Touchstone

For years, those of us at Salvo Magazine and our sister publication, Touchstone, have argued that the problem with libertarian freedom is its outcome-neutrality, devoid of any substantive vision for human flourishing (for example, see the concerns Robin Phillips raised in 2022: salvomag.com/post/a-classica…). Although critics have dismissed this as a caricature, the libertarians at Reason Magazine are now attacking Mark Meador, President Trump's nominee for FTC commissioner, for—guess what?—advocating human flourishing. Among Meador's alleged offenses is a tweet in which he explicitly connected freedom to human flourishing (see nitter.cf/mrmeador/status/181770…) These libertarians, with their simplistic "Big Government = Bad / Big Business = Good" ideology, demonstrate how the value-neutral freedom of the Enlightenment has left us with a purely negative conception of liberty predicated on the belief that it is good to avoid ever saying what is good. But as Robin Phillips pointed out in the article referenced above, "To be truly free to pursue goodness, one must engage in the arts of self-limitation and restriction, both at the level of the individual and society. But the libertarian conception of freedom subverts this by undermining our ability to inquire, not simply about The Good, but even about the ends of human society. This leaves us with a type of political nihilism where one is expected to do politics without knowing the ends for which the polis even exists."