Libertarianism: Purists vs. Pragmatists

September 17th, 2008 10:50 am | by Mike Miller | Published in Activism, Big Government, Constitution, Individual Responsibility, Libertarianism, Liberty, Politics, liberator online, mary ruwart | 1931Comments2008-09-17+14%3A50%3A40Mike+Miller

I’ve been reading a lot of griping lately about how the Libertiarian “purists” are preventing the party from ever gaining traction, and the self-described pragmatists are compromising important principles in order to get the drooling masses to join ranks. So it was quite fitting that Mary Ruwart (who would have been the Libertarian Party’s nominee if not for Bob Barr) has written on the subject in the latest issue of the Advocates for Self-Government’s Liberator Online:

Ask Dr. Ruwart

Dr. Mary Ruwart is a leading expert in libertarian communication. In this column she offers short answers to real questions about libertarianism. To submit questions to Dr. Ruwart, see end of column.

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Is compromising libertarian principles necessary to spread libertarian ideas?

QUESTION: I’ve been frustrated by some libertarians who think that “compromising” libertarian principles is the best way to get the libertarian message accepted by the public, on issues including mandatory health insurance and campaign finance restrictions. When I disagree with them, I am derided as a “purist.” How do I answer them?

MY SHORT ANSWER: Those who advocate mandatory health insurance and other government programs usually do so because they believe that freedom doesn’t work, at least on that particular issue.

Ask your fellow libertarians if they truly believe the government solution they advocate is better. If they do, provide them with the facts and figures showing how liberty trumps government every time.

Tax-supported government programs, like mandatory health insurance, invariably give us less than the free market would. For example, every country with mandatory health insurance has long lines for the expensive procedures, even if they are life-saving. In Britain, those over 55 years old are often denied kidney dialysis outright, so that the available spots can be given to younger people. Canadian heart patients flock to the U.S. for cardiac surgery, rather than die waiting in line. Patients who would get life-saving treatment in the U.S. are told to go home and prepare to die. You can find a great deal of documentation on this particular issue at www.ncpa.org and www.heartland.org.

You can get hundreds of examples proving that liberty, not coercion, provides the best outcome on this and many other issues from my book Healing Our World, available either from the Advocates (updated 2003 edition) or as a free download from www.ruwart.com (the older 1992 edition).

If your friends already believe that liberty provides the better solution, ask them how they can, in good conscience, encourage voters to adopt something that will harm them. If they answer that the end justifies the means, you can use arguments — like the ones in Healing Our World — to show how the means ultimately dictate the ends.

Instead of compromising libertarian principles, they can work to craft a persuasive way to present their arguments. The Advocates for Self-Government web site is full of resources to help anyone do just that.

Libertarians often believe that they can’t be effective unless they are elected. However, consider the effectiveness of U.S. socialists in the twentieth century. Even though only a few explicit socialists and Socialist Party members were elected in the past century, most of the major economic planks of the 1928 Socialist Party platform were quickly adopted by the Democrats and Republicans and became, to a major degree, U.S. law.

“In our opinion, the Socialist Party was the most influential political party in the United States in the first decades of the 20th Century,” wrote renowned libertarian economists Milton and Rose Friedman in their 1980 book, Free to Choose.

Maybe we should be less focused on election outcomes and more focused on winning hearts and minds, something that we can’t do by comprising our message. We wouldn’t want to win the “battles,” only to lose the “war!”

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Got questions? Dr. Ruwart has answers! If you’d like answers to YOUR “tough questions” on libertarian issues, email Dr. Ruwart at: ruwart@theAdvocates.org

Due to volume, Dr. Ruwart can’t personally acknowledge all emails. But we’ll run the best questions and answers in upcoming issues.

Dr. Ruwart’s previous Liberator Online answers are archived in searchable form at: http://www.TheAdvocates.org/ruwart/categories_list.php

Dr. Ruwart’s outstanding books “Healing Our World” and “Short Answers to the Tough Questions” are available from the Advocates: http://www.TheAdvocates.org/Merchant2/merchant.mv

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wrdalton says:

September 17th, 2008 at 11:25 am (#)

If Dr. Ruwart wants to propagate “Libertarianism” as an ideology committed to preserving certain principles, she is welcome to do it. I feel the same way about confessional battles in my church. But we are talking about the “Libertarian Party”. It doesn’t do to say that Libertarians can be “effective” without getting elected. The purpose of a political party is to bring citizens together with the object of securing the election of certain people to public office. For the Libertarian Party to do this requires building a coalition of citizens of different ideologies and viewpoints, but united by common interests. Right now, those with a common interest of ending the monopoly of the Republicrats, who are united by a common ideology on the subjects they consider essential, such as the ultimate power of the government, are more diverse than just libertarians, and the Libertarian Party needs to broaden its appeal to all these voters, or another party will need to arise to do the job.

bedr1 says:

September 17th, 2008 at 12:10 pm (#)

Dr. Ruwart, you have written like a well trained purist.

First of all I am glad that Dr. Ruwart did not get the LP nod. What a huge mistake that would have been. The Libertarian Party has been around since the early 70’s and pretty much has gone nowhere because of the purist thinking of those like Dr. Ruwart. Even Ron Paul understood that he could not win in the old LP. Why can’t the LP break free and go forward with its purist thinking? Well first off it needs to get rid of the debate club mentality that it has been pushing the last 30 years. Every other third party does the same thing, they sit there and dwell on insignificant stuff while our country is going into the dumpster. People on the outside look in and think – there is no way I am joining that party. Coming from another party to the LP, I watched as the wacko woman threw a fit on national TV because Barr won the LP Nomination. While I think conventions should be real and not a big production event like the Democrats and Republicans put on, focusing on crackpots and allowing them to run as your party’s nominee is crazy. Other crackpots and wackos may like it, but the general American public is turned off.

Second, with a purist party you will surely have the high moral ground and the will be the party that stands above all else for what it believes in no matter what, but you will be a party whose members will fit into a phone booth.

No, the party needs to reach out as much as it can to the most amount of people while still having its Libertarian platform. What does this mean? It means the platform remains strict, but those running for office may not in the past, present or future agree with everything it says.

Last, changing from a narrow based political party to a broad based political party takes time, it just doesn’t happen in one election cycle, from nominating one candidate. So the results will lag, but the party numbers will climb. Sure you might lose a few hard core purist at first, but their numbers are so small and insignificant that it will make no difference, but in the long run the numbers will climb as the party and its message become more appealing to the mainstream voter.

So the question is do you want the Libertarian Party to just be a party with a limited base and have limited power to help bring the United States back but be the party of purity and the moral highground? or do you want the Libertarian Party to actually be able to win and help get the United States back on track? For me its not a matter of giving up what we stand for, but rather winning, getting recognized as a true alternative to the other two parties and then once that is accomplished – teaching Americans what the Libertarian message really is and converting them to true Libertarianism.

Bob Barr is an excellent candidate and was an excellent choice regardless of what the Constitution Party faction of the Ron Paul supporters wants you to believe. If it wasn’t for Palin, Barr would have gotten many many disenchanted conservatives to vote for him. It was a
good move by McCain to pick Palin, it helped him in Alaska, Nevada, Colorado and Pennsylvania – all states where Barr had serious support. So YES Dr. Ruwart is correct, the Libertarian Party has had impact without electing anyone. I beleive the LP is at least part of the cause why McCain picked Palin – congrats LP, but do you really think it would have happened with Dr. Ruwart as the LP nominee. In one word NO. Outside of the LP nobody knows who Dr. Ruwart is and she would have died on the vine and McCain would have picked Lieberman.

I think its a step in the right direction for the LP, maybe in 2012 they will be smart, follow the same path and nominate Gary Johnson of New Mexico, and ummm…how about allowing the Presidential nominee to pick the VP so we can get some media out of that too, like the Republicans and Democrats do.

bedr1 says:

September 17th, 2008 at 12:12 pm (#)

PS I am not say Dr. Ruwart was the wacko who threw the fit. The other woman, who I don’t recall what her name was.

cxxguy says:

September 17th, 2008 at 6:11 pm (#)

The Purist/Pragmatist dichotomy used to illustrate the example is not a good one for (e.g. Paul/Barr vs. Ruwart). Why? Because the example used is actually one of compromising principal: advocating a *new* or *expanded* government program. Neither Barr, nor Paul, nor Ruwart are advocating any new programs.

The difference I generally see between purists and pragmatists is that purists want to go from here to freedom in one election cycle. Anybody who advocates anything less that repealing all offensive law *right now* is condemned. But advocating that which the voter might buy, so long as it is always *less* government, never *new* programs, or *expensions* to existing programs, is not compromising principal. It is convincing the electorate to move in our direction, and allowing them to move at their own pace.

See more on this at: http://radical-centrist.blogspot.com/2008/09/pauls-and-baldwins-and-barrs-oh-my.html

RBurnett says:

September 17th, 2008 at 10:49 pm (#)

I second all of the above comments and add the following:
It is amusing that she uses the friedmans to claim that the Socialist Party was one of the most influential–Henry Wallace, FDRs socialist VP, made another comment. He noted that yes, FDR had carried out the socialist programs, out of the White House, on a hospital stretcher, having been heavily modified. In a word, yes, to libertarians like the Friedmans and Ruwart, the policies of FDR look as if they did come from the Socialist Party–untill one asks a socialist and discovers that it wasn’t ever so. But then, to a libertarian purist like Ruwart, any government interference is socialist, and as we have a number of government programs, indeed, at the start of the country under the Constitution we had several, the nation must be socialist, and not libertarian. It’s not only the immediate repeal that the purists want, but the purity of conditions, the removal of government, even further removed than would be permissable under the Constitution, say, the removal of the government from the delivery of the mail (an enumerated power)
And Ruwart’s book on health and medicine is full of assertions, not facts. Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to the human condition. The so-called classical liberal/libertarian economist Adam Smith deplored the corruption practiced by the merchant, banker or baker–but that was the price of his system of natural liberty, and he found that government was necessary to not only rein these types in, but to involve itself in the regulation of the economy as needed. Ruwart is naive, thinking that once the revolution comes, the new education of libertarianism which will, as if by some miracle, have the scales fall from our eyes so that we may see the real truth, and the new libertarian man will emerge–utopia–to which I will respond with Machiavelli’s comment, that we should no longer speak of imaginary principalities or republics, as he noted, that alll communities are founded on force and fraud, or in Plato’s view, on that noble white lie–and to Dr Ruwart I would ask, what is the libertarian fraud or lie? Unless of course she is too far gone and really thinks that she and the libertarians have found the truth, the comprehensive truth that solves all of the most vexing of human conditions, from the procrastinator who will not do the things that are necessary for him to do, even as he himself sees them or to the problem of the doctor or ruler who must cut healthy flesh (sacraficing those healthy parts of the community) in order to get at and remove the diseased flesh (those diseased parts of the community)

One last note: Di Dr Ruwart learn her profession in a day or a week or an hour? Not at all–she had an education that took years, with many mistakes made and many changes–such is the reality of any education, and to add, that there are always alternatives to most any medical or political or economic situation–there is no such thing as the one best doable solution–Plato had to laugh off his own best political solution as unworkable–

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