Toward a Framework for Utopia

Chapter 12

Lots of political movements promise utopia: Just implement our program, and we'll usher in an ideal world. Libertarians offer something less, and more: a framework for utopia, as Robert Nozick put it.

My ideal community would probably not be your utopia. The attempt to create heaven on earth is doomed to fail, because we have different ideas of what heaven would be like. As our society becomes more diverse, the possibility of our agreeing on one plan for the whole nation becomes even more remote. And in any case, we can't possibly anticipate the changes that progress will bring. Utopian plans always involve a static and rigid vision of the ideal community, a vision that can't accommodate a dynamic world. We can no more imagine what civilization will be like a century from now than the people of 1900 could have imagined today's civilization. What we need is not utopia, but a free society in which people can design their own communities.

A libertarian society is a framework for utopia. In such a society, government would respect people's right to make their own choices in accord with the knowledge available to them. As long as each person respects the rights of others, he would be free to live as he chose. His choice might well involve voluntarily agreeing with others to live in a particular kind of community. Individuals could come together to form communities in which they would agree to abide by certain rules, which might forbid or require particular actions. Since people would individually and voluntarily agree to such rules, they would not be giving up their rights but simply agreeing to the rules of a community that they would be free to leave.

Such a framework might offer thousands of versions of utopia, which might appeal to different kinds of people. One community might offer a high level of services and amenities, with correspondingly high prices and fees. Another might be more spartan, for those who prefer to save their money. One might be organized around a particular religious observance. Those who entered one community might forswear alcohol, tobacco, nonmarital sex, and pornography. Other people might prefer something like Copenhagen's Free City of Christiania, where cars, guns, and hard drugs are banned but soft drugs are tolerated and all decisions are at least theoretically made in communal meetings. One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can't tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism. If a group of people--even a very large group--want to purchase land and own it in common, they would be free to do so. The libertarian legal order would require only that no one be coerced into giving up his property. Many people might choose a "utopia" very similar to today's small-town, suburban, or center-city environment, but we would all profit from the opportunity to choose other alternatives and to observe and emulate valuable innovations.

In such a society government would tolerate, as Leonard Read put it, "anything that's peaceful." Voluntary communities could make stricter rules, but the legal order of the whole society would punish only violations of the rights of others.

By radically downsizing and decentralizing government--by fully respecting the rights of each individual--we can create a society based on individual freedom and characterized by peace, tolerance, community, prosperity, responsibility, and progress. It is hard to predict the short-term course of any society, but in the long run the world will recognize the repressive and backward nature of coercion and the unlimited possibilities that freedom allows. The spread of commerce, industry, and information has undermined the age-old ways in which governments held men in thrall and is even now liberating humanity from the new forms of coercion and control developed by 20th-century governments.

I'm not sure if the United States or the world will be more libertarian--that is, freer--10 years from now. I'm pretty sure we will be freer 100 years from now, and I'm confident that our descendants 1000 years from now will live in a freer world. The third millennium will be the millennium of the free individual.