The Tragic Irony of Beltway Libertarianism

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121132718910208751.html>

The Wall Street Journal

May 21, 2008

FIGHTING WORDS
By THOMAS FRANK

The Tragic Irony of Beltway Libertarianism

May 21, 2008; Page A17

Consider the poor Washington libertarian. Everywhere else in America
his type is an exotic species, a coffee-shop heretic who quotes from
"Atlas Shrugged" and steers every conversation toward Ron Paul or
gold. Take him or leave him, he doesn't care. He is his own master.

Not so the Beltway variety. Here, in the very home of the taxing,
regulating leviathan, the libertarian is such a commonplace and
unremarkable bird that no one gives him a second glance. Here he is a
factotum of the establishment, a tiny voice in a vast choir assembled
by business and its tax-exempt front groups to sing the virtues of the
entrepreneur.

And therein lies his dilemma. Almost by definition, our young
libertarian's job is to celebrate the profit motive from the offices
of a not-for-profit organization. He is subsidized, in other words, to
hymn the unsubsidized way of life. Rugged individualism may be his
creed, but a rugged individual he ain't.

This is more than just an abstract problem, as I discovered last week
at a panel discussion hosted by America's Future Foundation, one of
the lesser libertarian nonprofits in the city. The questions that
night were whether nonprofit work constituted a "real job" and if
moving to the private sector was "selling out"  ideas well known to
any liberal do-gooder.

The audience of young professionals learned about the need to find a
job that you loved. It heard the inevitable complaint that "there are
plenty of people who are choosing for-profit over nonprofit" when
their heart tells them to do the opposite. A panelist asked the
audience to imagine a foundation worker saying to his boss, "I love
what I do, but in the end I've got a wife and three kids, and we live
in McLean, and the mortgage is through the roof, and my commute sucks,
or whatever, I need a little bit more cash," only to have his employer
turn him down.

These plaints sounded so familiar that I felt like suggesting that
everyone there hop out and grab a copy of Daniel Brook's fine but
distinctly unlibertarian 2007 book "The Trap." By skewing society's
rewards so lopsidedly to the top in the country's richest cities, Mr.
Brook writes, the tax-reducing, market-minded economic policies of the
last few decades have priced all sorts of high-minded occupations to
the bottom of the middle class: teaching, the arts, and, of course,
nonprofit work.

Many of the people Mr. Brook talks to in such cities haven't given up
on these pursuits because they're "sellouts"; they've given up because
they want proper health care or decent housing or good schools for
their kids.

In traditional sellout theory there is always some grand cause or
principle that is being exchanged for immediate gain  artistic
independence, for example, or the fate of the panda, trembling
piteously before the onrushing bulldozers of modernity.

But what is it that libertarians are selling when they accept the fat
paychecks of corporate America? The noble principle of self interest?
The utopia of the market itself? Will the workings of supply and
demand really seize up if some young Ayn Randette chooses to forsake,
say, the Cato Institute and instead help ExxonMobil pile up the pelf?

Fortunately, there were a few plainspoken men of the market present at
the gathering to set things straight. Capitalists were the world's
real heroes, they reminded us, delivering value to the public and
seeing that value quantified precisely by the numbers on the balance
sheet. That was reality. the idea that "there's something special
about nonprofits," scoffed one forthright fellow  "well, that's crap.
Nonprofits are an artifice of the law, and what's special about them
is not that they do different things or that they are organized in a
special way, it's that they don't pay taxes."

Personally, I would take this hard line one step further: Selling out
is not a threat to the market order; selling out is how the market
gets its way. Just look at the city in which all these remarks were
made. Private-sector Washington is one of the wealthiest places in
America. Public-service Washington lags considerably behind. The
chance of ditching the one for the other is what accounts for
everything from the power of K Street to the infamous "revolving
door," by which a public servant takes a cushy corporate job after
engineering some extravagant government favor for the corporation in
question  or its clients.

The libertarian nonprofits that line the city's streets often serve
merely to rationalize this operation after the fact, giving a pious
shine to the policies that are made in this unholy manner.

To their credit, the nonprofit libertarians I watched the other night
did not ask for sympathy. Their own doctrine won't permit it. Having
spent years urging lawmakers to wreck the social order that once made
occupations like theirs tenable, they will cling stubbornly to their
free-market idol all the way down.