The Libertarian and the Lobbyists

The Trouble with Libertarian Paternalism

It strikes me as practically libertarian.

Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian.

LL And so then, what this libertarian draws from these two points ...

The libertarian part is that the employee has the right to opt out of the default option. Because people rarely move away from the default option, the employer s paternalistic choice prevails, and we get libertarian paternalism.

And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this.

I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, evil Cato Institute.

But facts cannot compete with ideology. Indeed, any opposition even when backed by empirical evidence is portrayed as an attack on politicians own (superior) ideology, whether it be libertarian or informed by religious fundamentalism.

And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture.

More generally, the flaw in some forms of libertarian paternalism is that the free choice that it appears to offer leaves the paternalism largely unconstrained. Would it not be far better to force conscious choice in order to limit the consequences of paternalistic mistakes?

Ultimately, there is a fundamental and unresolved accountability deficit in the way libertarian paternalists go about nudging us. The Enlightenment idea that our System II rationality can always point to an optimal choice about which every reasonable individual would agree clashes with the widely accepted modern idea that there is a plurality of reasonable choices.