Via Jim, I discover a flattering post by Avedon Carol, who writes the following about we of the “loyal opposition”:

In truth, I regard honest libertarians as fellow travellers who are very nearly liberals – who just haven’t figured out yet that all Big Institutions can turn ugly on you, even when they are privately-owned.

Well, I’d say that libertarians already are liberals, though of course not in the contemporary American sense. But historically, the intellectual family tree is common background for egalitarian liberals and libertarian liberals. There are plenty of ways that shared enlightenment tradition poke through today.

As for the bit about Big Institutions—well, sure, of course that’s true. It’s not, I think, that most libertarians haven’t figured this out yet; it’s that we think corporate power is more harmful in combination with state power, and not usually checked very effectively by government. Same goes, incidentally, for the weird claim I sometimes see that libertarians don’t believe in market failure. With maybe a couple of exceptions among the fundamentalists, sure we do: we just think that the vast majority of the time, it corrects itself more cleanly and quickly than does intervention to “fix” it. Those are debatable propositions, of course, but it’s not just that possible flaws in markets or corporate motives haven’t occured to us.

What I assume Avedon has in mind is something like the tension between church and temporal power during the middle ages. The Western tradition of freedom from which we now benefit was in part the product of the mutual check these institutions provided on each other’s power. But those were cases where, to a large extent, authority was zero sum: more royal power meant less papal power, and vice-versa. Here, thatn doesn’t seem to hold true, as the familiar phenomenon of regulatory capture makes clear. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you made a list of all the things corporations do that folks on the left find offensive, nine of ten will be enabled by corporate coopting of state power. In fact, if you read or listen to so anti-corporate a figure as Noam Chomsky, what is his major critique? Often that proponents of free enterprise don’t live up to their own rhetoric. In the lecture linked above, he argues that businessmen often seem to believe that “free markets are fine for you, but not for me.”

So, for example, you often see regulations geared in a way that makes it difficult for smaller competitors to large established firms to comply, ceding the field to the big guys. What libertarian would like to see, in effect, is a government too restrained to be worth the trouble of buying. Now, here is actually an entry point for what I think is one of the best criticisms of our ideas. Because someone can object: look, what you’re talking about is like the socialist vision, in that it’s never actually going to work like the theory envisions. Once you permit these large economic inequalities, they are necessarily going to become political inequalities.

Now, there may not be any good response to that, but I don’t think it follows from this point that starting with expansive regulation solves the problem, unless you’re going to do away with the market system and disparity of wealth altogether. Still, let’s take a stab. A connected argument, another sort of way people claim a classically liberal society would undermine itself, is the argument from “atomism” we sometimes see. That is, if you’ve got a cultural context in which people are focused on the individual or community-based pursuit of happiness, you’re going to lose the kind of public engagement you need to maintain liberal institutions.

But as an empirical observation, it’s not clear how much meaningful engagement we’ve got now. Indeed, the more government does, the greater are the demands on engagement. The reason so much of what the state does is either direct or indirect corporate welfare is that almost nobody is going to have the time or inclination to monitor each of a thousand little programs that impose a small (because diffuse) cost and provide a concentrated benefit to a small set of firms. But if the starting point were relative laissez-faire, deviations from that benchmark would stand out more prominently as aberrant. That would lighten the demands on public attention and action, making it easier to check corporate rent-seeking.