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January 19, 1997
Leave It to the Elks By JAMES P. PINKERTON
End government aid, Charles Murray says. We've still got volunteers
What It Means
to Be a Libertarian
A Personal Interpretation.
By Charles Murray.
178 pp. New York:
Broadway Books. $28.
ne of the dilemmas of contemporary libertarianism was captured in a conversation Charles Murray had with The New Yorker after the 1996 elections. Mr. Murray was asked whom he had voted for. His heart, he responded, was with Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party candidate for President, yet he had reluctantly cast his ballot for Bob Dole. Mr. Murray must not have been alone among libertarians; Harry Browne won just over 485,000 votes in 1996 -- slightly more than half of what the Libertarian ticket earned in its peak year of 1980. Even more indicative of the disarray among libertarians are poll data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which found that Bill Clinton ran almost even with Mr. Dole among self-described libertarians.
With the election behind him, Mr. Murray has come forward with ''What It Means to Be a Libertarian,'' which will surely help distinguish his sharp-edged ideology from the more rounded thinking of most Republicans and Democrats. Yet his emergence as a leading spokesman for libertarianism poses still another problem. Libertarians are an optimistic, even giddy bunch; they see bureaucrats as the chief obstacle to humanity's Promethean propulsion. But the book that Mr. Murray is best known for reaches a pessimistic conclusion about the innate limits to human potential. ''The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,'' written with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, argued that at least as far as I.Q. is concerned we are not created equal. Moreover, the book said, the coming of the Information Age will only accelerate the emergence of a ''cognitive elite'' sure to reap an ever more disproportionate share of the national wealth. And so, paradoxically, Mr. Murray's work had the effect of subtly bolstering the position of pro-government paternalists. After all, if we are permanently unequal, isn't redistributionist government a permanent necessity?
Charles Murray was propelled into prominence a dozen years ago by ''Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980.'' That book, his first, ended with a cautiously worded recommendation to abolish welfare -- and proved explosive. In his new work, he is no longer cautious: ''End governmental transfer payments, in cash, kind or services.'' Repudiating the ''Mediscare'' pander bears and corporate statists of both parties, Mr. Murray is unequivocal; he seeks to eliminate ''every middle-class entitlement, agricultural subsidy and corporate subsidy along with programs for the poor.'' And to be on the safe side, he suggests the United States ''constitutionally forbid'' any such transfers in the future.
Mr. Murray argues that American history from the Revolution through the 1920's proves that small government, among its many virtues, ''produces children who grow up healthier, wiser and happier than their counterparts who grew up in the welfare state.'' He offers a thousand-points-of-light riff on all the groups that he believes stand ready to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of government: ''The Rotarians, Kiwanians, Ruritanians. The Elk, Moose, Oddfellows. Little League. Junior League. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The P.T.A.'' Indeed, in part because his past writings have been so influential, welfare is about to devolve on states and localities, and America will soon be testing this hypothesis.
Further extending his enthusiasm for anorexizing government, Mr. Murray offers more assurance that a thinner state will plump up the ideal of community. Limited government, he insists, will give us ''society with far greater texture, far less anomie and alienation.'' So he takes on both left and right: dismissing the communitarian concerns not only of Marx and Marcuse but also of Burke and Schumpeter.
Mr. Murray is at his most persuasive on narrower subjects like education. Comparing public education to Soviet agriculture, he laments that America's schools are not experiencing the same ''riotous change'' as the computer and telecommunications industries. He has no doubt, it seems, that if his suggestion for universal vouchers -- $3,000 a year for each of the more than 50 million American pupils, redeemable at any school -- were enacted, Bill Gates and other high-tech profit prospectors would see gold in every inner city and outer hamlet and stake out educational franchises with Silicon Valley exuberance.
As for the environment, Mr. Murray concedes that government regulation is ''theoretically legitimate'' but objects to its current implementation. Many environmental measures, he asserts, such as the Endangered Species Act, represent ''class interests in disguise.''
Much of this book is a series of Milton Friedmanesque mini-lessons on the virtues of freedom in everything from pensions -- Social Security is ''a Ponzi scheme'' -- to private behavior: we should be free to ''read, watch, say, listen to, eat, drink, inject or smoke'' whatever we wish. Unlike either ''Losing Ground'' or ''The Bell Curve,'' this slim volume stakes no claim to original research; it is intended as a manifesto.
Indeed, with the economic left in full retreat and the essentialist left mired in the trap of identity politics, with California and Arizona voting to legalize ''medicinal'' marijuana, with the Internet functioning already as a government-free zone, with politicians routinely portrayed in the popular culture as fools -- the moment would seem ripe for a popularizer to cobble disparate planks like these into a politically attractive platform of upward mobility for all. ''Only freedom,'' Mr. Murray tells us, ''enables human beings to live fully human lives.''
Yet libertarians can't have it both ways: they can't see people as proto-Randians, straining to be unleashed from government oppression, and at the same time offer pessimistic theories about inevitable stratification based on genetics. This contradiction -- between the message of Mr. Murray's bleak big book of three years ago and the happy little pamphlet of today -- must be resolved if libertarianism is going to grow, let alone gain votes, in the future.
James P. Pinkerton is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and the author of ''What Comes Next: The End of Big Government -- and the New Paradigm Ahead.''
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