I attended college in the late sixties. I majored in math and English, but I took political science classes whenever I could, because I liked the subject and both of my school’s poly-sci professors were such enjoyable lecturers. One thing they did bothered me, though – and some of the practicing politicians they brought in as guest lecturers did it too – what they said to us in the classroom was much farther to the left than anything they would ever say in public. I remember one of my profs saying “America needs some good, socialist reform.” He became lieutenant governor of Arkansas a few years later. You can bet that nobody heard him say anything like that then. I thought of these privately-far-left politicians and professors as the “closet socialists.” I agreed with some of the things they advocated; I just wished they were willing to forthrightly and openly persuade the electorate that they were the right things to do.

Seems to me that there is a similar phenomenon taking place on the other side of the political spectrum now: closet libertarians.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that calls for a minimal-size, minimal-scope, minimal-power, minimal-budget government that keeps taxes low and refrains from interfering with either the economic activities or the private behavior of its citizens. Libertarians have their own political party, that fields candidates in state and national elections. They have think tanks, web sites, the whole nine yards. They also have a huge group of adherents to half of their philosophy who never admit the relationship: Republicans. Listen to any prominent Pubbie since Ronald “The government is not the solution, the government is the problem” Reagan. Bush, Cheney, DeLay, McCain, Gingrich – they all preach the small-government, low-taxes, no-regulation, economic part of the libertarian catechism. They just leave out the private behavior part. The economic laissez-faire part appeals to the wealthy, mega-corporate protected-capitalism segment of their political base, but it is lip service to the opposite of the private behavior part that insures the loyalty of the fundamentalist, “family values” segment of their base. Of course, Thomas Frank and many others have pointed out that the Republicans walk the talk a lot less frequently when it comes to the private behavior part.

In summary, modern Republicans are sort of half-baked libertarians. Their dream for the United States is a Christian fundamentalist theocracy that is economically anarchic, except that somehow we still have paved streets and a recognized currency.

Damn if the Republicans call themselves libertarians, though, or even use the term. There are probably two reasons. First, they don’t want to associate themselves with the “libertine” aspect of libertarianism, the opposition to governmental restrictions on adult personal behavior. Second, they don’t want to be associated with the logical implications of the extreme economic laissez-faire aspect of libertarianism: no government support of medical care, no Social Security, no public schools, no legal protection of labor unions, no environmental regulations, etc. etc. Instead, they encode their version of the philosophy into a few mantras: taxes must be cut, taxes are too high, taxing equals thievery, the government is too large, the government is too interfering, the market decides everything better than the government can, and so on.

Here’s why I’m bringing all this up: when the mainstream commentariat makes its standard comment about Democrats “not having any new ideas,” we tend to counter with a list of policy measures: raise the minimum wage, fix medical care, and on – all to no avail. We get the “no new ideas” dismissal again the next day. I think the reason is that what the commentators really mean is that they never hear about the Democrats’ fundamental ideas. The Republicans have a fundamental philosophy – the economic half of libertarianism – and they preach it a lot, just not by name. They regularly recite, in other words, the premises of their philosophy of government – and we don’t. We could, because they exist:

· A large, complex society needs the active engagement of an enlightened, competently-managed government in many aspects of life.

· In particular, it is the role of democratic government to protect the weak: children, the elderly, the ill, the underprivileged.

· Capitalism is by far the most successful economic system, but society needs government to set and enforce its rules, for the sake of the investors (see the Enron scandal) as well as for the workers and the consumers.

· Government needs to be an astute investor in certain things that the market would avoid because the return is a better society rather than financial gain for the investor: housing for the poor, research on medicine for rare diseases, new energy technologies, police officer training, etc.

Other people can come up with more compelling and coherent lists than this. My point is that we can do two things that we’re not doing much of now: talk about our fundamental philosophical principles and attack theirs. Why shouldn’t we pound on libertarianism? We disagree with it. But I’ve never seen any of my favorite economics-oriented bloggers – Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Brad DeLong, and others – attack libertarianism head-on.

Reading between the lines of some of their posts, I suspect that there are two reasons why they don’t: (1) they respect the intellectual heft and the body of theoretical work built up by libertarian academics and intellectuals, and (2) they have beer buddies who work at the Cato Institute.

Can’t do anything about the second one, but to the first supposed inhibition I can say: Gimme a break. Libertarianism has a long way to go before it accumulates the century’s worth of intellectual heft and theoretical work associated with Marxism, and we wouldn’t hesitate to shoot at Marxism, which we also disagree with. It’s just so discredited by now, we rarely bother.

Come to think of it, I see a close relationship between libertarianism and Marxism. I like to call libertarianism “reverse-video Communism.” (Reverse-video is when you flip every pixel of a computer screen to its opposite color – switch to white letters on a black background, for example) That is, libertarianism and Marxism are opposites in one aspect – libertarianism wants government to have zero control of business, and Marxism wants government to have total control of business – but they are structurally congruent otherwise:

· Each is based on a Pretty Little Theory about how human beings make economic decisions, and followers of each believe that their Pretty Little Theory has the breadth of a scientific law; it explains all economic phenomena.

· They both envision a utopian withering away of government once their beliefs are put into action.

· Historically, in the case of each philosophy, when its followers achieved control of a country’s government (the U.S. in (crypto-semi-)libertarianism’s case and Russia in Marxism’s), those followers immediately abandoned their quest to implement their theory and accomplish the withering away of government, and instead focused entirely on accumulating and perpetuating their own power and wealth. (Recall that Solzhenitsyn called Joseph Stalin the richest man in world history, because he effectively owned all the material goods in the Soviet Union.)

Like Marxism, in other words, libertarianism is intellectually intriguing, theoretically profound, and wrong. Once again they are symmetric, in that the one thing that each gets right is the diagnosis of the fatal flaw of the other. Libertarianism points out that extreme governmental control of business smothers incentive, innovation and efficiency. Marxism points out that unchecked capitalism tends towards monopoly, with increasing centralization of wealth and concomitant political power. When we hear the right wingers mouthing their antigovernment, taxophobic slogans, we should point them out for what they are –half-assed libertarianism – refute them, and contrast them with our own fundamental beliefs about the appropriate role of government in a democratic, humane society. They have been indoctrinating the public with these mantras for three or four decades now. It is high time to directly confront and refute them. After all, they are wrong. If we carefully explain to the public what our fundamental beliefs about government really are, the public will soon realize that they agree with us. After all, we’re right.