If Libertarianism is so great, why has no country tried it?

[Sean Renaud]

I don't disagree with any of what you just said to be honest. If I had any qualm it would be about the racism, and not claiming it's not there. Just saying that it's not important. Just like I don't really care if Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer or whatever the story is. I figure if the philosophy itself were sound (it doesn't seem to be functional in a real world scenario) I wouldn't care if it came from Hitler or Ghandi. Ideas should be judged on their own merit. Not that I always accomplish that, though increasingly I'm unsure if it's my being prejudice against people because I have personal feelings about them or whether their credibility is so fucking blown that I assume they are some combination of lying, mistaken or exaggerating and I simply need more than their "I told you so" before I even consider it.

 

[richard_daily]

I don't disagree with any of what you just said to be honest. If I had any qualm it would be about the racism, and not claiming it's not there. Just saying that it's not important. Just like I don't really care if Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer or whatever the story is. I figure if the philosophy itself were sound (it doesn't seem to be functional in a real world scenario) I wouldn't care if it came from Hitler or Ghandi. Ideas should be judged on their own merit. Not that I always accomplish that, though increasingly I'm unsure if it's my being prejudice against people because I have personal feelings about them or whether their credibility is so fucking blown that I assume they are some combination of lying, mistaken or exaggerating and I simply need more than their "I told you so" before I even consider it.

I understand what you're saying, and to an extent I agree about taking the ideas separate from the individuals, but I disagree that you can remove historical context.

Martin Luther King beat his wife.
Prescott Bush (W's grandfather) was an adamant supporter of the Nazi party.
Emma Goldman (an anarchist author) was a racist.


Putting it into historical context is important, because it shows you the world views that shaped their opinions, even if they were just signs of the times.

Also, removing a person's flaws from the conversation does something that I think is dangerous, it elevates them to the status of someone better than they actually were. It creates a mythos around them, and instead of viewing them as humans who were flawed just like all of us, we view them as infallible. Infallible people can't make mistakes, and then of course, we are inclined to stick to their recommended course without looking at it critically. Without looking at it critically, we're just following their path without examining how we could be making it better.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Speaking of clueless people, it's interesting to see how many don't know the difference between Anarchism and Libertarianism.

That is just their favorite ascription or ad hominem; being Libertarian means no law, starving children, short life spans, a regular Malthusian existence.

If you want to see the model for what has become the Liberal Interventionist-Socialist Dream paradigm, look no further than today's headlines about Detroit.

The problem for those who blast Libertarianism (Classical Liberalism, Individuality and Capitalism) is that eventually they run out of other people's money.

… an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, rigid, far-seeing and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that.
Thus, taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

"Three main tendencies or tenets mark the drift toward totalitarianism. The first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental powers, for a constant widening of the governmental sphere of intervention. It is the tendency toward more and more regulation of every sphere of economic life, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of the individual. The tendency toward more and more governmental spending is a part of this trend. It means in effect that the individual is able to spend less and less of the income he earns on the things he himself wants, while the government takes more and more of his income from him to spend it in the ways that it thinks wise. One of the basic assumptions of totalitarianism, in brief (and of such steps toward it as socialism, state paternalism, and Keynesianism), is that the citizen cannot be trusted to spend his own money. As government control becomes wider and wider, individual discretion, the individual's control of his own affairs in all directions, necessarily becomes narrower and narrower. In sum, liberty is constantly diminished."
Henry Hazlett, 1965

 

[RobDownSouth]

...being Libertarian means no law, starving children, short life spans, a regular Malthusian existence.

Nonsense, chief. "no law" is anarchy (which is the cousin of glibertarianism).

Glibertarians such as yourself are quite fine with all sorts of laws (see also: AJ's desire for anti-abortion laws and anti-homosexual laws), so long as they affect others and not you personally.

 

[CandiCame]

Libertarianism is an economic construct, built around the premise that white people were giving up too much to socialism. Anarchism is a lifestyle (although there are non-lifestyle anarchists) based around direct action, community (rather than individualism) and being free from government intrusion (which is really the only similarity).

Rand was attempting to co-opt anarchism in her books, but if you look through them, they read more like the ravings of a mad woman who just wanted a bigger piece of the pie. libertarianism is politically closer to fascism than anarchism, especially if you look at Rand's work compared to fascist lit like the Turner Diaries.

Anarchism doesn't subscribe to the "more for me" philosophy, and private ownership of... well, everything. This is a huge difference between libertarianism and anarchism. All of this is especially hilarious when you consider that Rand took public assistance, much like many of the libertarians do today.

Wait, so libertarianism is race based? I was on board with everything about this, but this kinda sounds like the way Uncle Ruckas would explain a political party rather than how a party would explain itself.

I was never a huge fan of Rand... her entire philosophy seems counter-intuitive to human nature. We have a species preservation over self preservation instinct, and she seems to go self-preservation over species preservation. What was the one where they had that society where you just got what you wanted and they had no money and everything was fine and then that one dude started hording stuff and invented capitalism and was somehow the hero? Like that makes no sense. That's not how humans work. In a scenario that small (one town) if you take everybody's stuff you don't start a barter system, people kill you and return the stuff to the commons because they had shit to do- everyone had jobs in that society, it was an industrialized society, they weren't inventing a barter system, they had already grown beyond it. Dude took a step backward and was somehow praised for it.

 

[CandiCame]

I understand what you're saying, and to an extent I agree about taking the ideas separate from the individuals, but I disagree that you can remove historical context.

Martin Luther King beat his wife.
Prescott Bush (W's grandfather) was an adamant supporter of the Nazi party.
Emma Goldman (an anarchist author) was a racist.


Putting it into historical context is important, because it shows you the world views that shaped their opinions, even if they were just signs of the times.

Also, removing a person's flaws from the conversation does something that I think is dangerous, it elevates them to the status of someone better than they actually were. It creates a mythos around them, and instead of viewing them as humans who were flawed just like all of us, we view them as infallible. Infallible people can't make mistakes, and then of course, we are inclined to stick to their recommended course without looking at it critically. Without looking at it critically, we're just following their path without examining how we could be making it better.

I don't really get how any of that was ok. It wasn't cool to beat your wife in 50s, it sure as fucking shit wasn't cool to sympathize with Nazis when Nazis were in fucking power, and racism has been tolerated, but it's never been understandable or alright. That's why there have always been good people fighting against it.

Having said that, more in agreement with what Sean was saying in that sometimes HORRIBLE people have good ideas and you have to make yourself stop and say, "Wait. That made sense. By LT said it. ...Goddamn, everybody grab a gun and aim for the head, the apocalypse is neigh and I for one am not a zombie buffet."

For example, L Frank Balm wrote fucking essays about how Native Americans should literally be treated as a different, less evolved, subhuman species like chimps. Not gonna stop me from watching the new Oz movie in 3D. He was a bad person, but his books are good reads- although there is some folksy racism in some of them- like that one about electricity that makes Pacific Islanders look flat out retarded, but in general the Oz series is pretty good. I'm sure that applies to other things that aren't children's books.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

http://www.troll.me/images/conspiracy-keanu/what-if-che-guevara-lives-and-earns-money-from-all-these-tshirts.jpg

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I don't really get how any of that was ok. It wasn't cool to beat your wife in 50s, it sure as fucking shit wasn't cool to sympathize with Nazis when Nazis were in fucking power, and racism has been tolerated, but it's never been understandable or alright. That's why there have always been good people fighting against it.

Having said that, more in agreement with what Sean was saying in that sometimes HORRIBLE people have good ideas and you have to make yourself stop and say, "Wait. That made sense. By LT said it. ...Goddamn, everybody grab a gun and aim for the head, the apocalypse is neigh and I for one am not a zombie buffet."

For example, L Frank Balm wrote fucking essays about how Native Americans should literally be treated as a different, less evolved, subhuman species like chimps. Not gonna stop me from watching the new Oz movie in 3D. He was a bad person, but his books are good reads- although there is some folksy racism in some of them- like that one about electricity that makes Pacific Islanders look flat out retarded, but in general the Oz series is pretty good. I'm sure that applies to other things that aren't children's books.

You don't understand racism or ethnocentrism.

When I was a child our county filled up with nice folks from New England and put all of us Southern children in remedial speech so we'd talk correctly, like New England Yankees do. Us Southern folks had no idea we were so flawed, tho we made sense when we talked to each other. New England didn't esteem diversity then as they do now.

Based on my fund of experience with niggas, they aint exactly thrilled about how the libruls try and make them white. The librul thinks she's helping all to be equal to her but what the nigga see's is a white bitch who don't like niggas.

 

[KingOrfeo]

You can also see Catalonia in Spain, as well as the CNT as examples of anarchist community. They fought against Franco's fascist forces before WW2, and formed what essentially amounted to their own nation.

See the Spanish Revolution. The anarcho-syndicalist economy actually seemed to work pretty well, until the revolution was put down -- not by Franco, but by the Republican government, which depended on Stalin for military aid to fight Franco, and Stalin didn't like that kind of revolution one little bit. (Think Catholics v. Calvinists in the 17th Century.)

The Spanish Revolution was a workers' social revolution that began during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and resulted in the widespread implementation of anarchist and more broadly libertarian socialist organizational principles throughout various portions of the country for two to three years, primarily Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and parts of the Levante. Much of Spain's economy was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy Communist Party influence, as the Soviet Union-controlled party actively tried to crush attempts at worker empowerment. Factories were run through worker committees, agrarian areas became collectivised and run as libertarian communes. Even places like hotels, barber shops, and restaurants were collectivized and managed by their workers.

Sam Dolgoff estimated that about eight million people participated directly or at least indirectly in the Spanish Revolution,[1] which he claimed "came closer to realizing the ideal of the free stateless society on a vast scale than any other revolution in history."[2] Dolgoff quotes the French anarchist historian Gaston Leval (who was an active participant) to summarize the anarchist conception of the social revolution:[3]

In Spain during almost three years, despite a civil war that took a million lives, despite the opposition of the political parties (republicans, left and right Catalan separatists, socialists, Communists, Basque and Valencian regionalists, petty bourgeoisie, etc.), this idea of libertarian communism was put into effect. Very quickly more than 60% of the land was collectively cultivated by the peasants themselves, without landlords, without bosses, and without instituting capitalist competition to spur production. In almost all the industries, factories, mills, workshops, transportation services, public services, and utilities, the rank and file workers, their revolutionary committees, and their syndicates reorganized and administered production, distribution, and public services without capitalists, high salaried managers, or the authority of the state.

Even more: the various agrarian and industrial collectives immediately instituted economic equality in accordance with the essential principle of communism, 'From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.' They coordinated their efforts through free association in whole regions, created new wealth, increased production (especially in agriculture), built more schools, and bettered public services. They instituted not bourgeois formal democracy but genuine grass roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life. They replaced the war between men, 'survival of the fittest,' by the universal practice of mutual aid, and replaced rivalry by the principle of solidarity....

This experience, in which about eight million people directly or indirectly participated, opened a new way of life to those who sought an alternative to anti-social capitalism on the one hand, and totalitarian state bogus socialism on the other.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Just like I don't really care if Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer or whatever the story is.

Well, Disney ran his business like a fascist dictatorship (the Magic Police State, if you will), but he really didn't think much of the Nazis.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Well, Disney ran his business like a fascist dictatorship, but he really didn't think much of the Nazis.

Fair enough. Doesn't actually change my point though.

 

[KingOrfeo]

There is some historical evidence of anarchists using violence as a means to an end, although some of those claims are dubious and most likely involved set ups and cover ups, such as with the Haymarket Riots.

In the words of the great anarchofilker Leslie Fish: "It's Sister Jenny's Turn to Throw the Bomb!"

 

[KingOrfeo]

Okay fair enough. Though I think many of your criticisms of Libertarians ultimately comes down to they don't actually practice what they preach and most of them are Republicans who are ashamed to be associated with. . .well Republicans. But point made.

Look, you have to make the best of the society you're born into, which does not preclude working to change it. A socialist has as much right as anyone else to be a greedy businesscritter, and a libertarian has as much right as anyone else to apply for food stamps.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Wait, so libertarianism is race based?

Well, not ideologically, but sociohistorically. That's only the in the American setting, of course, but ideological libertarianism scarcely exists anywhere else. (Any foreign political party with "Liberal" in its name is probably libertarian, at least economically, but in a very moderate way compared to America's LP; they would never think of privatizing the public schools or anything like that.)

 

[KingOrfeo]

And you ain't no truth teller.

And once again the pot calls the china black.

 

[BotanyBoy]

And once again the pot calls the china black.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! More like the lump of coal you sack of hack shit.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Lind again:

Thursday, Jun 13, 2013 11:06 AM EDT

Grow up, Libertarians!
Your philosophy is superficial, juvenile nonsense. Here's what you should focus on instead
By Michael Lind

Since I published my Salon essay, “The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer,” true believers in the libertarian cult have been struggling to answer the simple but devastating question I asked: If libertarianism is such a good idea, why aren’t there any libertarian countries?

Writing in Reason, Ronald Bailey cites the spread of particular liberties since the eighteenth century as evidence that the entire world is becoming libertarian. But he ignores the fact that the welfare state and business regulation have grown up together with democracy and civil liberties. The citizens of democracies prefer to vote themselves generous social insurance benefits. They also insist on using government to police business firms while benefiting from a market economy.

Most of Bailey’s examples assume that this or that trend of which he approves will continue forever. For example, he points out that cross-border migrants now constitute one in 33 people (putting it this way makes it sound more impressive than “no more than 3 percent of the human race”). He doesn’t mention that even this surprisingly small amount of global migration has produced anti-immigrant backlashes in most developed countries, including the U.S., where comprehensive immigration reform may fail once again.

Writing in The Economist, a libertarian-leaning magazine, Will Wilkinson tries to answer my question in a different way:

One doesn’t have to be fond of libertarianism to imagine perfectly sound answers. When I was a libertarian, I might have said that there are no libertarian countries because too few people have been persuaded to become libertarians, just as at one point in our history too few men had been persuaded to support women’s suffrage. When enough have been persuaded, it will be tried.

Wilkinson is confusing policies and systems. In my essay, I took care to distinguish the two. I pointed out that particular useful policies favored by libertarians can be adopted by modern countries, without fundamentally altering the dominant mixed-economy model that blends markets, government and the nonprofit sector in a compound that will always be too “statist” for libertarians.

American progressives in the tradition of the two Roosevelts have never been doctrinaire “statists” or “socialists” and have no objection to promoting markets, where that serves the public interest. A progressive can favor privatizing the Post Office and expanding Social Security at the same time. Or vice versa (progressive arguments against Social Security privatization are based on its practical problems). I recently co-authored a proposal to use vouchers for eldercare in the U.S., without thereby becoming any less a sinister statist enemy of human freedom, from the perspective of the libertarian cult.

You never find similar pragmatism among libertarians. They are always against any public option and always for a real or imagined private option. Libertarianism is dogmatic, not experimental. Any maverick libertarian who suggested a deviation from orthodoxy — say, expanding Medicaid, on efficiency grounds — would be expelled from the cult as a “statist” heretic.

Bailey and Wilkinson accuse me of discouraging potentially useful social experimentation. But it’s not an experiment if you know the result in advance. Libertarians, like utopian socialists and utopian anarchists, think they already know the desirable end state of human social evolution, even if they are content to move toward that utopia incrementally.

Most liberals would approve of the philosopher Karl Popper’s distinction between “piecemeal social engineering” and “utopian social engineering,” symbolized by the lethal attempts of Jacobins, fascists and communists to remake whole societies from scratch on the basis of this or that theory. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper wrote that “the piecemeal engineer will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.” In some cases, fighting urgent evils requires the expansion of particular liberties, like abolishing slavery and segregation and securing the right to vote. In other cases, it requires limiting particular liberties, like the freedom of employers to buy and sell slaves, use child labor or pollute the environment.

Libertarianism poses as a comprehensive public philosophy promoting the “greatest ultimate good” of individual freedom, not just a list of particular policies, like private toll roads instead of public highways or vouchers for schools. So it is not enough for libertarians to point to discrete measures that have been adopted by systems based on other principles, like social democratic progressivism or conservative welfare capitalism. Libertarianism as a system will be hard to take seriously until there are at least a few functioning, systematically libertarian countries in the world.

Maybe at some point in the future some country will take the plunge and unilaterally adopt the gold standard, replace police and soldiers with private contractors, abolish all taxation except for a flat, regressive consumption tax, eliminate all public safety net programs, eliminate most or all environmental and occupational regulations, allow foreigners to move in and out of its territory without registration or regulation, and so on. And maybe that regime will even endure for a while, instead of quickly collapsing or suffering rejection by voters with buyer’s remorse.

Meanwhile, in today’s world, the focus of the political mainstream — moderate conservatives and centrists, along with progressives — is on modifying the inherited model of the twentieth century mixed economy, to adapt it to the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century. While there are substantial costs and benefits at stake, the reforms that are at issue are essentially incremental — cut Social Security or boost it, slightly increase or slightly lower legal immigration, increase progressive income taxation or add a federal consumption tax like a value-added tax to the mix.

And what exactly does the libertarian movement contribute to contemporary American debate? Here are a few of the ideas that the rest of us, from center-left to center-right, are supposed to treat with respectful attention: calls for a return to the gold standard; the abolition of the Federal Reserve; the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service; and the replacement of all taxes by a single regressive flat tax that would fall on low-income workers while slashing taxation of the rich.

My critic in The Economist, Will Wilkinson, writes:

The ideal of anti-theoretical experimentalism leads me to a preference for policies that promote the sort of cosmopolitan pluralism in which cultural synthesis and invention thrives. It leads me to favour decentralised authority over monumental central administration. It leads me to suspect that it would be better if America were twelve separate countries, or had 200 states. It leads me to think seasteads are a great idea.

Ron Paul, who merely wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, looks like a boring centrist, compared to Will Wilkinson, who thinks it might be worthwhile to abolish the United States, subdividing it into a dozen separate countries. (My Southern ancestors who supported the Confederacy would have been satisfied with two).

And the seasteads that Wilkinson favors? A few years back, libertarian guru Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri Friedman argued that, because they are too unpopular ever to win political power in contemporary democratic nation-states, libertarians should migrate to abandoned oil derricks offshore to create the stateless libertarian community (if that is not a contradiction in terms).

Friedman has now abandoned the seastead project, in favor of promoting autonomous “charter cities” to promote free markets and the rule of law in poor countries on the model of Hong Kong (an undemocratic British colony before it became an undemocratic satrapy of China’s communist dictatorship). Honduras has revised its laws to accommodate such autonomous zones. According to Details:

One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says.

Let us hope Appletopia is a kinder, gentler place than Apple’s Foxconn supplier company town in China, where netting had to be placed around dormitories to catch unfree workers seeking to escape from serfdom to multinational corporations by committing suicide.

But let me close on a conciliatory note. While libertarianism as a philosophy is superficial, juvenile nonsense, particular libertarian proposals are sometimes worthwhile on their merits. The seastead and charter cities movements are examples. If libertarians want to move to converted offshore oil platforms or multinational-owned company towns in the jungles of Central America, I for one will wish them well.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Michael Lind.

Yeh, same dude who wrote a book arguing that Vietnam was a war worth fighting. Quite the bullshitter, ain't he?

 

[KingOrfeo]

http://www.troll.me/images/conspiracy-keanu/what-if-che-guevara-lives-and-earns-money-from-all-these-tshirts.jpg

[shrug] Good for him.

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I wouldn't say that you're right twice a day.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And he's at it again!

Tuesday, Jul 30, 2013 03:22 PM EDT

“Libertarian populism” = Ayn Rand in disguise
All the re-brands and disguises in the world cannot obscure what this "new" ideology is really about

By Michael Lind

Question: What is a libertarian populist? Answer: A libertarian in disguise.

That is my conclusion, after perusing much of the recent discussion of whether a new “libertarian populism” (or “populist libertarianism”) could prove to be a winning formula for the exhausted and discredited American right.

At first glance, creating a common ideology to unite the libertarian and populist wings of today’s right must be an appealing idea for GOP strategists. But to succeed, both parents would have to contribute to the genetic makeup of the libertarian populist baby. The leading advocates of libertarian populism, however, look very much like run-of-the-mill libertarians to me.

Ben Domenech, for example, tries to define libertarian populism by arguing that it takes “a few of its aims from the Rand Paul approach – a balanced budget amendment, flatter and simpler taxes, and more – but there is also a stronger focus on issues which cut across party lines, including reform of higher education, prison and justice systems, civil liberty protections, and an assault on D.C. cronyism from green energy to Big Banks.” But all of this is standard-issue libertarianism, including libertarian critiques of “prison and justice systems” and “civil liberty protections.” Nothing new here, folks, move along.

What Domenech and others mean by “populist” appears to be “popular.” They want a popular libertarianism, a libertarianism that majorities of Americans might vote for, not a movement that has anything to do with actual historic populism in the United States, which has generally been, to coin a phrase, illibertarian.

Consider the 1892 platform of the original populists, the People’s Party:

The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.

The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

Here is Domenech one hundred and twenty-one years later, in 2013, quoting Robert Tracinski:

It reminds me of an odd challenge from Michael Lind at Salon, who argues that libertarianism is not a credible political philosophy because we can’t name any countries that have adopted it. It is a challenge that is not quite honest (Lind rejects on ad hoc grounds a number of examples of countries with much smaller governments) and also astonishingly ignorant of history. The libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.

The United States of the late nineteenth century, which according to Domenech was “[t]he libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it,” was considered a dystopian nightmare by the original populists at the time—“a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.”

If they really are inspired by the American populist legacy, and are not just opportunists trying to rebrand libertarian ideology, then self-described libertarian populists should be able to point to at least to some elements of the populism of a hundred years ago that still inspire them.

Bimetallism? Free silver? Apparently not. As Domenech writes, the America of William Jennings Bryan and the Populists “was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.”

Okay, today’s libertarian populists don’t favor debtor-friendly inflation (the real motive for support of bimetallism). Do libertarian populists agree with the original populists in supporting unions? According to the People’s Party platform, “The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection…”

What? What’s that you say? Libertarian populists aren’t for labor unions?

Well, how about restricting immigration that might reduce the wages of some American workers, another complaint of the original Populists—“imported pauperized labor beats down their wages….”

Domenech writes:

Here the populists and the libertarians are often diametrically opposed, particularly on aspects such as E-Verify. The libertarian priority is meeting market needs: people should be able to hire whoever they want, for whatever purpose they want, at whatever price they agree upon. The populist priority is security and balancing against a workforce which undercuts their jobs. A proposal which sought to meet both their demands would predicate any reforms to the immigration system on completing a fence along the border, whether such a step would work or not. [emphasis added]

Shorter Ben Domenech: Fake out the gullible populists with a possibly unworkable fence, while giving the open-borders libertarians what they want: unrestricted immigration of cheap labor to the U.S. This kind of “libertarian populism” looks very much like a combination of real libertarianism and fake populism.

Point Three of the People’s Party platform was a progressive income tax: “We demand a graduated income tax.” Sorry, populists—if Ben Domenech is an authoritative spokesman for libertarian populism, you can’t have that one, either. Remember, according to Domenech:

The libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank.

The only issue on which today’s self-described libertarian populists and the original populists of yesteryear would seem to agree is opposition to “crony capitalism”—rent-seeking by corporations in cahoots with corrupt government officials and institutions. Indeed, a denunciation of what is nowadays called crony capitalism is part of the populist platform:

From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

But non-hyphenated libertarians routinely defend themselves against the claim that they are shills for corporations, by stating their opposition to crony capitalism and corporate welfare, for libertarian rather than populist reasons.

Besides, for the most part the original American populists proposed replacing what they believed to be corrupt public-private schemes with purely governmental agencies run by career civil servants. William Jennings Bryan, for example, proposed the nationalization of railroad trunk lines by the federal government. On August 29, 1919, Bryan told the House Commerce Committee: “If I had to choose between the concentration of all this power in New York in the hands of railway magnates and the centralization of all this power in the hands of government officials, I would without a moment’s hesitation prefer to risk concentration in the hands of public officials…. And now, repeating again that if I had to choose between this centralization in the hands of public officials and the kind of centralization the railroad magnates want in their hands in New York, I would infinitely prefer to take my chances on the Government officials in Washington.”

I have to admit that I find the idea of a political-intellectual heir to both William Jennings Bryan and Ayn Rand tantalizing. Undoubtedly their offspring would be incredibly long-winded and preternaturally argumentative.

Alas, all the talk of “libertarian populism” to the contrary, such a mésalliance has not taken place. Plutocracy’s La Pasionaria has not even met the Boy Orator of the Platte, much less borne his child. She has merely dressed up for Halloween.

But you can put Ayn Rand in overalls and hand her a pitchfork, and that doesn’t make her a libertarian populist.

 

[jeninflorida]

liberals and socialist are mentally disturbed people


KingofTards - they have pills to fix you!