Vulgar Libertarianism

[Cochise]

This topic has been tossed around a bit in some of the other threads that I've been posting in, and I thought perhaps it deserved a thread of its own. There's an increasing tendency within libertarianism to be critical of the general libertarian support of corporate power, big business, and the upper class, and legislation that strengthens the position of those institutions. The crux of it is that wealth distribution and economic organization that has been propped up and created by a bloated central government is defended by free market rhetoric. The best summary is from libertarian author Kevin Carson in his Studies of Mutualist Political Economy:

This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: "Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get." For every imaginable policy issue, the good guys and bad guys can be predicted with ease, by simply inverting the slogan of Animal Farm: "Two legs good, four legs baaaad." In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury. As one of the most egregious examples of this tendency, consider Ayn Rand's characterization of big business as an "oppressed minority," and of the Military-Industrial Complex as a "myth or worse."

The ideal "free market" society of such people, it seems, is simply actually existing capitalism, minus the regulatory and welfare state: a hyper-thyroidal version of nineteenth century robber baron capitalism, perhaps; or better yet, a society "reformed" by the likes of Pinochet, the Dionysius to whom Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys played Aristotle.

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because "that’s not how the free market works"--implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of "free market principles."

It's certainly true that free markets are nonexistent, and that modern corporate capitalism is based on state intervention and government-regulated markets. Congressman Ron Paul puts it this way: Has Capitalism Failed? by Ron Paul

It is now commonplace and politically correct to blame what is referred to as the excesses of capitalism for the economic problems we face, and especially for the Wall Street fraud that dominates the business news...Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It's not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!

Yet on the same website, Mises Institute president and close Paul affiliate Lew Rockwell, for whom the site is named, is recorded as having said this: Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

You are surrounded by the blessings of capitalism. The buffet table, which you and your lunch partners only had to walk in a building to find, has a greater variety of food at a cheaper price than that which was available to any living person – king, lord, duke, plutocrat, or pope – in almost all of the history of the world. Not even fifty years ago would this have been imaginable.

Not even fifty years ago? Not before 1958, that is. Yet the most popular demarcation point for the definitive end of "free markets" (though it's really not accurate) and the beginning of "corporatism" or "state capitalism" is 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment substantially expanded income tax provisions. The Libertarian Party shares that view: Taxes | Libertarian Party

Before 1913, federal income taxes were rare and short-lived. America became the most prosperous nation on earth. The U.S. Government did not try to police the world or play "nanny" to everyone from cradle to grave. People took responsibility for themselves, their families, and their communities. That is how the founders of America thought it should be. And it worked. It can again!

Hence, Rockwell is defending an economic system characterized by extensive income taxation and state intervention as though it were a free market, which is simply wrong. But it has to be understood just how far this can go. Existing property distribution is based on theft, because effectively all existing private resources and wealth was either acquired through force or fraud at some point, or created through resources or capital goods that were themselves acquired or created through force or fraud at some point. Slavery, indentured servitude, and outright genocide characterizes the history of this country itself, and the distribution of wealth and property created through overt state intervention of the past continues to be inherited by the ancestors of the destitute even if they're no longer enslaved or routinely massacred. Walk on the Navajo reservation someday, and that will be plainly apparent. Ultra-libertarian Murray Rothbard argued that the economic conditions of former slaves would leave them in horrendous conditions and subordinate to others if they did not receive legitimate economic compensation. He wrote this in The Ethics of Liberty:

We have indicated above that there was only one possible moral solution for the slave question: immediate and unconditional abolition, with no compensation to the slavemasters. Indeed, any compensation should have been the other way—to repay the oppressed slaves for their lifetime of slavery. A vital part of such necessary compensation would have been to grant the plantation lands not to the slavemaster, who scarcely had valid title to any property, but to the slaves themselves, whose labor, on our “homesteading” principle, was mixed with the soil to develop the plantations. In short, at the very least, elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated. As it was, the victorious North made the same mistake—though “mistake” is far too charitable a word for an act that preserved the essence of an unjust and oppressive social system—as had Czar Alexander when he freed the Russian serfs in 1861: the bodies of the oppressed were freed, but the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With the economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm laborers. The serfs and the slaves had tasted freedom, but had been cruelly deprived of its fruits.

I cannot rally behind the cry that "taxation is theft!" because the thievery of stolen property does not alarm me. When libertarians defend the lingering consequences of statism by incorrectly protecting corporate capitalism with free market rhetoric, they support that statism, do they not?

 

[Real Korimyr #9]

Oppression is the natural state of man. Neither property nor taxation are theft-- they are merely the seizure and defense of goods and services by force, and both are necessary for the functioning of modern society, or any society of appreciable size.

Freed slaves should not be given property. We have seen the consequences of this in Africa, and in Russia, and indeed everywhere that Communism has taken hold. Freed slaves should be given nothing more than a proper place in society and the means to acquire property for themselves. Anything else will merely end up squandered or destroyed.

Where our system has failed is that it has not ensured a proper place for everyone in society, and has not left the means to acquire property within reach of every citizen.

 

[Geo Patric]

Paul is wrong about Capitalism. Capitalism defines itself. And the notion that only completely free market, unregulated capitalism is capitalism is nonsense, even foolish nonsense, if we look at the only time such capitalism operated and everyone suffered;workers, the state AND industrialist and capitalists. AND when we consider that, even to the extent that it worked it depended on an oppressive political system.

Even Smith, when writing Wealth Of Nations was not constructing a new economic model but instead doing, primarily, what all good scientists do, as Newton and Darwin did - recording what he witnessed and what he deduced from what he witnessed. The "laws" of capitalism was what worked.

"Clarifications" and tweaking would be needed to save it. Continuing reassessment is needed to keep it healthy.

And Rockwell's commentary borders on the fatutous. Had he had the opportunity to sit in on a roman orgy he might have recorded a scene very similar. Would, then, orgiasm be defined as virtuous because it afforded a degree of opulence to a few?

I am unfamiliar wiith Rothbard, but the snippet sounds eminently correct, though i question the need (or in light of how Libertarianism has come to define itself, the appropriateness) of the modifier of "justice" he employs. Justice is justice. No party and no ideology may claim it. Such modifiers limit the most potent of abstracts.

All in all, i commend your conclusions. You sound like the most sensible Libertarian I have heard in a great many years, indeed, since i registered (once) as Libertarian myself. THAT Libertarian ideology appears, alas, to have been consigned to the dustbin.

geo.

 

[Cochise]

Oppression is the natural state of man. Neither property nor taxation are theft-- they are merely the seizure and defense of goods and services by force, and both are necessary for the functioning of modern society, or any society of appreciable size.

Freed slaves should not be given property. We have seen the consequences of this in Africa, and in Russia, and indeed everywhere that Communism has taken hold. Freed slaves should be given nothing more than a proper place in society and the means to acquire property for themselves. Anything else will merely end up squandered or destroyed.

Where our system has failed is that it has not ensured a proper place for everyone in society, and has not left the means to acquire property within reach of every citizen.

That is...interesting, but most libertarians are not actually overtly authoritarian. So you wouldn't be hypocritical the way they would; you've not hidden anything about the authoritarian nature of the program you've laid out. I think you'll agree about the case of libertarian inconsistency, actually.

Paul is wrong about Capitalism. Capitalism defines itself. And the notion that only completely free market, unregulated capitalism is capitalism is nonsense, even foolish nonsense, if we look at the only time such capitalism operated and everyone suffered;workers, the state AND industrialist and capitalists. AND when we consider that, even to the extent that it worked it depended on an oppressive political system.

Yes.

Even Smith, when writing Wealth Of Nations was not constructing a new economic model but instead doing, primarily, what all good scientists do, as Newton and Darwin did - recording what he witnessed and what he deduced from what he witnessed. The "laws" of capitalism was what worked.

Yes, though I'd be cautious to extrapolate his assessment of agrarian individualism to industrial corporatism, as some libertarians do. Aside from that, he advocated far more interventionism than is generally believed.

"Clarifications" and tweaking would be needed to save it. Continuing reassessment is needed to keep it healthy.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with the continued existence of government intervention in an actual free market, but it does seem to me that massive redistribution is necessary in order to remedy the sins of our fathers.

And Rockwell's commentary borders on the fatutous. Had he had the opportunity to sit in on a roman orgy he might have recorded a scene very similar. Would, then, orgiasm be defined as virtuous because it afforded a degree of opulence to a few?

I'm sure he's making a ridiculous claim; he's prone to do that. But my central focus was that he was crediting something that Paul claimed was nonexistent for affluence. We can't have it both ways.

I am unfamiliar wiith Rothbard, but the snippet sounds eminently correct, though i question the need (or in light of how Libertarianism has come to define itself, the appropriateness) of the modifier of "justice" he employs. Justice is justice. No party and no ideology may claim it. Such modifiers limit the most potent of abstracts.

That seems intuitively appealing, though I believe that the conception of justice that most people have line up with libertarian ideas.

All in all, i commend your conclusions. You sound like the most sensible Libertarian I have heard in a great many years, indeed, since i registered (once) as Libertarian myself. THAT Libertarian ideology appears, alas, to have been consigned to the dustbin.

geo.

Many thanks. The most foundational thing about the concept of unjust acquisition of existing private property and vulgar libertarianism is the fact that actual libertarian justice would seem to compel massive redistribution...and the entire LP platform is opposed to free market principles, since it supports the consequences of past state intervention and oppression. As said, progressive taxation is "hardly" theft since stolen property isn't morally protected from plunder.

 

[Geo Patric]

Cochise,

I wouldn't necessarily agree with the continued existence of government intervention in an actual free market, but it does seem to me that massive redistribution is necessary in order to remedy the sins of our fathers.

this, though i have attempted to think it through, proposes a scary proposition in that I cannot see how it would not further widen the divide between rich and powerful and poor and powerless. We cannot ignore that, though is is foolish to conflate economic and political systems, it is equally foolish to pretend that there is no 'balance of power' relationship.

Economics MUST be subject to politics or politics will be subject to economics. The merit of that paradigm depends on the merit of the political system.

We can't have it both ways.

yeah, though i have always wondered what the purpose of having cake was if you did not intend to eat it. I am sure the execs over at Goldman Sacks are wondering the same thing 'bout now.

progressive taxation is "hardly" theft since stolen property isn't morally protected from plunder.

nicely put.

geo.