Icelanders Visit Cato and D.C.

I recently had the pleasure of welcoming a group of Icelandic libertarians involved in the youth group of the Independence Party to the Cato Institute, to discuss with them what we do at Cato to advance liberty and what they are doing to advance liberty in their own country. One of the participants, StefÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?Â¡n FriÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?Â°rik StefÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?Â¡nsson, wrote up a nice blog entry [in Icelandic] on their visit. It even links to a speech on liberty and limited government that I gave at the Cato Institute in 2002.

I should add that I have greatly enjoyed visiting Iceland. Not only is the country remarkably beautiful, but the culture is endlessly fascinating. For a good introduction to the richness of Icelandic literature, read Njalssaga and then Jesse Byock’s brilliant Viking Age Iceland and William Ian Miller’s similarly brilliant Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Then take a visit to Iceland and make a pilgrimage to one of the most beautiful places on earth, one that has a special relevance to the history of freedom and limited government, Ã?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?Â¾ingvellir, where the AlÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?Â¾ing first met in the year 930.

Tom G. Palmer October 24, 2004

Well, I didn’t have personal conversations with all of them, but I did with a few and they identified themselves as libertarians, bemoaned the problem of dealing with social conservative scolds (armed with legislative power) in the Althing and in their own party, and sounded pretty libertarian to me. Perhaps it’s a matter of degree. All of them seemed at least to be strongly liberal in the classical sense.

Whether one is considered a libertarian or not is, obviously, a matter of definition. If libertarianism is a radical version of classical liberalism, then how radical a liberal is might determine whether he or she qualifies as a libertarian. (But then, does the radicalism refer to the end point desired, or the means taken to reach it, or the strategy, or the willingness to compromise or make tradeoffs in pursuit of greater liberty or avoidance of increased coercion, or what?) If libertarian is the name taken by classical liberals generally after the word liberalism was taken over by statists with a bent for social engineering, then classical liberals qualify as libertarians, and we would then distinguish between more or less “hard core” or “extreme” versions of libertarianism. What liberals/libertarians share in common is, at lest, the presumption of liberty, i.e., the presumption that it is the exercise of force that must be justified, whereas exercises of liberty do not require such specification or justification. In other words, at the base of the legal system of a free society what is specified is not what one may do (freedoms), but what one may not (unfreedoms).

Thus, I would consider someone who wanted to ban the National Socialist Party in Germany after the Second World War a libertarian, because there were good reasons for forbidding the display of Hitler’s image and NSDAP insignia. It would be an exercise of coercion, but an exercise of coercion that would be justified as necessary to prevent a criminal gang from coming back to power and resuming their policies of genocide and oppression. Some (generally those who haven’t thought about the matter very hard, I think) would argue that any exercise of coercion against people who merely might gain power and violate rights would be itself unlibertarian. They would start with the presumption of liberty, but then not allow anything to rebut it. A presumption would be, in that view, irrebuttable. But a likely outcome of such an irrebuttable presumption would be the resumption of tyranny and mass murder, which would make libertarianism self-defeating. Hence, my view is that there is a presumption of liberty, but that it is rebuttable. I think that that’s enough to qualify someone as a libertarian, although it might have to be supplemented with empirical evidence about the likelihood that such restrictions would be necessary or effective and with theories and evidence regarding the abilities of free persons to generate social order, lawfulness, and so forth. But that’s what investigation of the world is all about, anyway.

2 Responses to “Icelanders Visit Cato and D.C.”

Icelander October 24, 2004
Those young conservatives are hardly libertarian.

October 24, 2004 at 9:19 pm
Tom G. Palmer October 24, 2004
Well, I didn’t have personal conversations with all of them, but I did with a few and they identified themselves as libertarians, bemoaned the problem of dealing with social conservative scolds (armed with legislative power) in the Althing and in their own party, and sounded pretty libertarian to me. Perhaps it’s a matter of degree. All of them seemed at least to be strongly liberal in the classical sense.
Whether one is considered a libertarian or not is, obviously, a matter of definition. If libertarianism is a radical version of classical liberalism, then how radical a liberal is might determine whether he or she qualifies as a libertarian. (But then, does the radicalism refer to the end point desired, or the means taken to reach it, or the strategy, or the willingness to compromise or make tradeoffs in pursuit of greater liberty or avoidance of increased coercion, or what?) If libertarian is the name taken by classical liberals generally after the word liberalism was taken over by statists with a bent for social engineering, then classical liberals qualify as libertarians, and we would then distinguish between more or less “hard core” or “extreme” versions of libertarianism. What liberals/libertarians share in common is, at lest, the presumption of liberty, i.e., the presumption that it is the exercise of force that must be justified, whereas exercises of liberty do not require such specification or justification. In other words, at the base of the legal system of a free society what is specified is not what one may do (freedoms), but what one may not (unfreedoms).
Thus, I would consider someone who wanted to ban the National Socialist Party in Germany after the Second World War a libertarian, because there were good reasons for forbidding the display of Hitler’s image and NSDAP insignia. It would be an exercise of coercion, but an exercise of coercion that would be justified as necessary to prevent a criminal gang from coming back to power and resuming their policies of genocide and oppression. Some (generally those who haven’t thought about the matter very hard, I think) would argue that any exercise of coercion against people who merely might gain power and violate rights would be itself unlibertarian. They would start with the presumption of liberty, but then not allow anything to rebut it. A presumption would be, in that view, irrebuttable. But a likely outcome of such an irrebuttable presumption would be the resumption of tyranny and mass murder, which would make libertarianism self-defeating. Hence, my view is that there is a presumption of liberty, but that it is rebuttable. I think that that’s enough to qualify someone as a libertarian, although it might have to be supplemented with empirical evidence about the likelihood that such restrictions would be necessary or effective and with theories and evidence regarding the abilities of free persons to generate social order, lawfulness, and so forth. But that’s what investigation of the world is all about, anyway.

October 24, 2004 at 9:50 pm