If you’ve followed my posts and the comments in this blog, you may know that I’ve got a very short temper when it comes to Libertarians. It’s the same sort of frustration one experiences when dealing with a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, and it grows worse when the economically-successful ones blame poverty on moral failure and lament the discrimination and hardship they experience as a member of the top 1%.

So I was going to sit here and write an essay on exactly what is wrong with Libertarianism, when lo and behold, I found someone else beat me to it, and did a better job than I could have. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but here’s just a few snippets:

Libertarianism strikes me as if someone (let’s call her “Ayn Rand”) sat down to create the Un-Communism. Thus:

Communism                               Libertarianism
Property is theft                       Property is sacred
Totalitarianism                         Any government is bad
Capitalists are baby-eating villains    Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes
Workers should rule                     Worker activism is evil
The poor are oppressed                  The poor are pampered good-for-nothings

Does this sound exaggerated? Let’s listen to Murray Rothbard:

We contend here, however, that the model of government is akin, not to the business firm, but to the criminal organization, and indeed that the State is the organization of robbery systematized and writ large.

Or here’s Lew Rockwell on Rothbard (emphasis mine):

He was also the architect of the body of thought known around the world as libertarianism. This radically anti-state political philosophy unites free-market economics, a no-exceptions attachment to private property rights, a profound concern for human liberty, and a love of peace, with the conclusion that society should be completely free to develop absent any interference from the state, which can and should be eliminated.

Thomas DiLorenzo on worker activism:

“[L]abor unions [pursue] policies which impede the very institutions of capitalism that are the cause of their own prosperity.”

Or Ludwig von Mises:

“What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working.”

(Employer violence is apparently acceptable.) The Libertarian Party platform explains that workers have no right to protest drug tests, and supports the return of child labor.

Whew! Preach it, brother!

But, really, what’s to fear from Libertarians? It’s not like they’re actually out there winning any elections on a national scale.

Crackpots are usually harmless; how about the Libertarian Party?

In itself, I’m afraid, it’s nothing but a footnote. It gets no more than 1% of the vote– a showing that’s been surpassed historically by the Anti-Masonic Party, the Greenbacks, the Prohibition Party, the Socialists, the Greens, and whatever John Anderson was.

Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian “Government is Bad” horse and ridden far with it:

But at least the Libertarians are consistent, right? They believe in personal liberty above all (or as I like to say, progressives believe in “we”, libertarians believe in “me”) and that leads them to our side on the social issues of the day. Libertarians believe in legalizing drugs, allowing any consensual adult sexual lifestyles that don’t harm others, and personal privacy… so isn’t a hardcore libertarian at least half-preferable to a hardcore Republican?

The Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There’s the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).

I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.

The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition. The libertarian voter is chiefly exercised over taxes, regulation, and social programs; the libertarian wing of the Republican party has, for forty years, gone along with the war on drugs, corporate welfare, establishment of dictatorships abroad, and an alliance with theocrats. Christian libertarians like Ron Paul want God in the public schools and are happy to have the government forbid abortion and gay marriage. I never saw the libertarians objecting to Bush Sr. mocking the protection of civil rights, or to Ken Starr’s government inquiry into politicians’ sex lives. On the Cato Institute’s list of recent books, I count 1 of 19 dealing with an issue on which libertarians and liberals tend to agree, and that was on foreign policy (specifically, the Iraq war).

If this is changing, as Bush’s never-ending “War on Terror” expands the powers of government, demonizes dissent, and enmeshes the country in military crusades and nation-building, as the Republicans push to remove the checks and balances that remain in our government system– if libertarians come to realize that Republicans and not Democrats are the greater threat to liberty– I’d be delighted.

The best is saved for last, as the writer takes a look at what happens when government is so small it can be “drowned in a bathtub” (to quote Grover Norquist) and corporations are free of the pesky regulation and oversight and taxation that Libertarians detest:

The libertarianism that has any effect in the world, then, has nothing to do with social liberty, and everything to do with removing all restrictions on business. So what’s wrong with that?

Let’s look at some cases that came within spitting distance of the libertarian ideal. Some libertarians won’t like these, because they are not Spotless Instances of the Free Utopia; but as I’ve said, nothing is proved by science fiction. If complete economic freedom and absence of government is a cure-all, partial economic freedom and limited government should be a cure-some.

Pre-New Deal America

At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted– and it did. The result was robber barons, monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests.

The New Deal itself was a response to crisis (though by no means an unprecedented one; it wasn’t much worse than the Gilded Age depressions). A quarter of the population was out of work. Five thousand banks failed, destroying the savings of 9 million families. Steel plants were operating at 12% capacity. Banks foreclosed on a quarter of Mississippi’s land. Wall Street was discredited by insider trading and collusion with banks at the expense of investors. Farmers were breaking out into open revolt; miners and jobless city workers were rioting.

Don’t think, by the way, that if governments don’t provide gunboats, no one else will. Corporations will build their own military if necessary: the East Indies Company did; Leopold did in the Congo; management did when fighting with labor.

Post-communist Russia

Or take Russia in the decade after the fall of Communism, as advised by free-market absolutists like Jeffrey Sachs. Russian GDP declined 50% in five years. The elite grabbed the assets they could and shuffled them out of Russia so fast that IMF loans couldn’t compensate. In 1994 alone, 600 businessmen, journalists, and politicians were murdered by gangsters. Russia lacked a working road system, a banking system, anti-monopoly regulation, effective law enforcement, or any sort of safety net for the elderly and the jobless. Inflation reached 2250% in 1992. Central government authority effectively disappeared in many regions.

By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.

Today’s Russia is moving back toward authoritarianism under Putin. Again, this should dismay libertarians: apparently, given a little freedom, many people will demand less. You’d better be careful about setting up that utopia; ten years further on it may be taken over by authoritarians.

Pinochet’s Chile

Or consider the darling of many an ’80s conservative: Pinochet’s Chile, installed by Nixon, praised by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, George Bush, and Paul Johnson. In twenty years, foreign debt quadrupled, natural resources were wasted, universal health care was abandoned (leading to epidemics of typhoid fever and hepatitis), unions were outlawed, military spending rose (for what? who the hell is going to attack Chile?), social security was “privatized” (with predictable results: ever-increasing government bailouts) and the poverty rate doubled, from 20% to 41%. Chile’s growth rate from 1974 to 1982 was 1.5%; the Latin American average was 4.3%.

Pinochet was a dicator, of course, which makes some libertarians feel that they have nothing to learn here. Somehow Chile’s experience (say) privatizing social security can tell us nothing about privatizing social security here, because Pinochet was a dictator. Presumably if you set up a business in Chile, the laws of supply and demand and perhaps those of gravity wouldn’t apply, because Pinochet was a dictator.

When it’s convenient, libertarians even trumpet their association with Chile’s “free market” policies; self-gov.org (originators of that cute quiz) includes a page celebrating Milton Friedman, self-proclaimed libertarian, who helped form and advise the group of University of Chicago professors and graduates who implemented Pinochet’s policies. The Cato Institute even named a prize for “Advancing Liberty” after this benefactor of the Chilean dictatorship.

Libertarians, above all else, believe that a free and unrestricted marketplace will always serve the greatest good. If a lunch counter doesn’t want to serve blacks, then some entrepreneur will open up a lunch counter that will, take the business, and the discriminatory lunch counter will go under. Or if a pharmacist doesn’t want to fill a birth control prescription because it is against his morality, then some other pharmacist will fill the need.

The problem is that a free and unrestricted marketplace always evolves into a closed, controlled, monopolistic one. We’re already seeing that effect in the consolidation and mergers of most the big corporations that are too big to be challenged in the marketplace (Wal-Mart, ChevronTexaco, Starbucks, etc.)

Markets are very good at some things, like deciding what to produce and distributing it. But unrestricted markets don’t produce general prosperity, and lawless business can and will abuse its power. Examples can be multiplied ad nauseam: read some history– or the newspaper.

• Since natural resources are accounted as free gains and pollution isn’t counted against the bottom line, business on its own will grab resources and pollute till an environment is destroyed.
• The food business, on its own, will put filth in our food and lie about what it’s made of. The few industries which are exceptions to food and drug laws (e.g. providers of alcohol and supplements) fight hard to stay that way. The food industry resists even providing information to consumers.
• Business will lock minorities out of jobs and refuse to serve them, or serve them only in degrading ways.
• Business will create unsafe goods, endanger workers, profiteer in times of crisis, use violence to prevent unionization– and spend millions on politicians who will remove the people’s right to limit these abuses.
• Thanks to the libertarian business climate, companies are happily moving jobs abroad, lowering wages, worsening working conditions.
• The same libertarian climate encourages narcissists to pay themselves handsomely while ruling incompetently, and leads to false accounting, insider trading, and corruption.
• Businesses create monopolies and cartels when they can manage it; and the first thing monopolies do is raise prices.
• Businesses can create bureaucracies as impenetrable and money-wasting as any government. (The worst I’ve ever had to deal with are health insurers. And no, it’s not “government regulation” that makes them that way; insurers have an interest in making the claims process as difficult as possible.)
• State-controlled media are vile; but business-controlled media are hardly better, especially given the consolidation of major media. Democracy needs a diversity of voices, and we’re moving instead toward domination of the airwaves by a few conglomerates.
• The poor are ill-served even for basic services: they pay more for food; they pay through the nose for rotten apartments; they can’t get loans even if they can get bank accounts; if they can get a job it’s ill paid, with no health benefits. Poor areas are also highly polluted (in ways that cause massive health problems), while lacking such services as movie theaters.

Libertarian responses to such lists are beyond amazing.

• “Businesses would be stupid to do those things.” Then they’re stupid, because they do them. Private racial discrimination, for instance, lasted a hundred years; and it wasn’t ended by businessmen changing their minds, but by blacks and liberals organizing. The Libertarian Party platform actually hopes to legally re-enable private discrimination.
• “The market will correct those problems.” In a few cases it will– if you wait long enough. But very often it’s simply impossible: e.g., the monopolist has made sure no alternatives exist. (One of the railroad tycoons, for instance, was careful to buy up steamship lines.) And though it was sometimes possible to break a monopoly by starting a well-bankrolled competing business, that was no consolation to (say) an oil producer who saw Rockefeller consolidating all the refineries. He could hardly start up his own refinery, and he’d be bankrupt before anyone succeeded in doing so.)

  Slavery is another example: though some hoped that the market would eventually make it unprofitable, it sure was taking its time, and neither the slave nor the abolitionist had any non-governmental leverage over the slaveowners.

  (Libertarians usually claim to oppose slavery… but that’s awfully easy to say on this side of Civil War and the civil rights movement. The slaveowners thought they were defending their sacred rights to property and self-government.)

• “We believe in laws too.” And they do, rather touchingly; they just don’t believe in enforcing them. Enforcement of the laws passed by democratic legislatures is called “men with guns” or “initiating force” in libertarian ideology. And without enforcement, laws are just pretty words. You can see this today in Latin America, which often has very progressive laws. The business and landowning elite just ignores them.
• “So what do you want, state-run movie theaters?” The single-villain ideology is so strong that the only response some people can make to a market failure is to invent a statist response and criticize that. Sometimes the best solution to these problems is to use the market– once it gets a good liberal kick in the pants to go find one.

Finally, he goes for the jugular — the meme that taxation is tantamount to “armed men with guns stealing your money”:

Perhaps the most communicable libertarian meme– and one of the most mischievous– is the attempt to paint taxation as theft.

First, it’s dishonest. Most libertarians theoretically accept government for defense and law enforcement. (There are some absolutists who don’t even believe in national defense; I guess they want to have a libertarian utopia for awhile, then hand it over to foreign invaders.)

Now, national defense and law enforcement cost money: about 22% of the 2002 budget– 33% of the non-social-security budget. You can’t swallow that and maintain that all taxes are bad. At least the cost of those functions is not “your money”; it’s a legitimate charge for necessary services.

Americans enjoy the fruits of public scientific research, a well-educated job force, highways and airports, clean food, honest labelling, Social Security, unemployment insurance, trustworthy banks, national parks. Libertarianism has encouraged the peculiarly American delusion that these things come for free. It makes a philosophy out of biting the hand that feeds you.

Second, it leads directly to George Bush’s financial irresponsibility. Would a libertarian urge his family or his software company or his gun club to spend twice what it takes in? When libertarians maintain that irresponsibility among the poor is such a bad thing, why is it OK in the government?

Finally, it hides dependence on the government. The economic powerhouse of the US is still the Midwest, the Northeast, and California– largely liberal Democratic areas. As Dean Lacy has pointed out, over the last decade, the blue states of 2004 paid $1.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received, while red states received $800 billion more than they paid.

In summation, he condemns Libertarianism as an unacceptable morality:

First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else– love, humanity, justice.

Second, it’s the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who’s read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.

Third, and perhaps most common, it’s the worldview of a provincial narcissist. As I’ve observed in my overview of the 20th century, liberalism won its battles so thoroughly that people have forgotten why those battles were fought.

That second one made me laugh out loud. I was that snotty teen and considered myself a hardcore Heinleinian Libertarian in the 1980’s. I voted for Reagan ’84 in our school’s mock election, and voted for Bush 41 in ’88 in my first real election. Then, somewhere at the dawn of the ’90s, I realized that Trickle-Down Economics was really Trickle-On Economics, and to the rich man and rich corporation, securing more riches is the only concern, even to the detriment of the environment, their workers, their customers, and our society.