Stardate 20030224.1722

(Captain's log): Several people have responded to my post about my political beliefs with the same question. Paul's was typical:

Just read your piece describing your beliefs. The label that seems to come closest to your views is "libertarian", yet you didn't use that word in your piece. Is there some reason you avoid that label?

25 years as an engineer has made me "ruthlessly pragmatic" (as one reader put it) and made me deeply suspicious of anyone who proposes solutions because they fit some established ideology, rather than because they actually bring about the best result. My orientation is on consequences and results; I'm not anything like as much interested in the moral purity of the means by which they're achieved.

I find myself agreeing with a lot of people all across the political spectrum about various issues. I tend to agree with the left about abortion rights, for instance, though probably not for the same rationale. Leftists who favor this issue usually try to frame it as an issue of liberation of women; I favor abortion rights mostly because I oppose attempts by the government to impose moral behavior.

On the other hand, I disagree vehemently with the left about other things such as the use of confiscatory taxation as a way of redistributing wealth.

Equally, I agree with libertarians about a lot of issues, but I end up disagreeing with them on other things, and even when I do agree with them it's often the case that I don't agree with their reasons.

Most of them seem to be strongly dedicated to the principle of laissez faire with regards to economics, and go much further in the direction of eliminating government interference in commerce than I can accept. In this I tend to land somewhere in between the strong socialist leftist position of government central economic planning (where nearly every important economic decision is made by the state) and the libertarian position that the government should never meddle in markets at all.

I think that European business is massively overregulated, and I think that the US is somewhat overregulated but not really to the point of causing dramatic harm. But the Libertarians want to eliminate substantially all government regulation of business and commerce. That's an ideologically consistent position, certainly, but it's also one that ultimately fails in any of several ways.

Libertarians tend to oppose government regulation because it is axiomatically bad. I object to excessive government regulation because as a practical matter it stifles economic activity.

But that, in turn, means that I favor government regulation when I think it promotes healthy economic activity; libertarians tend to oppose that, too, because axiomatically all government regulation is wrong.

The Libertarian position on this and on other subjects often falters on the reality of the Tragedy of the Commons. My political opinion is that in many cases the only way to defend the commons is by government regulation, and most libertarians find that unacceptable.

But their point of view is controlled by the need to be consistent about opposing government regulation, so their attempts to come up with alternatives often end up seeming truly bizarre to me. In fact, speaking as an engineer they are "inelegant"; I would go so far as to call them "kludgey". They usually involve attempting to eliminate the commons by broadly expanding private ownership, which is at least plausible in some cases but not even remotely plausible in other cases. What their proposals would end up doing as a practical matter is to eliminate direct government regulation, and instead gain paralysis in the courts or what amounts to a kibitzer's veto on many issues as hordes of people end up using lawsuits to try to exercise their newly dispersed property rights. In yet other cases it is impractical to even try to apply the concept of dispersed private ownership.

In most cases the problem is that the libertarians making these proposals are interpreting "the commons" much too literally, and think they can eliminate the tragedy by eliminating the commons itself. They assume that the tragedy arises from common ownership and thus the tragedy can be averted by elimination of common ownership. It doesn't work that way, and all they do with their proposals is to alter how the tragedy manifests. "The commons" exists as a practical matter of situation; it has nothing to do with legal ownership, public or private, broad or concentrated, and altering who owns something doesn't magically make the commons vanish.

So there were two reasons why I didn't use the magic word "libertarian" in that posting: One was that I don't consider myself a libertarian even though I agree with libertarians about a lot of things, any more than I consider myself "leftist" just because I agree with them about many things.

The other is that a lot of Libertarians are like Objectivists or fundamentalist Christians (or Macophiles, for that matter) in that if you ever say anything even remotely negative about their view of things then you'll get flooded with mail trying to set you straight. And I've picked enough fights with zealots lately, thankyouverymuch. I didn't want to even use the word "libertarian" because doing so would stir up a nest of hornets. Which is why, for instance, I did not give a specific example above of how the Libertarian proposal would fail because I would instantly start receiving two kin