Better political labels than the typical one-dimensional spectrum
[Written by Donald Boudreaux for The Freemen, August 1997]
Categorizing a political position according to some simple
left-right scale of values leaves something to be desired. Political
views cover such a wide variety of issues that it is impossible to
describe adequately any one person merely by identifying where he sits
on a lone horizontal line.
Use of the single left-right scale makes impossible a satisfactory
description of libertarian (and classical- liberal) attitudes toward
government. Libertarians oppose not only government direction of
economic affairs, but also government meddling in the personal lives of
peaceful people. Does this opposition make libertarians “rightists”
(because they promote free enterprise) or “leftists” (because they
oppose government meddling in people’s private affairs)? As a
communications tool, the left-right distinction suffers acute anemia.
Nevertheless, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the familiar
left-right—”liberal-conservative”—lingo, such use continues. One reason
for its durability is convenience. Never mind that all-impor-rant
nuances are ignored when describing someone as being, say, “to the
right of Richard Nixon” or “to the left of Lyndon Johnson. The
description takes only seconds and doesn’t tax the attention of nightly
news audiences.
Therefore, no practical good is done by lamenting the mass media’s
insistence on using a one-dimensional tool for describing political
views. A better strategy for helping to improve political discussion is
to devise a set of more descriptive terms.
There is much to be said for a suggestion offered by Professor
Richard Gamble, who teaches history at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
Richard proposes that instead of describing someone as either “left” or
“right,” or “liberal” or “conservative,” we describe him as being
either a centralist or a decentralist. This “centralist- decentralist” language would be a vast improvement over the muddled “left-right” language.
Unfortunately, “centralist-decentralist” language contains its own
potential confu-sion-namely, “decentralist” might be taken to mean
someone who is indifferent to what Clint Bolick calls “grassroots
tyranny.” Is there an even better set of labels for a one-dimensional
political spectrum? I think so: “coercivist-voluntarist.”
At one end of this spectrum are coer-civists. Coercivists believe
that all order in society must be consciously designed and implemented
by a sovereign government power. Coercivists cannot fathom how
individuals without mandates from above can ever pattern their actions
in a way that is not only orderly, but also peaceful and productive.
For the coercivist, direction by sovereign government is as necessary
for the creation of social order as the meticulous craftsmanship of a
watchmaker is necessary for the creation of a watch.
At the other end of the spectrum are voluntarists. Voluntarists
understand two important facts about society that coer-civists miss.
First, voluntarists understand that social order is inevitable without
coercive direction from the state as long as the basic rules
of private property and voluntary contracting are respected. This
inevitability of social order when such rules are observed is the great
lesson taught by Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and all of
the truly great economists through the ages.
Second, voluntarists understand that coercive social engineering by government—far from promoting social harmony—is fated to ruin
existing social order. Voluntarists grasp the truth that genuine and
productive social order is possible only when each person is free to
pursue his own goals in his own way, constrained by no political
power. Coercive political power is the enemy of social order because it
is unavoidably arbitrary—bestowing favors for reasons wholly unrelated
to the values the recipients provide to their fellow human beings. And
even if by some miracle the exercise of political power could be shorn
of its arbitrariness, it can never escape being an exercise conducted
in gross ignorance. It is a simpleton’s fantasy to imagine that all the
immense and detailed knowledge necessary for the successful central
direction of human affairs can ever be possessed by government.
Society emerges from the cooperation of hundreds of millions of
people, each acting on the basis of his own unique knowledge of
individual wants, talents, occupations, and circumstances. No
bureaucrat can know enough about software design to outperform Bill
Gates, or enough about retailing to successfully second-guess the folks
at Wal-Mart, or enough about any of the millions of different
industries to outdo people who are highly specialized in their various
trades.
The coercivist-voluntarist vocabulary is superior to the
left-right, or liberal-conservative, vocabulary at distinguishing
liberty’s friends from its foes. Support for high taxes and intrusive
government commercial regulation is a “liberal” trait. A supporter of
high taxes and regulation is also, however, properly labeled a
coercivist. But note: no less of a coercivist is the conservative who
applauds government regulation of what adults voluntarily read, view,
or ingest. Both parties believe that social order will deteriorate into
chaos unless government coercion overrides the myriad private choices
made by individuals.
Voluntarists are typically accused of endorsing complete freedom of
each individual from all restraints. This accusation is nonsense. While
they oppose heavy reliance upon coercively imposed restraints, sensible voluntarists do not oppose restraints per se.
Voluntarists, in contrast to coercivists, recognize that superior
restraints on individual behavior emerge decentrally and peaceably.
Parents restrain their children. Neighbors use both formal and informal
means to restrain each other from un-neighborly behaviors. The ability
of buyers to choose where to spend their money restrains businesses
from abusing customers.
A free society is chock-full of such decentrally and noncoercively
imposed restraints. Indeed, it is the voluntary origins of such
restraints that make them more trustworthy than coercively imposed
restraints. A voluntary restraint grows decentrally from the give and take of everyday life and is sensitive to all the costs and benefits of
both the restraint itself and of the restrained behavior. But a
coercive restraint too often is the product not of that give and take
of all affected parties but, instead, of political deals. And political
deals are notoriously biased toward the wishes of the politically
well-organized while ignoring the wishes of those unable to form
effective political coalitions. What’s more, members of the political
class often free themselves from the very restraints they foist upon
others. Coercively imposed restraints are not social restraints at all;
rather, they are arbitrary commands issued by the politically
privileged.
The true voluntarist fears nothing as much as he fears coercive power—whether exercised by those on the “left” or the “right.”
Donald Boudreaux is the former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and current Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University.
