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The Education of a Libertarian
9–11 minutes
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to
authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest
good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian
collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the
death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call
myself “libertarian.”
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have
changed radically on the question of how to achieve these
goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom
and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the
development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the
challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the
late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of
debate and the desire to bring about freedom through
political means. I started a student newspaper to
challenge the prevailing campus orthodoxies; we scored
some limited victories, most notably in undoing speech
codes instituted by the university. But in a broader sense
we did not achieve all that much for all the effort
expended. Much of it felt like trench warfare on the
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Western Front in World War I; there was a lot of carnage,
but we did not move the center of the debate. In hindsight,
we were preaching mainly to the choir — even if this had
the important side benefit of convincing the choir’s
members to continue singing for the rest of their lives.
As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I
began to understand why so many become disillusioned
after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather
than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many
of my saner peers retreated to tending their small
gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one
became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is
not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest
conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic
drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer
hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to
alcohol but beyond it.
As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a
libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a
financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage,
facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of
moral hazards — and we know that the response to this
crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more
government. Those who have argued for free markets
have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of
recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically
minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in
2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that
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the broader education of the body politic has become a
fool’s errand.
Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been
going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance,
the last economic depression in the United States that did
not result in massive government intervention was the
collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed
the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could
lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the
roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have
forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were
the last decade in American history during which one
could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920,
the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the
extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies
that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered
the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one
limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not
despair because I no longer believe that politics
encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time,
the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from
politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and
fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that
guides so-called “social democracy.”
The critical question then becomes one of means, of how
to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are
no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the
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mode for escape must involve some sort of new and
hitherto untried process that leads us to some
undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused
my efforts on new technologies that may create a new
space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such
technological frontiers:
(1) Cyberspace. As an entrepreneur and investor, I have
focused my efforts on the Internet. In the late 1990s, the
founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a
new world currency, free from all government control and
dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In
the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for
new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities
not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new
Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new
world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds
will impact and force change on the existing social and
political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these
new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more
imaginary than real. The open question, which will not be
resolved for many years, centers on which of these
accounts of the Internet proves true.
(2) Outer space. Because the vast reaches of outer
space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a
limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the
final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket
technologies have seen only modest advances since the
1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly
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far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize
space, but we also must be realistic about the time
horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science
fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second
half of the 21st century.
(3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space
lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the
questions about whether people will live there (answer:
enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether
seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage
point, the technology involved is more tentative than the
Internet, but much more realistic than space travel. We
may have reached the stage at which it is economically
feasible, or where it soon will be feasible. It is a realistic
risk, and for this reason I eagerly support this initiative.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we
must resist the temptation of technological utopianism —
the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its
own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and
therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political
in our world.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between
politics and technology. The future will be much better or
much worse, but the question of the future remains very
open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race
is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to
the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of
technology the choices of individuals may still be
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paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort
of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery
of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the
very best in his extraordinary experiment.
Editor’s Note: Mr. Thiel has further elaborated on the
question of suffrage here. We copy these remarks below
as well:
I had hoped my essay on the limits of politics would
provoke reactions, and I was not disappointed. But the
most intense response has been aimed not at
cyberspace, seasteading, or libertarian politics, but at a
commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns
that is often called the gender gap.
It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be
taken away or that this would solve the political problems
that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should
be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make
things better.
Voting is not under siege in America, but many other
rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using
even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government,
and forced to bail out reckless financial companies.
I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a
libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys
relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is
us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is
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about interfering with other people’s lives without their
consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians
have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I
advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful
projects that some consider utopian.
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