Robert Nozick, Father of Libertarianism: Even He Gave Up on the Movement He Inspired.

8/12/2019 Robert Nozick, Father of Libertarianism: Even He Gave Up on the Movement He Inspired.

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THE DILETTANTE READING AND LOUNGING AND WATCHING.

UNE 20 2011 7:06 AM

The Liberty ScamWhy even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism,

ave up on the movement he inspired.

y Stephen Metcalf
http://www.slate.com/http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante/2011/06/the_liberty_scam.single.html#http://www.slate.com/authors.stephen_metcalf.htmlhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante.html


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Robert Nozick

.
http://www.slate.com/id/2297013/


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ecently, I overheard a fellow Amtraker back off a conversation on politics. "You know, it's

ecause I'm a libertarian," he said, sounding like a vegetarian politely declining offal. Later

hat afternoon, in the otherwise quite groovy loft I sometimes crash at in SoHo, where one

might once have expected,say, Of Grammatologyor at least a back issue ofElle Decor, there

at not one but two copies of something called The Libertarian Reader. "Libertarianism"

laces oneso believes the libertariannot on the political spectrum but slightly above it,

nd this accounts for its appeal to both the tricorne fringe and owners of premium real

state. Liberty's current bedfellows include Paul Ryan (his staffers are assigned Atlas

hrugged), Glenn Beck (he flogged The Road to Serfdomonto the best-seller list), SlateSlate's Jack

hafer, South Park, the founder of Whole Foods, this nudnik, P.J. O'Rourke, now David

Mamet, and to the extent she cares for anything beyond her own naked self-interestoh,

wait, that islibertarianismSarah Palin.

With libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently as the 1970s, it was

owhere to be found. Once the creed of smart set rogues, H.L. Mencken among them,

bertarianism all but disappeared after the Second World War. What happened? The single

most comprehensive, centrally planned, coordinated governmental action in history

hat's what happened. In addition to defeating fascism, the Second World War acted as a

magnificent sieve, through which almost no one, libertarians included, passed unchanged.

To pick one example: Lionel Robbins, the most prominent anti-Keynesian before the war,

erved as director of the economic division of the British War Cabinet; after the War,

obbins presided over the massive expansion of the British higher education system.) By

he '50s, with Western Europe and America free, prosperous, happy, and heavily taxed,

bertarianism had lost its roguish charm. It was the Weltanschauungof itinerant cranks:

onald Reagan warming up the Moose Lodge; Ayn Rand mesmerizing her Saturday night

ycophants; the Reader's Digesteconomist touting an Austrian pedigree.

ibertarians will blanch at lumping their revered VonsMises and Hayekin with the

utters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to haveeld a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the

enowned law and economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception,

eavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as

Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy

ndividuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremiswas rarely

mbraced freelyi.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy benefactor. It cannot be

tressed enough: In the decades after the war, a kind of levee separated polite discourseom free-market economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, who

wrote in a review of Hayek's Prices and Production: "An extraordinary example of how,

tarting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."*
http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/02/david-mamets-conversion-storyhttp://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2010/09/21/super-rich-law-professor-retires-from-blogging-after-electronic-lynch-mob-attacks-his-position-on-taxes/?boxes=Homepagechannelshttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226320553/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0226320553http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452011876/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0452011876http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684847671/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0684847671http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801858305/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0801858305


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nd then came Robert Nozick.

o my knowledge, in writing Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his breathtaking defense of

bertarianism, Nozick never accepted a dime other than from his employer, the

hilosophy department at Harvard University. (Unless it was from the Center for Advanced

tudy in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, the "minimally structured academic

nstitution bordering on individualist anarchy" as Nozick put it, where he wrote the book's

arly chapters.) In fact, Nozick was the disinterested intellectual that laissez-faire had been

earching for since Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. Nozick started out

classic of the type: a Brooklyn kid, one generation off the shtetl, toting a dog-eared Plato.

ut along the way to a full Harvard professorship, attained at the age of 30, he'd lost the

ocialist ardors of his upbringing. "For a while I thought: 'Well, the arguments are right,

apitalism is the best system, but only bad people would think so,' " he once told a

ournalist. "Then, at some point, my mind and my heart were in unison."

he Times Literary Supplementranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one of the "100 Most

nfluential Books Since the War," and that, I think, is underselling it. To this day, left

ntellectuals remember where they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against

ot just socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the

Telegraphwrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied

he new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from Roosevelt's

ew Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere etls." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and

rogressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F.

oodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the

ategorical imperative.

s a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian

conomist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the

undamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the

most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to

ursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we

ax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced

abor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of nhours of labor is like taking nhours

om the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need?

Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

o the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost,

amely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the

umanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto
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imselfwhat Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For

ozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he

writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means;

hey may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent.

ndividuals are inviolable."

ike to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian

onsensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in

conomics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became

eader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts,

ulminating in the election of Reagan, and well, where it stops, nobody knows.

rue, a recondite book by an obscure professor wouldn't have made any difference if it

adn't caught the drift of public feeling. But also true: Public feeling might have remained

egrudging, demagogic, sub-intellectual if the public's courage hadn't been shored up (ors conscience bought off, depending on your point of view) by intellectuals like Nozick.

ake Margaret Thatcher's infamous provocation"There's no such thing as society"with

s implication that human beings are nothing more than brutishly competitive atoms. Now

sten to its original formulation, in Anarchy: "But there is no social entitywith a good that

ndergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different

ndividual people, with their own individual lives." The tone is differentit's Kantian, not

obbesianand so is the moral emphasis: Society is unreal not because individuals arerutish but because they are dignified.

With the solemn invocation of individual lives, the liberal humanist ought to push away

om the table, take a deep breath, and ask whether any of this remarkable assault is true.

Can it really be that eliminating the income tax shows maximum moral respect for others?

thought a fraction of a rich man's fortune is to the rich man only money but to a starving

man is freedom. Am I a moral idiot?It is impossible without writing a book (and many have)

o do Anarchyjustice. Nonetheless, one argument from its pages is considered its most

entral, most famous, most bewitching. This is the so-called "Wilt Chamberlain" argument,

nd pausing to pick it apart, we can begin to see why Nozick's defense of libertarianism, as

ozick himself came to believe, collapsed.

..

When I think with my own brain and look with my own eyes, it's obvious to me that some

ombination of civil rights, democratic institutions, educational capital, social trust,

onsumer choice, and economic opportunity make me free. This is not what Nozick is

rguing. Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar as

here are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework in support of private


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roperty and freedom of contract. When I study American history, I can see why America,

hanks to a dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely

uited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is arguing.

ozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to

ubmit individuals to coercion.

ow does so supple a mind end up committed to so seemingly brittle a belief system? The

eap of faith here is, no surprise, in the construal of libertyitself, which unlike other values

says the libertarian) makes no restricting or normative claims on anybody; liberty is

nstead like oxygeninvisible, pervasive, enabling. Every other value, meanwhile,

epresents someone else's deranged will-to-power by which, under the guise of high-

mindedness or disinterest, he would "pattern" all of society to his own liking. "Almost

very suggested principle of justice is patterned," Nozick says, by way of setting up the

hamberlain argument. "To each according to his moral merit, or needs, or marginal

roduct, or how hard he tries " By way of showing us how an unpatterned, or libertarian,

ociety is more just than any patterned one, Nozick asks the reader to consult her own

reference, and choose a society patterned in any way she sees fitMarxist, bell-curve

meritocracyyou pick. Now call that pattern D1. Then, Nozick writes:

Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction.

Also suppose contracts run only for a year, with players being free agents.) He signs the

ollowing sort of contract with a team: In each home game twenty-five cents from the pricef each ticket of admission goes to him. (We ignore the question of whether he is

gouging" the owners, letting them look out for themselves.) Let us suppose that in one

eason one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain ends up with

250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else

as. Is he entitled to his income? Is this new distribution D2 unjust?"

ozick assumes our dream society is in some respect egalitarian; that to prevent Wilt from

rossly out-earning his fellow citizens, the system we've imagined in D1 will curtail

hamberlain's right to the whole fruit of his own labor. To the liberal humanist, Nozick is

aying: You don't take your finest hero, Kant, seriously, because if you did, you would never

acrifice Wilt's autonomy to the social planner's designs. To the socialist, he is saying: You

on't take your own finest hero, Marx, seriously, because if you did, you would never

xpropriate his surplus value (via taxation) as blithely as the capitalist. And to his own

ellow Harvard professors, he is saying: You don't take your own finest heroyourself

eriously, because if you did, why would you ever curtail the prerogative of a superstar?


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or all its intriguing parts, Anarchycan be thought of as one long Excuse me?in response

o one Harvard colleague in particular, the political philosopher John Rawls. In A Theory of

ustice, Rawls argued that our talents are not really our own, because they are not morally

ntrinsic to us. Rawls asked us to imagine that we know nothing about our life advantages

hat how gifted, smart, attractive, charismatic we are, as well as the socio-economic status

f our parents, lie behind a veil of ignorance. He then asked us to design an insurance

olicy against poor accidents of birth. That insurance policy would be "justice," in the form

f a society that was fair even from the perspective of its least well-off citizenwho, after

ll, passing through the veil of ignorance, might turn out to be us.

o this, Nozick replies: All that intellectual pomp, arrayed to convince me that my talents

re not mine? But my talents aren't like fire and disease. They aren't fatalities I insure

gainst. Quite the opposite: My talents constitute the substance of who I am, and I am right

o bank on them. Having cornered us with Kant, with Marx, and, most of all, with our own

anity, Nozick concludes, "No end-state principle of justice can be continuously realized

without continuous interference with people's lives," confident that "interference" is

ufficiently morally offensive to carry the day.


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Wilt Chamberlain

ere the liberal humanist needs to relax, take a second breath, and realize that, whileever, the Wilt Chamberlain argument is maybe a little too cleveri.e., what seems on first

lush to be a simple case of freedom from interference is in fact a kind of connivance.

narchynot only purports to be a defense of capitalism, but a proud defense of capitalism.

nd yet if Anarchywould defend capitalism unashamedly, why does its most famous

rgument include almost none of the defining features of capitalismi.e., no risk capital,

o capital markets, no financier? Why does it feature a basketball player and not, say, a

aptain of industry, a CEO, a visionary entrepreneur? The example as Nozick sets it outncludes a gifted athlete (Wilt Chamberlain), paying customers (those with a dollar to see

Wilt play)and yet, other than a passing reference to the team's "owners,"no capitalist!

n Nozick's example, we know what portion of every ticket (25 cents) represents the

monetary equivalent of every paying customer's desire to see not the game itself but Wilt

hamberlain play in it. Bearing in mind that all thought experiments beg our indulgence

without requiring our stupidity, notice that, in order to abstract out this allegiance from

llegiance to the team, to the sport, etc., and give it a dollar figure, Nozick has assigned

what amounts to a market price to Wilt's talents while also suggesting the price was

chieved by negotiation between Wilt and the owner. Now, here we must pause, and note

hat "price" is not an incidental feature of a libertarian belief systemit is what obviates


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he need, beyond enforcing the basic rule of law, for government. To a libertarian, price is,

n effect, the conscience of society finding its highest expression in every swipe of the debit

ard. Just as the thought experiment, "If there were purple cows on the moon, they would

ertainly be purple" tells us nothing about the moon, cows, or the color purple, assuming a

world in which labor and management arrive at gentleman's agreementsand in which

hose agreements capture the precise value, down to the penny, of labor's marginal

roducttells us very little about justice.

ut another way, Nozick is cornering us into answering a ridiculously loaded question: If

very person were a capitalist, and every capitalist a human capitalist, and every human

apitalist was compensated in exact proportion to the pleasure he or she provided others,

would a world without progressive taxation be just? To arrive at this question, Nozick

anishes most of the known features of capitalism (capital, owners, means of production,

abor, collective bargaining) while maximizing one feature of capitalismits ability to

unnel money to the uniquely talented. In the example, "liberty" is all but cognate with a

ystem that efficiently compensates the superstar.

he connivance is thus hidden in plain sight. "Wilt Chamberlain" is an African-American

whose talents are unique, scarce, perspicuous (points, rebounds, assists), and in high

emand. We feel powerfully the man should be paid, and not to do soto expect a black

thlete to perform for (largely) white audiences without adequate compensationraises

he specter of the plantation. But being a star athlete isn't the only way to make money. Inddition to earning a wage, one can garnish a wage, collect a fee, levy a toll, cash in a

ividend, take a kickback, collect a monopoly rent, hit the superfecta, inherit Tara, insider

rade, or stumble on Texas tea. For each way of conceiving wealth, there is at least one way

f moralizing its distribution. The Wilt Chamberlain example is designed to corner us

uite cynically, in my viewinto moralizing allof them as if they were recompense for a

nique talent that gives pleasure; and to tax each of them, and regulate each of them,

ccording to the same principle of radical noninterference suggested by a black ballplayernally getting his due.

..

o my critique of the Chamberlain example, a libertarian might respond: Given frictionless

markets, rational self-maximizers, and perfect information, the market price for Wilt's

ervices could not stay separable from the market price to see Wilt play. (Visionary

ntrepreneurs would create start-up leagues, competing leagues would bid up prices forhe best players.) In a free-market paradise, capital will flow to talent, until rewards

ommensurate perfectly with utility. Maybe; and maybe in a socialist paradise, no one will

atch the common cold. The essence of any utopianism is: Conjure an ideal that makes an


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mpossible demand on reality, then announce that, until the demand is met in full, your

deal can't be fairly evaluated. Attribute any incidental successes to the halfway meeting of

he demand, any failure to the halfway still to go.

ow could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The answer is: He didn't. "The

bertarian position I once propounded," Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late

80s, "now seems to me seriously inadequate." In Anarchydemocracy was nowhere to be

ound; Nozick now believed that democratic institutions "express and symbolize our

qual human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction." In Anarchy, the best

overnment was the least government, a value-neutral enforcer of contracts; now, Nozick

oncluded, "There are some things we choose to do together through government in

olemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in

his official fashion ..."

We're faced then with two intriguing mysteries. Why did the Nozick of 1975 confuse capitalwith human capital? And why did Nozick by 1989 feel the need to disavow the Nozick of

975? The key, I think, is recognizing the two mysteries as twin expressions of a single,

rimal, human fallibility: the need to attribute success to one's own moral substance,

ailure to sheer misfortune. The effectiveness of the Wilt Chamberlain example, after all, is

est measured by how readily you identify with Wilt Chamberlain. Anarchyis nothing if not

tour-de-force, an advertisement not just for libertarianism but for the sinuous

ntelligence required to put over so peculiar a thought experiment. In the early '70s, Nozickand this is audible in the writingclearly identified with Wilt: He believed his talents

ould only be flattered by a free market in high value-add labor. By the late '80s, in a world

one gaga for Gordon Gekko and Esprit, he was no longer quite so sure.

ven in 1975, it took a pretty narrow view of history to think all capital is human capital, and

hat philosophy professors, even the especially bright ones, would thrive in the free

market. But there was a historical reason for Nozick's belief: the magnificent sieve.

arvard's enrollment prior to World War II was 3,300; after the war, it was 5,300, 4,000 of

whom were veterans. The GI Bill was on its way to investing more in education grants,

usiness loans, and home loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954,

with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had

pent on research before the war. "Some universities," C. Wright Mills could write in the

mid-'50s, "are financial branches of the military establishment." In the postwar decades,

he American university grew in enrollment, budget and prestige, thanks to a substantial

ransfer of wealth from the private economy, under the rubric of "military Keynesianism."

s a tentacle of the military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of

olonial gentility.
http://www.inthe80s.com/clothes/sparks902hotmailcom00.shtml


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t the same time the university boomed, marginal tax rates for high earners stood as high

s 90 percent. This collapsed the so-called L-curve, the graphic depiction of wealth

istribution in the United States. The L-curve lay at its flattest in 1970, just as Nozick was

tting down to write Anarchy. In 1970, there were nearly 500,000 employed academics, and

heir relative income stood at an all-time high. To the extent anyone could believe mental

alent, human capital, and capital were indistinguishable, it was thanks to the greatest

market distortion in the history of industrial capitalism; and because for 40 years, thanks to

his distortion, talent had not been forced to compete with the old "captains of industry,"

with the financiers and the CEOs.

uccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capitalthese conveniently

isappeared from Nozick's argument because they'd all but disappeared from capitalism.

n a world in which J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete,

educed to historical curios, to a funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt frames, the

rofessionalsthe scientists, engineers, professors, lawyers and doctorscorrespondingly

se in both power and esteem. And in a world in which the professions are gatekept by

niversities, which in turn select students based on their measured intelligence, the idea

hat talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not only capital, but the only capital,

ecomes easier and easier for a humanities professor to put across. Hence the terminal

ony of Anarchy: Its author's audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was underwritten

y a most un-libertarian arrangementi.e., the postwar social compact of high marginal

axation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very "public good"

ozick decried as nonexistent.

nd the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise in (relative) income

nd prestige of the upper white collar professions, Keynesianism created the very blind

pot by which professionals turned against Keynesianism. Charging high fees as defended

y their cartels, cartels defended in turn by universities, universities in turn made powerful

y the military state, many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves theirre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated protections from

he marketplace but the result of their own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a

ee market for labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out

awls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchya surprise best-seller, it helped make

onald Reagan president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the public

ood.

ince 1970, the guild power of lawyers, doctors, engineers, and, yes, philosophy professors

as nothing but attenuated. To take only the most pitiful example, medical doctors have

volved over this period from fee-for-service professionals totally in control of their own

workplace to salaried body mechanics subject to the relentless cost-cutting mandate of a


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orporate employer. They've gone from being Marcus Welbya living monument to

ublic service through private practiceto being, as one comprehensive study put it,

arried "middle management." Who can argue with a straight face that a doctor in 2011

as more liberty than his counterpart in 1970? What any good liberal Democrat with an

unce of vestigial self-respect would have said to Nozick in 1970"Sure, Bob, but we both

now what your liberty means. It means power will once again mean money, and money

will be at liberty to flow to the top"in fact happened. The irony is that as capital once

gain concentrates as nothing more than capital (i.e., as the immense skim of the

nanciers), the Nozickian illusion (that capital is human capital and human capital is the

nly capital) gets harder and harder to sustain.

ustained it is, though. Just as Nozick would have us tax every dollar as if it were earned by

seven-foot demigod, apologists for laissez-faire would have us treat all outsize

ompensation as if it were earned by a tech revolutionary or the value-investing equivalent

f Mozart (as opposed to, say, this guy, this guy, this guy, or this guy). It turns out the Wilt

hamberlain example is all but unkillable; only it might better be called the Steve Jobs

xample, or the Warren Buffett* example. The idea that supernormal compensation is fit

eward for supernormal talent is the ideological superglue of neoliberalism, holding firm

nce the 1980s. It's no wonder that in the aftermath of the housing bust, with the glue

howing signs of decaywith Madoff and "Government Sachs" displacing Jobs and Buffett

n the headlines"liberty" made its comeback. When the facts go against you, resort to

values." When values go against you, resort to the mother of all values. When the mother

f all values swoons, reach deep into the public purse with one hand, and with the other

eat the public senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged.

..

alling yourself a libertarian is another way of saying you believe power should be held

ontinuously answerable to the individual's capacity for creativity and free choice. By that

tandard, Thomas Jefferson, John Ruskin, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky,

Michel Foucault, and even John Maynard Keynes are libertarians. (Orwell: "The real division

not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and

bertarians." Keynes: "But above all, individualism is the best safeguard of personal

berty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the

xercise of personal choice.") Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it

this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our

oubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and

onfuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an

reducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRFloVhrsmghttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june11/madoff_05-12.htmlhttp://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2008/08/04/garrett_van_wagoner_finally_gi/http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/jury_has_decided_raj_rajaratna.html


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is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. All contents 2014 The Slate Group LLC. All rights reserved.

nother way to put itand here lies the legacy of Keynesis that a free society is an

nterplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the

asis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health,

oss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in

he form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a

ubstantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is

o serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty

ostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking

lace. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent

onservativeeconomist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead,

nd even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber

ncluded." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave

s most alone.

hanks in no small part to that silence, we have passed through the looking glass. Large-

cale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now

fficiallypart of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly

nd explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian" right moves to take the

sks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely

nto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.

Correction, June 20, 2011:Correction, June 20, 2011: The article originally misspelled Warren Buffett's surname.

Correction, June 24, 2011:Correction, June 24, 2011: The article originally stated that Keynes wrote his line critical

f Hayek in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom.

Robert Nozick, Father of Libertarianism: Even He Gave Up on the Movement He Inspired.

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