Belief in Government Requires More Faith Than Belief in God
By Chet Lake
In a recent article published by Alternet, C.J. Werlemen argues that libertarian atheists base their political beliefs on faith. In order to support his thesis, Werlemen primarily uses straw-man arguments, ad-hominem attacks, and red herrings designed to disparage and discredit libertarian atheists and libertarianism as a whole.
For example, he refers to famous libertarian atheist, Penn Jillette, as an ignorant magician and compares Michael Shermer (another libertarian atheist) to a college-age, naïve kid for becoming a libertarian after reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It quickly becomes clear that this article doesn’t even approach anything that remotely resembles a decent criticism of libertarian atheists, much less libertarianism itself.
In the interest of full disclosure, I consider myself a libertarian atheist, and as a libertarian atheist, I cringed while reading Werlemen’s sloppy hit piece, especially when I read the following claims:
“Atheists like to joke that faith makes a virtue out of not thinking about things, but the belief in libertarianism is an act of faith given libertarianism has not only never been tried before anywhere, but most of the world’s leading economists denounce it as a folly…
“When I hear an atheist say he is a libertarian, I know he’s given absolutely no thought to it [libertarianism]…”
“Libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments because there are no facts to support their arguments. Atheists love facts, so I don’t understand why so many are libertarians” (emphasis mine).
These are not the only claims he makes, but I am most concerned with these three. Werlemen’s argument can be reformulated as the following:
(1) Faith is not thinking about things
(2) Some atheists believe in libertarianism
(3) Belief in libertarianism is an act of faith
(4) Therefore, those atheists who believe in libertarianism are acting on faith (i.e., not thinking about things)
For the sake of argument, I will grant premise (1) since that appears to be what Werlemen is saying and premise (2) for obvious reasons. I will focus on refuting premise (3). If I can convincingly refute it, then the conclusion (4) will not follow.
Werlemen supports premise (3) by stating “libertarianism has not only never been tried before anywhere, but most of the world’s leading economists denounce it as a folly”. He defines libertarianism “as anti-communism or ‘capitalism with the gloves off’…” and “With libertarianism, property is sacred; all governments are bad; capitalists are noble heroes; unions are evil; and the poor are pampered good-for-nothings.” To him, “libertarians are republicans with bongs who don’t like foreign wars and drug laws.” Looking at Werlemen’s own words, it’s difficult to say if by ‘libertarianism’ he means anarcho-capitalism, minarchism, paleo-conservatism, or some other kind of ‘libertarianism’.
Also, he merely asserts that most leading economists denounce it as folly. Are we to take his assertion on faith, something he chastises libertarian atheists for allegedly doing? Atheists love facts, after all! Not only is libertarianism not clearly defined in the first place, accepting premise (3) as true on the basis of a fact-free argument sounds a lot like what Werlemen calls faith. Ergo, premise (3) is unsupported.
For the sake of argument, let’s ignore this failure and take another look at what Werlemen seems to be saying about faith. According to him, “faith makes a virtue out of not thinking about things”. Let’s take our libertarian hats off and think about that for a moment. As it turns out, professional libertarian thought isn’t really thought at all. The works of people like Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek (Nobel laureate), Dierdre McCloskey, Elinor Ostrom, James Buchanan (Nobel laureate), and Milton Friedman (Nobel laureate), (yes, I am assuming that people will generally accept that at least one of them was or is a libertarian) weren’t really thoughtful contributions to philosophy or to social sciences like economics, but were merely unsupported declarations of faith devoid of any empirical evidence whatsoever.
Sarcasm aside, these contributions to libertarianism are clearly not devoid of rigorous thought. To see this is the case, all one needs to do is read libertarian works such as Anarchy State & Utopia, The Constitution of Liberty, The Bourgeois Virtues, Capitalism and Freedom, The Use of Knowledge in Society, just to name a few. Believing premise (3) to be true commits one to also believing that all that literature was a product of not thinking about things, which is absurd.
Do some libertarian atheists believe in libertarianism without really thinking about it? Sure. And I can accept that some of Werlemen’s caricatures, though not descriptive of libertarians in general or libertarianism as a whole, do contain some grains of truth. However, that does not mean that belief in libertarianism itself is sufficient for being considered an act of faith, i.e., not thinking about things. If it were, we would have to accept an absurdity.
We now see that Werlemen’s critique of libertarian atheism is, in truth, a critique of neither. It is simply a liberal-red-meat hatchet job, which is far more guilty of the offenses it ascribes to libertarianism than is libertarianism, and does not deserve to occupy any space in any discerning mind.
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