Austin Bramwell
claims that it is difficult to get an answer from
libertarians about the current financial crisis. Why?
"Libertarianism has two faces," he writes, "which I call the
comic and the tragic."One says that markets are flourishing and
personal emancipation is proceeding apace, so every day in every
way things are getting better and better. The other sees the dead
hand of the state crushing individual freedoms with rapid,
stultifying government growth.
Bramwell concludes that libertarians "react to circumstances as
the mood dictates." Maybe. I'm sure you could find specific
libertarians and conservative fellow travelers of libertarianism
who, say, in the span of the 1990s went from bemoaning a
Clintonian era of big government -- from Hillarycare to Ruby
Ridge -- and closed the decade by praising the fantastic growth
and innovation of the markets during the Internet-boom economy. I
know in over a decade of column-writing, I've had my bouts of
triumphalism and pessimism. But for the most part we are talking
about distinctly different people here, even if they would all
describe themselves as libertarians.
There is almost no overlap between the people who see agree with
Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch that this is a libertarian
moment and the Rothbardians who believe we
never should have junked the Articles of Confederation. Or the
libertarians who cheered the Internet boom of the 1990s as a
victory of markets over the state and the exponents of Austrian
economics who saw that boom as an illusory product of the Federal
Reserve's loose monetary policies and artificially low interest
rates. Thomas Woods, whose current book on the financial meltdown
I reviewed
this week in the Washington Times, doesn't look back
fondly on the dot-com era.
Saying that these different camps are inconsistent is like
complaining that conservatism is contradictory because of a lack
of commonality between the Weekly Standard and
Commentary on the one hand and the American
Conservative and Chronicles on the other.
