PURE LIBERTARIANISM….Should the U.S. government bail out the auto industry? Arnold Kling comments:
This is an example where pure libertarianism gets you quickly to the right answer. Lose the “we,” and instead ask, would I undertake this policy myself? That is, would I lend money to the auto makers? If the answer is that I wouldn’t, then the implication is that “we” shouldn’t.
The same reasoning applies to giving money to financial firms. I wouldn’t, therefore we shouldn’t.
Picture everyone in Congress who voted for TARP standing on a street corner in a Santa suit, ringing a bell, and asking for donations to pay for the rescues of AIG, Citigroup, and so forth. In a libertarian society, that is what they would have to do in order to fund the bailouts.
If that image doesn’t move you in a libertarian direction, then nothing will.
Well, then, I guess nothing will. Because this sure doesn’t do anything to persuade me.
As it happens, I’m not entirely convinced that Detroit ought to be bailed out. At the moment, I’m probably more in the “prepackaged bankruptcy” camp. Still, the whole point of government is that it does things for us collectively that we can’t (or wouldn’t) do individually. After all, if congressmen stood on corners begging for donations to the Pentagon they probably wouldn’t raise enough to fund a single F-22, but that doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t fund the Pentagon. Ditto for roads, courts, police, Social Security, unemployment insurance, foreign embassies, and national parks. The arch-angelic among us excepted, none of us would contribute much money to these causes unless we knew that everyone else who benefited from them was contributing too.
TARP is no different. We aren’t rescuing banks because we feel sorry for bankers (though I’ll concede that sometimes I kind of wonder about that), we’re rescuing them because we think their failure would bring the economy down around our ears and we’d just as soon avoid that. A bit of collective action on this front will help keep all of us out of a repeat of the 1930s.
Now, that might be wrong. Go ahead and make the case for inaction on its merits if that’s how you feel. But a generic claim that federal intervention is a bad idea because none of us would intervene as individuals just doesn’t hold water for anyone who isn’t already a hardcore libertarian. This is the kind of argument that hurts their cause, not the kind that helps it.
