I'm going to call it a protest against the philosophy of interventionism. I think liberty is a moral issue. Natural rights, if you will. The fact that it has utilitarian justification is, to me, just gravy. Freedom would be worth it even if it didn't produce the 'best' outcome. I enjoyed Bastiat's Harmonies because it attempted to show that utilitarian outcomes flowed from natural liberty. I find attempts to rigorously calculate utilitarian outcomes without recourse to 'natural rights' are often very off-putting. After all, how does one measure utility? If the American black man was better fed and cared for before the civil war than after, was it wrong to free him? If my pigs are safe in my field, not bothering anyone, then it's wrong for anyone to force me to shoot them, because unjustified force is evil. The fact that it is a tremendous waste of resources is secondary to the fact that my rights have been violated.
Edit: It has come to my attention that where I said utilitarianism, I meant consequentialism in general. Wikipedia says that consequentialism judges an action by it's outcome. Utilitarianism measures that outcome by aggregate happiness. Judging the outcome of any action involves establishing a scale of goodness. Determining whether that scale should be in utils, dollars, leisure hours, level of self-determination, or some other measure (either absolute or relative) is necessarily normative. My (hyperbolic) point about the slaves was that without a natural rights argument, who cares what the slaves want? If we can objectively evaluate potential working conditions and determine that they were better off in slavery, are we justified in keeping them there against their wishes? After all it's for their own good. Or the greater good. Depending on the scale we decide to use.
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