You Could Be Consistently Libertarian in 1970 and Socialist in 2020

Changing your political affiliation is usually treated as evidence of something: youthful naivety corrected, or principle abandoned, or intellectual drift. The one thing it is rarely treated as is the correct response to a changed world.

Here is a case where it would be exactly that — where a single consistent principle, applied honestly at two different times, produces opposite affiliations.

The Reasoning of a 1970 Libertarian

Take someone in 1970 who is not an ideologue but an analyst. He is trying to work out where the greatest harm in the economy comes from, so he can direct reform there.

He knows markets have defects. He is not naïve about it: mismanagement is real, pollution is real, monopoly is real, and corporations bribing officials is real. He grants all of it.

He judges these defects to be smaller than the failures of government. And notice how he reaches that judgement — not by ideology, but by magnitude. He looks at the volume of resources government commands, the scale of what it misallocates, and the harm that follows, and compares it to the corresponding figures for the private sector. On that comparison, in 1970, government is the larger problem.

So he concludes that reform should be aimed at government. That is a defensible, evidence-based position, arrived at by a method rather than by a prior commitment.

What Changed

Over the following fifty years, government expenditure and capital shrank considerably relative to private and corporate capital. The state did not disappear, but its share of the total fell while the private share rose — and rose especially at the top, where the largest firms now command resources comparable to mid-sized nations.

Now apply the 1970 method to 2020 conditions.

The defects of markets have not changed in kind. But their magnitude has, because magnitude was always a function of the resources involved, and those resources have multiplied. Faults that were genuinely minor when the private sector was smaller may now outweigh the whole of government's failings — not because markets got worse, but because they got bigger.

The same measurement rule, applied honestly at two dates, yields libertarianism then and something close to socialism now.

What This Does and Does Not Show

I want to be careful about the scope, because there is an overreach available.

I am not claiming this is in fact the case. Establishing it would require real data: the relative sizes over time, and some defensible way of quantifying harm on both sides. I have not done that work and I am not asserting the conclusion.

What I am claiming is that the position is coherent, and that its coherence tells us something about how political argument goes wrong.

The Real Point

Most people treat "libertarian" and "socialist" as terminal identities — things you are, which then determine what you conclude about any particular question. On that model, switching sides is a betrayal or a conversion, and it needs explaining.

But if the underlying commitment is a method — direct reform at whichever sector is doing the most damage — then the affiliation is downstream of an empirical question, and it should be expected to move when the facts move.

Someone who held the same affiliation for fifty years through that much structural change has some explaining to do, not the person who switched. Constancy is only a virtue if the world stood still.

This is a specific instance of a more general complaint I have about ideological packages: they convert conclusions into identities, and identities do not update. The method updates. The identity defends.