I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

116 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
My foray into health care, Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? (1997),
picked up on the themes of voluntary contract in a world in which collective action problems
do not run rampant, and argued against the theme of positive rights—the right to housing,
health care, education or whatever—that have frequently been used to justify massive
government intervention into health care markets. Here this constant effort to create government
cross-subsidies leaves people frightened to oppose any position that undermines
their special benefit, even if they have to pay through the nose to maintain other programs
that work for the benefit of others. It is here that we see the great dangers of the use of even
limited government. Any program of forced exchanges requires the government to take
from A and give to B—thousands of times over. But in order for this to work, something
has to be given back to the A’s of this world to make it all come out even. The great temptation
of the political fixers is to use a program that is designed to foster across-the-board
social improvements into one that contains a huge dose of wealth and income redistribution
that goes beyond the proper purposes of the state, but which is so hard to stop in its tracks.
Even as I write this essay, the Medicare program thrives on implicit transfers, but does little
to create any valuable public good. The middle ground is the place where we want to be,
but it is very hard to maintain footing, especially in the absence of any real consensus as
to what governments ought to do.
Principles for A Free Society—Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998),
further elaborates on the theme of how a system of private property and free markets can be
consistent with the common good and explores in great detail an issue that I had overlooked
in earlier writings: when does it make sense to keep the commons in the long run, be it with
water or common carriers and network industries? The issue has indeed sparked a lot of work
on my part about intellectual property, when does it begin and leave off, so that we know
what always should be, and will become part of some public domain commons.
And finally, in Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003),
I seek to summarize earlier work and explain in detail why the fads and fancies of academic
life on matters of moral relativism, conceptual doubt, preference formation, and behavioral
economics do not undermine the classical liberal synthesis, with strong individual rights
and a takings power with just compensation that I had worked so long to put together.
All in all, there is clearly a strong libertarian streak in what I write. The rules on force
and fraud are the first improvement that any sensible system will seek to make from a state
of nature. But if the logic of takings and forced exchanges is correct, then libertarian thinking
is only the first leg of a more comprehensive theory that has to explain the deviations from
the libertarian principle as well as conformity to it. I hope that the mix I have put forth will
attract attacks from the left, on the ground that it is too hostile to state intervention, and from
the right on the ground that it leaves too much to state power. Now that I have hit 60, but
still continue to write, the thought that I might be a “moderate” after all has some great appeal.
But others will have to decide whether the intellectual positions that I have sought to put
together stand firm or fall like a house of cards. I’ll let others calculate the odds.
Richard A. Epstein is James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of
Chicago Law School, and Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution.