Anne Heller on Libertarianism

Can you define libertarianism?

I will give a quote. This is what H L Mencken said in 1926: ‘It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.’

Your first book is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

If you read only one book about libertarianism, read this legendary 1957 novel, a 1,100-page deconstruction of the Marxian proposition, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ It took her 14 years to write Atlas Shrugged and that wasn’t working on it part-time. That was working very, very hard and at one point she stayed inside her house or on her property in California for a month. She was very intense. This is her magnum opus. Ayn Rand was born Alyssa Rosenburg in St Petersburg, Russia, and was 12 when the Russian Revolution took place and all her family’s property was snatched. 

How old was she when she left Russia?

Twenty-one. 

So she was properly Russian.

Oh, she was Russian. You should have heard her voice! So, Atlas Shrugged is the mature, the fullest expression of her rejection of any kind of collectivism. It’s probably the only novel of ideas that was written in the form of a detective story. It’s a real page-turner. The heroes of the novel are the entrepreneurs in America in the mid-20th century – the steelmakers, the coal miners, the productive people have all been disappearing from public view and nobody knows where they’ve gone. This happens over the course of ten years, and the heroine, Dagny Taggart, who owns a railroad, which is the controlling metaphor for the novel, tries to find out where they’ve gone, because she’s not able to run her business without all these wonderful suppliers. The ones who are left are all dolts taking government handouts. What she finds out is that a man, the hero, John Galt, who later becomes her lover, has been recruiting the best people everywhere to go on strike. Nothing in the economy can be done without these people, and they stay on strike until the nation comes to its senses and stops becoming a socialist economy. It’s basically about the Roosevelt administration and what it did to the economy. It’s a fantastical rebuttal.

There aren’t many people who would think of America as a socialist society. 

Well, she did. And there were lots of people who did in the 30s, 40s, 50s. Before Roosevelt, before the Depression, you can’t imagine how much less government regulation there was in the United States. And that’s the America that Ayn Rand and H L Mencken loved. It’s a whole kind of old-school libertarianism. It’s isolationism, free markets, free minds and not letting the state get too powerful. Individual rather than state power.

It is the only page-turning critique of the welfare state, the bureaucratisation of the ‘altruistic’ impulse, and the transformation of America from a culture of self-reliance to one of self-entitlement by an author whose four mid-century novels (with The Fountainhead, Anthem and We the Living) sold one million copies in 2009.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

Mill’s famous essay is an illuminating reading experience, even if you read it in college. Its thesis is to define ‘the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’. Its conclusion is that ‘the sole principle for which mankind are [sic] warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection’. He goes on to say that the parental social order has no moral basis for coercing us to do anything against our will – even for our own good, let alone the good of others! He was a utilitarian rather than a libertarian proponent of natural rights, which disqualified him as a lover of liberty for Rand, but file that away and read on, unperturbed.

What’s the difference? 

Utilitarian political philosophy is based on the greatest good for the greatest number. Libertarian political philosophy is individual rights. This essay is about why society and the government will take over more and more of our lives and tell us what to do if we don’t resist. It’s the natural way of things.

Can people resist?

No, we can’t resist. The price of liberty is vigilance and we aren’t very vigilant people. Imagine how John Stuart Mill would feel if he were made to wear a seatbelt because the federal government tells him so. His idea is that there is no reason for society or the government to infringe on individual decision-making except for self-protection and the protection of others. We ought to defend our individual liberties. He even saw in Britain in his time a tendency for the government and society to accumulate power – what libertarians have been worrying about ever since. 

But aren’t human beings social animals? Aren’t we like ants in an anthill?

Some are but some, like Isaac Newton, prefer never to see another human being as long as he lived. He worked in solitude and yet produced some of the greatest benefits of mankind. So, no. Some are and some of us are not.

Our Enemy the State by Albert Jay Nock.

Published in 1935, two years into the New Deal’s experiment in social engineering, this wry classic on the intensifying nature of incursions by state power into private economic spheres is a classic of libertarianism.