First post here is a link to an interesting essay by my favorite blogger Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution. Its is a month old, but still merits attention in my opinion as it very succintly describes the challenges for Libertarianism in the 21st century, where most of the old dangers of stagflation and nationalizations are no longer as prevalent, but where we’re still stuck with “big government”. Its an answer to the questions put forward by Brian Doherty in connection with his book Radicals for Capitalism: “Did Libertarianism accomplish anything?”
Tyler Cowen argues essentially that there is a tradeoff between liberty and government which cannot simply be seen as a contradition between liberty and power. In stead, in some areas advances in government leads to advances in liberty. I’m not sure I really agree, but Cowens points are interesting:
We need to recognize that some of the current threats to liberty are outside of the old categories. I worry about pandemics and natural disasters, as well as global warming and climate change more generally (it doesn’t have to be carbon-induced to be a problem). These developments are big threats to the liberty of many people in the world, although not necessarily Americans. The best answers to these problems don’t always lie on the old liberty/power spectrum in a simple way. Defining property rights in clean air, or in a regular climate, isn’t that easy and it probably cannot be done without significant state intervention of some kind or another.
Read the whole thing. Discussion thread here as well.