“But again if we follow that definition of liberty strictly and solely we end up in absurdity. We end up with the thesis that the beggar is as free to eat caviar and drink champagne as the millionaire! ”

Disagree. You’re making the mistake Berlin skewered in his Two Concepts of Liberty, which is to call one thing – equality – another thing – i.e. liberty. You seem to be arguing (” The strict libertarian definition of liberty does indeed make the left totalitarian- because any concern with any other value except liberty will lead to action which retards the growth of liberty”) that those who insist on the negative definition of liberty must also always value it above all other considerations. I appreciate that ‘right-libertarians’ often argue like this – but they are an eccentric minority. Practically everyone else understands that liberty is not absolute and can be and is limited in the interests of equality, justice, welfare, or whatever. The key thing, as Berlin said, was not to make the mistake of calling one thing another thing. Beecause therein lies the path to the sort of confusion we’ve seen on this space already with people seriously arguing that things like forcing 16-18 year olds to stay on in education or banning smoking are ‘liberal’ measures.

“The strict libertarian definition of liberty does indeed make the left totalitarian- because any concern with any other value except liberty will lead to action which retards the growth of liberty.”

It does not *make* the Left totalitarian — many libs, even loony minarchists such as myself, accept that there are tradeoffs, and some are worth making a trade-off for. However, given human nature, the ability to coerce people to behave as you would wish in one way does tend to lead to the desire to impose in another way and it escalates, sometimes beyond one’s control.

Let’s take the Welfare State in general and the Health Service in particular. Some people might argue that a state provided health service, free at the point of use was a good thing to do, and worth the trade-off against the loss of property (liberty).

However, it is because the state now controls the provision of Health that it now feels that it can control the personal actions — smoking, diet, etc. — of those who must use the Health Service because the state either sees itself as having to pay for the lifestyles of the unhealthy, or it sees itself as holding money in trust for taxpayers. Effectively, all citizens are now in hock to the state and must therefore comply with it.

“For the straightforward libertarian answer is that only the state can coerce, but that is obviously nonsense.”

No matter how bad your company, you *can* leave and find another job. It may not be easy but you *are* free to do so. Only the state can *lawfully* remove your liberty. No private company can and only anarcho-libertarians seriously argue that private companies should run criminal justice and be able to imprison you (and I’ve never met one of those).

DK

“However, it is because the state now controls the provision of Health that it now feels that it can control the personal actions — smoking, diet, etc. — of those who must use the Health Service because the state either sees itself as having to pay for the lifestyles of the unhealthy, or it sees itself as holding money in trust for taxpayers. Effectively, all citizens are now in hock to the state and must therefore comply with it.”

So how do you account for the fact that the smoking ban was imported from the Land of the Free where they have no National Health Service?

>there are parts of the left which are totalitarian in the UK today- very minor parts like the communist and trotskyite parties of the far left

I think the Trots, quite rightly, would dispute this. They are many things, including ‘wrong’, but ‘totalitarian’ isn’t one of them.

The “left” is by no mean necessarily totalitarian, indeed the left used to be, as a rule, libertarian in the sense that it pushed for equality before the law, the equal rights of participation of all in public life and free markets.

It is only that many of the preoccupations of the modern left tend to lead it toward totalitarian doctrines. For example, the need not only to abolish poverty itself but also relative poverty which implies, rather arbitrarily, that a society is unjust by definition if some of its members live on less than two thirds the median income, no matter what the actual material situation of the individuals living below that drawn line. It is a patterned or planned distribution of wealth. And the plan is quite noble when it is taken in isolation from the coercive activities that are required to enforce it.

The problem with such a definition is that it ignores individual choice. Some people may make decisions that place them below this poverty line but if you say it is unjust for them to remain at the poverty line, no matter what their choices, then you are soon going to start making indefinite demands on the rest of society. The problem spirals because people, in the implicit knowledge that no matter what choices they make they will be compensated, have no personal incentive to make better decisions in the future.

Faced with this, a government has no choice but to start cutting down on the choices that people have which has frustrated the creation of this patterned distribution.

In the UK, this is the case most of all in health care, where a theoretical planned distribution of equal access to health care has meant that people are now aware of the costs of having an unhealthy lifestyle. Inequalities develop which have to be managed and the demand for health care constantly increases. In order to combat them, the personal habits of individuals becomes an issue for the state and hence the recent attempt to regulate food, drinking and smoking. It is at this point where the left’s demand for equality begins to infringe on the freedom of the individual.

It is not redistribution of wealth itself that libertarians are necessarily opposed to. Milton Friedman, a libertarian economist, endorsed many mechanisms for redistribution, including through free independent education for all and through a citizens basic income. Libertarianism is by no means incompatible with a safety net for all in society.

But patterned distribution of wealth, the model behind the modern welfare state and a barely ever challenged paradigm of social justice on the left, that aims at equality or one of its proxies (i.e. abolishing relative poverty), is bound to fail and necessarily comes to impact on individual liberty. And when it is the government’s business what you eat, drink and whether you smoke or not, that is the road to serfdom.

“So how do you account for the fact that the smoking ban was imported from the Land of the Free where they have no National Health Service?”

Just because the health system in the various states in the US don’t call themselves by NHS, does not mean they are not heavily regulated by their particular brand of state/corporatism. Corporations are often compelled to bare the cost of their employees health plans which means they have an interest in using state power to regulate their behaviour, and getting the state to pay for more of it.

Libertarians do not consider the US to be the “Land of the Free” (although in theory, their constitution comes close). Consider that the presidential candidate with the most radical programme is the libertarian republican, Ron Paul.

While it’s fun debating the extreme “logical” conclusions of something, and many theorists spend their entire lives doing this, it’s not always useful.
True, the extreme conclusion of socialism is totalitarian, but the extreme conclusion of liberty is a nightmare.
So, the answer is “somewhere in between”. This is why I get uppity about being called “authoritarian” sometimes – there are things where it is not best, for the whole, for people to have absolute freedom.
Citizens should have as close to absolute freedom as is possible without letting the underprivileged get trampled. A democratic system of checks and balances should ensure that any checks on freedom are not absolute, and are subject to change.
As inequality has grown since the “socialist-ish” corporatism system was abandoned, you might conclude there are areas of life where liberty is now too unfettered to be a good thing.
That does not mean looking back to some never-was-socialist-utopia, but looking for new ways to solve what is a real problem. If that means some state coercion, perhaps that’s not a bad, or backward, thing.
We need not take commentary from certain people about “politburos” etc seriously, as they are just childish (and grossly misleading).

Is it helpful to make a distinction between terminal values (improved welfare for the worst-off) and instrumental values (market mechanisms or state intervention) when talking about what it means to be on the left and whether it leads to totalitarianism?

See here for a perhaps off-puttinglly technical yet potentially still instructive discussion of instrumental and terminal values.

You may define being on the left as a disproportionate concern for the welfare of the poor and powerless (a terminal value), but there are many potential ways (policies etc.) of addressing that concern (which you can think of as instrumental values), some of which may lead to totalitarianism and others not. It is possible (although I wonder how many on this site will be prepared to credit it) to have a genuine disproportionate concern for the welfare of the worst-off, and yet believe that policies usually thought of as right wing are the best ways to achieve that end. There’s no necessary conflict between being on the left in this sense, and liberty.

Or you may define being on the left as having to do with particular set of policies (here filling the role of instrumental values), which you hope will achieve your aim of improved welfare (terminal value). Broadly speaking, if you think of being on the left as believing the state ought to figure out what’s best and intervene to achieve that, perhaps correcting ‘market failures’, and if you then combine that with a jaundiced (realistic?) view of what that’s likely to mean in practice, the road to totalitarianism is perhaps more obvious.

Or perhaps being on the left means valuing the welfare of the worst-off over other possible ends (such as liberty) in which case when the two come into conflict, being on the left means sacrificing liberty.

Then again, while I can see the argument that prioritizing equality of outcome will entail some loss of liberty, I don’t see there’s necessarily a slippery slope all the way to totalitarianism. After all, we can think of many countries with what we’d call left-wing administrations that also seem to keep themselves safely on the right side of totalitarian.

“but the extreme conclusion of liberty is a nightmare.”

Not really: a kibbutz is one possible conclusion of liberty. The point of liberty is that it has no set ends and that people have a chance to avoid nightmares. People can choose whatever living and communal arrangements they like so long as they are compatible with other people’s choices. People don’t have to take part in a market system so long as the market is not suppressed coercively and is allowed to do its thing when it is more effective than anything else. A libertarian isn’t going to ask that everyone treat friendship or love as being in a market.

I think many on the left tend to extrapolate from some of the disastrous consequences of our current corporate-capitalist model (that they see as the opposite of the welfare state model) when trying to imagine libertarianism. They do not realise that liberty involve simultaneously a dramatic reduction in the rights of corporations (which are artificial legal entities that are granted status only by a state).

Is the Left Totalitarian?

Hmmm……..Do Bears defecate in the Woods?????

“The issue therefore is whether economic aid transferred by collective consent from the top of the socio-economic pyramid to the bottom is totalitarian.”

That isn’t what I was arguing (thanks for the link). The issue for me is rather whether or not there are valid or even necessary limits to the scope of the State. If not, then the *totality* of each person in the country is claimed by the State, and this is totalitarianism (following on from the distinction made in the 1970s by Kirkpatrick between authoritarianism and totalitarianism).

Therefore, if a person claims that the State has *any* role at all in the non-coercive and consensual sexual activities of adults, that person has ticked a box in the ‘totalitarian’ column of the checklist. The nature and extent of that claimed role is a detail. And so on. The forthcoming legislation about types of pronography (filter evasion, not typo) ticks this box.

I have a feeling that a lot of people who genuinely are totalitarian, however nice and well-intentioned they are, just dislike the sound of the word. ‘No,’ they protest. ‘I’m Liberal because I want to help people!’

“Corporations are often compelled to bare the cost of their employees health plans which means they have an interest in using state power to regulate their behaviour, and getting the state to pay for more of it.”

Employers are involved in their employees’ health plans in a number of countries but it hasn’t yeilded the result that you suggest it has in the United States. My point, which this illustrates, is that the purported relationship between a state-provided health care system and illiberal measures such as smoking bans isn’t supported by the evidence.

Both left-wing and right-wing states have been totalitarian. Many left-wing thinkers are libertarian. However, the fundamental issue is that the much of the modern right wing tends to believe that you know best what is good for you and that much of the modern left wing tends to believe that it knows what is good for you and only it knows what is best for everyone.

Add the endemic power-accruing tendencies of the political (as opposed to philosophical) classes of either viewpoint – especially the successful ones – and you get, if not yet totalitarianism, nanny-state-ism. And that is the start of a slippery slope.

oh sorry Gracchi I see you deal with most of the points I raise, albeit in different terms. Yes I think you make a good point. Perhaps another way of putting “Part of being leftwing therefore is an attempt to relieve the implausibilities contained within libertarian thinking on liberty” is that being left wing (might – ought to) entail negotiating a position of the trade-off between equality and (Berlin’s) liberty in order to deliver a more complete notion of liberty, a blend of negative and positive liberty.

(OK, as I understand it, Berlin would say that positive liberty is not liberty at all, but I still think there’s something in the notion of positive liberty even if we really need to invent another word for it – ‘equality’ doesn’t do it because we could all be equal in our inability to do something whereas positive liberty is about being able to do things )

I ought to read Berlin.

Nick (post 5): “where a theoretical planned distribution of equal access to health care has meant that people are now aware of the costs of having an unhealthy lifestyle.”

Do you mean ‘not aware’?

The rest of your post gets to the point in a way I tend to agree with. Of course the demand for healthcare is not equal from one individual to the next, and lifestyle factors including drinking and smoking play a part in this.

But isn’t that what our heavy taxation on alcohol and tobacco is for? I cannot believe that the current Government’s ‘anti-vice’ obsession is really all about healthcare costs rather than being symptomatic of a kind of paternalistic control-freakery that is evident also in areas that have nothing to do with health, such as the growing database state.

“now aware” was a typo. I meant “not aware”.

I suppose it is true that there is not such a direct link between states trying to enforce patterned distribution of health care, wealth, or education and the need a state perceives to regulate people’s lives as I suggested.

You can have states that try to do both, one or the other. There are plenty non-egalitarian models that still require regulation for other reasons (often religious, for example). So I suppose the point is that managed patterned distributions of resources do not achieve what they set out to do. Having found that they do not work and the present situation is unsatisfactory, a government may decide to try to regulate other things instead which it sees as being good for people. So these two sorts of policy drives can be linked but do not have to be. Nor are they necessarily causally related.

I’d like to see the anti-authoritarian and less statist parts of the left better represented in the political mainstream. The assumption that it is doomed to fail (going back at least as far a Marx) doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny; production increased in anarchist Catalonia, self-organising Free Software projects are able to compete with the corporations. Too often the left concentrates too much on the state as the means redistributing power and forgets about the unions and co-operative movement (who after all founded the Labour Party). For example, if you consider yourself both liberal and on the left, workplace democracy seems to me over-determined, a no-brainer, but I suspect it is considered a fringe idea.

The difference between an authoritarian employer and an authoritarian state is that an individual can unilaterally change employer.
I don’t agree with your assertion that the state only has a distant influence either. I can’t light a fag in my local pub because of the state, can’t put my rubbish in the bin because of it, can’t get a doctors appointment because of it, have to put a booster seat in my car etc etc the state is there in the minutiae of peoples every day lives, gnawing away at them. I don’t care what the intent is, it’s oppresive and unhealthy.

Even more insiduoulsy, behaviour is increasingly controlled through social, rather than stste coersion, and the manipulation of norms, not necessarily accompanied by legal sanction (what many call political correctness). This is where nu lab went wrong for me, it made the personal, social.

@Matt Munroe: In most cases a citizen can, in theory, emigrate and renounce their citizenship (even if it makes them stateless). This is rarely practical, but neither is leaving an abusive employer in many cases.

yep, in the same way that jews could leave Germany…….

Well if your talking about those sorts of extremes then your original point can be rebutted with “The same way African slaves could unilaterally change employer.”

The point is why should I have to leave the country because I don’t like the government, when I am effectively paying them to represent me ? You can’t conflate employer and state (unless, like 30% of the UK workforce they literally are one and the same).

You shouldn’t have to leave the country, but why should someone have to make themself destitute to escape the arbitrary authority of an employer, who they are effectively paying for with their labour. Ideally, they would be able to remove both the government and the employer through democratic means.

“You shouldn’t have to leave the country, but why should someone have to make themself destitute to escape the arbitrary authority of an employer, who they are effectively paying for with their labour. Ideally, they would be able to remove both the government and the employer through democratic means.”

Employees provide their labour voluntarily as well so it is a false parallel you are drawing there. In addition, employers have to compete for staff whereas states can draw on the resources of everyone in the economy. If conditions provided by an employer are so bad, then it is perfectly possible to live self-employed or to set up your own company or co-operative to compete for staff yourself.

But you cannot live under an authoritarian state as a self-owning citizen. This is where the difference lies: you have an absolute right of exit from employment. This works in practice too especially in a functioning free market where there are plenty of other options.

I don’t believe that the parallel between an employer and a state is perfect. Indeed with a fully functioning free market and assuming bosses are prevented from using violence I’ll concede it breaks down completely. But there are cases where the disanalogies become rather theoretical: a pit community with 90% working for one employer, or an third world garment factory were workers face physical intimidation if they try to leave for another job.

Well libertarianism precludes violence committed both by employers and employees. If either are unhappy with their arrangement, they should part company.

The third world factory example is certainly a true example of injustice but that is because there the employer starts to take on some of the usual functions of the state. As for the pit community, it really depends on whether employees have a right to leave the community if they don’t like the working conditions. Of course, there isn’t anything to stop a pit community from being setup on anarchist or democratic or communal lines but it is perfectly legitimate for a commercial company as well. So long as whatever arrangements are there are non-coercive (people have a right to leave without losing their rightfully held possessions), any form is compatible with individual liberty.

Matt Munro

I don’t agree with your assertion that the state only has a distant influence either. I… can’t put my rubbish in the bin because of it,can’t get a doctors appointment because of it

You can put your rubbish in your bin; not sure who would collect it though, or where your bin will have appeared from. You could wait for a private sector firm to volunteer; perhaps they’ve been crowded out? And there are private doctors if you need an appointment; if you can afford it, of course.

Lazily equating “the left” with totalitarianism is like me lazily equating “the right” with fascism. It misses out all the subtleties in-between.
The libertarian dream that if only the state would leave us alone, everything would be OK is a nonsense. Sometimes we need a push.

Those left-wing groups like the Trots and Commies aren’t “totalitarian”. They’re bureaucratic, controlling, etc. but not totalitarian. To describe them as such is to water down the meaning of the word.

“The libertarian dream that if only the state would leave us alone, everything would be OK is a nonsense. Sometimes we need a push.”

From who though? Who gets to do the “pushing” and how do we decide who they are? Appointed “experts” or democratic populists?

There is nothing in a libertarian society to stop people from using freedom of speech and expression to suggest new ideas and suggest new or superior moral codes or ways of doing business. The non-coercion principle just means that everyone has a right to review these ideas for themselves and opt out of them if it doesn’t work for them.

Quinn, no issue with that, give me back all the tax that I’ve paid for rubbish collection and the NHS and I’ll make my own arrangements.