Andrew Koppelman

I don't agree with everything Koppelman has to say in his many books, but in this one he hits a home run. The argument is that libertarianism has a legitimate pedigree grounded in Hayek, but that foundation has become corrupted by the extremist positions of Rothbard, Nozick, and Rand. These say that people who aren't rich are basically inferior losers, and it is wrong for the winners of society to be required to contributed from their excess (as Locke says they must) to prevent them from dying or otherwise suffering.

The transition, which is largely unnoticed by casual and trendy libertarians who know little more than the memes on social media, is captured in one of the book's closing sentences: "the standard libertarian story is that people have the right to do what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else [the NAP]. Now we are told [after COVID when they argued that infected people could not be required to wear masks or be vaccinated as that would infringe "liberty"] that they have a right of choice even if they *do* hurt or even kill other people. If this is right, then we have been very unfair to drunk drivers, who also are exercising their liberty." This criticism applies equally to the libertarian denial of climate change and its consequences. "They rail against socialism, but they resemble Stalin and Mao in their blithe willingness to accept quite a lot of death as the price of their utopia."

I doubt this book will change any minds, as most contemporary Republican libertarians, funded by Koch, are immersed not in a political philosophy but a quasi-religious ideology that allows them to target minorities and other marginalized people under the guise of being principled rather than merely racist and bigoted. But there's much to learn in these pages as to how we've reached this point.… (mere)

Libertarians have been working hard to take over not just the Republican Party, but the entire conversation. Thanks to huge money from the Koch Bros., this political philosophy has become mainstream in the USA, and nowhere else in the world. What it actually is and where it came from reveal a lot in Burning Down The House, by Andrew Koppelman, who teaches constitutional law. His research has made him pretty clearly and obviously disgusted with this hypocrisy, which is demonstrably tearing the country apart.

Libertarianism, much like other political movements, bears little resemblance today to its origins. Today’s rabid proponents are all but totally ignorant of those leftist beginnings, their logic, or how they fit in the scheme of things. They don’t know how it has changed over the decades, or how it means something completely different today as an offshoot of the extreme conservative right. All they know is property rights and personal freedoms, no matter what it costs anyone else. And as Koppelman finds himself repeating, even their leading lights clearly don’t understand property rights.

Koppelman, who calls himself a pro-capitalism leftist, gives every patron saint of libertarianism their generous time in the spotlight. From Von Mises to Hayek, Epstein, Rothbard and Nozick to Ayn Rand and Charles Koch, he stitches together their views, and points out where they run into difficulty, which is often. But like me when reviewing a conservative’s book, Koppelman hits nonsense walls everywhere he turns, as facts fall by the wayside, logic gets trampled, and personal views take precedence over consistency.

He settles on Hayek as the most rational spokesperson, quoting him throughout, and allowing him to set the stage for each chapter’s discussion of how this does not work. Those chapters cover Prosperity, Tyranny, Liberty, the Nanny State, personal rights – everything near and dear to libertarians. All of them are self-destructive, when they don’t threaten the planet itself.

They consider themselves the opposite of socialists, (whoever they are since that also spreads over a spectrum). They like to say America took a wrong turn to socialism in the Great Depression, under FDR’s horrific, endless presidency. But FDR was no socialist. His philosophy was pretty obviously welfare state capitalism, as Koppelman points out. Libertarians don’t even know who the enemy is.

Most of them are against any kind of aid, from Medicare to farm subsidies to clean water. They want to close down social security on the grounds that it loosens the bonds between parents and children who need to care for aging family members by themselves. The vast majority of Americans totally rely on their social security payments, and ending them would be an unparalleled human disaster in the country.

Koppelman does not accuse libertarians of hypocrisy over property rights. But there are some who believe people have no right to “own” land since they didn’t make it, or sell the minerals they dig up from it, and that people who jealously guard their “private property” should at least pay taxes for the privilege. Even the libertarian scholar Jack Rawls saw that, but libertarians want it all and to never have to pay anything to keep it.



Interestingly for me, Koppelman does not see libertarianism as religion. Religion has the unimpeachable advantage of belief over facts, which neatly allows for all the conflicting variations, doctrines and rules to coexist. And if nothing else in libertarianism, there are variations, doctrines and rules. No one seems to appreciate it the same way as anyone else. Libertarianism is a mess of contradictions. Everyone has their own values they assign to it, and what they say about it is definitive.

It clearly is not definitive, and if you’ve only listened to one or two libertarians, you have no idea how messy their religion really is. Like evangelicals, there is no argument, but everyone goes their own way, from Rapturists to Trump being the Chosen One, to sects like the Moonies and their AR-15 religion or Seventh Day Adventists where only 100,000 get to go to heaven. So with libertarians, where the state should not exist at all, to the state only providing external defense forces, to the state providing some services as long as they are equal for all and don’t require personal taxation, and on and on. Koppelman asks: “Would we be really be freer without roads, bridges, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, police, firefighters, environmental protection?” A better question might be: how long would that last?

The Get Off My Property crowd are all about personal freedoms. Any direction given to them at all is an infringement of their personal freedoms. They firmly believe that anything they work at is their personal property and no one can have any say in it. That even includes the children they make. Their children are their personal property. They do not have to feed or clothe them or educate them if they don’t want to. And they certainly don’t have to vaccinate them against constant flow of plagues, even if they infect others. Incest is totally permitted in this scenario, and should not be mentioned in any law at all. Incest is a personal freedom over one’s private property. Personal property is beyond the reach of any law for libertarians. That goes double for wives.

Along the same lines, there should be no drug laws at all. Anyone can take whatever they want, and if it kills them, that’s their “choice”. But libertarians never consider how many people they take down with them, as they drive drunk, or decide to take their guns to the mall. Aren’t they infringing on other people’s personal freedoms? Wouldn’t alcohol and drug safety laws mitigate some of that risk? Not to libertarians.

No, the government should have no say in what Big Pharma makes and sells, and nothing should be done about cleanliness, sloppiness, impurities, fake ingredients or fraudulent marketing claims. And so with the whole economy. Everyone is on their own in libertarian societies, which as Koppleman points out cannot exist: “It is an infantile fantasy of godlike self-sufficiency. People in fact cannot be free in isolation. There can be no freedom without institutions. Structures of responsible regulation, and nonmarket transfers of income and wealth, are necessary preconditions of liberty.”

Everything in libertarian heaven is private property and private services. The courts and the police are private companies. Pay them often or you might be very sorry some day. (The book opens with the Cranick house burning down unhindered as firefighters watered the neighbors’ houses to prevent them burning too. Cranick failed to pay the fee that year, so no fire protection for them.) Those unable to pay their own way because of illness or disabilities or birth defects would simply be abandoned because there is no room for “moochers”. This is the kind of freedom libertarians are anxious to implement in the USA.

Ayn Rand gets special treatment in the book. She is by far the most famous of the libertarians, but also the least scholarly and the most superficial. She is all about forcefully taking liberties, to the point where Koppelman says: “Religious traditionalists don’t get to tell us what our fundamental purposes are. Neither does Rand.” She is full of “undefended assumptions and circular arguments.” A self-proclaimed poster child for libertarianism, she boasted that she started with nothing and made it entirely on her own, totally ignoring the Chicago family that took her in as an unconnected Russian immigrant and helped her get established. She never paid them back when her millions came in from her books and films, and she wrote them out of her history altogether. Hayek told Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: (that you the people) are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” In return, Rand regarded Hayek as “an ass, with no conception of a free society at all.” And these are the two leading lights of the movement.

Ultimately, Koppelman finds himself pleading: “It is educational malpractice to require students to read her prose as if it were an example of serious philosophy.”

He reserves a special place for environmental issues and therefore Charles Koch, who singlehandedly kept the federal government from enacting meaningful global warming laws for decades – until now. Koch has used his billions to force the majority of Republican candidates to sign no climate law pledges, and if they refuse, to pack their meetings with rabid screamers and have them primaried out of office.

Of the anti-environmentalists, Koppelman says: “The most important of these bandits is the fossil fuel industry, which has deployed libertarian language to make the Republican Party the only major political party in the world that denies climate change science. This license to profit by hurting people and destroying their property betrays the most basic commitments of even Randian libertarianism.” How can libertarians allow private property to be so wantonly damaged? Just another contradiction in an incoherent philosophy.

Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has been actively fighting virtually anything that might benefit Americans, even stopping public transit projects and road and bridge repairs. All these things should be privately owned and funded – or not undertaken at all, they say.

Koch has been drumming the anti-environmental message so long, it has become a mindless cult: “The libertarians who embrace it, thinking that they are thereby promoting freedom, are useful idiots, like the idealistic leftists of the 1930s whose hatred of poverty and racism led them to embrace Stalin. John Galt is a sap.”

Koppelman cites David Boaz, vice president of the (Koch-founded) Cato Institute, summarizing the differences: “Conservatives want to be your daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do. Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you as an adult.” That however is not just self-serving but quite untrue. Libertarians don’t want anything to do with you at all, in any way. Empathy is not a libertarian trait.

The book is a comprehensive work of political philosophy - not politics. It is an intellectual examination of what people explain about their own positions inside that philosophy. Their experts are damned by their own scholarship, the crazies hung out to dry. It is a pleasure to read: thorough, detailed and uncompromising.

Ultimately the conclusion to Burning Down The House must be that libertarianism is the male white supremacy patriarchy fantasy to end all. The USA under libertarians would make Mad Max look like Father Knows Best.

David Wineberg… (mere)

A sincere if flawed attempt to address a serious emerging problem, from a exceptional scholar and advocate. If one looks only at this final suggestion as to a defensible compromise between the rights of gay persons to enter the public square without discrimination, and for sincere religious believers to ply their trade without compromising their principles, Koppelman comes off as reasonable: Businesses can violate antidiscrimination laws only if they have posted signs and other notices that they will not serve gay persons. That policy protects gays from the shock of exclusion from business that have presented themselves as open to the public, but does risk making antigay discrimination more visible and thus unexceptional. Businesses on the other hand are able to preserve their personal beliefs but risk public animosity from such open bigotry, perhaps to the point of losing enough customers that they must close the shop. He similarly fails to adequately identify “religion”, instead conflating it with churches.
Both gain, and both lose, and thus on the whole this seems generally tolerable.

Getting to this point, however, Koppelman expresses some troubling premises that are disappointing from someone who is generally thought of as an advocate of civil rights of gays. First, he states repeatedly that bakers and such should not be forced to “participate” in same-sex weddings, without unpacking what constitutes “participation.” By this reading, the store that rents the tux has participated, as has the rented limo. This seems a rather broad and vague standard to trigger constitutional concern.

But more troubling is the fact that Koppelman, as a straight man, seems willing to deem acceptable a greater amount of suffering by gay individuals than a member of the community probably would. Religious discrimination is a problem only if it exceeds some unspecified amount; gays should be prepared to take some as a matter of course because, well, that’s just what religions do. He is in fact far more concerned about protecting religious bakers and florists than gay customers, a stance understandable in that because he has himself never been the target of discrimination he doesn’t really understand what it does to the impacted person. He speaks in the abstract, but he doesn’t really understand. It is, in any event, disheartening to see him feel more empathy for the discriminating business than for the victim of discrimination.

Much of this makes little appearance in the final suggestion, and for that reason it can be entertained. To the extent, however, that the buildup to the conclusion is actually necessary to reach that end, then it too must fall.… (mere)