John Stuart Mill Demolishes Libertarianism

John Stuart Mill, whose work I praised in my last post, is most famous for his book On Liberty, a spirited defense of the proposition that people not be coerced, either by legislation or by social pressure, in matters concerning only or primarily themselves. You might think that, if anyone would be included within the bounds of a word such as "libertarian," it would be the dude who wrote a book called On Liberty. Nope. Not by the modern sense of that word, anyway. This paragraph is so good it needs to be reproduced in block form:

Again, trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of goods to the public does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principle, comes within the jurisdiction of society; accordingly, it was once held to be the duty of governments, in all cases which were considered of importance, to fix prices and regulate the processes of manufacture. But it is now recognized, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine of "free trade," which rests on different grounds from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this essay. Restrictions on trade, or on production for purposes of trade, are indeed restraints; and all restraint, qua restraint, is an evil; but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them. As the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade [my emphasis], so neither is it in most of the questions which arise respecting the limits of that doctrine... Such questions involve considerations of liberty only in so far as leaving people to themselves is always better, caeteris paribus, than controlling them; but that they may be legitimately controlled for these ends is in practice undeniable."

As the principle of liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade. Yeah. Chew that one over, modern American libertarians. This is why one can be a liberal, which I think in its modern sense is first and foremost about devotion to pretty much Mill's exact ideas about individual liberty, without being a libertarian: those ideas simply don't tell us anything about the proper scope of economic regulation. Economic activity by one person, basically by definition, affects more than just that one person, and is therefore amenable to regulation where appropriate. It is an empirical question when such regulation will be appropriate, not one that can be settled by reference to grand philosophical first principles.

Earlier in the book, by the way, Mill also says that each individual is responsible to society for doing their share of the work of maintaining/defending society, a share which must be determined by some principle of equity. In modern society we choose the "progressive income tax" as the primary principle of equity, and it seems to me to be entirely within the scope of Mill's ideas of liberty. There really isn't much in this work that's inconsistent with anything in the modern American-liberal platform, and it's the definitive statement of the modern ideal of individual liberty.