Libertarians
Libertarians bemuse me. A bit like children from Never Never Land! They are a curious artifact of the modern world – they certainly never existed before it. Generally well educated, and only infrequently wealthy, they are uniquely privileged denizens of a society rich enough in opportunity for them to make a decent place for themselves, without overburdening them with reciprocal responsibilities. They see things with a child’s pure vision, always earnest and never doubting. Life is understood as a Manichean duel between their freedom and the encroaching demands of others. Manichean duels, by definition, are zero sum games. And therein lies Libertarianism’s problem – it doesn’t deal with who we are.
We are a social species. We live in mutual interaction, and in mutual interdependence. I assert this, not philosophically, but as demonstrable fact, beyond any reasonable argument. (Can anyone adduce any substantial history, or other body of evidence, to contradict it?) It is part and parcel of the human survival strategy. Our first model for social organization was the tribe. It was universal, and lasted from the time we began to roam the savannah until the advent of large scale domesticated agriculture – tens upon tens of thousands of years. The “hand” of governance in a tribe becomes the wisdom of the ancestors, the laws and customs of the tribe - and woe to transgressors! (No time for Libertarians) Governance is instituted, beginning with our life in tribes, to secure the benefits of living in societies. (It has only been a relatively recent inspiration that governance be in consultation with and by consent of the governed, and that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” be inalienable from it.) Life, as we live it, involves a tug of war between the initiatives of individuals, and the advantages of, and desire for community – as understood by those same individuals. Human life is, therefore, a non-zero sum game - harboring win/win options - with things to be won by both individuals and the community through creative resolutions. The working out of fruitful compromises is what we need to be about. It is what we are about.
The application of non-zero sum thinking to the human condition casts a presumptive suspicion on the fundamental precept underlying Libertarianism: life understood as a win/lose contest of individual freedom maximizers. This dichotomous view is an echo of other, similarly underlying, habits of thought active in the modern world: the prevailing view of economic life as the action of individual value maximizers, and the currently popular concept of evolution as the story of the “selfish gene”. (At least, with economics the principle is understood as a simplifying assumption – although that understanding seems more frequently “honored in the breech than the observance.”)
Libertarians, indeed, recognize the usefulness in resolutions of interests between particular individuals, but begin to bridle with the intervention of mechanisms by which that process is writ large, through governance. To most of us the nature of those mechanisms is critical, but to libertarians, any such mechanism (even democracy) is suspect, and that suspicion, readily mutating into fierce resistance, has the effect of leaving their heads circling in a win/lose, zero-sum universe. This prejudice inclines them against recognizing what most humans accept as true - and see all around them as a practical reality: that premiums can and do accrue to concerns extending beyond narrow self interest - as in a concern for the whole – and we need to be open those possibilities. So zealously absorbed in the art of carefully balancing competing freedoms, libertarians miss the possibilities for art in the balance.
Government, which, in the Modern world, can as easily become a means for realizing opportunity as for blighting it, becomes the enemy, and efforts to discover creative resolutions employing the process of governance are reflexively dismissed as the work of the devil. Given to understanding government, per se, as a villain severely restricts true creative engagement with the process. Libertarianism, while useful in maintaining a high level of awareness to real dangers inherent in modern life, hardly leads to an optimal relationship with modernity.
If you would be interested in a larger discussion of non zero sum thinking I recommend: Robert Wright’s Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny. If you would be interested in further considerations of the limitations of Libertarianism, I direct you to Gary Wills’ recent book on Anti-Governmentalism, especially its closing.
8:00:42 PM 
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