Not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies...

now i was 15 in 1973, and as the years went by it dawned on me, as it dawned on a lot of folks, that there wasn't going to be a revolution. also it is a bit hard for an anarchist to contemplate the actual mechanisms and results of actual revolutions. none of the twentieth century revolutions eventuated in anything that resembled the rhetoric of the revolutionaries. and every successful revolution of the twentieth century eventuated in a totalitarian regime. and i got sidetracked of course: love, poetry, philosophy, drugs. i remained committed to the ideas, which i found in emma goldman or developed for myself, and i have tried to express them or stay true to the anti-authoritarian impulse, of which i have found over the years that i have an inexhaustible supply. but i also made some sort of peace with some sorts of authority (even my own: the hardest task).

Crispin "Bowties and ee cummings are cool" Sartwell, 12-15-2010

Way back when we first started this thing, one of my bros found a political-social index that ranked you on a left-right, libertarian-statist matrix. We all were various combinations of left-libertarians...I believe that I was the furthest to the left, and Mr. Fun was furthest to the right although more libertarian than I. Of course, that calls into question the real meaning of Libertarianism.

Well, Christopher Beam in New York Magazine has a great article on just that topic. It's kind of anti-libertarian, but only in so far as the more radical and Objectivist types push it. Reading it, I realized  that the most conservative of the founders, Hamilton and Adams were probably the most statist; Jefferson and Madison would have seemed far more liberal, in all senses of the word, as well as the least statist. Intersting how that happens...When Ron Paul accuses the Federal Reserve of covering up Roswell or whatever other nefarious doings, he is the spiritual heir not of Hamilton but of Jefferson and Andy Jackson.

The thing about libertarianism is that it's really not a left/right thing but a high/low thing. Someone who is totally libertarian is...well, possibly Crispin "Snakewalk" Sartwell, who is in fact an anarchist, a professor of Philosophy at Dickinson and owner of an extremely large and disturbing collection of pictures of John Mayall. (He also is the Stig on Top Gear -- the real one in England, not our phoney version. And a practicing Druid...) However, Crispin is far too generous and kind -- except to his students where he channels Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds by being cruel to be kind -- to fit the extreme social libertarian mode. Crispin, as a philosopher, knows that when you carry thing to their logical extreme, they tend to warp and become illogical. Light bends in atmospheres, and ideas bend in connection with reality. Pure light and pure ideas are interesting concepts, but what mainly of Platonic importance; we can argue about the essence of libertarianism or of light in the abstract -- however, getting things done and maybe getting some ambient lighting in the cave would be more illuminating. We can argue about Orcs all we want, but it's of little practical use unless you're an animator, a writer or a fan of Atlas Shrugged...Crispin, far more articulate than I, puts it well, as he always does even when (or perhaps especially when) I disagree with him.

 

The New York Magazine article nails that aspect of libertarianism really well --

Consider the social side of Libertopia. It’s no coincidence that most libertarians discover the philosophy as teenagers. At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.(AXE Emphasis Added)

Beam earlier makes the point that a radically libertarian reading of the Constitution probably is closest to the original intent of the Founders. However, that original intent or idea had all sorts of provisos about the common good, the general welfare, justice and so on. Thus there was room to evolve, and the government has expanded in order to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. Does it go too far at times? Yeah...but, in a libertarian world, a truly libertarian world, there is no agency to really do those things. Beam points out that out and does it exceptionally well...Citing a former Cato Institute Wonk who left because he was either too intellectually pure or not pure enough, Brink Lindsey, who says that "The dominant strain of libertarianism these days is—and I’m not using these words in any kind of pejorative sense—radical and utopian,” he says that mainstream libertarianism is pretty far out there.

Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central bank—otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.

And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because “states’ rights” had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system evolved because private charity didn’t suffice. Challenges to the libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor, charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their families will take care of them. If they have no families to take care of them—well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Of course, we’ll never get there. And that’s the point. Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.

It's also worth noting that we basically tried to do all the stuff noted above and none it worked. When every bank printed money, it didn't work. My "Bank of AXE" fifty dollar bill might not work so well in Orange Country where they're mainly using "Bicycle Sites Bank" money. If I say I have a bank, I can print money...yeah, didn't work in the 1800s, and won't work now. Private Toll Roads as opposed to public roads? Didn't work. Private charities -- with a severly weakened government safety net, they're in trouble. Eliminate it, and have you seen Angela's Ashes recently? One can argue that privatization of natural monopolies is an example of extreme libertarianism, and I think that -- if we consider Enron as a great example of this kind of thinking -- one would be right and establish Beam's position of true minarchy would result in being surrounded by greedy assholes.

Government should provide that which can not be provided equitably or adequately by the private sector. For example, the Food and Drug Administration outsources the responsibility to review research proposals for human subjects in clinical trials to Institutional Review Boards. That works reasonably well, except that the people paying for the review are...the people who are trying to get the trials done. I used to work for one of those boards, and frankly, I found there to be a serious disconnect between the idea of making money reviewing the ethical standards of a research proposal and then taking money from the people you're reviewing. In no way do I question the integrity of the organization -- far from it. There was a motive in making certain that the research proposal conformed to and that the research was then conducted in strict accordance to the rules -- nobody likes to be sued for gross negligence or go to jail for corruption. Since the airwaves are now crowded with commercials for various law firms that talk about suing for serious side-effects, the big Pharmaceutical companies don't want anything to screw them down the road; approval of shody proposals would result in bad research, risk to subjects and possibly huge damages.

By basically outsourcing this responsibility -- approving research as meeting FDA requirements -- the FDA was putting responsibility for that piece of the approval process  in hands that made sense and that had a strong economic motive to do a good job. However, if you outsource operations of a major airport to the private sector or even sell it to the private sector you are guaranteed problems if there is a crunch between regulation and requirements versus profitability. If you like spending days with the several thousand of your closest strangers waiting for someone to get the runways cleared and the planes deiced, then such an arrangement would be right in your comfort zone. However, if you're not insane, you want the people making decisions to allocate resources to be primarily driven not by profit for shareholders but services for stakeholders. The focus of the constituencies is different -- and, the common good in this place should outweigh profit.

 

Comments

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[MARC]

that was one of the best takedowns of "utopian" libertariansim ive read on the web so far. the scare quotes are around untopian because somolia dosent look like paradise to me. oh i suppose if you snd your freinds have some guns and ammo there is fun to be had,for a little while, until a bigger groups of freinds with more guns blow you all away and take your stuff.

[Brian M]

Sadly, though, Somalia was no paradise when it had a "government" either. Especially since it has served as a theater of pain for multiple States and their interests. Who can know for sure that in a more perfect world the clan system might not evolve into something better than the last century of colonial governments, post-colonial kleptocracies, and corrupt client states?