Yesterday in my inbox I found a message announcing an upcoming episode of Frontline that explores “the reality of rape on the job” for immigrant workers in American fields, farms and factories.

Coincidentally, I had just finished re-reading this excellent essay by Charles Johnson on rape culture, libertarian social theory, and the Hayekian concept of spontaneous order.

Encountering these two items together led me to recall the debate that took place – almost exactly a year ago – between some of the folks at Crooked Timber and some of us here at BHL regarding the adequacy of libertarian views in recognizing and coping with workplace coercion. And it put me in a position to articulate what I think is an important point that went unmade in that debate.

The point is that both libertarians and leftists are prone to making a certain kind of mistake when it comes to thinking about workplace coercion. Both mistakes involve a failure to appreciate the Hayekian idea of spontaneous order. But the failures are made with respect to different categories of phenomena, and lead to different (but equally mistaken) kinds of practical social and legal prescriptions.

Those on the left recognize that power, coercion, and oppression are often social phenomena just as much as they are legal phenomena. And they recognize the way in which dispersed acts of racism and sexism can lead to cumulative social harms that nobody either intended nor foresaw. Charles Johnson’s running example is Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger rape. Individual male rapists almost certainly aren’t trying to keep women in a position of subordination, but that doesn’t mean that the cumulative sum of their actions doesn’t have that effect. Similarly, home buyers and sellers with a slight preference for having neighbors of the same race don’t intend to create racially segregated neighborhoods, and employers who restrict their workers’ freedom in various ways might just be trying to cut down on costs. But social injustice can be an emergent property. All too often, however, leftists assume that these dispersed evils call out for a centralized, coercive solution. To the problem of sexual harassment, or low wages, or unsafe working conditions, the standard leftist response is: “There oughta be a law.”

Libertarians, on the other hand, recognize that social problems can often be addressed, and often more effectively addressed, by various forms of decentralized, voluntary activity. Cattle ranchers in Shasta county resolve disputes through informal norms without needing to appeal to formal law, individuals settle on the use of certain commodities as money without any central direction or legal imprimatur, and profit-maximizing firms act in ways that make us all wealthier without really trying to do so. But libertarians have a hard time recognizing that decentralized and/or non-coercive behavior can lead to serious social maladies as well – hence their difficulty in taking seriously the problems of sexism, racism, rape culture, and the abusive behavior of private employers. If our caricatured leftist holds that every social problem calls for a law to address it, the caricatured libertarian holds that if it isn’t a law, it isn’t really a problem.



Both the leftist and the libertarian grasps an insight that the other misses. And both fall into a mistake that the other avoids. Leftists end up with a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of various social ills, paired with a naive faith in the ability and desire of legislators to solve those problems. Libertarians have a more realistic view of politics, and a better understanding of the positive potential of spontaneous order, but they combine this with a narrowly exclusive focus on coercion as the single source of social maladies, and usually just centralized, state-based coercion at that.

To (over-)simplify, leftists have a better understanding of the nature of social problems, while libertarians have a better understanding of the strengths and limitations of voluntary and coercive methods of addressing those problems.

We here at BHL take some heat from our fellow libertarians for taking traditionally leftist concerns like rape culture seriously. And, of course, we take heat from the left for not taking concerns like worker harassment seriously enough. But both of these criticisms stem from a misunderstanding of the BHL project. Libertarians incorrectly assume that if we’re taking leftist concerns seriously, it means we’re going to embrace leftist solutions to those concerns too. And leftists assume that if we aren’t embracing their solutions, we must not really be all that serious about our concern.

Both of these responses are mistaken, and both ignore the possibility of a view that takes the concerns of the left seriously, while also remaining firmly rooted in the traditional libertarian analyses of social and political dynamics. It is just such a combination, I think, that forms a big part of what is truly distinctive and important about the BHL approach and various forms of left-libertarianism.