As David Boaz amply documents below, there are many irritating features to David Leonhardt’s NYT book review of Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism. One that particularly stood out for me, however, was Leonhardt’s insinuation that libertarianism is partially to blame for the unfolding disaster in Iraq. In a paragraph intended to catalogue libertarianism’s current political difficulties, Leonhardt writes that Bush’s “free-market approach to rebuilding Iraq has proven disastrous.” Now, if there is a properly “free-market” approach to bombing, invading, and occupying countries that don’t threaten us, I’m unaware of it.
Perhaps Leonhardt is referring to Paul Bremer’s 2003 refusal to reopen state-run factories. But the line suggests a broader attempt to hang the biggest foreign policy disaster in 30 years around libertarians’ necks. Nice try. The Iraq mess is the product of an ideological joint venture between neoconservatives and liberal hawks. Libertarians, in the main, opposed it. The American Prospect’s Matt Yglesias–who’s no libertarian–understands this far better than Leonhardt. As Yglesias put it a while back:
the notion that anything even remotely resembling libertarianism could underwrite an effort to conscript huge quantities of resources from the American public and deploy them in an attempt to wholly remake the social and political order in a foreign country is too absurd to merit a rebuttal. This is an argument properly directed at egalitarian liberals, and we have reason to be asked to produce some specific arguments about why the dim prospects for succeeding at this were ex ante knowable (such arguments can, I think, be fairly easily produced) and/or why, given the opportunity costs, nation-building in Iraq was not a wise place to deploy the resources in question (this argument, I think, can be produced very easily). As long as the conversation is supposed to be proceeding on the shared basis of libertarianism, however, one hardly needs to say anything. It’s coercion, it’s planning, it’s every non-libertarian thing under the sun.
And as long as we’re passing out blame for the Iraq War, don’t forget that Leonhardt’s employer, the Grey Lady herself, deserves a large chunk.
