In honor of the New Year, let’s begin with a bit of epistemic hygiene. In your opinion, what’s the best argument against libertarianism? What’s the argument against libertarianism that keeps you up at night? The one that makes you uncomfortable? Or that has tempted you away from libertarian positions? If you’re a former libertarian, which argument led you away? And if you’re not a libertarian, what’s your favorite argument against libertarianism? There’s no need to review arguments in detail. Just give some examples (which probably involve stating the target version of libertarianism). Here are two that worry me:

(1) Generic Skepticism: radical libertarians in particular make a lot of claims about how a free or “freed” market will function under various institutional conditions. But it’s hard to know what will or won’t work. When challenged, libertarians sometimes fall back on hard-nosed a prioristic models of market functioning, but those defenses are seldom very satisfying. Other times, libertarians stress that the case for most principled political positions that don’t simply ratify the status quo require similar epistemic bets. The latter point seems to me somewhere near the truth, probably.

(2) Non-Moralized Notions of Coercion: many libertarians think they can defend their views by embracing a rather modest presumption against the use of coercion. But in doing so, they often appeal to a moralized notion, where people are coerced, say, only when their rights are being violated. But if that’s the notion of coercion involved, the presumption against coercion is no longer modest, but loaded. If you appeal to a non-moralized notion of coercion, then it becomes clear you need more argument to show that libertarianism is the least coercive political system. I think you can make the argument, but it’s a hard one, made harder by (1).

I think I have five that really bother me.