A Lib/Lib Alliance?

For housework entertainment, I've been Ipodding a Princeton conference the confluence (if any between libertarians and liberals. You've got three of each, plus a couple of commentators. It is uneven; a couple of the liberal profs just utter come-to-Jesus pieties about how libertarians just ought to recognize where their real home lies. Chris Hayes as the third liberal does a good job of offering an update from the trenches--turns out there actually are confirmed sightings of overlap on issues of, e.g., torture, snooping, immigration and Bushite big government predation. Still the libertarians are more fun, not least because they seem more genuinely puzzled and thereby give evidence of having thought about it more (Jacob Levy, who offered the nearest thing to a full-blown academic paper, posted his text on his own blog here).

But it's unsatisfying for one inescaable reason: the libertarians are, as Will Wilkinson of Cato suggests, pretty much ringers: all, so far as I can tell, are secularist, with indifference or downright hostility to the Republican churchy agenda. And I think they all believe in some kind of sociasl safety net--I keep hearing voices reminding us that Hayek believed in a safety net, and that Milton Friedman is the step-grandfather of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

If this is libertarianism, then as the old punchline goes, "we're only arguin' over price." We might favor, say, single payer health insurance because it achieves economies of scale. Or we might want to restrict Social Security because it is just sloshing money from one middle class bucket to another. But these are not matters of grand theory; they're details for technogeeks.

Moreover, if the panelists are indeed libertarians and they are at best a pretty rarified subset. Pop into the saloon down at the corner and it shouldn't take but a moment who find that "libertarianism" is fully consistent with the ramming of religion down other peoples' throats, and embraced by people for whom the very idea of a social safety net is enough to send beer out of the nose. The panelists might want to say that it is those guys who are not real libertarians while they themselves are the genuine article. But they're going to have to settle that issue (one hopes without broken bar stools) before they can make any progress on the left.

[Aside: in the right kind of saloon, you might even be able to win a bar bet on the issue of whether or not Hayek or Friedman favored a social safety net. Then again, merely citing chapter and verse might not do the trick.]

I will suggest a couple of further complications, more for deviltry than any serious purpose. One, these liberals and libertarians seem to believe they have found common ground on opposition to the war. Copy that, but they aren't the old ones. The paleoconservatives too, from what I understand, think that mischiveous foreign adventures are a pretty stupid idea. And two, for a moment consider Latinos, voters or illegal immigrants, for whom both sides of this debate wanted to show some respect. From what I can tell, Latino voters chart out on the issue spectrum just about the opposite of the people in this Lib/Lib alliance. These guys seeem generally comfortable with free markets (plus the proverbial safety net) and an "individualist" take on social issues--hospitable to abortin choice, gay marriage, the whole nine yards. Latinos (like the paleos?) are far more distrustful of markets in general, far less horrified at the spectre of big government, and far more retrograde on issues involving church & family.

This isn't big news; politics is always a crazy quilt. If there is any news at all, I suppose it would be (a) a lot of people from all over the spectrum are really really fed up with the incumbent and his cronies; and (b) liberals are not as entranced by government per se as perhaps they were before the Cultural Revolution. Hey, these things take time.