You would think that the advocates of a philosophy of political economy that embraces spontaneous social order, bottom-up rule-making based on peaceful voluntary exchange, and even competing polycentric law at least at some level would be safe from the charge of conceit. How conceited can someone be who forswears compelling other people to live in certain ways, expressing a willingness — no, an eagerness — to leave that to peaceful cooperation among free individuals? Making the “knowledge problem” a centerpiece of one’s worldview is hardly the mark of arrogance. Quite the contrary.
Yet critics of the libertarian philosophy throw the charge of know-it-allness at its exponents all the time. (A sample is here.) It’s the go-to criticism. When counterarguments fail, accuse the libertarian of hubris.
I’m talking about substance, not style. Regrettably, someone could display arrogance while insisting that neither he nor anyone else could possibly know enough to plan other people’s lives. However off-putting that style, it does not change the fact that the position embodies a fundamental humility. There are inherent limits to any individual’s knowledge, and therefore government social engineering, which requires the use of aggressive force, must fail.
To put it succinctly, libertarianism has humility baked in at the most fundamental level.
Humility is not to be conflated with radical doubt, however. One can be humble while also believing it is possible to know things. And some things, including the nature and market implications of human action, can be known conceptually. One can know, for example, that intelligently planning an economy or even a particular market is beyond anyone’s, including one’s own, capacities. The same can be said of more modest schemes to modify market outcomes through government intervention. One can acknowledge the limits of reason à la Hayek without being a skeptic or rejecting reason as impotent. (Don’t all skeptics make covert knowledge claims?) After all, it is reason that discovers its own limits. …
Among the things we can know is that no individual or group of individuals can successfully plan an economy or society in the interests of all, or intelligently alter the outcomes of free social cooperation, because in principle they cannot have access to all that is now known or will be discovered by the people they intend to move about like so many chess pieces. …
So who, at the deepest level, is full of conceit? Those who respect individual liberty, understanding that free association, like the justice on which it is based, has good consequences, or those who call on the state to interfere violently with free association because they presume to know which outcomes are superior to those they imagine will emerge through peaceful cooperation.
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