Reason magazine has a very interesting piece about D.C.-based libertarians — the think tankers and policy wonks — who are readying for at least four years of an Obama administration. Associate Editor David Weigel writes that libertarians have divided into two camps: Bargainers and Battlers. Here’s a sample:
“The upside of the Obama victory,” says Matt Kibbe, president of the pro-market group FreedomWorks, “is that it draws, more clearly, the lines between the good guys and the bad guys. It gives us an especially good idea of who the bad guys are.” I.e., the new administration.
A D.C. libertarian’s status as a Bargainer or a Battler largely depends on what issue he or she works on every day. Economic libertarians such as Kibbe, the people who spent the Bush era pushing unsuccessfully for market-based health care reform and private Social Security accounts, expect four to eight years in an even deeper wilderness. “I watched the Social Security campaign unravel from the inside,” Kibbe remembers. Now there will be no “inside.”
Obama has some advisers who sympathize with libertarians, many of whom he befriended at Harvard and the University of Chicago. These include Jeff Liebman, one of Obama’s top economic advisers, who has been attacked by liberals for statements supporting Social Security privatization and tax cuts. “I know Jeff Liebman well,” says Michael Tanner, a Cato Institute analyst who fought for private Social Security accounts in 2005, but “Obama ran a campaign that precludes Social Security reform.”
Not only is this an interesting preview of how the Obama administration might approach issues of personal and economic freedom, but it’s a good reminder that liberty-minded organizations such as the John Locke Foundation and The Reason Foundation, which both produce daily news and commentary, as well as research papers, will be must-visits during the Obama years.
