Varieties of Libertarianism

Last weekend Judy and I spent a day in West Marin County, just north of San Francisco. This is truly a magical place, perhaps even more so than it used to be when the "Marin County Culture" was a relatively new phenomenon back in the early 1970's. (For a wonderful description of a three-day ramble through this area, complete with recommended bed and breakfasts, see this recent New York Times article.)

After crossing the Golden Gate and driving Highway One to Stinson Beach, we hiked in the Audubon Canyon Ranch, where we could see hundreds of nesting Egrets and Great Blue Herons in a wilderness preserved from freeway and suburban sprawl developers in the late 1950's and early '60's. Then we rambled around Bolinas, a bucolic old hippy community on the coast. Bolina's principal local claim to fame is the success with which its residents have persistently removed from nearby Highway One every directional road sign that CalTrans has tried to place at the intersection to identify the turnoff to Bolinas. In so doing for the past 30 odd-years, Bolinas residents have successfully prevented most people from noticing the turnoff, and thereby preserved their own isolation.

The result is that, even more than the rest of West Marin, Bolinas itself is an island both in time and in state of mind. The residents have succeeded as far as is possible in this internet age in cutting themselves off from the contemporary world, and have preserved a way of life that many aspired to in the late 1960's and early 1970's -- a way of life characterized by the so-called "new age" or "hippy" philosophy of live and let live, in "harmony with nature" and divorced from the "uptight" rat race of mainstream american consumerist culture. It is a very "liberal" philosophy, but one that is particularly antithetical to social regimentation, order, and control.

It struck me that the philosophy of West Marin and Bolinas could be called "libertarian" in the classical John Stuart Mills understanding of the term, because it was based on the theory that everyone should given as much freedom to do what they chose as possible limited only by the primary directive of "do no harm" to others. By this standard, one's freedom essentially ends at the tip of another's nose. But there is one very important caveat to this description. Unlike classical libertariansim, the libertarianism exemplified by West Marin and its residents (seen most purely in Bolinas) extends its injunction of "do no harm" to include harm to the environment and to animals, as well as to other individuals.

One could call this philosophy "soft libertarianism," to distinguish it from the stricter form of political libertarianism exemplified today by the campaigns of Ron Paul and Bob Barr -- a more "conservative" libertarianism that emphasizes economic freedom and the liberty of individuals to do anything in the free market they damn well please. This "hard" libertarianism -- whose great high priest was that queen of voodoo economics, author Ayn Rand -- sees people more as individual economic units than as members of a planetary ecosystem. In encounters with adherents of this philosophy, one commonly hears phrases such as "taxation is theft" and rants about the evils of any form of economic or environmental regulation, no matter what the salutary purpose or effect of such regulation might be for people's health, welfare and happiness.

Count me as a soft libertarian. Human beings are not simply individual automatons making individual economic decisions in a way which collectively, through the operation of the "invisible hand" of the free market, somehow result in the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead, we are highly evolved animals, seamlessly connected to the environment of the entire planet as well as to each other, whose actions for good or ill affect everything that happens in the web of life. With this understanding, we should all be free to live our lives as we choose, but within the parameters of the universal law of "do no harm."