Micha Ghertner responds to the charge of libertarian utopianism:
Neither Barnett nor Friedman exhibits the kind of wishful thinking that Belle Waring lampoons in her much cited blog post. If anything, they argue for just the opposite. It requires a certain level of optimism for people like Richard Epstein to believe that with only the proper constitutional constraints, government abuse of power could be held in check. It is the pessimism of people like Barnett and Friedman, their unbridled skepticism, that leads them to reject the utopian belief that government can ever be adequately restrained.
On another hand, here’s Sasha Volokh:
We debate the form of the ideal end stage as part of the debate over whether to take any further steps in its direction. . . .
The main argument for utopianism is similar to the argument in favor of thought experiments and hypotheticals in philosophy . . . . These hypotheticals are totally unrealistic, but if you don’t have an answer for them, it’s unclear how coherent your answers are going to be in all the realistic cases. Thought experiments and hypotheticals are unrealistic because they strip away all the realistic elements which are, in fact, irrelevant to the case at hand.
Similarly, why worry about whether there’s going to be taxation in the ideal libertarian society? Because in our day-to-day life, we have to make judgments about whether moderate step A is better than moderate step B. . . . Some of the questions in the debate — is some eminent domain O.K.? — even happens to be important today . . . .
There’s also an anti-libertarian argument in favor of libertarian utopianism. Many people spout slogans of any stripe because slogans sound good. “Taxation is theft” sounds great, and so does “A man’s home is his castle.” Also, “property is theft” and “from each according to his ability . . .” sound good on the surface. A lot of people will break down and embrace some sort of moderate politics if you push them hard enough and make them commit to their ideal world. Most utopias are pretty ugly if you force people to not just wish for a pony but also confront the real-world consequences of their utopianism.
Finally, I recently found these remarks from Hayek:
Modern man prides himself that he has built [our] civilization as if in doing so he had carried out a plan which he had before formed in his mind. The fact is, of course, that if at any point of the past man had mapped out his future on the basis of the then-existing knowledge and then followed this plan, we would not be where we are. We would not only be much poorer, we would not only be less wise, but we would also be less gentle, less moral; in fact we would still have brutally to fight each other for our very lives. We owe the fact that not only our knowledge has grown, but also our morals have improved – and I think they have improved, and especially that the concern for our neighbor has increased – not to anybody planning for such a development, but to the fact that in an essentially free society certain trends have prevailed because they made for a peaceful, orderly, and progressive society.
(“The defense of our civilization against intellectual error” in What’s Past Is Prologue, tributes on the 70th birthday of Leonard Read, 1968)
What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”
(Individualism and Economic Order, 1949)