the past.
The dialectical libertarian may also recognize that voluntary associations, like guilds, historically provided workers with mutual insurance to protect them against the risk of unemployment. Historically, unemployment insurance was provided by the worker’s respective guild rather than by the government. However, the modern nation-state abolished the guild system in order to increase the power of the government over the people. Furthermore, governments put in place all sorts of regulations that prohibit or prevent workers from freely associating into guilds or unions today. If the government prevents workers from voluntarily associating for the purpose of bargaining for better wages and working conditions, then OSHA rules, minimum wage laws, and such become justifiable corrections to problems that are really the fault of the government in the first place. The libertarian, of course, will always prefer the least disruptive “bandaid” to a more disruptive one, so they may prefer a minimum income guarantee to a minimum wage law while also recognizing that a minimum wage law is better than nothing at all.
It’s also important to recognize that there may be no going back. Things like guilds and fraternal societies were actively destroyed by governments. These institutions emerged spontaneously over the course of centuries and may be extremely difficult or impossible to revive, like dinosaurs or the wooly mammoth. While libertarians ought to try to build up more libertarian alternatives so that we may perhaps return to some variation of free-market healthcare in the future, he or she must also be willing to settle for more “formally statist” solutions in the meantime. And if the task of restoring the free-market institutions proves to be impossible, we may be stuck with having to permanently settle for a less-than-ideal solution.
If the government had not historically interfered so heavily in the market in order to suppress and destroy all kinds of voluntary associations, the economy would look much more “socialistic” today. A truly libertarian society, where such interventions had not historically occurred, would have many prominent distributist and libertarian-socialist type free associations and organizational models. There would be far more unions since workers would be allowed to organize freely. There would be far more guilds and co-ops. The hierarchical firm is the predominant model in modern capitalism because it is favored by the rules and regulations that have been put in place by governments. However, it is well-known that co-operatives tend to be just as efficient if not more efficient than hierarchical firms when regulations are more friendly to their existence. Where co-operatives are not systematically suppressed, they do quite well, as we can see with the Mondragon Corporation in Spain and the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, one of the wealthiest regions in Europe where co-ops make up a third of the economy. A dialectical libertarian should realize that we don’t have very many co-ops only because the government favors hierarchical firms and top-down organizational structures. It’s not that co-ops have been out-competed in the free market but rather that governments have actively suppressed them while also subsidizing their competition. Therefore, a strong dialectical libertarian case could be made for libertarians to support certain distributist and social-democratic policies that are aimed at undoing this damage and bringing back the co-operative economy that we would still have if the government had not suppressed it.
Direct subsidies are not necessarily anti-libertarian when one takes the greater context of the existing system and its history into consideration. The government has been actively subsidizing gas cars and the fossil fuel industry forever. The personal automobile would never have become the norm if not for the fact that the government created the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways under Eisenhower. If the government had not created the interstate highway system, the personal automobile would be much less useful and more people would rely on trains for transportation between towns and cities. Furthermore, the government actively subsidizes exploratory drilling and R&D for the fossil fuel industry, much more so than for their competitors. It will take decades of much larger subsidies going to eco-friendly alternatives before the scales will even balance and fair competition be restored in the marketplace. There’s a strong dialectical libertarian case to be made for subsidizing electric cars, green energy, and the infrastructure needed to popularize them. Apart from this, there’s also a dialectical libertarian case to be made for subsidizing small businesses, co-ops, and other enterprises that are beneficial to society and would likely thrive in a free market but have been systematically disadvantaged and harmed by government interventions under actually existing capitalism.
