Intuitive Libertarianism

Here, I summarize my ideological development since college.* This was for a book someone put together of biographies of libertarian figures.

[ *Based on: “Intuitive Libertarianism,” pp. 193-8 in Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving Toward Freedom in Today’s World , ed. Jo Ann Cavallo and Walter Block (Palgrave Macmillan 2023). ]

Psychological research finds political orientation to be correlated with broad personality traits, such as agreeableness or extraversion. There are even studies measuring the heritability of political orientation (it’s about 40%). If you’ve interacted with ideologues, you’ve probably noticed some patterns. Perhaps you’ve noticed that people who like to wear ties are more likely to be conservative, while those who enjoy poetry readings are more likely to be socialists. (A good philosophical question is to what extent the correlations between personality and political beliefs ought to undermine our confidence in our own objectivity and ability to identify political truth. But that is a question for another time.)

So perhaps you can understand what I mean when I say that some people are natural-born libertarians. If you’ve spent time in libertarian circles, you’ve probably noticed tastes and traits that are much more prevalent among libertarians than among the general population. Libertarians tend to be more frank and less tactful; more open to breaking social conventions; more interested in working out the logic of abstract systems; more interested in computers, science fiction, and philosophical debate; more committed to principles of rationality; and more interested in monetary systems and economic theory than the general population. In my social media feed, I see messages from the same people critiquing Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Dune and President Joe Biden’s economic policies.

I am one of these natural born libertarians. I have more or less all the traits that are strongly correlated with being a libertarian. Perhaps most importantly, I have little intuitive respect for social hierarchies. I don’t perceive people who are at the top of a social hierarchy as more deserving of respect or entitled to special privileges, compared to, say, my plumber. I have no intuitive sense of why we “have to” obey the law or the commands of the powerful, apart, of course, from fear of these people’s predictable aggression. So one could have predicted that I would have to be a libertarian.

I wasn’t always a libertarian, though. When I entered college at UC Berkeley, I was some sort