Point of clarity: I’ve gone all over in my life, from right-leaning moderate, family-influenced Democrat to ardent center-leaning Green party idealist to aggressive Socialist asshole, and have reached a point where no political philosophy clearly speaks to me anymore. In the interest of full disclosure, at this point all I can tell you is that I’m liberal in ideology and fairly conservative in practice. I don’t see a lot of benefits in capitalism, but I think reverting to an exclusively socialistic mindset would be both needlessly reactionary and ill-fated. If I had to break down my political philosophy and put it under the banner of a slogan–a name, if you will–I’d call myself a Social Humanist–that is, I believe in the usefulness of Statism in terms of providing cultural groups with a means of organizing and maximizing the quality of life of their constituents, but also understand the importance of the individual within the context of cultural growth. I think that, if there must be a capital-based economic system, it is not only the right, but the duty of the state to ensure capital does not become the determinant of cultural change, and that is not only the duty, but the right of the state to cultivate the physical and intellectual potential of its citizens. Reciprocally, I feel it is the duty of the citizen to maximize their understanding of themselves and all others around them while contributing to the social good–if they cannot find a way to do it themselves, they may choose avenues offered by the state. If any of this is vague, I’m sorry–I’m not an economist, nor am I truly a political scientist. I’m just a human trying to figure out his way in the world, just like anyone else.
And now, I’m going to needlessly conjecture some invective against Libertarianism.
I’ve tried very, very hard over the course of the past decade or so to try to ascribe some semblance of respectability to Libertarianism. There’s something inherently cute about it, naïve, even, a sense of idealistic wishful thought that I, as a man whose passions (if not overt political loyalties) lie hip-deep in Socialism can at least appreciate. However, with the Tea Party inexplicably attempting to establish a foothold in contemporary political discourse, and self-proclaimed Libertarians coming out of the closet en masse, I’ve been forced to actively examine it, partly to separate the real folk from the funk-fakers and partly to ascertain whether or not my gut reaction–“these motherfuckers are crazy”–is correct or not. My current frame-of-mind–I hesitate to use the term “conclusion,” as my thoughts on this subject will continue to grow and re-shape as my understanding of life and such matters does the same–is that Libertarianism is, like Anarchism, a really interesting idea, one borne of the knowledge of the existing limitations and processes of current socio-political and economic systems.
It’s also fucking terrifying, and here’s why:
1) Libertarianism within an economic context, assumes an economic “equal playing field” that does not exist.
White people in the Western world have championed the idea of equal opportunity arguably since the Industrial Revolution–in the United States, they even went so far as to include it in the Constitution. The problem being, for as noble as the notion of humanity’s equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of the capacity to own (substitution mine–I always thought “property” was as much a misnomer as “happiness”) may seem, history has suggested and continues to suggest that White, male, heterosexual rich people have the easiest track toward acquiring them. The easiest measure of this is, clearly, the presidency of the United States. Some people–idiots, I like to call them–point to the obvious example of Barack Obama’s election as the sign that things are different, to which I simply point to the 42 white guys before him and say “when America elects its 43rd Black president, then we can talk.”
The argument also extends itself to earnings and holdings, so I don’t put any stock in the idea that “well, people are earning a lot more” is worth mentioning. Sure, there are more minorities, homosexuals, women, etc. who earn more money–everybody‘s earning more money, because the amount of money in the economic system has increased with (but, sadly, not directly correspondent to) the increase in global population. That there are millionaires in the ranks of ethnic minorities now doesn’t mean we’re all equal, because there are still a shitload of people who have a tougher time achieving that bullshit fantasy known as “the American dream” because they had the misfortune of being born poor. The idea that a completely ungoverned “free” market is somehow the cure to economic disparity is complete bullshit–deregulating business and industry has never resulted in anything other than disaster, either from an economic standpoint (Cal Coolidge exacerbating the onset of the Great Depression) or an environmental one (do I really need to point this out, or can we all just agree that the Industrial Revolution essentially began humanity’s ultimate fuckery of the ecosystem?). Moreover, it’s been proven repeatedly that success in any market economic system almost invariably comes not as a result of quality-of-work, but by simply being able to outlast the competition–to rephrase, in Capitalism, you don’t usually “win” as much as you “lose least.” Barring some scorched-Earth scenario in which all the world’s richest families somehow completely go extinct, thereby dividing their assets into the larger system, even a so-called “free market” economy will still have a hierarchy based on existing capital, one that won’t be broken no matter who comes along.
Which leads me to my second point:
Libertarian economic theory naïvely assumes innovation is the engine of productivity, ignoring its culturally subjective origins.
I have to admit, most of my vitriol on this point stems from my recent discovery that the nebulous “they” have, in fact, made a cinematic adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, one of the most ridiculous fucking things ever committed to print. Lest I go off on another rant a-la my Watchmen dissection, I’ll simply assume you’ve either read the book or Wikipedia’d/Cliffs Notes’d it and skip to the thrust of the fucking novel: that the people who drive the engine of industry and the market economy are clearly the people with the best ideas, most knowledge, and are therefore deserving of the most power, and that all legislative regulation of business is somehow the evil collectivistic mono-consciousness hoping to sweep away all notion of individuality from Western society. Run-on sentences aside, I hope you were able to catch the scent of ideological bullshit. Since we’ve previously established that hegemony in a market economy is almost exclusively the province of people who have had resources from the get-go, the Objectivist argument clearly believes that the progenitors of said hegemony deserved the power in the first place, because they obviously had the best ideas, which is why their power became hegemonic in the first place.
I don’t consider myself to be all-knowing, or even all-intelligent. But the fact that even I’m able to see this as complete bullshit makes me wonder what the fuck the Austrian school and lasseiz-faire economists are fucking smoking to make them think there’s any logical merit to this. There’s no way anyone can look at the Objectivist economic argument and not see an obvious bias in favor of post-industrial Euro-American hegemonic power. So, basically, the economic systems used by the indigenous populations of the United States (or lack thereof where applicable) clearly deserved to cease to exist, because they weren’t useful to the Europeans who came over and clearly deserved to establish their dominance on their ancestral land. Maybe that’s looking at it too abstractly, but it still works within specifics, because the bottom line of any market economy is that it’s not driven by “innovation,” at least in the sense that it’s not always the most effective or most functionally capable product that succeeds. In fact, since humanity has basically run out of space to do anything other than use resources, the notion of the most useful invention being the most successful has gone the way of the Iroquois. White people even came up with a word that means “not actually the best product, but the easiest one to sell:” marketable. The notion that use inexorably determines usefulness is pretty ambitious and hopeful, but unfortunately depends upon definitions of “useful” that weren’t created with functionality in mind–ask any fan of Sega hardware. In fact, it is the pure subjectivity of the market that effectively repudiates Objectivism and, by extension, Libertarian economic theory. It’s what I mean when I say (as I always do) that there is no “free” market. It can be argued that Eurocentric white society killed the only “free” market there was, but lacking the practical and academic knowledge of indigenous American cultures, that would be both unfair and inaccurate. Not that it’s going to stop me from putting it out there, of course.
Which leads me, 1500-plus words in, to my next (and, for now at least, final) point: Social Libertarianism is too inextricably tied to the biases and systemic disparities created by market economics to be anything other than a means of unjustly enabling a select group of people to survive at the cost of others
I suppose I’m unfairly equating “libertarian” with “advocating the minimization of State influence, allowing the individual to determine the course of society,” but that seems to be the only real thing uniting all factions of libertarianism within the current U.S. political climate, or the only thing separating Libertarians themselves from logical-thinking people who don’t necessarily lump themselves into a clearly-compartmentalized philosophical category. It’d be nice to live in a society in which people truly had the right to do as they pleased without having to exist under the domain of a state. It’d also be nice to exist in a place in which there was an infinite amount of space and resources, in which there was an equal division of everything.
See, that’s the thing about libertarianism that gets me the most: it relies upon the notion of all things being equal and reduces the ills of society to be exclusively within the will of the people committing those acts that constitute said ills. This is how you can tell where the concepts of American libertarianism comes from: it accepts that “coercion and violence” exist within American culture and recognizes the need for an overarching authority to protect citizens from it, yet doesn’t acknowledge exactly what makes people violent and coercive; sure, there are a fair amount of fucked-up, evil people out there commit crimes just because they can. There’s going to be a number of people in any society who do that. But there’s an even larger amount of people who do fucked-up shit because they either a) lack the education to know better than to do it, or b) are made desperate by desperate situations. To phrase it another way: a Libertarian assumes a mugger is a mugger because he doesn’t want to be a businessman, or a drug dealer is a drug dealer because he doesn’t want to be a police officer, when the reality is the average mugger has neither the investment capital nor practical knowledge to be a businessman and the average drug dealer has figured out they can more money selling drugs than working their way up through the ranks of a so-called ‘honest’ profession. I’m not trying to excuse violent or criminal behavior; I’m just pointing out that Libertarians are quick to paint those who commit crimes as people who don’t deserve to be in society because they take advantage of the rights society gives them. That is, of course, unless it’s a right they believe in, and then all of a sudden the individual motivations of a criminal become chiefly important. And you can say what you want about Libertarians ostensibly being against the U.S.’s ridiculous drug laws, but they seem to care a whole lot more about the right to carry weapons than legalizing marijuana.
Because, really, the substance of American Libertarianism can be summed up in three words: “Unless It’s Mine.” The government shouldn’t intervene on behalf of anyone’s rights–unless it’s my right to own a gun or establish a company. The government shouldn’t intervene in business or industry–unless it’s my property that’s being taken away from me. The government should allow the private sector to create and manage infrastructure–unless the private sector from decides it wants to create and manage infrastructure where mine currently happens to be.
I suppose it’s important to mention that I do think certain aspects of Libertarian philosophy do make sense, and ought to be examined and, in a moderate way, practiced, but those tend to fall more under the lowercase libertarian ideology, the kind people in places other than U.S. tend to think about when they think of the term. Furthermore, my beef is not with Libertarians themselves…I suppose. There are people I know whom I think consider themselves Libertarian whose opinions I actually respect and value. But I can’t trust American Libertarianism on the whole, because it’s so tied to the notion of a “free” market, completely overlooking things like white privilege and hegemonic influence, or the fact that much of what they consider to be their divine right was obtained through the machinations of a strong central government. In turn, I can’t fully respect those who wholeheartedly and myopically embrace the movement, because they are, in essence, trying to say the past 400 years didn’t happen, while embracing the results which are proof that it very much did.
Just a thought.
the night-day machine. 