Speaker 1: Today, I'm going to be speaking with Andrew Koppelman, who is a law professor
at Northwestern University and also author of the book Out Today Burning Down the House
How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
It's not just the delusion.
It's also the greed, which I think is important.
Really great having you on.
I appreciate.
Speaker 4: That.
It's a coalition.
The coalition is very happy to be here.
Speaker 1: So, okay.
I mean, I think maybe the way to start talking about this is I as a progressive on the left,
I air on the side of small l libertarianism when given the choice between authoritarianism
and libertarianism, unless there's a really good, compelling reason to get a government
or some authority involved, I say stay out of it.
And of course, there are so many exceptions to this that's like my general idea.
But when we talk about libertarian philosophy in the way you talk about in the book, you're
not really talking about what I'm talking about, which is a small l libertarian leaning.
Is that right?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that the common ground between us is the idea that the point of government,
what we should be aiming at in government is giving everybody the means to decide for
themselves how they're going to live their lives.
And now that is a very new idea in human history.
For most of human history, the point of the state was the greater glory of King Sargon
or the triumph of the two religion, or the triumph of the master race or, you know, something
other than the flourishing of the individual.
So really the argument between you and me and the Libertarians is an argument about
strategy.
How does one go about building a world in which people are free to live as they like?
And what's distinctive about the Libertarians is a very strong view that the way to assure
that is to cripple the state, to limit the power of the state.
If only the state were radically limited, only protected our persons and property, and
did nothing else, we would be freer.
Speaker 1: When you talk about the delusion part, it would be great to hear a little bit
about what you mean.
You know, I've experienced conversations with libertarians that devolve into, you know,
strange conversations about everybody makes their own road and puts tolls on it.
Or I'm sure you've heard in popular media the way that these conversations often go.
What is the delusion part that you're talking about?
Speaker 4: Well, the delusion is the idea that in order to live the lives that we want,
that we can do without the kind of big, powerful state that we have had, certainly in the United
States in the last 100 years.
Because there are quite a lot of things that keep us from living our lives the way we want,
which do not consist of either the government or other people encroaching on our property.
I mean, one good example is COVID or COVID didn't violate anybody's rights.
But the reason why we were able to beat it back is because government raised an awful
lot of money with taxation.
Libertarians hate taxation.
Big government gave a lot of money to private investors who would not have invested the
money themselves in developing a vaccine.
And it was a partnership between government and the private sector that made it possible
for us to go back to something approaching normal life.
Without that, I think that we would still be hunkered down in our houses, fearful of
death every time we are in a room with a group of strangers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that that's really interesting.
You know, oftentimes the word coercive comes up in conversations with with libertarians
and, you know, whether it's applied to taxes or business regulations or the IRS, at the
end of the day, if you just refuse to pay your taxes, eventually someone arrests you
and you could potentially, you know, this concept of coercion.
It seems to me that if you step back a little bit from politics and just think about anthropology
and so many other fields of study, there's this idea that once you get to a group larger
than 150 often is the number that's mentioned 150 humans.
You sort of need to have some decisions made from the top in order to be able to grow as
a society beyond that.
And so even if there is a little bit of coercion, don't we need a little coercion in order to
be able to to live as a modern society?
Speaker 4: Well, I think that it's a mistake to think of it in terms of size.
The question is not a little coercion or a lot of coercion, but a right amount of coercion.
So one example that I think that libertarian, you know, libertarian philosophers who are
who.
Why engage with primarily in the book?
Because libertarianism is a political philosophy, I think.
Well, if there is a minimal thing for the state to do, it's to keep people from harming
other people.
Well, one way in which we can harm other people is by pollution.
You and I can agree to have me make a product that you buy, and it makes me better off and
it makes you better off.
And that's the great thing about markets.
But look, if in the course of manufacturing, the thing that you want to buy, I poison all
the children in a three mile radius of my factory then.
Now I'm not adding value to the world.
Now you and I are conspiring to hurt a bunch of innocent people.
Well, so how do you fix that?
You're not going to fix it with private lawsuits because it's hard for each of the victims
to prove that they've been harmed.
The only way to do it is with regulation that limits what you can put in the air.
And if you want to have that kind of regulation, you need a government with a huge staff of
scientists to try to figure out which chemicals are harmful and which aren't.
You cannot fix this problem without big government.
Speaker 1: You talk in the book, as you mention, about figures like Robert Nozick.
You talk about Hayek.
We hear a lot about Ayn Rand and the Koch brothers and all of these different players
that are often loosely described as as libertarians of some sort of flavor of modern libertarianism
has been influenced the most by who of these characters or others that you engage with
in the book?
Speaker 4: Well, the common sense libertarianism that an awful lot of people hold, the sort
of the common sense minimal state idea really owes the most to a murray Rothbard.
Who is the most important political philosopher you never heard of.
He's the one who shaped the early Libertarian Party.
He is the one who persuaded Charles Koch to start funding libertarian causes.
He is the one who met young Robert Moses when he was a graduate student and got him interested
in this stuff.
He also mentor Randy Barnett, who was the mastermind of the legal challenge to Obamacare.
And so I think that he's the most important of the lot.
And I talk about all of these people in the book, which basically describes the way in
which libertarian thought has evolved over time.
And he is fundamentally an anarchist.
But I know one way of taking his line of thought is to that which I guess people who are not
willing to go all the way to anarchism have gone is to say, Well, whatever else we do,
let's minimize the power of the state and the authority of the state.
And while that's still not the official line of the Republican Party has enormous influence
there.
Trump didn't talk in broadly libertarian terms, but you look at what actually got passed when
the Republicans had both houses and the presidency, they did a big tax cut for the rich.
They narrowly took health care away from 20 million people, and they gutted administrative
agencies like the EPA, which I guess goes to the thing I said at the beginning about
a coalition.
Libertarianism draws two different kinds of people.
One is philosophers like Nosek, who have a story to tell about what unjust state is.
And the other part of the coalition is business people who'd like to be able to hurt people
without being bothered by the police.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, but I'm curious in terms of the modern Republican Party, because
you're sort of mentioning a little bit about the rhetoric versus the things that were passed
under Trump in those those couple of years in the modern Republican Party, kind of in
the MAGA direction that that that it has gone.
It seems nationalism is a big thing.
It seems as though authoritarianism, when it is convenient to you, it has become an
increasingly big feature.
Is there any real traditional libertarianism that is still kind of left or prominent in
the modern Republican Party?
Speaker 4: Well, the libertarianism that remains prominent is a desire to constrain the state.
The formula of the Republican Party for a long time has been to talk populist while
doing big favors for rich supporters.
And so you see that in what continues to be the target of the Republicans, the modern
administrative state.
This administrative state is really inconvenient for business.
So you tell people you tell ordinary working people that, you know, I'm going to protect
you from these arrogant government bureaucrats who don't respect you.
And then you limit the capacity of the bureaucrats to deliver clean water and safe workplaces
and clean air.
And so the consequence is that then you tell your ordinary working person, look, I saved
you from the bureaucrats.
And as a consequence, that ordinary working person does not live long enough to meet his
grandchildren.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
I mean, I guess the desire to limit the power of the state seems to be only in ways that
those on what's perceived to be the left want to have the state involved.
Right.
Because in many other ways, in terms of clamping down on media outlets that you disagree with
or when it comes to a lot of these social issues, abortion and gay marriage and the
right to fire someone for their perceived or sexual orientation.
In those cases, they seem okay actually using the power of the state.
Speaker 4: Well, and what we saw under the first Trump administration, we'll see if there's
a second Trump administration.
But they've already learned that they could get away with scooping up peaceful protesters
and shoving them into vans and taking through an undisclosed location.
That doesn't seem especially libertarian.
On the other hand, as I said, the libertarianism today is a coalition between business people
who want to make a lot of money and these principled libertarians.
And it is the business people who I think are the prevalent part of the coalition.
And I should say I'm not casting any aspersions on businesspeople.
The ordinary business person in a well-regulated state can feel pretty confident that if he's
making money, he's doing good for the world because somebody is buying his product.
And if he were injuring innocent third parties, somebody from the government would come and
tell him that and tell him to stop.
And the fact that nobody tells him to stop means that he can feel like he's done a good
thing in the world with his business.
You will not be able to be confident of that under Trump.
Trump wants you to make money whether you hurt people or not.
Speaker 1: Last thing I wanted to touch on during the pandemic, there were a lot of,
again, self-described libertarians who were saying the vaccines, that's a problem, masks
a problem.
What's happening in school is a problem, a problem.
What businesses are having to do for this initial period of a few months that quite
frankly, ended pretty quickly.
All of these things are a problem.
What would a sort of more sensible but still libertarian approach be to those issues that
we saw during the pandemic?
Speaker 4: Well, it's pretty simple.
The the liberal response, which I think is the right one, is if government is proposing
to restrict somebody's liberty, it's got to have a pretty good reason.
Sometimes the reasons are no good, and sometimes the story about arrogant government bureaucrats
is correct.
The Centers for Disease Control came up with a test that didn't work and wouldn't let anybody
else develop one.
It was a scandal.
But on the other hand, yeah, a lot of these restrictions, certainly the massive promotion
of vaccines with tax money and the requirement that health care workers get vaccinated.
Yeah, it promotes people's liberty.
It keeps them alive.
In fact.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking about some of the things in Andrew Koppelman, new book
out today, Burning Down the House How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
We're linking to the book and I really appreciate your time today.
Here it is.
There it is.
A beautiful.
Speaker 4: Podcast.
Speaker 1: Thanks, Andrew.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
This was great.