Libertarian handbook.

• Author: Brittan, Samuel

A review of Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Jason Brennan, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Most people have atomistic attitudes toward public affairs. There is not much correlation between what a citizen thinks about the Iraq War, for instance, and his or her attitudes towards drug legislation or the budget deficit. But a sizeable minority does strive for consistent attitudes. One such cluster of attitudes has become known as "libertarianism." This ungainly name has had to be invented because the good old term "liberal" has been taken over, in the United States at least, by advocates of a high level of government intervention.

Professor Brennan defines a libertarian in this excellent handbook as someone who believes that "people should be allowed to do almost anything they like, provided they do not violate other people's equal rights." Many would endorse this, but libertarians really mean it. Left-wing interventionists would like to dismiss them as capitalist stooges, but a glance at Brennan's book shows that this is wrong. He is concerned not just with people who vote in various parts of the world for small parties of that name, but with a set of attitudes. In the United States, most libertarians vote for one or other of the two big parties or abstain.

Libertarians should on no account be confused with the U.S. Tea Party movement, "whose members are predominantly nationalist, social conservatives." They believe that government should promote traditional religious values and tend to oppose feminism, abortion, immigrant rights, and stiffer penalties for crime. By contrast, the author asserts that free immigration would double world GDR "If you do not advocate open immigration, any claim to be concerned about social justice or the wellbeing of the poor is mere pretense." In a rare moment of compromise, the author argues that if we cannot afford to provide immigrants with welfare benefits we should allow them in without them. ("Hard" libertarians would abolish such benefits, but not all libertarians are hard.)

It is when it comes to...