Can you remember when libertarians stood for something good? Okay, maybe you can’t, but let’s at least acknowledge the arguably reasonable notions that libertarianism once represented.
Many people, including some of us who identify as left-wing progressives, can see the appeal of a political approach that combines fiscal conservatism with liberalism on social issues. It would be quite nice if we lived in a world where individuals would have full freedom in their private lives and be protected in their civil rights, and where governments could closely restrain spending, keeping taxes low.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that place. Passionate, concerted effort is still required to help others gain and maintain basic human rights, both here in the West and especially in the developing world. Monumental challenges like global warming, widespread malnutrition, and the threat of pandemic disease can best be addressed through the blend of a mixed economy alongside representative governance.
Conditions simply don’t exist today in which classic libertarianism either makes good sense or can attain broad popularity. Perhaps they never will.
But my biggest complaint is that far too many who still claim the mantle of libertarianism don’t actually believe in the value of small government or in protecting civil liberties. Instead, they appear far closer to the reactionaries of the past, more interested in preserving the entrenched positions of the privileged than in seeing any meaningful reforms. The ‘liberty’ in libertarian seems to apply only to the freedom for the powerful to defend their advantage.
Consider this quote from a recent essay by Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital:
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
By this reasoning, then, rolling back the clock a hundred years or more is the best prescription for what ails us. If only we could go back to that glorious Gilded Age in American history, when capitalism stood unquestioned as a force for good, when millionaires openly wielded their political power without compunction, when white males occupied all the positions of power and influence, then maybe all our other problems would go away. Yeah, as if.
Scarier yet is this astonishing statement from Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Really?
Yes, really. If you read the rest of his essay (which isn’t very long), you’ll see that Thiel is not saying this simply to be provocative, or as a point of sophistry. No, he truly means it. For him, freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.
That doesn’t sound much like someone who would be proud to endorse the American Declaration of Independence, or who would view the U.S. Constitution as an inspired source of wisdom and guidance.
And, as a matter of fact, Thiel pretty much admits that he has no great desire to remain a citizen of the United States, nor even, for that matter, to be an active participant in engaging with the rest of us in our messy world of democratic politics. His lofty goal, instead, is to run away into cyberspace, outer space, or to his own private island. I kid you not.
Thiel says:
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
It saddens me to realize that some people actually think like he does, and that they can’t understand why the majority of us find their ideas so objectionable. But what’s most confounding is that they have the effrontery to label themselves as ‘libertarian’, which, to my mind, does insult to anyone who genuinely supports the doctrines of social liberty and fiscal conservatism.
Whatever Peter Thiel and his type are, they are not classical libertarians; a better moniker for their views might be establishmentarian, since what it seems they really want is to maintain and support the traditional power establishment, or, failing that, to construct a new, glorious, permanent and restricted country club environment of their own.
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye…
Mike Treder is the Managing Director of the IEET, and former Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.
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Mike Treder needs to do more research. Classical liberals (libertarians) like Thomas Jefferson and many of the Founders supported individual liberty, but had harsh words for democracy, calling it the "tyranny of the majority."
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” -- Thomas Jefferson
“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.” -- Thomas Jefferson
Every society we know of which has both agriculture and metallurgy also produces a state, run by alpha male warriors who confiscate part of the society's economic surplus to consolidate their power and secure reproductive advantages. It looks as if states arise spontaneously through human action but not by human design, much like the Hayekian view of markets.
If, as seems likely, humans can't help themselves about forming factions and engaging in politics as they compete for the alpha male positions, then libertarians have have to defy human nature in their efforts to create politics-free utopias.
Bravo! I also read Thiel's essay and many of the comments that followed. Your response presents an entirely plausible interpretation of his words, and I share your concerns that many self-described Libertarians "appear far closer to the reactionaries of the past, more interested in preserving the entrenched positions of the privileged than in seeing any meaningful reforms." These elitists may escape into outer space or float away on a platform at sea to avoid the greater human community, but let's hope that their piggy banks keep them warm and continue to enable the services they have grudgingly accepted from those they resent.
Funny, once Libertarians have got a lot of money they're big preachers about people's rights to the fruits of their labor, but as soon as they run into trouble they're the first to go running the government for hand-outs. (for example the multi-billionare dollar handouts to bankers in the US).
Most didn't start work until they were at least 17 - who was supporting them for the first 17 years of their lives? - arguably taxes are just 'paying back' money owed to society from 'loans' like benefits in times of hardship or social capital.
To put it as kindly as possible Mike, Libertarianism 'makes no sense' according to all empirical data and rational thought. (Sure I used to be one for a while, but I admitted I was deluded).
Many Singularitarians claim that they are super-rational and ultra-smart. If if these supposed 'super-geniuses' could be so severely mistaken about basic economics and sociology, what else are they mistaken about?
It is possible for them to equally mistaken about other basic foundational issues? For example, the claim that Bayesian Induction is the basis for all rationality.
@Samantha, is that the best you can come up with? I thought Mike's piece was well-written. If you have a specific critique, it would be best to make it. Otherwise, you just come off as someone who is perhaps sputtering in embarrassed recognition.
". . . arguably taxes are just 'paying back' money owed to society from 'loans' like benefits in times of hardship or social capital."
Don't libertarians lecture the rest of us about "the seen and the unseen" when it comes to economic calculation? They complain about taxes ("the seen"), while ignoring the benefits ("the unseen") they derived from previous generations' investments through taxation into the built-up social capital they've benefited from. By trying to stop this generational maintenance and transmission of social capital, libertarians display a high time preference (like some of the sociological groups they despise) which tends to squander the wealth of the present at the expense of the future.
I honestly think that a modest amount socialism could work in theory. Unfortunately no one on the left is very realistic about the reasons that people are poor. This is going to be controversial. The average world IQ is 90 and many countries are far below that. I think a welfare state can work to a certain extent when the population is homogeneous and has a fairly high IQ (and no immigration). If someone happens to have a problem, then they can be helped out by other people through taxes.
However if you look at California they have had mass immigration from a country where the average IQ is 87. This shift in population demographics drives the state towards the left and away from libertarianism. California is a mess right know with an unemployment of 11.6% and a huge budget deficit. The IQ of the state is going to continue to drop especially as people who are wealthy are fleeing due to excessive taxation and immigration increases. People on the left are ludicrously arguing that the republicans are holding the state hostage by not passing a "sensible" budget. However, to the left a "sensible" budget means taxing businesses into oblivion and running the wealthy out of the state.
Then you're going to be giving the government more control as the population's IQ drops? This is not a recipe for success. Think how in venezuela (average IQ 89) the people basically dismantled any semblance of a sensible government. It has turned into a mobocracy. Some countries are returning themselves to communism, because the average IQ of the population isn't intelligent enough to understand why voting in this sort of government is bad.
Work on the IQ problem and figure out how to make people smarter by some sort of cognitive enhancement method. Otherwise all this progressive stuff won't really change the dynamics of how much wealth people can generate.
"If, as seems likely, humans can't help themselves about forming factions and engaging in politics as they compete for the alpha male positions, then libertarians have have to defy human nature in their efforts to create politics-free utopias."
I've never met a libertarian (deontological, consequentialist, socialist, capitalist or otherwise) who claimed a libertarian society would be utopian... just that it'd be a more moral and productive society.
There appears to be a flaw with your criticism. If you believe that libertarians are wrong in believe humans can exist without coercive governance due to their nature... how do you rectify the problem that these same flawed humans, ones likely who are attracted to power, would be in charge? Would that not lead to greater disaster?
I have to say that the author of this article here grossly redefines what libertarianism means. No libertarian stands for elitism. No libertarian, not a single one, would want to hold any power over other people. Those who ask for a society like that cannot be called libertarians, but are actually what is today called "conservatives", or "republicans" in the US.
Libertarians base their beliefs on the freedom of the individual, equally possessed (not granted), by virtue of their birth as a human being.
Modern libertarians stand for capitalism and laisser-faire markets as they are a logical consequence of property rights.
They believe that neither government, nor anyone at all, has the right to force anyone else to do anything. The only genuine rule, true libertarians accept throughout, is the non-aggression axiom, which limits any person's freedom by the same freedom of someone else.
If you encounter a person calling themselves "libertarian", while promoting an elitist ruling class or exploitation of other people through whatever means... go and slap the back of their head for abusing this (admittedly today fashionable) label.
Also, dear author, please research your topic more.
Many thanks.
Kevin Carson • http://mutualist.blogspot.com • Jul 21, 2009
The libertarian movement is a lot more diverse than your comments would suggest.
For example, Murray Rothbard (during his project of creating a New Left/Old Right alliance in the years ca. 1970) suggested that the primary function of "our corporate state" was to subsidize the accumulation of capital and the operating costs of big business. Roy Childs wrote a long essay arguing that big business interests were the primary political force behind the growth of big government (or as he put it, liberal intellectuals have historically been the running dogs of big businessmen).
If the vulgar libertarians you describe (and I admit there are too many of them) tend to predominate, they don't have a stranglehold on the movement. There are plenty of principled libertarians who see big business as the primary villain in the growth of the American state, and see free markets as the enemy of corporate power.
And that's a lot closer to the truth historically than your implicit (but apparent) assumptions that the period either before the New Deal or before the Progressive Era was one approximating laissez-faire, that corporate power emerged naturally from the unrestrained market, and that the primary motive force behind the mixed economy and regulatory-welfare state was countervailing power in restraint of big business.
The truth of the matter is a lot closer to the analysis of Gabriel Kolko and G. William Domhoff than to that of Art Schlesinger: the state has acted (if I may borrow the phrase) as executive committee of the corporate ruling class, with most regulations aimed at protecting big business from competition.
Far from the Gilded Age being an example of laissez-faire, the corporate economy as we know it was created as a massive, top-down social engineering project almost entirely by state intervention. Were it not for the land grant railroads, there likely wouldn't have been any large mass-production manufacturing corporations serving a national market. And patents (which should be anathema to any principled believer in free markets) were the main force for cartelizing industry under the control of a few giant corporations; consider, just as a few examples, 1) the growth of AT&T from the Bell Patent Association, 2) the pooling of patents by GE and Westinghouse, and 3) the creation of a first-rate American chemical industry on the direct foundation of Atty General Palmer's seizure of German chemical patents in WWI. Absent all these things the likely pattern of the second industrialization would have likely been, instead, a hundred or more local manufacturing economies on the Emilia-Romagna model, with powered general-purpose machinery integrated into craft production. Rather than the centralized mass-production economy described by Schumpeter and Galbraith, we'd have seen full achievement of the decentralizing power of electricity described by Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi.
Except even free markets create wealth inequalities which lead to the type of rent seeking you describe. So I think it is justifiable to claim laissez-faire capitalism tends toward corporatism.
That isn't to say consistent pushing towards laissez-faire wouldn't help decentralize to some extent... though you will perpetually run up against the collective action problem... and the fact that most don't actually believe in laissez-faire as an ideal in the first place.
Well, EmbraceUnity, in fairness I'll have to concede that what a free market would or would not create involves as much counterfactual speculation on my part as on yours. But there has not in fact ever been a free market in which one could empirically verify that wealth inequalities emerged from laissez-faire.
Actually existing capitalism, from its very beginning, has been a system of collusion between the state and a plutocratic ruling class: the Enclosures and other state-enabled seizures of land from the peasantry; the reenactment of the Enclosures in the Third World by the colonial powers, nullifying the peasantry's rightful property in the land it worked; the Laws of Settlement, which acted as an internal passport system in early industrial Britain; the Combination Laws. Even at the height of so-called "laissez-faire," we had state enforcement of artificial property rights in land (i.e., the enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, against the people who actually first mixed their labor with it), and enforcement of usurious interest rates through artificial scarcity of credit.
I suppose you could dismiss that as a libertarian variant of the "true socialism has never been tried" argument. But I've never had much use for the sort of people who want to blame Rosa Luxemburg for Stalin and Pol Pot.
And anyway, what can I say? I'm an anarchist. I believe that the state is, by its very nature, the tool of a ruling class. We've never had a truly free market (in the sense of a society based on truly free exchange, without state-enforced monopolies and privilege) without a ruling class acting through the state to rig the rules.
One of our big areas of disagreement is probably the real motivation behind the so-called "progressive" state of the 20th century. I think the real difference between the two parties is this: the conservatives are like a farmer who figures he'll come out ahead by working his draft animals to death and then replacing him, whereas the liberals are like a farmer who's smart enough to figure out it's more profitable in the long run to feed his animals well and work them in moderation. But the system is still run by the farmer, who views us as livestock. In Tolstoy's "Parable," the humane farmer gave his cattle the best feed, built comfortable stalls for them, and enlarged the fence. When asked why he didn't let them go, he responded "But then I couldn't milk them!"
I don't think that even in theory laissez-faire capitalism can prevent inequality. Differences in genetics, luck, location, etc will produce differences in outcome, and those who end up on top have the capability of rent seeking. One of the most effective ways to rent seek is to create a monopoly on force.... and behold... we're right back to corporatism.
I can't see any way the outcome would be different, except some fictional world where everyone and everything is exactly the same, and nothing unexpected ever happens.
Well, it depends on how much inequality we're talking about. The portion of present-day inequality that results from differences in ability and luck, or hard work, is a pretty miniscule part of the total IMO. If it weren't for the government's "intellectual property" monopoly, Bill Gates' fortune for developing Windows would probably be comparable to that of the average Linux developer. Without the state-enforced scarcity rents on land and capital that enable wealth to grow on itself via compound interest, I'd expect the largest fortunes to top out at maybe the low tens of millions of $$, and then be dissipated by the next generation. And without the enforcement to absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, and with the widespread availability of cheap networked/crowdsourced microcredit, I'd expect self-employment or just "squatting on the commons" to be a much more viable option for the average person. It would be a society with inequality ranging from large to small pebbles, instead of--as at present--boulders and dust.
That sounds lovely. Unfortunately, I think artificial scarcities on a small scale are relatively easy to create, and could bootstrap people towards ever greater concentration of power. Especially since it seems like very few people understand this.
I think our best hope is for this knowledge to be widely disseminated, hopefully via effective memes, and then for society to reflexively correct artificial scarcities before they become entrenched.
Also one has to consider there is a sort of natural selection occurring at the level of world-systems. I think it is certainly true that highly centralized state capitalist enterprises like North Korea will never achieve the imperial might of the modern liberal world-system. Yet, at any given point in time there is are certain ratios of centralization and decentralization which provide for maximum reproduction of the system. How can we be so certain that greater decentralization will lead to greater reproductive fitness?
It has been suggested that the US operates an "empire-system" which is able to use its military/economic/cultural might to foist policies and investments upon other nations in order to make them "want what the US wants."
Of course it may be that now the US's role as hegemon is becoming less relevant and the transnational capitalist class in general is able to create such conditions through the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and through the selective placement of capital by multinationals.
A more reproductively fit system which is decentralized would need to provide incentives for people to go to the ends of the earth and autonomously open up markets in much the way multinationals do today... or as catholic missionaries do. That is how to achieve reproductive fitness.
Though, before going down that road you must be at least reasonably certain it will be an improvement. While our current system may not be as centralized as monarchy, there are new forms of biopolitical tyranny which could not have been imagined in the medieval era.
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