Nitpick-olas Sarwark: Egalitarianism or Libertarianism

by H. L. Menger

If you happen to have an eye-wash station nearby, I invite you to suffer a recent tweet by Nicholas Sarwark (@nsarwark), current chairman of the Libertarian Party:

Thank you for highlighting Murray Rothbard's greatest deception.

He used the incoherence of result egalitarianism as a way to conflate it with rule egalitarianism, reject it as all the same "egalitarianism" to sneak different levels of individual rights into libertarianism.

This was in response to a claim by one Homer Simpleton (@homer_simpleton):

Egalitarianism is an antonym for libertarianism.

- Nicholas Sarwark (@nsarwark)

Readers of the Hoppean do not need a defense of this argument. Instead, the focus of this short piece is to rebuke Sarwark's picky, peculiar taxonomy of egalitarianism.

To begin, let us restate Sarwark's criticism more precisely. There are two types of egalitarianism, both of which hold equality (French egalité) as the summum bonum. Result egalitarians bawl for material equality: everyone should have the same wealth, status, power, and so on. Rule egalitarians, in contrast, tout procedural equality: everyone's behavior should be prescribed by one set of laws. This distinction is seldom made verbally (i.e. "egalitarian" is rarely qualified by another adjective). The sinister Murray Rothbard seized upon this linguistic shortcoming, and so declared to the peons of the movement that any and all egalitarianism is an obstacle to freedom. Thus Rothbardians cheer on an inequality of rights that does not belong to libertarianism. The now-obscured truth is that result egalitarians teach nonsense, but rule egalitarianism is a prerequisite for freedom.

So runs Sarwark's argument.

Let us now consider the merit of the distinction. Understand that the matter at hand here is about terms, not substance. The goal is not to determine whether "result egalitarianism" and "rule egalitarianism" are one and the same. The goal is not to determine whether "rule egalitarianism" is necessary for liberty. The goal is this: to determine whether Rothbard obscured a distinction of critical importance.

In his entry on egalitarianism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Professor Richard Arneson dedicated separate sections to equality of opportunity, condition, relation, etc. The third section discusses Lockean property rights, a set of rules we might classify as rule egalitarianism—might! For Arneson briefly says of it:

“It might just as well be viewed as a rejection of egalitarianism rather than as a version of it.”

Further down, Dr. Arneson introduces innovations in Lockean rights theory:

“A more egalitarian variant of Lockean rights doctrine combines the right of self-ownership with skepticism about the Lockean account of the moral basis of private ownership rights.”

To restate: egalitarian Lockeans retain the idea of self-ownership, but they differ in that they do not uphold private property ethics. They are more egalitarian precisely because they prefer distribution, not rules, of ownership. Neither Dr. Arneson nor any of his citations use Sarwark's taxonomy, and Arneson even supposes that libertarianism is a rejection of egalitarianism. The phrases rule egalitarianism and result egalitarianism, along with any synonyms thereof, do not appear in the article.

The experts don't recognize Sarwark's distinction. Rothbard's condemnation of egalitarianism can only be called deceptive by Sarwark's own personal definitions. It is just as well for me to slander Eleiko for not distinguishing, as I do, between long dumbbells and short dumbbells, but instead marketing their long dumbbells as "barbells".

Sarwark deserves a bit of slack; it may be that his precise terms are not used by any serious person, but it seems obvious enough that he delineates two concepts. Let us then consider the other half of his point: did Rothbard conflate material and legal equality? The distinction is on the one hand so obvious and on the other so trivial that, searching Rothbard's works, the present writer could only come up with one quote. Here he is in the middle of criticizing rehabilitation as injustice:

But this gives the power to determine the prisoners' lives into the hands of an arbitrary group of supposed rehabilitators. lt would mean that instead of equality under the law—an elementary criterion of justice—with equal crimes being punished equally, one man may go to prison for a few weeks, if he is quickly "rehabilitated," while another may remain in prison indefinitely. (The Ethics of Liberty, p. 94; emphasis mine.)

Sarwark argues that this is deceptive, because it says "equality under the law" instead of his concocted turn of phrase, "rule egalitarianism". There is no deception nor conflation here. All that happened here was that Sarwark, dead-set against the Rothbardians in his party, complained that a long-dead man didn't use the language he just invented.

To reiterate, the contention here was strictly terminological, yet Sarwark puffed it up as "Rothbard's greatest deception". I hope that this brief piece will stand as a testament to just how petty the LP elites are.