Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412140044
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The new crop of Republicans is more opposed to government and has more faith in the unregulated market than even the most conservative members of the older Republican generation. If you want to know how much the pendulum has swung, consider this: In the recent contest over who would be the Senate Republican whip, Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a solid conservative with no love for liberals, was considered the ``moderate'' when compared with the victor, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi.
Libertarianism is a philosophy of radically limited government. While there is a range of opinion among those who call themselves libertarian, libertarians basically believe that the only legitimate functions of government are to protect citizens from force and fraud, and to enforce contracts. If they had their way, libertarians would get the government out of everything else, including education, the postal system, Social Security, medical care, environmental regulation, farming - and that's just for starters.
In foreign policy, libertarians are resolutely noninterventionist - ``isolationist,'' if you prefer - and that pushed them out of the pro-military, anticommunist mainstream of the Republican Party during the Cold War. Now, many Republicans are attracted to the libertarians' foreign-policy vision, involving a minimum of American activism abroad.
The basic impulse of the libertarian was captured by Murray Rothbard, an economist and longtime libertarian activist. ``If you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts,'' he wrote, ``simply think of the State as a criminal band and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.''
One leading neolibertarian Republican is Rep. Dick Armey, the new House majority leader. One of his intellectual heroes is Ludwig von Mises, a libertarian economist who believed that ``perfect capitalism'' is a system that was ``never and nowhere completely tried or achieved'' because most capitalist countries accepted a significant role for government. Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts is one of the party's most outspoken defenders of libertarianism, while Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas leans toward libertarianism on many issues.
The emergence of the libertarian Republicans is the story of one of those quiet intellectual revolutions that can have enormous political impact. Libertarianism is attractive, especially to intellectuals, because of its rigor and consistency. Armey, for example, dislikes almost all government programs equally, which is why he allied himself with Northeastern liberals to fight farm subsidies. In electoral terms, it is attractive to those well-off professionals who have nothing in common with the religious right but would just like to be left alone. And its moral code - that everyone should be responsible for himself or herself and expect no help from the state, ever - has a certain clarity and finality.
The libertarians have also replaced the Marxists as the world's leading Utopia builders. That's because they can claim that their version of a world with almost no government has never been tried. Tearing down the state, they insist, will work wonders.
The libertarian Republicans may thus pose a far greater political and intellectual challenge to Democrats than either traditional conservatives or the religious right. But libertarianism's seductiveness needs to be confronted, because like all Utopians, the libertarians ignore some messy realities.
For example, the libertarian notion that all individuals are entirely responsible for themselves is morally appealing as an ethic for each adult. But people don't enter the world as adults. They arrive as dependent infants, and in cases where families (or single parents) find themselves without resources - whether through their own fault or not - the infants involved may suffer in ways that make it difficult for them ever to become responsible adults. That's why the initial impulse behind the welfare state grew from a desire to help orphans, poor children and mothers. The current welfare state may be broken, but sweeping it away won't make the problems it's trying to solve disappear.
Similarly, the market does many things well, but its workings did not lead automatically to a clean environment, which is why environmental regulations exist; or to full employment, which is why unemployment compensation exists; or to universal education, which is why public schools exist; or to decent pensions, which is why Social Security exists.
These are the sorts of basic arguments that the current anti-government mood will call forth in the coming months. The libertarians do us all a favor by forcing this kind of ground-zero debate and by pushing supporters of active government toward less intrusive and less bureaucratic uses of state power.
But the rest of us will do the libertarians a favor by preventing them from enacting their Utopia. Because if the libertarians ever get all that they want, the results will almost certainly discredit their faith that something called ``perfect capitalism'' either can or should exist.
E. J. Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post editorial-page staff.
- The Washington Post
by CNB