Colin Flanagan
Bailey Rosier
Libertarianism in the Face of a Global Pandemic
Introduction
There is a lot of talk these days, especially by those on the left, who call for an end to the capitalist system as we know it. Twitter names changed to include hammers and sickles, preaching for the return of Marxist ideals, socialist cries inspired by Scandinavian models, and rent strikes collide with a system designed to encourage free enterprise. A younger generation is displeased with the hand they have been dealt, and why wouldn’t they? With a lower life expectancy, a warming planet, and an unsatisfactory minimum wage, how could they feel even a semblance of security, at least compared to what their parents and grandparents felt?
There are several streams of highly revered thinking that tell us they can’t. Neoclassical economic theory paints the modern consumer as risk-averse. Rawls draws us to his original position thought experiment. If you were the theoretical “social planner,” and could draw the wealth distribution in society anyway you wanted, knowing that by random chance you would immediately be placed somewhere on the curve, how would it look? You would maximize the minimum amount of wealth for sure. On the other side of that, we know from logic that humans are not necessarily risk-loving, but they are not risk-averse. They gamble, and the capitalist system encourages entrepreneurship. For every Rawls, there is a Nozick. In his words, if Wilt Chamberlain possessed basketball skills that people were willing to pay to see, should they not all pay to watch him play, even if it makes them worse off financially while making him a millionaire?
The libertarian ideology then is valid, but its problem does not lie with who will build the roads, but Locke’s issue of license versus liberty. At what point does liberty become license? For Locke and many others, originating in the tradition of Plato and culminating in Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 Two Concepts of Liberty, positive liberty refers to the type of rights that the Founding Fathers discuss but did not guarantee in the Bill of Rights. Positive liberty is the ability to take action according to one’s desire of free will. This is the sort of “natural law” rule, but it comes with a set of issues. First, there is the classic issue that positive liberty can allow for a throttling or entrapment of the minority. A pure democracy looks like positive liberty. Minority rights are one of the reasons that the United States has a republic. Another one of the many issues that comes with the concept of positive liberty is that it can lead to anarchy when abused. The concept of this abuse is license. When liberty is pushed too far, it becomes license.
The fundamental issue of libertarianism becomes much less about who supplies services that we rely on the government for and much more about who does not respect the rights of others to the same positive liberty. The most fundamental right of all is the right to life. Whether it was bestowed upon you by a creator or by the flip of a cosmological coin, your life exists and it is your right to continue it. As Aquinas theorized, it is from the natural law–the basis for all human conduct. People who follow the natural law believe that humans want to have a good life, and they should strive for it and have the freedom to do so. Natural law theorists believe in this positive liberty. From birth, people have just two rights, the right to their life and the right to their pursuit of happiness. From this, all other rights can be derived, until the point that these rights infringe upon these fundamental rights of others. In a primitive example, two cavemen are stranded on an island. There are enough resources for them both to survive but one caveman is stronger and enslaves the other and forces labor upon him until he is no longer free to pursue happiness. Realizing that the slave takes resources away from him, the ruling caveman kills him, deeming his labor no longer more valuable than the resources he required to work.
This sort of class-struggle has gone on for millennia, and people have pondered the worth of freedom in this sort of world. If a world dominated by libertarians allows for license, where two of the most fundamental rights are infringed upon, whether by feudalist lords, robber barons, or circus ringleaders, there can be no true freedom enjoyed by all individuals. In this world of no restriction, there is a descent into anarchy where might makes right and majority rule is inevitable.
This can descend into chaos very quickly. The lack of restraint by individuals throughout history has caused some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Imperialism has torn apart entire cultures, and even in today’s society, the stains of colonialism divide cultures and races much more than we could hope to eliminate in our lifetimes. This is the stain of the abuse of positive liberty.
In their creation of the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers derived from the two rights of life and pursuit of happiness other rights, ones which they declared the government would not limit. This was their creation of negative liberty, by stating that the government would not infringe upon these rights, they had already acknowledged that they had the power to do so. By granting these rights, among them the freedom to speech, expression, press, and to bear arms, the United States expanded to its citizens new freedoms that were not guaranteed to them at birth, freedoms derived from life and the pursuit of happiness. The Framers decided that these were further essential freedoms necessary to the pursuit of happiness. They protected their citizens from the tyrannical class struggle that they had known under the rule of the crown. From their personal perspective, the pursuit of happiness required these freedoms.
We now find ourselves in the face of a United States government that has more power than ever before. 9/11 and the privacy scandals that came after it. The Patriot Act. Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden. Our greatest fear lies in what we do not know yet about its power. Pair this with the current historic pandemic: COVID-19. There is a worldwide outbreak of this disease that the healthcare system could not support if unmitigated. In a purely libertarian society, could this be mitigated? In other words, are the “Stay-at-home” and “Shelter-in-place” orders issued by most of the states just in a libertarian society?
Yes, for the utopian libertarian society where there is no abuse of liberty. Where license is involved, libertarianism fails to secure the most two fundamental rights. So consider the pandemic, where the virus travels silently and unknowingly from person to person for up to fourteen days before a symptom is shown. The virus causes a highly serious disease which requires scarce medical resources in ventilators and personal protective equipment to be treated effectively. In the perfect libertarian society, everyone would stay home anyway in order to not infect their fellow man which would thereby threaten his most fundamental rights.
For all of the “libertarians” who are protesting their governors and public health officials, threatening their lives and the lives of others around them with guns and ammunition and even more ironically, the virus itself, these people are not libertarians. They only want license. They want anarchy in the streets, an unmitigated public health crisis where over a million Americans including themselves could die all in the name of doing whatever you want whenever you want. This is not liberty. Furthermore, consider the documented ammo runs taking place across the country as people shelter in fear that the government is planning a hostile takeover of the entire country through these pandemic measures. Why on earth would the government want to crash its country’s economy? What do these elected officials stand to gain by locking the country up? Enslaving its citizens and subjecting them to tyranny breaks their own contract with their people. Would the Constitution be void at the point? That leads to anarchy on all sides, a complete abuse of liberty by everyone involved. A libertarian would hate this for nearly every ideological reason.
So for the libertarian, these stay-at-home orders in a pandemic are perfectly just. The negative liberty that the government guarantees in the Bill of Rights is much less fundamental than that guaranteed from birth. But for the anarchist, these laws, much like any other laws are unjust and should be broken, all in the name of their own misconception of what it means to be truly free.

My response to the October question: Social media/the internet + hyperpartisanship = a lot of inaccurate and unattributable thoughts masquerading as news. What can be done to make what we see/read/experience online more trustworthy and verifiable?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-IJixm3GwVTnABi08qn8VPx_8Zgzd2WJRY1T7iDnti8

[The Home Page will show a running blog of your recent posts, which are categorized and show on that category’s page. Please delete this post or edit with your own information.]