Libertarian Economics Are Wrong

 I admit Libertarian policies on rights I find attractive. The older I got, the less attractive I found their economic message. Bottom line for me is that the Libertarians share with the Puritans the idea that riches signify the blessings of God rather than good luck or criminality. In a capitalist society, an unequal distribution of capital is an unequal distribution of power. I think that is Marxism 101. For a Libertarian society, there is little liberty.

For a better critique of Libertarian economics, let me suggest No Exit: The Uncivil Folly of Libertarian Flight by David Bosworth.

Nowhere in Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s analysis will you find the inconvenient fact that capitalists have always depended on government to secure their welfare, beginning with England’s Enclosure Acts, which, to turn the authors’ own logic against them, licensed the uncompensated seizure of public lands for conversion to commercial ownership. Nor will you find any reference to the horrific working conditions of those, often underaged or enslaved, who have toiled in fields, factories, and mines to create the wealth of nations. Nor do Davidson and Rees-Mogg admit the importance of both labor unions and government in ending, or at least mitigating, the worst forms of exploitation. And of course they never acknowledge that the free market itself is an idealized fiction whose conditions can be approximated only through government intervention. As a consequence, they ignore the actual history of corporate capitalism, which, whether in the form of US Steel, Standard Oil, Microsoft, or Google, has repeatedly produced markets that are not competitive but monopolistic.

Strangely, the book lacks any detailed definition of the Sovereign Individual. Linking its identity solely to financial worth and capitalist know-how, the authors ignore the inherently social character of human beings and their need for a cultural identity that transcends the merely economic. Surveying the long history of governance in the West, they never consider the degree to which the radical individualism they favor is itself a historical artifact, one primarily shaped by the proliferation of a print literacy whose cultural dominance was already passing in 1997. Shrewd about many of the economic changes the digital revolution was creating, they nevertheless missed how it was rendering their idealized notion of the Sovereign Individual as extinct in our time as the chivalrous knight became in early modernity.

Yep, property is not secure without a government; corporations are a creature created by governments; therefore, so long as there is property there is government and that government serves the rich.

Ayn Rand puts in here appearance here; the most dangerous political writer in modern times:

Consciously or not, the paranoid anticipation of an imminent catastrophe by today’s digital exiteers has been induced, in part, by dystopian stories they read or watched while growing up,14 and the fictional works that have most influenced their libertarian mindset are two novels by Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). As an anticommunist immigrant from Russia, Rand developed a philosophy that mirrored the absolutism of Leninism while inverting its moral poles. According to her, individual selfishness is an unalloyed virtue, government regulation an absolute evil. The entrepreneur emerges as the ideal hero, while the masses touted by Marx are reduced to moochers and losers, parasitically exploiting that hero’s productivity. With their two-dimensional characters, binary plotting, and endless speeches ventriloquizing Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, the novels are agitprop for the radical individualism that would inspire so many major figures of American libertarianism, from former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, whose advice helped shape federal financial policy for thirty years, to former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who made Atlas Shrugged required reading for his congressional aides.15 But if Greenspan and Ryan’s somewhat tempered Cato Institure variety of libertarianism valorized the individual above all else, it did not turn its back entirely on the body politic or on politics itself. The state, in this view, needed to be constrained but not abandoned. It would take a new wave of extremists similar to Oliver or Davidson to declare the state moribund beyond all saving.

What is most notable about Rand’s fiction is how thoroughly it undermines Americans’ traditional understanding of the heroic figure, as it was first formulated in our myth of frontier settlement and depicted in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41). As a frontier scout and solitary bachelor who lives in the wilderness, Cooper’s hero, Natty Bumppo, is a romanticized embodiment of pure self-reliance. Yet in times of crisis, he always arrives to save the day for the Anglo-American settlers whose company he neither wants nor needs.

But according to the credo of the radical libertarians who seek to emulate characters out of Atlas Shrugged, the American hero has no obligation to the community. In times of crisis, heroic virtue no longer requires self-sacrificial acts rooted in the social affections of loyalty or gratitude; it has been reduced instead to pure self-interest. When the alarm sounds, the first shot is fired, or a pandemic erupts, these self-crowned sovereigns are inclined to flee the field, shedding citizenship like the uniform of a losing army, retreating to their hideaways in the Rockies, silos in South Dakota, or subterranean havens on the Kiwi islands.

She is dangerous because she is sociopathic - she would have us back in the state of nature where life is short, brutish, and nasty for everyone but the rich. Anyone reading Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan cannot find anything useful in Ayn Rand. At least, that is what came of my reading Hobbes.

I have one quibble with the following: I read The Declaration of Independence as promoting a communitarian politics.

As those who formulated our old frontier myth intuitively grasped, such a turn toward a personal liberation free of social obligations is finally unsustainable. Without serious reforms, our democracy is unlikely to survive the combined effect of the growing inequalities in wealth and the algorithm-driven divisiveness our tech-based economy has so directly contributed to. Surely, some of the panic implied in the exit strategies now pursued by those who have most benefited from that economy is rooted in their recognition of that scary fact. Even when terrified by “progress” in their own field, as many high-tech execs profess to be about the social implications of artificial intelligence, they seem unable or unwilling to intervene. Indeed, one of the motives behind Elon Musk’s obsession with establishing a colony on Mars is to provide an escape route for humanity, an extraterrestrial haven from the devastation threatened by AI.

Ayn Rand's libertarians appeals to college sophomores who think they will be Randian hero; those who remain attached to her ideas after they turn 21 have arrested intellectual development.

sch 12/22