The foundations of liberty

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Welcome

Hello and welcome to the first lecture of our Learning Hub series. My name is Thomas, and I'm going to be the one giving these lectures for the foreseeable future. In this series, we will be going into libertarian ideas, history, and particular thinkers, and we will be discussing these in increasing detail as the series goes on.

For now though, as this is our first lecture, I want to start by speaking more broadly, and the broadest topic we can cover is libertarianism itself, so in this lecture I'll be giving the very basics of libertarianism and what it is.

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What governments are

To understand libertarianism, we first have to understand what governments are. All across the world there are governments, and these are massive organisations that have the final say about what happens in a given territory. At least in theory, no one is more powerful than a government, because governments maintain a monopoly over the military, the police, and the courts. As well as this, a government's territory is usually quite big. At least in Australia, our government controls an entire continent.

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Little competition

These two things combined mean that governments don't have much competition. We could contrast governments with, for example, hotels: If a hotel provides a poor service or costs too much money, it is quite easy to switch hotels, whereas moving from one country to another is incredibly difficult for most people.

Because governments have little competition, and have a monopoly of power in their territory, a determined government can do essentially whatever it wants in its land. And if it wants to, a government can be completely awful and often it can get away with this for decades or centuries.

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As little as possible

This then naturally raises the question: If a government can do so much, what should it do, or what should it not do? Almost all political philosophies and positions are trying to answer this question in some way or another. And while there are a number of different factions of libertarians who would view this question differently, I think the common thread that unites us is that all libertarians would answer that the government should do as little as possible. That is, the government should have little to no involvement in our daily lives or in private society in general. Libertarian is not just about balancing the government's budget or deregulating some specific industry. Rather, libertarianism is about cutting the government out of everything that we reasonably can.

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The social media ban

As an example of this, in Australia we now have the under 16's social media ban. If you remember back to when this law was being passed, the discussion in the news about it was this quiet quibbling about whether the law will make parents lives easier, or whether kids will get able to around it. Unlike the major parties, all libertarians unequivocally rejected this law, from perspective of libertarians, the law would an affront to people's liberty and people's privacy, and, importantly, it was completely unnecessary. And, because the libertarian perspective is that the government should do as little as possible, unnecessary laws like this are always going to be viewed a bad thing.

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How much law there is

And there's plenty more unnecessary laws like that in this country. Only about 40 years ago in 1985, all of the Commonwealth laws and regulations in force in Australia amounted to about 25,000 pages. In 2022 that number had grown to 193,000 pages. The Commonwealth statue book as of 2022 was about 280,000 pages long. To put that in perspective a little, if you've ever read 1984, imagine a book that's that long, except every single word is an entire page, and then read that book 3 or 4 times over, and that's how long the statute book is.

Most of us will never really be able to comprehend how much law that is, because we all live in our own little parts of society where not all of it applies to us, but there is an unbelievable amount of restrictions and controls that the government places on every single facet and crevice of society, and considering that society was by no means collapsing in the 1980s, we can already say that almost all of it is probably unnecessary.

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Privatising services

In libertarianism, this mindset of "as little as possible" is not just about laws and regulations, we also ask what services should the government be running or not? For example, if you've ever dealt with getting your licence or car registration, you'll know that every single step of the way is clearly way more expensive than it needs to be. This problem occurs because transport services are run by the government, no one else is allowed to provide these services for a cheaper price, and so the your local transport service can charge more or less whatever it wants.

And so as libertarians we ask, could we shrink the government and stop the abuse of these services by privatising them—that is, could we allow other competitors to enter the market, and potentially also turn the government service into its own company? We could also ask the same question about government broadcasters, government banks, government regulation, and so on. Different libertarians have various opinions on what can or cannot be privatised, some libertarians do still believe that the government must keep many of its current services, but that many others can be privatised or partially privatised, some libertarians believe that the government should be doing nothing more than running the police, the military and the courts, so that it can enforce the contracts that people make amongst each other, and some libertarians believe it is possible to even privatise these services and simply get rid of government altogether. However, libertarianism is a big tent, and those are just a few positions of many that we will be exploring as this series goes on.

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Why so little government

So libertarians believe the government should do as little as possible. Why? Why not have a more nuanced view where government expansion can be good sometimes and not others? The answer that libertarians give to this can be split into two parts, there are economic reasons and there are ethical reasons.

The economic case libertarians make against government expansion is often quite simple. We can take the example of rent control or rent caps. All you have to do to understand the basic effect of rent control is to look at supply and demand: If the price of a good is forced below what it would be on the free market, then demand will outstrip supply, which is to say, you have a shortage. We can see the effects of this in the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina. In 2023 Argentina elected the first libertarian head of state ever, the president Javier Milei, who immediately ended all rent controls on any new contracts in the country, and immediately the rental market was flooded with new supply, and the cost of rent fell drastically relative to people's incomes. These kinds of hard rent caps are largely considered to be indefensible in economics, and economic data very much demonstrates that it's a bad idea, but there are always political candidates and political parties advocating for this kind of thing anyway.

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Rent control in Buenos Aires

We can see the effects of this in the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina. In 2023 Argentina elected the first libertarian head of state ever, the president Javier Milei, who immediately ended all rent controls on any new contracts in the country, and immediately the rental market was flooded with new supply, and the cost of rent fell drastically relative to people's incomes. These kinds of hard rent caps are largely considered to be indefensible in economics, and economic data very much demonstrates that it's a bad idea, but there are always political candidates and political parties advocating for this kind of thing anyway.

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Applying economic principles

This is not to say that mainstream economists agree with libertarians on everything, they definitely don't, and economics gets far more complicated than just supply and demand. Rather, what I’m trying to say is that many libertarians make economic arguments by taking basic economic principles and applying them thoroughly and consistently. This style of economics makes libertarian arguments relatively easy to follow and easy to argue for. It also means that libertarian economics tends to be very rationalistic, there are a lot of logical arguments built upon other logical arguments, and so if you are the kind of libertarian who does economics in this way we always have to be careful and vigilant that what we’re saying is logically sound.

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Rights and ethics

The other main arguments for libertarianism are ethical arguments. Specifically, the core claim of libertarian ethics is that individuals have rights that no one should be permitted to violate, including the government.

I should note that not all libertarians believe that individual rights exist in and of themselves. Some simply believe that enforcing individual rights will produce the best outcomes for the most people. However, rights-based thinking is more common, and I will focus on it here.

To understand what libertarians mean by rights, it helps us to draw a distinction that will come up repeatedly in this series: the difference between negative rights and positive rights. A negative right is a right not to have something done to you, meaning that it places a constraint on what others may do. A positive right, by contrast, is a right to be provided with something, which requires someone else to act on your behalf. When people argue that everyone has a right to free healthcare or perhaps free internet or free food or so on, they are typically invoking positive rights. Libertarians are generally sceptical of positive rights, because fulfilling them can and often does require taking something from someone else. The rights that libertarians build their ethics around are negative rights — rights against interference.

The two negative rights that sit at the centre of libertarian ethics are the right to property and the right to bodily autonomy. The right to property is the right to own things and to use them as you see fit without others forcibly taking or controlling them. The right to bodily autonomy, on the other hand, is the right to make decisions about your own life and person without others imposing their choices on you. If you can think of your body as being your property in some sense, you can also conceive of these as fundamentally being one right.

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Rights and government expansion

What libertarians then observe is that government expansion will almost always conflict with one or both of these rights. Regulations constrain what people may do with your property. Taxes, from this perspective, are the compulsory taking of money, which is itself a form of property. Drug laws and lifestyle restrictions are impositions on bodily autonomy, and so on. This is why, from a libertarian ethical standpoint, it doesn't matter if a given government policy is well-intentioned or maybe even effective. Rather, what matters is whether the government had the right to enforce a given law in the first place. That is what makes libertarian ethics a genuinely distinct way of thinking about politics, rather than just a preference for smaller government.

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Two kinds of argument

One thing to keep in mind from this section is that these two types of arguments, economic arguments and ethical arguments, are completely logically distinct from each other. Economic arguments are used to figure out what would happen if the government did as little as possible, would society be richer, would it change how our lives work, and so on, whereas ethical arguments are about what outcomes are good or bad. You could argue in one of these ways but not the other, for example you could say "Economically, libertarianism would make society richer, I want to be in a richer society and you probably do as well, independently of whether that's objectively good or bad". And likewise, you can argue entirely on the basis of ethics and say "Libertarianism may make society richer, but even if it didn't, people have rights, and the government never has the right to violate them, even if it's for the sake of material well-being". Nevertheless, most libertarians make both economic and ethical arguments together.

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Left-wing or right-wing

Before we close out, I want to go over whether libertarianism is left-wing or right-wing, because it's a question that tends to come up for people who encounter libertarianism for the first time, and the answer is really a little complicated.

Very often, the spectrum of left-wing versus right-wing is defined using economic questions, with the left favouring expensive government programs, redistribution of wealth, and collective approaches to social problems, and the right tending to favour the free market, privatisation, and limited government intervention. In this sense, libertarianism is straightforwardly right-wing.

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The political compass

For these reasons you can argue that the left-right spectrum doesn't capture libertarianism very well. Another way to look at things is the political compass, which you see everywhere on the internet, where you have two spectrums that form two axes of a graph. One is left-to-right, for economics, and one is authoritarian-to-libertarian, for the size of the government, and when we map out politics like this, libertarianism clearly covers the bottom right quadrant of the compass. Nevertheless there is a lot more to this question, and you may wonder, looking at this graph, what it means to be an economically left-wing libertarian, and that's something that we'll get into when we cover libertarian history and it might require it's own lecture at some point.

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Who libertarians align with

In terms of who libertarians align themselves with, libertarians are sort of in their own camp but tend to find themselves aligned with conservatives or classical liberal parties more often than not. This is probably why libertarianism is generally perceived as a variety of right-wing politics, even if some people would disagree with that categorisation.

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Closing the lecture

That brings us to the end of this first lecture. We have covered a fair amount of ground: What a government is and what makes it distinctive, why libertarians believe it should do as little as possible, and finally where libertarianism tends to sit in the broader political landscape.

In the lectures that follow, we will take each of these ideas considerably further, we will also be getting into history and talking about some of the serious objections to libertarianism and how libertarians respond to them. This lecture has really only given us the vocabulary and the basic framework we need so that we can get into those discussions properly, I hope to see you there.