As hypocritical as it may sound, libertarians, anti-statists and market anarchists should embrace the welfare state and acquire as many public benefits as possible. Many libertarians find themselves torn between being ultra-purist sectarians or opportunistic sellouts, but free-minded citizens should not pigeonhole themselves to either of these two dispositions.
If any libertarian were to live a purist, anti-statist lifestyle, it would require not walking on public sidewalks, not driving on public roads, not receiving care from government-licensed doctors and not drinking municipal water. It can be argued that libertarians would be not be able to do anything since the state owns all property and merely rents it to us via taxation.
Under these circumstances it seems impossible to be a libertarian and not violate your principals, especially while both Democrats and Republicans are pushing for massive entitlement programs. Both the left and right support the expansion of the welfare state by supporting programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Veterans Affairs hospitals and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Any politician that would suggest we eliminate any of these programs would be committing political suicide since most of society has yet to come to the conclusion that the private sector can offer these same services at a more efficient rate and at a cheaper cost. So it seems a libertarian is left with no alternative. Yet despite the overwhelming fear of being a labeled a sellout and violating your own personal convictions, a libertarian can and should use any, if not all, of these programs.
Let us suppose there were a gang in Gainesville that regularly burglarized homes and this gang were too powerful to be stopped by law enforcement or private citizens. This gang of thieves does not keep their plunder but gives it away to other residents of Gainesville. The victims of this theft would not be acting immorally by attempting to recoup the goods stolen from them. Anyone who is opposed to this theft would actually be acting as a moral agent by retrieving these goods since they are relieving this gang of their stolen possessions.
Professor of economics at Loyola University Walter Block is one of the many anarcho-capitalists that defends anti-statists using public assistance programs. Block’s defense of libertarians using public assistance is derived from the non-aggression principle (NAP), which libertarian philosophy is based upon.
Since the NAP states that the initiation of force is illegitimate, one would assume that using public services would contradict the NAP because force was used to acquire the funds for these programs. Block explains in a piece titled “May a Libertarian Take Money From the Government?” that using public assistance does not violate the NAP.
Block explains that if Z were to steal goods from Y and give them to X, X would be completely moral in using these goods because X never initiated force against Y to obtain these goods. Thus, X has never violated the NAP and is completely moral in consuming these goods and does not violate the NAP by doing so. Block goes on to state, “Certainly, all libertarian theories of private property rights, of punishment, would agree that of all people in the world, Z is the absolutely least deserving of this foodstuff.”
Keep in mind the fact that the state creates nothing and has absolutely no resources except for the ones that it steals from its citizens. Therefore the best current option for counteracting this theft is to participate in entitlement programs.
Being a libertarian does not mean being a martyr for the cause of free markets and peace. There is nothing wrong with walking on government sidewalks, eating price-controlled bread or living in a rent-controlled apartment because none of these conditions are of libertarian making. These conditions are simply our current matrix. and libertarians should take advantage of them while still agitating and speaking out against the state.
T. Emmet Ryan is a Santa Fe political science sophomore. His columns appear Tuesdays.