Libertarians' likeable lunacy

Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: You are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind -- litigation -- to make inconsistent decisions. And usually there is no one "right" answer: There is a spectrum of acceptable answers involving trade-offs (dirty air versus fewer jobs, etc.) that ought to be made democratically -- that is, through government.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competing routes keep it all efficient.

And what about, uh, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own the intersections, but it would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own and maintain all the roads and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government.

Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn't people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the approval maze at the Food and Drug Administration. The Terri Schiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism's greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.

The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to the right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you're allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren't you allowed to drive without a seat belt?

The answer is that it's a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death -- especially your death in a car crash -- does impose externalities on me. I would pay good money not to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right, like the right to choose the time and manner of one's death, may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or irresponsible is not.