I once had a meal with a man[i]who had been a Republican operative. He was lamenting the factionalism within that party, and as an example told the story of some Christian evangelicals. They had come to him offering to support his candidate providing the candidate agreed with them on 15 points.

         “In politics, you don’t get all 15 points,” he said. “Maybe you get eight of them. You have to be satisfied with that. These people didn’t understand that.” To them, each of the 15 was connected to Truth, and was not negotiable. There was no agreement, and no progress.

         In politics, a lot of libertarians act like those evangelicals. Their badge is their purity. Politics, however, is not about demonstrating one’s purity. It is about finding 51 percent of a group to agree on something. Once in a while you can do that by standing up for purity, but usually not.

         Some people don’t care about affecting the outcome of current political battles. They have their eyes on the distant future. But if they want to have an influence now, they have to accept the influence of others on a shared position. Their view is that half a loaf — or a quarter, or a slice — is better than none. And this is the reality of politics.

         The utopians picture compromise solutions as sell-outs, but it is not necessarily so. The fights over two such positions — Social Security reform and school vouchers — are probably far more important than any issue purely libertarian.

         Take vouchers. They were invented by a libertarian, Milton Friedman, and over many years became part of the mainstream conservative program. Vouchers are denounced by utopians because they retain the state as funder of education. Indeed, in a community like mine, where 30 percent of the kids are in private school, a successful voucher system would probably increase the demand for school money from taxes.

         Still, vouchers would create a way to privatize the provision of education. With a voucher system, parents would have to approach their kids’ schooling as customers, just like private-school parents. They would have to search for what they wanted rather than beseeching the government for it, and soon enough they would not bother with the government any more. Their ideas and expectations would have changed because their institutions had changed. 

         All of this amounts to a kind of stealth libertarianism, which makes the realist smile. The utopian frowns at the halfwayness of it. He wants to sell people first on the rightness of his ideal. If he can do that, he says, we won’t need a halfway measure like vouchers. The problem is that he cannot make a sale. He needs a 51 percent solution, and he doesn’t have one of those.

         In the state where I live, vouchers have been rejected by the voters, as have charters. They are dead, dead, dead. [ii] But in other places they are being tried — and that is the key. Whether they prevail will depend not on how many people are convinced to be libertarians, but how well parents like voucher schools and what the test scores show.

         Now consider the proposal for Social Security private accounts. It came out of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that started pushing it more than 25 years ago. It made it into political contention for two reasons. First, because Social Security was going broke. It would not have been considered except for that. Second, because it offered an idea that was neither a tax increase nor a benefit cut, and sounded a whole lot better than either. Thus a libertarian-born idea became, in the late 1990s, doctrine of the Republican Party.

         This was more stealth libertarianism. Its inventors wanted a way to prod Americans to take personal responsibility for the 12.6 percent of wages the government was extracting from every paycheck. It was not politically possible to do this by taking away Social Security benefits and telling them, “Take care of yourself.” But the tax had risen, making Social Security a worse and worse deal. Demographics made inevitable a further tax increase or benefit cut that would push the rate of return below zero for a high-earning worker. Private accounts offered the hope of a richer retirement. 

         The sales pitch for private accounts was more about money than freedom — and the money issue was not a slam-dunk. High earners would get more benefit from keeping their money than low earners, because the government’s system had favored low earners. Private accounts did offer the chance of much greater returns, but also the chance of a small return. Private accounts shifted risk from the government to individuals. For a halfway competent investor, this shift was well worth taking, but it was real and opponents pointed it out. And the demographic problem — that a higher proportion of the population would be retired and living off a smaller proportion of workers — was only disguised. Demographics would affect private-account holders through the price of assets. 

         Private accounts also required collective transition costs. In the new system each generation would pay its own retirement rather than its parents’. That was an improvement; it would let workers use the power of compound interest, which is very powerful over a lifetime. But that seemed to suggest that one generation would have to pay twice — once for its parents, who had not paid for themselves, and once for itself. To soften that blow, the system would have to borrow a large sum, perhaps a trillion dollars over 40 years. The Cato people argued that this didn’t matter, but obviously it did.

         The Left charged that Social Security privatization was a Wall Street scheme motivated by greed. It was not; Wall Streeters don’t make long-term investments in political ideas. The Cato people had done it, with the goal of promoting liberty; but the politicians who took over the idea only partly sold it for that reason. George W. Bush tried. A different president could have done better, but probably Congress was not ready for it. (But how do you get people ready for it? Maybe you try and fail, and try again.)

         There is still hope for Social Security private accounts. When the Democrats come to solving this problem they will offer a tax increase. They will have to. The Republicans will reach for an alternative, and what can they find that is better than private accounts?            

         Those two proposals — school vouchers and Social Security private accounts — are libertarian ideas. It was conservatives who tried to implement them. It was also conservatives who pushed welfare time limits. That measure was signed by Bill Clinton over the opposition of left-liberals. It was a conservative project passed with mostly Republican votes. In a decade it has cut the federal welfare rolls about in half.

         Still another bit of stealth libertarianism: medical savings accounts. These were invented by a free-market conservative, J. Patrick Rooney, then CEO of the Golden Rule Insurance Co., as an alternative to low-deductible medical insurance. Their tax deductibility was passed into law by the Republican Congress under George W. Bush. Like school vouchers, they exist at the margin. The versions available are not always ideal, but are better than nothing. Also like vouchers, they are aimed at one of the really big, expensive thing the modern welfare state does — in this case, medicine, the one big part of the American economy in which the state is still trying to supplant private industry. I have my doubts whether Americans will cotton to medical savings accounts, because everyone I know who has generous medical coverage prefers it. But in the fight for private medicine this is the best new idea on the shelf. 

         Four ideas: vouchers, Social Security private accounts, welfare time limits and medical savings accounts. All are gradualist but powerful ideas to increase individual choice and responsibility. All strengthen an individualist culture. All are projects of conservatives.

         But libertarians have long been uneasy with conservatives, especially since 9-11, when the conservatives raised the banner of soldiers, spies, prosecutors and cops. I understand the feeling about that. If I want to be agreeable in a group of progressive-liberals, which most of my neighbors are, I grumble about civil liberties and the war. There I have common ground with them — but it is common only if we do not discuss it past the first drink.

         The left-liberal idea of foreign policy is internationalism — that the United States shall refrain from global assertiveness without permission of the United Nations — or at least of NATO.  Liberals are not against war, if dressed in humanitarian garb. They still revere Wilson, who got us into World War I, and they broach no criticism of Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman. Most of them applauded when Clinton ordered the bombing of Serbia, a country that posed no threat to the United States. Most of them want the American military to go into Darfur. Their first criticism of the Bush foreign policy is not that it kills people but that it has alienated our allies, meaning particularly the Canadians, Germans and French.

         The libertarian’s idea of foreign policy is more about America minding its own business. The libertarian who objects to the Bush foreign policy will probably not object to the “lone cowboy” aspect. Probably he likes that part. Maybe it reminds him of Robert Heinlein. A libertarian cowboy will be more respectful of other people than a neocon cowboy, but he will not want to be permanently assigned to a posse of humanitarians.

         Domestically, the left-liberal believes in freedom, or believes he believes in it. But it is an abridged freedom. He may have a government like the one in my city, which tells me I have to have a license to cut down a tree of more than 6 inches in diameter, or to have a cat in my house, or a business. If it is a business, the sign can be only eight inches square and have nothing on it but my name. I violate the law if I burn scrap lumber in my backyard or put one sheet of paper in my garbage can. Or one plastic bottle. Or one glass bottle. I am forbidden to ride a bicycle without a helmet or a car without a seat belt or to decline to pay union dues if some stranger has signed a labor contract that demands I pay them. I cannot smoke in a café or bar or buy a medical insurance policy that doesn’t cover naturopathy, a craft I consider quackery. My public school district wants to assign kids to my neighborhood high school based on race, even though the state constitution specifically forbids it, and the matter is about to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.[iii]I pay taxes for a baseball stadium named for an insurance company, a football stadium named for a telephone company and a basketball stadium named for a bank. I pay taxes for a stadium that was blown up. I pay taxes for the new city hall, which has a grass roof.

         To the liberal, freedom concerns none of these things. Apart from freedom of expression, the liberal’s idea of freedom is mainly about privacy. It is about a place for whoopee, and for not being held to account or morally judged afterward. In many ways his idea of freedom is the 15-year-old’s: Stay out of my room. Show me respect. And hey, when’s dinner?

         The liberal says, “I’m for choice.” The libertarian wants to know which one: school choice? Social Security choice? drug choice? union-membership choice? Alas, the liberal is “pro-choice” only to avoid being labeled “pro-abortion.” He is not pro-choice. He is pro-privacy. (And legally the right of abortion rests on an argument for marital privacy.)