Last week I wrote about how a shift from taxpayer funding to market-based solutions within the criminal justice system in Ferguson, Missouri, jeopardised civil rights, distorted incentives and reinforced racial prejudices. That shift was a result of persistent lobbying by libertarian intellectuals, who believe in perfectly free markets and view government taxes as criminal expropriation. The meltdown of 2008 should have turned people off any deep faith in unregulated markets, but instead strengthened the libertarian movement. Although the number of its adherents is relatively small, the philosophy has an outsize influence in public discourse, and is therefore worth countering.

I will consider three aspects of libertarianism, and attempt to show the fatal flaw in each. The first is its foundational idea of self-ownership; the second its commitment to individual liberty; and the third its attitude to natural resources and the environment.

In describing self-ownership, I could quote Robert Nozick or Murray Rothbard who provided contemporary libertarianism with its philosophical base, but I will instead cite Amit Varma, a friend and fellow journalist who is among the most influential Indian libertarians. In a recent piece titled The Kim Kardashian Liberals, Varma summarised libertarianism’s core belief:
“According to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, the most basic right of all is the right to self-ownership. ‘Every man has a property in his own person,’ Locke wrote. ‘This no Body has any right to but himself.’ This is, to borrow a term Thomas Jefferson used in the Declaration of Independence, self-evident. When we are born, we own ourselves ‒ it doesn’t make any sense that anyone else does, or that everyone communally does…

All other rights emerge from the right to self-ownership. Our right to life, to start with, is a direct corollary of the right to self-ownership. The right to free speech, for we own our thoughts and their expression. The right to the fruits of our labours ‒ or, essentially, the right to property.”

A self-contradiction

Varma’s statement leads immediately to an insurmountable contradiction: we are born self-owners, and yet a number of our rights are severely curtailed for years after our birth. Even libertarians do not believe that children deserve the same rights to free expression, movement and property as do adults. A child’s right to life, on the other hand, is as sacrosanct from the moment of its birth as that of any adult. A gap thus opens up not only between the notion of self-ownership and that of rights as a whole (for we now are faced with self-owners who either do not have certain rights, or are legitimately forbidden from exercising them fully), but also among different kinds of rights (the right to life being absolute from birth, while others are restricted for up to 18 years).

Libertarians have attempted to overcome these fundamental contradictions, but their solutions are like patches for badly-written software, unwieldy add-ons ill-suited to a theory that claims to have found one simple, elegant equation that explains everything in the universe of human interactions.

A number of philosophical approaches uphold human rights without deriving them from self-ownership, notably Immanuel Kant’s argument for always treating humans as ends in themselves rather than merely means to an end. Ownership is a legal term, and its application to human selves is a misguided metaphor rather than a natural or organic fact. Having discarded the idea of self-ownership, we can retain a respect for rights without any concomitant commitment to free markets.

Limits on liberty

Libertarians are, as the nomenclature itself suggests, fixated on liberty. But how much individual liberty would an ideal libertarian society afford? Let us assume we live in a libertarian paradise, and every bit of land and water on earth has been opened up for purchase and sale, and now lies in private hands. Libertarian theory makes clear that an individual’s rights are circumscribed or abrogated once he or she steps into another person’s private property. This is only logical: if I enter someone else’s house without permission, the owner can put me in prison for trespass, or, in some circumstances, even kill me. We live comfortably with these restrictions, but how would we act if not just homes but every road, every park, and every beach were treated like somebody’s private home?

The owner of the road outside my residence could refuse to let me use it because he didn’t like the way I looked, or the colour of my skin, or the community to which I belong. Jobs and educational opportunities would, of course, be equally vulnerable to prejudice and whim. In an ideal libertarian world everything outside of my private property would be somebody else’s private property, where my rights would no longer hold. This sounds more like hell than paradise to me.

I like my freedom of movement to be expressible through walks on beaches, parks, and meadows. I think a world in which these are available for common use expands rather than restricts freedom. Each society has worked out for itself some notion of the commons, and in our own age communitarianism has moved into virtual space through sites like Wikipedia. I’d rather be a commoner in a land of commons than a monarch with sovereign rights over my own property in a world divided into billions of monarchies.

Ignoring Locke

John Locke, who thought up the idea of self-ownership, also developed the labour theory of property which holds that a natural resource originally becomes privatised through the exertion of labour. He insisted that sufficient land ought to be retained for common use, but libertarians quickly discarded that aspect of his philosophy. Locke’s ideas legitimised one of the great dispossessions in history, the alienation of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists from ancestral lands across the globe in the colonial period. The tragedy has continued in our post-colonial times.

Consider a tribe in eastern India that has held on to a lifestyle older than the Vedas centred around the worship of a mountain. Bauxite is discovered in the mountain, and suddenly, for the sake of a fraction of a percentage point addition of the nation’s GDP, we fence off large swathes of the tribe’s traditional habitat, and begin to destroy the mountain to extract valuable ore. It is bad enough that the state appoints itself custodian of the land, and locals are now beholden to corrupt forest officers. It is bad enough that our forest cover has shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. Now, even the last vestige of the tribe’s identity and pride is in the process of being erased.

The state pays lip service to the beliefs of tribals, but libertarians have no time for people with no conception of private lands. They would parcel out each mountain and forest to private individuals or firms, who could gouge as many hills and belch as much smoke from smelters as they wished, any kind of environmental control mechanism being an unconscionable restriction of free enterprise.

In practice, I agree with my libertarian friends on most ethical issue issues, and even some economic ones (I see no reason why the state should keep pouring taxpayer money into Air India, for instance). The idea of a world run on libertarian lines, however, makes me shudder, and I hope the moment this pernicious philosophy is enjoying ends soon.