I’ve been reading the new Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog with interest. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I find myself in agreement with many of the principles that underpin it as a political philosophy. Jacob Levy gets at the heart of the differences between liberals and libertarians and then explains why, from a political perspective, they are not really very important:
So libertarianism as a doctrine in political philosophy had this distinctive contribution to make: it rejected state activity to increase the material well-being of the poor. I think by gradual drift, that came to seem like all libertarianism was concerned with. >
But in the real world, state action to improve the material lot of the poor is not a very large portion of state action. This is politically predictable, almost trivially so. But that means that the focus on libertarianism’s apparent philosophical difference with Rawlsian liberalism gives us a very distorted sense of the work libertarians could do politically in the world. We don’t live in a Rawlsian world, separated from Nozick’s by the existence of poverty-alleviation programs. We live in a world characterized by massive state action of all sorts, most of which does nothing to alleviate poverty and a great deal of which is actively regressive or harmful to the worst-off. If everyone in America understood those two paragraphs, this country would be a much better place.