Individualism and coerced collectivism
In an April 2018 episode, Bob Zadek framed the divide between libertarianism and non-libertarian points of view as one between the individual and the group. He described non-libertarian positions as freedom for a majority acting through government to impose its worldview on a minority, so that the majority lives as it wishes and the minority is unfree, and contrasted this with libertarianism’s emphasis on “the smallest political unit, which is one person.” In his framing, collectivism consists of “assigning people to one or another or hundreds of groups,” so that they are treated not as individuals but as members of a group David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).
David Boaz agreed that libertarians are individualists but added a qualification: libertarians understand that people are social animals who associate voluntarily in churches, businesses, neighborhoods and families. What libertarians object to, he said, is “coerced collectivism” and the use of government force to treat people unequally. He placed group division in a long history, from what he called a primitive form of tribalism through anti-Semitism, racism against people of color, divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and the scapegoating of both the rich and the poor. Boaz also cautioned against assuming that majorities always hold power: under apartheid in South Africa, he said, it was the majority that was discriminated against, and in contemporary democratic government many policies are not endorsed by a majority. As an example he cited a recent increase in tariffs on newsprint from Canada, which he said was not put to any vote but was obtained by the paper industry from politicians in Washington David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).
Guns, self-defense and dependence on the state
In an October 2018 episode, David Harsanyi told Zadek that how one feels about an individual’s ability to protect themselves, their family and their property reveals how one feels about the Constitution and about “individualism rather than collectivism.” He argued that a person who believes everyone should rely on the state for their well-being is probably not a fan of the Constitution at all. Zadek put the point in terms of dependency: to the extent that gun control limits or makes ineffective the right of self-defense, the individual must turn to the government for protection, so that gun control “inherently builds extreme dependency upon the state” and subordinates the individual to the government [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Harsanyi extended the argument to socialism, which he said undermines the idea of individualism for collectivism and the state. He described most of the Bill of Rights as individual rights specifying what government cannot do, and said that requiring a person to ask the state for permission to have guns within the scope of legality cuts against everything the Constitution is about. He credited Heller with codifying that the right of gun ownership is an individual right rather than a collective right, not merely a matter of militias but of people defending themselves. Zadek described Heller as a groundbreaking case that clearly established at the Supreme Court level that the right to bear arms was a right of individuals and not a collective right, and observed that it took a very long time for the Supreme Court to speak to this individual right, which he called probably the least litigated of all the rights in the Bill of Rights [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Harsanyi also sketched the legislative history. Before the 1930s, he said, there was not a single written federal law limiting gun ownership that he knew of, though there were occasional state and more likely city laws, typically in the West, barring guns from a red-light district; no one had a license for a gun. In the 1930s, he said, fears of machine-gun crime—which he connected to the criminal element created by government intrusion into drinking through Prohibition—led the federal government during FDR’s administration to pass the National Firearms Act in two iterations, which in turn led to the first Supreme Court ruling on gun ownership, Miller. He said that case found the government could limit the kinds of weaponry people owned, but nothing in common use, only exotic or military weapons, and that until 1986 people could own fully automatic weapons simply by paying some money. The modern debate, he said, was framed in the 1970s and late ’60s, when urban crime split Americans between those who wanted guns off the streets and those who wanted more guns for self-protection [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Marriage licensing, eugenics and “right-wing collectivism”
In a February 2020 episode, Jeffrey Tucker said that the question of procreation and freedom of association in partnering, particularly sexual partnering, had been the topic of his previous book, Right-Wing Collectivism, in which he spent an entire book on the history of demographic panic and government planning. He said it was the progressives of the turn of the twentieth century who wanted to use eugenics and marriage licensing laws, and that the reason people must get a license to marry is a government panic that the wrong people were pairing off and diminishing the quality of the population Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
Zadek supplied a date and a motive: the first marriage licensing statutes were in New England in the 1820s, and the reason, as reflected in the media of the time, was a fear that white women were marrying Asians, mulattos and imbeciles, so that licensing was a way to preserve the species. Tucker called this an ugly past and noted that marriage licenses persist today with no move to abolish them. He said he favored freedom with respect to same-sex marriage, but that the government mandate arose because previous laws had put government in charge of distributing marriage licenses; had government never been involved in the marriage industry, there would have been no reason for a Supreme Court decision or the debate. He concluded that government should be gotten out of the marriage marketplace entirely. He added that the fear was racial but also a general fear of marrying someone stupider and reducing the quality of the population, with a eugenic orientation aimed at preventing some people from procreating—a belief he said was widespread into the 1910s and 1920s, and which he linked to minimum wage laws as another means of stopping people from working and thus from procreating Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
Zadek offered his own formulation of socialism in the same exchange, calling it an arranged marriage in economics, in which somebody external decides important decisions such as how you hire a doctor, licensing laws, and what products you may buy or consume; if one abhors arranged marriages, he said, socialism is an arranged marriage on steroids Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
Conscription and the trend toward collectivization
In a June 2020 episode, Zadek described a national commission that had been created, in his telling, in the most idealistic manner to re-examine the draft, and which spent money and recommended, even as a last resort, mandatory public service. He quoted a commentator, Emma Moore, identified as an analyst for military veterans and social programs associated with the Center for a New American Security, saying of the pandemic, “The virus, the experience with the virus”—in Zadek’s rendering a direct quote—“highlights in my mind the greater need for national service.” Zadek said this dynamic scared him: a report on the Selective Service System had led people to seize on any event in public life as proof that mandatory public service is needed Conscription Gets a Face Lift (2020).
Warren Gibson responded that he did not know whether the report was born of innocence or guilt, but that it was indeed scary to the extent it was taken seriously, and that he feared it would not be shelved and forgotten; he called it “a little more groundwork for increasing collectivization of our society.” Zadek noted that the commission held public hearings and invited expert commentary on mandatory public service beyond its primary mission of reorganizing the Selective Service System, and that he listened to one hearing in which Doug Bandow of Cato spoke passionately about the downsides of mandatory public service—taking a year of somebody’s life, depriving the country of their work experience, and mandating that a person give an hour of their life to the public sector. Zadek found it telling that even those who said they would love the idea of national public service but considered it politically a non-starter seemed to be saying they would love it today except that they would get voted out of office Conscription Gets a Face Lift (2020).
Across episodes
The topic recurs across the April 2018 Boaz episode, the October 2018 Harsanyi episode, the February 2020 Tucker episode and the June 2020 Gibson episode, with collectivism treated in each as coercion or group assignment rather than as voluntary association; the excerpts show no development or revision of the concept between the earlier and later treatments, only its application to different subjects—group politics, gun rights, marriage licensing and conscription.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define collectivism as a formal doctrine, nor do they name or discuss its major theorists or texts. They do not describe the outcome of the national service commission’s recommendations, the fate of marriage licensing laws, or the current state of gun legislation. The Boaz and Harsanyi episodes end or break off mid-discussion—Harsanyi’s on the Sullivan Law, the Boaz excerpt at the close of Boaz’s answer—so the arguments made after those points are not available here.