This is the sixth entry in my Antistatism Series.
The last two posts in this series, “Practicability,” and “Heaven, Hell, or Hades?,” showed that Ayn Rand’s politics is incomplete because it provides no sufficiently realized account of limited government’s practicability. Objectivism states that a government of delegated and enumerated powers, limited to the purpose of enforcing the principle of individual rights, is requisite in order for man to reap the benefits of social organization. Objectivism does not, however, make any explicit argument that such a government can actually be established and maintained.
Objectivists, of course, universally believe in the practicability and sustainability of limited government. If they believed otherwise, their politics would be futile and impractical, and therefore immoral by their own standards. Since their philosophy lacks any explicit argument for the practicability and sustainability of its core institution, how do they justify their belief?
As we have already seen, Objectivists justify their belief in limited government by gesture to the first century of American republicanism, roughly 1789–1889. (The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 makes a convenient bookend.) This brief golden age of free minds and free enterprise is for Objectivists a “proof of concept” demonstrating the practicability of limited government. The fact that limited government failed, or is in the midst of over a century of slow, ugly failure, does not, for Objectivists, indict limited government itself. Rather, the Objectivist view is that American Constitutional government was doomed to failure from the start because it lacked a proper philosophical foundation. Now that Ayn Rand has provided that foundation, they believe, it has become possible to restore limited government and to maintain it.
Any Objectivist, therefore, can stand on one foot and explain in two words why things have a chance to be different next time: Objectivist philosophy. The question is: does this explanation count for anything, or is it just empty posturing?