Letters to the Editor
Los Angeles Times
January 12, 2008
In “Libertarians’ likeable lunacy” (1/12), Michael Kinsley attacks a parody of libertarian beliefs. Unfortunately, he is embarrassingly misinformed.
Kinsley’s two core arguments are prime illustrations.
Kinsley asserts that libertarians defend our freedoms by analogy to the right to die, dismissing that as a bad analogy with the silly example of not wearing a seatbelt. But that is not what libertarians argue. Our freedoms (i.e., rights protected from others’ violations) derive from our ownership of ourselves. That self-ownership does imply the right to die, but it also implies the right to be irresponsible in Kinsley’s eyes. Unless he asserts that we don’t own ourselves, implying that someone else does, his argument proves nothing.
Kinsley then asserts that the need for “political equality” overrides people’s ownership of themselves and the fruits of their efforts. But the redistribution he desires in the name of political equality violates the equality America was founded on—equal treatment under the law, whose central purpose is defending Locke’s trinity of rights to “life, liberty and property” against aggression. Our political rights were designed to protect our equal self-ownership, but Kinsley’s assertion that we must sacrifice that equality for more “political equality” turns the logic of America’s founding upside down.
Michael Kinsley intentionally misrepresents libertarian beliefs as “likeable lunacy,” which would certainly surprise America’s founders, whose beliefs libertarians echo. And the supposed lunacy of believing we own ourselves is far less dangerous than Kinsley’s knavery in using that misrepresentation to promoting policies that further erode American’s “title” to themselves.
Gary M. Galles
Professor of Economics
Pepperdine University
