A Fresh Look at Left-Libertarianism

Due to the influence of Ron Paul (and his intellectual pantheon: Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, etc.), the version of libertarianism discussed in the US is almost always rightist. Ron Paul and Gary Johnson both spent some time in the Republican primary, and most other prominent libertarians (the Kochs, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan) tend to associate themselves with the right side of the American political spectrum.

But many libertarians would be quick to point out that their political philosophy does not fit easily into the left-right divide. And they'd be right; there's a huge branch of left-libertarianism that we almost fully neglect. While this in practice comes close to what most of us would call Anarchism, that is also a term that has been reshaped to fit leftist and rightist agendas.

I'm not a left libertarian; it's a fact that a representative government provides a greater number of public goods more efficiently that any other form of organization. But the recent discussion of Walmart, Obamacare and working conditions in general led to a pretty interesting left-libertarian idea: you can almost eliminate the need for state coercion by instituting a system of universal workplace democracy.

While equal worker ownership would be ideal, I still think that you could accomplish pretty much the same thing through full unionization. Why would you want this? Because, if workers and management are deciding working conditions voluntarily, you can remove the need for a state to regulate working conditions. You would obviously still need a robust legal system, with a large focus on arbitration, but the overall system would become considerably less complex and much more flexible. It follows the same principal of local governance (a principal libertarians love to insert into just about every debate): each company decides what's best for them, with workers and managers maximizing their collective benefit within the resources they have available.

For someone like me, there is another reason to focus on this style of workplace governance: it's more efficient and ultimately results in more growth. Since 1991, OECD countries with higher union representation have had greater growth. This is supported by an emerging body of research emerging that refutes the classical "economies of scale" argument for strict hierarchy: larger and more centralized organizations promote complexity, shirking and rent-seeking, making them less efficient.

But you're really interested in maximizing liberty, you'd go a step further and make sure that compulsions to work were less harsh. Providing things like health care and a pension would give people the opportunity to experiment, create and move between workplaces that they didn't want. It's both freedom in the negative sense (avoiding compulsion at the workplace) and in the positive sense (being able to do what you truly want). Either way, you can get there by taking on some left-libertarian ideas.