Over the past few months, academic philosophers have published several essays on the internet criticizing libertarianism. First, there was Alex Rosenberg at 3:AM Magazine arguing that free markets can be justified neither on grounds of economic efficiency or desert. Then there was Japa Pallikkathayil at Political Philosop-her, expressing concerns about market interactions involving vulnerable persons. And finally, and most famously, there was Amia Srinivasan at the New York Times asking what she took to be some damning and/or unanswerable “Questions for Free-Market Moralists.”

A common move in these arguments, especially Rosenberg’s and Srinivasan’s, is to claim that the argument for libertarianism relies on premises that are grossly implausible. Rosenberg, for instance, seems to think that libertarians buy into the model of perfect competition as an accurate description of reality, and so that merely pointing out the existence of market failure is sufficient to refute them. And both Rosenberg and Srinivasan claim that libertarians are committed to the belief that people morally deserve all and only what they can earn on the free market, regardless of how arbitrary the distribution of talent, bad luck, and social environments may be.

I’ve been tempted to respond to each of these pieces directly, in point-by-point fashion. Ultimately, though, I decided that it would be better to write a piece setting out the positive case for the morality of markets, and showing how that case rested on premises that are not at all easy to reject.

That piece has now been published at 3:AM Magazine. I hope you’ll take a moment to check it out. An excerpt:

[I]t is not difficult to identify cases in which markets seem to fail. Real world markets don’t live up to the economist’s ideal of perfect competition, and even perfectly efficient markets would still be deficient from the perspective of ideal justice. Clever philosophers and economists can easily come up with models of alternative institutional structures that would do a better job. But models aren’t reality, whether we’re talking about markets or governments. And the fact that real world markets pale in comparison with idealized governments does nothing to make the case for handing more power and authority over to actual governments. Actual governments, like actual businesses, are run by human beings with imperfect knowledge, imperfect rationality, and sometimes impure motives. But unlike businesses, who make their mistakes on a decentralized scale with their own money, and who face the constant discipline of a system of profit and loss, government plays its game on a grand scale, and with other people’s resources. Rent-seeking and cronyism are thus not temporary problems that we have only because the wrong people, or the wrong party, hold office. They are deep, structural problems with politics – a kind of government failure that must at the very least be weighed carefully against the perceived problems of the market when thinking about how much power we really want the state to wield.

Read the rest here.

[A note – the editors left the text of my essay mostly alone, but ran a bit roughshod over my original hyperlinking. My original text had some links to pieces of which I’m rather fond, and which help to flesh out the argument, like this piece from John Hasnas and this one from David Schmidtz in the section on spontaneous order. The phrase “government failure” was linked to this Econlib piece, and the concern that regulation would be used to further the interest of the state’s cronies was linked to this classic from Roy Childs. Most significantly, though, the first sentence of my original piece did not link to Alex Rosenberg’s article. That article has a number of problems, from my perspective, but an overly exclusive focus on Nozick is not one of them. Indeed, Rosenberg doesn’t mention Nozick at all, so the editor’s insertion of a link to his piece there is especially puzzling.]

[UPDATE: My original links are back in the post, and the misleading link to Rosenberg’s essay has been moved to a more appropriate place in the article. My thanks to the editors.]