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 power of the superwealthy in the Robber Baron era was restrained only by organized labor and the government, and the first eighty years of the twentieth century were about how labor and the government won the argument with Big Money, and were able 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, everyone benefited if the workers actually made enough money to buy the cars they built. It happened in large part because J.M. Keynes persuaded key people among the American elite 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 domestic story, until Ronald Reagan came to office, 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 their exclusion.
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.
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, Mickey Kaus are some of the best known names associated with Libertarianism. Some Libertarians like 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. Isn't that 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 agenda of the power elite to destroy governmental restrictions in order that the they consolidate power.
Because here's where the intellectual coherence of Libertarians breaks down in the economic sphere. Libertarianism in this sphere is anarcho-capitalist. 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 power elite, 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.