Big Government Libertarianism

Something odd is happening. Support for a non-defense discretionary spending hike is coming from some surprising quarters.

Big-government liberalism is nothing new; the time when liberalism was associated with laissez-faire economics is long past. In recent years, as Republicans have gained a taste for drunken-sailor spending habits, we've had to contend with big-government conservatism. But now comes the strangest beast of them all: big-government libertarianism.

Big Government Libertarianism

The title is, of course, an oxymoron. As the author points out, Frist and others have discovered that it is effective to use the language of libertarianism to cloak plans for additional spending.

Government spending has passed the point of no return. Now it's just a matter of planning to survive the inevitable fiscal implosion.

I think the "big-government libertarian" argument would be something like this:

Imagine a world in which government subsidizes all of Wal-Mart's competitors heavily. I'm talking billions of dollars to each. No money goes to Wal-Mart because a lot of legislators have a grudge against it. Eventually, Wal-Mart gets run out of business as a result. Wal-Mart would have thrived in a purely free market environment, but government interference in its competitors drove Wal-Mart out of business, even though it didn't mess directly with Wal-Mart at all. If the government had given the same level of funding to Wal-Mart that it gave to its competitors, overall spending would be greater, but the distortionary effect on the market would have been much less because the stores all would have been treated equally under the law, enabling something like fair competition.

Wal-Mart in the example is stem cell research in reality. Because government pours so much money into health science, the market gets rigged so that you pretty much have to go to where the government funding is (unless you're making some drug or machine that will be profitable in the short term). The "big-government libertarian" would correctly point out that stem cell research is getting screwed because of a grudge against it in Congress -- in this case a serious ethical concern, but still an ethical concern that wouldn't have prevented it from arising in the free market without government interference.

I'm not so sure that I agree 100% with that argument, but it doesn't seem like such an insane or nakedly hypocritical position to hold.

On top of that, you'll find libertarians who think there are legitimate market failures for some types of science, and that government funding of science is inherently different in that respect from throwing money at social problems (and therefore less odious).

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