Shikha Dalmia and Harvard economist
George Borjas.
Political disagreements can often
be sorted into two types: “Where are we
going?” and “How are we going to get
there?” At some point, of course, some
people’s answers to “Where are we going?”
get far enough apart that they must splin-
ter away. The historical alliance between
libertarians and conservatives (especially
William F. Buckley’s carefully curated
National Review variant of intellectual
fusionist conservatism) started to decay
over the draft and the counterculture, then
crumbled at the end of the Cold War, when
“We’re going to defeat communism” was
no longer a useful answer to that ques-
tion. More recently, some people who once
called themselves libertarians departed
the movement to pursue a politics based on
racial identity and nationalism. When an
already-small movement loses members or
allies, it’s a good time to reflect on what it
means to be a libertarian. But it isn’t always
a crisis—it may even be a good thing.
I don’t know whether free speech
and open inquiry necessarily lead to the
right answers on either type of political
question. In fact, I’m skeptical of the idea
that enough hollering at each other willAFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES of
violent conflict, the leaders of a
pair of African nations met in July
for the first time since 2000. Newly
elected Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy
Ahmed (left) flew to Eritrea, where he
embraced that country’s president,
Isaias Afwerki, on the tarmac. The
meeting led to celebrations in the
streets of Asmara. Both countries
have poor human rights records, and
the hope is that making peace will
move them closer to liberalization.
eventually hoist us all up to a higher plane
of human understanding somehow. But
institutions that enable debate do pretty
clearly produce higher quality arguments.
Airing disagreements requires everyone
to strengthen their cases.
If the place you’re headed is a world
characterized by free minds and free
markets, there will always be a place in
Reason’s pages to hash out the question of
how to get there and room for plenty of dif-
ferent responses. (And not just in our print
pages: Check out reason.com for several
additional debates.)
Latter-day Misesians are often quick to
contest the traditional story of what went
down in that fateful mid-century Mont
Pelerin meeting. They think Friedman’s
version of events makes their guy look
bad; they prefer to cast Mises as a defender
of ideological integrity in the face of a
pernicious pre-emptive watering down of
principle. In his account, Friedman dryly
notes that by his lights the assembly “con-
tained not a single person who, by even
the loosest standards, could be called a
socialist,” which seems undeniably true
in hindsight. But the specific point of
disagreement that drove Mises from the
room in anger—the “appropriateness ofgovernment action to affect the distribu-
tion of income”—remains unresolved in
liber tarian circles.
Sometimes the questions we argue
about are pure déjà vu. The cover of one
of the very first issues of Reason asks the
question: “The Cops: Heroes or Villains?”
That’s a topic on which one could easily
hold a debate today at any libertarian
gathering and find robust disagreement.
The fact that many of these debates
may never be resolved once and for all is
no excuse not to have them. Mises and
Friedman may not have been able to agree
on everything, but they—along with
other powerhouse brainiacs before and
since—became pillars in a movement that
has valiantly kept a crucial strain of pro-
freedom ideology alive in even the most
dire political conditions. Engagement
with people who argue in good faith from
outside of libertarianism is both inevi-
table and desirable. But internal debates
are just as important to figuring out how to
make the world free. This issue of Reason
is our latest installment in five decades of
contributing to that project.K ATH ERI N E MAN G U -WARD is editor in chief of
Reason.Photo: Tiksa Negeri/Reuters REASON 5
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