Libertarianism--The Unwitting Ally of Tyranny

I can understand why the very rich would  profess to be Libertarians in the same way that I can understand why the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century professed to be Social Darwinists. When you burn away all the high-sounding rhetoric and distorting propaganda for which Libertarianism is the cover, it's essentially the same doctrine, and its barbarous effects on our political and economic life are also the same. (I am more open to the idea of Libertarian principles governing the cultural sphere, for reasons I describe in this essay.  But they lead to disastrous results in the political and economic spheres.)

The Social Darwinists basically professed an eat-or-be-eaten, might-makes-right ethic and justified it in survival-of-the-fittest quasi-scientific terms.  The rich and powerful in any society are just evolution's winners.  They are rich because that's how evolution works. They are beyond good and evil as evolution is.  Rules and laws are for the losers, for the little people, those who haven't the talent, initiative, boldness, and shrewdness that the winners have.  The rich and powerful are the kings of the hill and it is to be expected that they will use all their power, wealth, violence and political ruthlessness to fight off anyone who would try to drag them down. The mediocre have no role except to serve the needs of evolution's winners.  So went the thinking of the Robber Barons, and that's pretty much what we saw until the Prosgressive movement at the turn of the century started to push back.

The only ones who could restrain the power of the superwealthy in the Robber Baron era were organized labor and the government, and the first eighty years of the twentieth century were about how the power of both inspired by Progressive ideals to create prosperity for a hugely expanded segment of the American population.  It happened because Henry Ford was smart enough to figure out that rather than fighting labor and doing whatever it could to keep wages low, that everyone benefitted if the workers actually made enough money to buy the cars they were building. It happened in large part because J.M. Keynes persuaded some key people among the American overclass that Bolshevism was their future unless they changed their m.o., and so the progressive FDR replaced conservative libertarian icon Herbert Hoover. 

And the American story, until Ronald Reagan came to office--at least on the domestic side--was a story of a decent, progressive America emerging, one that tried to bring more and more Americans into the prosperous middle.  For complex historical and cultural reasons, black Americans were left out, and it took until the 1960s before serious efforts were made to remedy the injustices associated with that.  The tactics to effect these remedies were in some cases successful and in others not. I am not a great fan of patronizing affirmative action policies as a remedy.  I think that the high-rise monstrosities that passed for public housing in the sixties and seventies created as many problems as they solved.  We can argue about what works and what doesn't, but whatever the practical results, the unreached goal of expanding to everyone access to prosperity was a worthy one, and one still worth pursuing. 

Progressives are those who believe that government is one of the principal vehicles to promote the general welfare of a society.    And progressives are (or should be) adamantly opposed to  Libertarianism in the economic and political spheres.  Libertarians think that government is the enemy, and associate its power with tyranny.

I think it's a good thing that "progressive" replace "liberal" because I think more accurately describes the aspirations of people like me in the radical center who want to secure and protect the rights and prosperity for the greatest number of people--the aspirations of most decent Americans who have some sense of there being a common good. Classical Liberalism is  Libertarianism, and the conceptual confusion that comes from the verbal enmeshment of liberal and libertarian is easily fixed by using the word progressive. 

I also dislike the word "liberal" because it has become too associated with libertinism and moral caprice as in "Hollywood liberal." A progressive is someone who thinks that government is an essential tool for ordinary people to use to insure that their rights and welfare are protected from a predatory superwealthy overclass.  The progressivism of which I speak is deeply rooted in a tradition of American decency,  moral seriousness, and communitarianism.

But my  main objective in this post is to write about the regressivism that is at the heart of the Libertarian movement. Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Frederich von Hayek, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Grover Norquist, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus are some of the best known names associated with Libertarianism. Some Libertarians like Sullivan and Kaus are militarists, and others like the editors at AntiWar.com are not. 

It's an interesting split.  The anti-war types, consistent with the Libertarian aversion for strong governments, are against the growth of government power, and they see war as the best excuse for government to appropriate more power to itself, which is exactly what we're seeing in the current government dominated by the so-called conservative libertarian principles of the GOP.  The pro-war libertarians see war as the right of the strong to do what they need to do to pursue and protect their interests.  I think the anti-war libertarians are more intellectually consistent, but naive about how power works.  The pro-war libertarians are either conscious or unconscious promoters of the overclass agenda to destroy governmental restrictions in order that the superwealthy consolidate power and eventually to destroy the liberty of everyone else.

Because here's where the intellectual incoherence of Libertarians breaks down in the economic sphere.  Libertarianism in this sphere is anarcho-capitalism.  It wants no limits on the freedom of individuals or corporations to pursue their interests.  If government is seen to be the enemy because of its power to restrain liberty, Libertarians are naive about the threat to Liberty that comes from those who have become powerful because of their unrestricted freedom to pursue wealth. The practical effect of Libertarianism leads inevitably to the loss of Liberty for the majority so that the few can do as they please, and this must inevitably evolve into the crony capitalism that is degrading our political life as I write. 

Some principled Libertarians might be theoretically against crony capitalism, but it's their very principles that lead to its inevitability.  If there are no restraints put on the wealthy, what countervailing power is there to stop them from becoming the government?  And when they become the government, then all of a sudden, the superwealthy shed their Libertarian principles and become the great advocates of big government because government no longer restrains them; the government is them. It has become the principal tool they use now to achieve their objectives.

What the Libertarians oppose in principle, they promote in fact. The Libertarians, so fearful of the tyranny of governments, have created a widely, if superficially, adopted  political philosophy that creates the conditions in which the government is inevitably be bought by the wealthy thus creating the tyranny they so adamantly oppose. Isn't this precisely what we're seeing with the Bush administration, the administration that so many Libertarians voted for because they thought Bush was a principled conservative?

They can protest all they want that this isn't what they wanted, but it follows as night from day if Libertarian principles govern our political culture.  And so Thatcherites like Andrew Sullivan, who supported and defended Bush for four years on small-government, conservative-libertarian principle are shocked, just shocked, to discover that he is not a real conservative.  Well, duh.  It's never been about principle; it's always been about power. And and people like Sullivan, witting or unwitting, enabled the ascendancy of this crowd who could care less about principles except as it gives them a rhetoric for their propaganda. Sullivan seems to be a decent enough chap, buy why he is taken seriously by anybody except as a lackey apologist for the overclass is beyond me.

Our foreign policy has been for decades in the service of corporate overclass elites.  To think otherwise is in my mind simply to have been duped by the propaganda that drones ever on in the media that they own.  Now even our domestic policy is being directed by them.  Policies regarding the environment, health care, tax codes, energy--you name it.  The laws are being written by the corporate lobbyists.   The government of the United States is now owned by the superwealthy, and especially those who work within the military/industrial/ congressional complex use it to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us. Our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle are simply their servants, for the most part bought and paid for because of our corrupting campaign finance system.

Libertarianism, in the end, promotes only the freedom of the strong to dominate the weak.  The only counterbalance that those of us in the middle have to the power is in a democratic government that works in the interests of the many rather than in the interests of the few.  This in the end is the only tool that ordinary people have to protect themselves against tyranny, and it's a tool that that in the last twenty five years they have slowly given away.  That's why everything depends on our taking our government back to insure that we have the power to fight the inevitable tyranny that is to come if the Libertarians continue to muddle our collective thinking. The superwealthy elites are not interested in Liberty or democracy in Iraq or in the United States.  Everything about the current administration is disdainful of democracy and democratic procedures.  They are about power and about abusing it in any way they want.

Comments

[Matt Zemek]

Jack and other After the Future readers:

Read this story, which I found in today's P-I. I think in many indirect but real ways, it has a lot to say about why (and how) our citizenry is and has been impotent in the face of all Jack writes about in this particular post.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/267700_prek22.html

[Eustochius]

"Sullivan seems to be a decent enough chap, buy why he is taken seriously by anybody except as a lackey apologist for the overclass is beyond me."

I love your posts on spirituality, Jack, but I fear you are becoming increasingly extreme and shrill.

You weave a convincing narrative, but I am not sure if it will withstand hard-nosed economic analysis. For instance, I believe that social spending actually has increased during the Bush administration -- in all areas. But I don't doubt for a second that he has also handed wads of cash to corporations as well.

After all, one major complaint conservatives had is when Bush just poured huge amounts of money into the Katrina recovery effort. Many compared it to being FDR-esque in its scope.

My impression is that he's just a big spender overall. That's -- in addition to Iraq -- is why our deficit is so high. (I think tax revenues have increased since the Bush tax-cuts, so I'm not sure what effect we can say for certain what would have happened without them.)

I also found this article on outsourcing interesting.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83304/daniel-w-drezner/the-outsourcing-bogeyman.html

You may say that the writer (Daniel Drezner) is just "an apologist for the overclass," but is this any way to argue?

Shouldn't you examine the case on its merits?

I'm not an economist, but it seems that to sustain the arguments you make require a great deal of economics' expertise, because it is so easy to demagogue numbers if you don't look at the data itself. I think a famous economist said once that one should learn economics to avoid being deceived by economists.

And I am pretty sure that you're beating a straw-man when you claim that conservatives/libertarians favor a form of anarcho-capitalism. I'm sure some do, but most of the conservatives I talk to are strongly opposed to corporate welfare and are appalled at the corruption brought in by Tom Delay.

I very much agree that corporations need to be reigned in and much stronger ethics must be put in place. I also favor greater education spending and serious, effective market-oriented approaches to poverty. I may be wrong, but I suspect you wouldn't support someone like John McCain, which would suprise me, as I think he's very much in the mold of trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt.

And on Europe, I agree that we have lower income mobility, but what about average standard of living and rate of economic growth? Economic growth is vital for improving the standard of living over the long-haul. I've read reports that in 20-30 years that the per-capita GDP of Europeans will be half the US's if current trends continue. And greater economic growth means more tax revenue for programs as well.

As I said, I, in general favor solutions that are market-oriented. Meaning that, like a good Taoist, any approach to helping the poor or improving our environment should endeavor to harness market forces rather than oppose them.

Another issue is entitlement spending: I think that takes up a huge portion of our budget and that we're going to have to take serious steps to get it under control or our young people will be paying a very serious price. So for instance, we likely need to raise the retirement age since people are living longer.

I write all this because, while I agree that there is great deal of corporate exploitation going on, and am very sympathetic to doing all we can to help the less fortunate -- via governmental means --I fear you have gone a little too far in your thinking. For instance, your comment about Andrew Sullivan strikes me as well -- a bit paranoid.

We need to take bold measures, but at the same we're being soft-hearted, we need to be hard-headed.

One final comment, I really find it hard to accept that the Bush adminstration doesn't care at all about democracy promotion. If that's true why on earth would such talented people as Condoleeza Rice and Zalmay Khalizad be involved. I really find it hard to believe, given her background, that Condi or Zal are just "apologists for the overclass."

Listen, I dislike Bush as much as the next guy and I really hope the Dems make some big wins in '06, but I'm -- well -- a little concerned about you, that's all.

[Jack Whelan]

Eustochius--

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I wish more people who disagreed with me would write. But I think you're missing the point. This is not an argument about economic practicalities, about what works or what does not, or about whether George Bush is doing a good job or not. It's much more basic than that. It's an argument about fundamental principles and their implications.

This is for me no longer a polite parlor discussion among reasonable people about how much taxes are too much or too little or about how to give the economy a tweak. It's about how Libertarianism is really at its roots a justification of the law of the jungle, and how if that is true, then it follows that as in the jungle, the strong dominate the weak. If you're going to argue with me, then that's where I want you to take me on. And then we can discuss whether or not that's exactly what we're seeing in Bush Administration policies. To me nothing could be more obvious that this is the case, but I'm open to be challenged on that.

If then what I'm saying is true, then it follows that what I said about Sullivan is true. I think he is a decent guy, but I think he's also very implicated in the Beltway mainstream media culture, and while I don't believe he understands the implications of his libertarian principles, that's precisely why I find it hard to take him serioiusly. He's an incoherent hodgepode of unintegrated, contradictory ideas. I find it hard to take him seriously because I find his positions naive and fundamentally inconsistent with his professed Christianity, about which I believe him to be quite sincere. Philosophical Libertarianism and Christianity are about as incompatible as two world views could be. I hope someday he gets it all sorted out, but in the meantime he is, I'm afraid, an unwitting overclass tool.

What is pernicious about Libertarianism in my view is that decent thoughtful people like you are taken in by it because it seems so reasonable and sane. It is an extremist ideology masquerading in think tank gravitas, and its acceptance as just one position on the American marketplace of ideas naively underestimates its influence on public policy and on the American electorate, which goes along with it for exactly the reasons you elucidate in your post. These people are hellbent on destroying what it took eighty years to build, and we are, dear Eustochius, going to feel the brunt of it all too soon if we don't put a stop to it.

What if I'm right? Would my tone be shrill then? Should the Trojoan sentinel who suspects something is not quite right about this horse they're dragging into the city shout out his warning, or should he invite the city elders to discuss it over tea. If it turns out that I'm wrong, I'll apologize, but I don't think I am.

[Eustochius]

You're very correct that if this is what is going on, you're obligated to alert as many people as possible. And I think you're right that libertarianism -- taken to its extreme -- does lead to a law of a jungle. But, granting that you are right, it is nonetheless a fine line to walk so people don't tune you out. I think you are doing an admirable job overall -- you're not for example, screaming and swearing as many liberal blogs are wont, but overclass sounds, well, a little conspiratorial. I think big corporations is a better term -- less inflamatory but still packs a punch. Because if by the overclass, you mean the rich, well everyone wants to be rich.

There's no doubt that Republicans have manipulated the debate, however. After all, I think about now they would be screaming, "Class warfare." But if you focused on increasing income mobility and education availiability -- they can't use that against you.

But even so, I guess, while I think the country has serious problems, I don't really think we're in crisis mode.

After all, Bush has atrocious ratings and it seems unlikely that the Republicans will win back both houses. And Bush will be gone in just a few years and be replaced with someone who's likely to reject his policies.

And take for example social security reform. It was an abysmal failure; I'm not so sure we should panic if we have a lame-duck president who can't get anything done.

Besides, the Democrats should have come together and tried to fix it, and not just demagogue it into the ground. On the one hand, I can understand people's nervousness about privatizing social security and how it would benefit stock traders and what not. However, there's seems little doubt that under Bush's plan that their money would have grown faster and more reliably. If I were going to invest my money for retirement, it makes a lot more sense to put a fair amount in the stock market, because over the long-haul you'll get solid 10% returns, as opposed to the 1 or 2% I think with social security.

As long as money were directly taken from the paychecks, not only would they have guaranteed money, but they'd have a lot more of it in retirement. (Okay it's not guaranteed, guaranteed, but it would be doing exactly what a competent investor would do. You'd probably have a far greater chance of dying in a plane crash than having less money than SS would have given you, and a vanishingly small chance of having significantly less, especially if you shifted the portfolio to more conservative investments as retirement approached.)

So, I don't really view this privitization thing as seriously as you do. On schools, I'm against vouchers but I think we should get rid of the teacher's union, or phase it out, but pay a lot higher salaries to attract great teachers. I went to public school not that that long ago, and the teachers were definitely far from excellent.

But where I do agree with you strongly is on handouts for corporations. That's definitely very sleazy and needs to be stopped. And that also means eliminating farm subsidies for large argibusinesses, but not for small farmers.

Again, would I call this crisis? Probably not. I think overall we still have a quite high-standard of living, and our levels of corruption are not near Latin American levels. But I do think it demands serious and sustained attention.

And I guess I think someone like John McCain, paired with a Democratic House and Senate could take it on. If it were pure Democrats, I think we could have another fiasco like we're having now.

So, in many ways, I think it makes more sense to focus on clear examples of corruption -- like corporate tax-breaks and corporate favors -- to take a stern and hard-line on that, but to remain flexible with other issues.

So I agree the situation needs serious sustained attention, but I don't think we're on the brink of collapse. And above all, I want policies that actually work. I'm almost as afraid of what a revival of strong left-wing policies (protectionism, for instance) would do to the economy, as I am of corporate handouts.

The problem -- as I see it -- is that conservatives are actually right about many economic issues, it's just that the Republicans are also so corrupt right now. So, when they come up with a plan that might actually be good for the people, like privatizing SS, no one will listen because they've destroyed their credibility.

I guess you may think I've been bamboozled by economists, but one thing that was pointed out to me I thought was quite interesting. If you take a country, like a poor african country, with a per-capita GDP of about $500, and you redistribute all the money to each person equally -- how much does each person get? Still $500, of course! The point being that economic growth is often more critical in the long haul than any redistribution to the poor would be.

So I guess while I believe that corporations have indeed enriched themselves at the expense of tax payers, I don't really trust liberals to be hard-headed enough when it comes to economics to actually fix the problems they're trying to solve. Or at least I'm skeptical. But in the end, our disagreements are not that large. We both support a Democratic takeover. We just differ in our level of concern and in our methods.

Best wishes, and keep up the good work.

Eustochius

[Jack Whelan]

Eustochius--

I understand where you're coming from. The basic differences between you and me are that, first, you trust our leaders, and I do not--they long ago lost any reason for me to give it to them. Second, you look at politics as a kind of argument between people of good will, who disagree about policies because of their different philosophies, and it can all be worked out with compromise. That may have been more true before Reagan, but now I see it as a political power struggle in which the people in the middle have gradually been disempowered. To accomplish this has been a very conscious agenda of the extremists who have taken over the GOP who have made the ugliness in American politics much, much uglier. Either you see that or you don't. Libertarianism combined with a bizarre form of Christian religiosity has been the ideology of these extremists.

The phrase "class warfare", while it may be distasteful to you, accurately describes what is happening; it's been happening since the beginning of time. Unless people organize to prevent it, the strong naturally seek to dominate the weak. The U.S. was founded to be such an organization, but as the founders feared, it has been continuously threatened, first by the southern oligarchs, then by the Robber Barons, and now by the corporate overclass. And the threat was beaten back the first two times because people recognized it for what it was, and fought it. The question now is whether things are too far gone for any kind of a fight to be mounted because the war has been waged behind a cloud of propaganda and confusion making it hard to recognize for what it is.

Along thes lines, the right in this country has deliberately tried to make the phrase 'class warfare' radioactive so that people have precisely the reaction you had to it when I use it. We can't talk about it, and so it seems invisible. But it's the big story that the right doesn't want anybody to be telling, because it's a war that they can wage all the more effectively so long as the rest of us are sleeping while they do it.

[Joshua]

As a libertarian, and a relative latecomer (via http://donklephant.com/2006/04/22/not-with-a-bang-but-a-burp/ ) to this whole libertarianism-as-class-warfare discussion, I do need to point out one thing about libertarianism that, on its face anyway, challenges that idea (and which neither you nor any other commentators here, for or against, have discussed yet). That is that some of the most prominent libertarian causes are ones that involve private activity that has nothing to do with the interests of the rich and powerful, and indeed seems to fly in the face of those interests.

Most famously, libertarians tend to take a dim view of the so-called "war on drugs," on the principle that government should not be in the business of saving people from themselves (and certainly not by the types of draconian measures associated with the drug war both domestically and abroad). But I find it hard to believe the overclass of which you speak is particularly keen on seeing any presently illicit drugs legalized. As employers it's not in their interests to have more drugs be legal and generally available to their employees. Also, the booze and tobacco industries certainly don't want any more legal competition for their own business.

So, how does this figure into the libertarianism-as-class-warfare meme? If your response is that drug legalization would lead to a Big Pot or Big Cocaine along the same lines as Big Tobacco, I would submit that that would still be infinitely preferable to what we have now with the drug war (and, of course, what our forebears once had with alcohol Prohibition before they wised up and abandoned it). At least "Big Tobacco" never sent gangs of armed thugs into neighborhoods to protect their sales.

[Jack Whelan]

Joshua--

My repsonse to you is the same as to Eustochius. It's not that I find many of the particular policy ideas of libertarians problematic. We can talk about the practicalities without reference to an underlying philosophy. We could similarly talk about how Mussolini got the trains working, or how Mao improved child nutrition, but does that mean that Fascism or Maoism is unobjectionable? Is Libertarianism to be praised because it has a more practical solution to the problem of drugs.

As I explained elsewhere, I'm for Libertarian principles in the cultural sphere--the sphere of values. People should be free to do as they please so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. Where I find Libertarianism dangerous is in the economic and political spheres, insofar as it wants to minimize government regulation and maximize privatization; where it argues that taxation is theft and that everyone has a legitimate right to be as avaricious as they please. This, in my view, must inevitably lead to tyranny, not from the tyranny of the majority that Libertarians obsess about, but from the few, the oligarchs whose power must increase as governments power to restrain them is stripped away. If you don't think so, let me hear your arguments.

So I'm not talking about specifiic issues, I'm talking about Libertarianism's fundamental principles and long-term objectives. I believe there are lots of Libertarians like you who sign on because it makes a certain kind of sense to you, but you don't realize what the implications of Libertarian principles are or how they are being used in the long run to take away your Liberty. Hence the word "unwitting" in my title.

What I want you to see is that Libertarianism is just a form of neo-Social Darwinism when applied in the economic and political spheres. The whole anarcho-capitalist program of Libertarianism, which is really at the heart of GOP domestic economic policy since Reagan--lower taxes, deregulation, union busting, privatization--are all designed to destroy the New Deal system, which was so effective at protecting the weak from the predations of the strong and in promoting widespread participation in American prosperity.

I think that most Americans don't know much about history and take for granted their relative prosperity. They have no idea how much they owe to the New Deal and have no idea how different things will be once the last of it has been dismantled, if the Libertarians have their way.

[Jack Whelan]

Joshua--

See my response to Tom Strong, a left libertarian who shares your concerns, here: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2006/04/class_warfare.html

All I can say is that I think you're getting so hung up in the constitutional technicalities, or whatever, you're not seeing the big picture.