Mr. Sachs here performs the equivalent of, say, accusing someone who advocates sobriety of thereby being indifferent to other values such parental responsibility, financial prudence, and neighborliness. But just as being sober in no way precludes – and likely promotes – other values such as parental responsibility, being a libertarian in no way precludes any of the values and causes that Mr. Sachs lists. Indeed, libertarians argue that these other values and causes are best promoted by individual liberty, and that too many people who insist that achieving these other values requires the suppression of liberty are cynically seeking convenient cover for their own self-aggrandizement.
Of course, libertarians might be mistaken about liberty’s merits. But that Mr. Sachs presumes that libertarians hold cheap such values as compassion, civic responsibility, and honesty proves that what Lord Acton wrote about Robert Kemp Philp’s description of history applies perfectly to Mr. Sachs’s description of libertarianism: “It were well if he knew his subject as well as he knows his own mind about it.”
– Two quotes there from Donald J. Boudreaux (responding to this). There is his own own eloquence, and there is the Acton quote at the end of what he himself says.
How true. When non-libertarians accuse us of all manner of pathologies, it makes me wonder whether they are in fact projecting their own traits onto others. Perhaps more charitably, they believe that moral values and codes of behaviour are not things that can be rationally thought about, and are necessary for a happy life. Rather, this is the mindset that regards morality as something that is in opposition to the pursuit of a long-term, happy life and must be imposed by some sort of authority (state, church, etc).
Boudreaux’s prolixity reminds me of Henry James. That’s not intended as a compliment.
I’ve been reading Rasmussen and Uyl’s recent book, “Norms of Liberty,” which has a lot to say about morality and classical liberalism. Well worth the read for anyone interested in the relationship between libertarianism and morality.