Philosophy and consequences: Liberty and good public policy are not the same thing.

• Author: Palmer, Tom
• Position: "Libertarianism, from A to Z" - Book review

Libertarianism, from A to Z, by Jeffrey A. Miron, Basic Books, 224 pages, $24.95

The cover of Libertarianism, from A to Z, by the Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, offers to "take the reader beyond the mere surface of libertarian thought to reveal the philosophy's underlying--and compelling--logic." In fact, the book fails to reveal much underlying philosophy at all. It offers a lot of good sense in a small package, but it's really a handbook on public policy rather than a guide to libertarianism. Miron's conflation of the two raises important questions about whether liberty is a value in itself or merely a means to some other end.

Miron locates libertarians within the liberal tradition, writing that "liberalism used to be the term for the perspective now generally known as libertarianism." A short digression into the origins of liberalism and the emergence of the term libertarian may shed some light on the discussion here.

The term libertarian came to be used in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly the United States, as a replacement for the older term liberalism, which had gone into sharp decline at the end of the 19th century. The ultimate insult was the appropriation of "liberalism" by illiberal thinkers who advocated replacing plain ol' freedom with one or another sort of "higher" or "authentic" or "true" freedom, the achievement of which required using what the old liberals would have denounced as arbitrary power. As the free market economist Joseph Schumpeter later noted, "As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label."

Both liberal and libertarian are built on the root term liber, Latin for "to be free." Thus the etymology of liberalism and libertarianism direct us to a philosophy that focuses on human liberty. In the great tradition derived from the Spanish Scholastics, the English Levelers, the radical Whigs, and others, enjoying individual liberty means not being subject to the arbitrary power of others or, alternatively, not being subject to the use of force initiated by others. In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke defined an individual's freedom as "a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Persons, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own." Much discussion has since gone into the problems...