Breaking Bad: 6 Seasons of Libertarian Macho Flash

The end of Breaking Bad is nothing short of the end of an era. In six short seasons we watched the mild mannered Walter Hartwell White transform from a defeated Malcolm-In-The-Middle-esque family man who’s biggest problems were a boss who wanted him to work late on his birthday, and a wife who wanted him to eat veggie bacon, to an internationally feared kingpin of a multi-million dollar bloodthirsty meth empire, pseudonymously known as Heisenberg, all because of a little lung cancer diagnosis. And despite all the bodies chemically disincorporated, prisoners shanked, and children murdered, the show remains a pinnacle of libertarianism’s infiltration of mainstream pop culture.

For those that don’t know “Macho Libertarian Flash” is a term that’s come to mean the strategy of promoting libertarianism by shocking people with radical, although philosophically consistent positions. For example, in a debate over gun control the Macho Libertarian may blurt out, “Sell automatic riffles to teenagers out of an ice cream truck for all I care.”

Breaking Bad is essentially a 6 season long Macho Libertarian treatise against the War On Drugs. We’re all very comfortable talking about marijuana legalization, but a lot of us get squeamish about decriminalizing harder substances. Breaking Bad pulls no such punches. Marijuana is a joke in the series, even to Hank the DEA agent who admits that pot is harmless even as he fails to make the gateway drug argument. This series cuts right the root, exploring the folly of criminalizing one of the nastiest drugs around.

To be perfectly clear, I’m not defending Walter White’s actions. A number of libertarians have gone to bat interpreting Walt’s actions through a strict nonaggression principle lens, and tried to justify all his most abhorrent behavior. Here at Silver Circle we embrace flawed heroes. We don’t need Randian moral paragons. We shouldn’t expect characters to be perfect libertarians any more than we should expect activists to be perfect libertarians. It’s the story that matters. It’s the ethos of the world of Breaking Bad that oozes the message of liberty.

Consider this scene from “Cat’s in the Bag.” Walt is the freshly minted iron chef of meth. He, and his young partner Jesse had a violent confrontation with some legacy meth dealers who didn’t appreciate the competition. Through the miracle of chemistry Walt poisons them, killing one and incapacitating the other. Trying to decide how to deal with the one who survived, he says to Jesse,

“He’s a distributor right. A business man. He’s a man of business. It would therefor seem to follow that he is capable of acting out of mutual self interest.”

If that’s not a nugget of perfectly consistent libertarian rhetoric I don’t know what is. Even in the face of violent retaliation, Walt considers striking a deal of mutual self interest first. To many that would seem foolish, even idiotic, but to a libertarian it makes perfect sense.

Or how about this scene from “A No Rough Stuff Type of Deal.” Walt has just revealed his lung cancer diagnosis to his family and is sitting on his back porch with his brother in-law, the DEA agent Hank Schrader. Hank offers him a cigar. Here’s the dialog.

WALT: “Cuban?”
HANK: “I did a little favor for an FBI guy.”
WALT: “Now, I was under the impression these were illegal.”
HANK: “Yeah well, sometimes forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest. Doesn’t it?”
WALT: “It’s funny isn’t it? How we draw that line.
HANK: Yeah? What line is that?
WALT: Well, what’s legal, what’s illegal. Cuban cigars, alcohol. You know, if we were drinking this in 1930, we’d be breaking the law. Another year… we’d be okay. Who knows what will be legal next year?
HANK: You mean like pot?
WALT: Yeah. Like pot. Or whatever.
HANK: Cocaine? Heroin?
WALT: I’m just saying it’s arbitrary.
HANK: Well, you ought to visit lockup.
You hear a lot of guys talking like that.”

This scene is practically a whole libertarian treatise on the Drug War. You’ve got the DEA agent who colludes with an FBI agent to break the law, and then gave a cigar to a man dying of lung cancer. His own family no less! So, obviously law enforcement doesn’t give a crap about public health. You’ve got the “forbidden fruit” argument, which is that prohibiting substances actually increase their use in society. You’ve got Walt saying flatly that the law itself is arbitrary, and you’ve got Hank implying that prisoners of the Drug War know this! They aren’t just hapless victims of a stupid law. They are informed, and consciously deciding to break bad laws. I about jumped out of my seat when I saw that scene the first time.

In “Sunset,” during season three, we meet our first explicitly libertarian character, complete with Ron Paul bumper sticker. Walt gets a new lab assistant named Gale for his underground super lab. Gale holds an MS degree in organic chemistry and is a specialist in X-ray crystallography, and Walt understandably wonders how he got into the meth business. Gale answers:

“Well, there’s crime… and then there’s CRIME. I’m definitely a libertarian. Consenting adults want what they want and if I’m not supplying it they will get it somewhere else. At least with me they’re getting exactly what they pay for. No added toxins or impurities.”

During the series we get to see Walt get pepper sprayed for talking back to a cop. We get to see Walt’s wife, Skylar pull the “Am I being detained… am I free to go” routine when Hank won’t let her leave. We get to see Jesse refuse a search of his RV with some stunning legal jujitsu. And course who can forget Saul Goodman, the criminal attorney who’s literally a criminal attorney, who masterfully games the system throughout the later seasons. I heard a rumor that AMC is giving Saul his own spin-off series.

Ultimately, the Macho Libertarian Flash of Breaking Bad goes far beyond the tension between law enforcement and the drug market. It cuts right to the heart of what liberty is, and that is responsibility. In the beginning Walt is refusing cancer treatment, so his family stages an intervention to persuade him to change his mind. When asked to explain why he refuses he says,

“What I want, what I need, is a choice. Sometimes I feel like I never actually make, any of my own choices. I mean, my entire life it just seems I never had a real say about any of it. This last one, cancer, all I have left is how I choose to approach this… What good is it to survive if I’m too sick to work, to enjoy a meal, to make love. For what time I have left, I want to live in my own house, I want to sleep in my own bed. I don’t want to choke down 40 or 50 pills every single day, and lose my hair, lie around, too tired to get up, and so nauseated that I can’t even move my head. You cleaning up after me. Me, some dead man, artificially alive, just marking time… I choose not to do it.”

To summarize, Walt is literally saying, “live free or die,” a slogan emblazoned on his New Hampshire license plates in the last season. And that’s what this show is about. It’s about choices, sometimes bad choices. It’s about Walter White’s moral agency. We identify with Walter White in a very intimate way, because like all of us he is striving to be free in an unfree world where his path is chosen for him. And he breaks bad precisely for that reason, to choose his own path. Walter White cannot be a perfect libertarian in this story, because fundamentally it’s a story about holding him accountable for his bad choices, for his aggression, and for his natural crimes, but not his statutory crimes. It’s a story about unintended consequences, and infused deep in the operating system of the world they’ve created, it’s a story about the folly of hubris in a libertarian world.

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