At a time in which our society has never been more interdependent in every possible way, libertarians think they’re John fucking Wayne looking out over his ranch with an Apache scalp in his belt, or John fucking Galt doing…whatever it is he does. (Collect vintage desk toys from the Sharper Image?)
Their whole ideology is like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s all make-believe, except for the chain-mail–they brought that from home. Elves, dwarves and fair maidens for capital. Even with the supposedly “good ones”—anti-war libertarians—we’re still talking about people who think Medicare’s going to lead to Stalinism.
So my advice is to call them out.
Ask them what their beef really is with the welfare state. First, they’ll talk about the deficit and say we just can’t afford entitlement programs. Well, that’s obviously a joke, so move on. Then they’ll say that it gives the government tyrannical power. Okay. Let me know when the Danes open a Guantánamo Bay in Greenland.
Here’s the real reason libertarians hate the idea. The welfare state is a check against servility towards the rich. A strong welfare state would give us the power to say Fuck You to our bosses—this is the power to say “I’m gonna work odd jobs for twenty hours a week while I work on my driftwood sculptures and play keyboards in my a chillwave band. And I’ll still be able to go to the doctor and make rent.”
Sounds like freedom to me.
libertarians
Three fundamental components of libertarianism (live and let live, smaller government, and anti-militarism) are dear to me. However, I reject libertarianism as a whole, because at its heart lies a profound misconception. Libertarianism is predicated on the assumption that people are rational. The libertarian refuses to believe that the government is smarter than he is. He rejects the notion that the government should tell him how to live his life, or that the government should take care of him or anybody else. His attitude is that the individual is always smarter than the government. If the individual makes an error in judgement, reality will quickly impose its consequences, and that person will learn and improve. Pleistocene Hunter Gatherers ☀
[In the U.S.], “libertarian” means “extreme advocate of total tyranny”… It means power ought to be given into the hands of private unaccountable tyrannies. Even worse than state tyrannies, because there the public has some kind of role. But the corporate system, especially as it has evolved in the twentieth century, is pure tyranny. Completely unaccountable. You’re inside one of these institutions, you take orders from above, you hand it down below… there’s nothing you can say, tyrannies do what they feel like, they’re global in scale. This is the extreme opposite of what been called “libertarian” everywhere in the world since the enlightenment. Noam Chomksy ☀
There’s only problem with Liberty Fund’s lesson in Sumerian history and language: the real meaning of the amagi cuneiform isn’t about abolishing “big government” or abolishing the Fed–nope, it’s about abolishing debts to free citizens from debt slavery. What the history-failures at Liberty Fund hilariously mistranslated was that the term “return to mother” is Sumerian-speak for “jubilee”–as in “debt forgiveness” or “freedom from debt.”
Is the ability to take risks and then suffer the consequences of those risks really what freedom is all about? And what’s the problem, really, with a government that takes care of everybody? Running Chicken ☀
But when we abolished slavery the meaning of “freedom” became entirely unclear. Its opposite was gone. It’s as if the color “black” was abolished: how would we now understand the color “white?” Freedom is much harder to define after 1865: what does it mean without slavery? I know what I prefer—the capacity to speak my mind, a certain amount of property rights, protection from violence—but if you ask me to define “freedom” it’s going to be a challenge. Freedom obviously can’t mean “the right to do whatever you want,” since that impinges on the freedom of others, and it can’t simply mean “the possession of property,” since property could be gained by violent means. The laws which secure my rights (or if you like, my freedoms) are also constraints–they require the paying of taxes and a degree of obedience to authority. Lots of people now equate freedom with choice, imagining something like “I’m free because the market gives me 100 different choices of breakfast cereal.” This is clearly not quite what Jefferson had in mind, and of course you might have 100 different kinds of breakfast cereal but little or no choice about the kinds of work you might have to do to earn a living and little meaningful political choice. “Freedom” is hard to define in the absence of slavery. Libertarians always refer back to the age of “classical liberalism,” the age of Jefferson and Locke. This is not coincidentally also the age of racial slavery: slavery gave meaning to freedom, while racial slavery legitimated a notion of natural rights founded in biological difference. Racial slavery wasn’t a regrettable accident: it was crucial to the formation of ideas about liberty and freedom. It was the opposite that gave those ideas meaning. Because the end of actual slavery destabilized the notion of freedom, modern libertarians have to keep finding new forms of “slavery” to keep their world view sensible. Why Libertarians Love Slavery ☀
When they say “government is the problem” what they’re really saying is “Having a state police force is the problem.” Having a justice system is the problem. Having schools is the problem. Providing care for the indigent elderly and the physically or developmentally disabled is the problem. Public transportation is the problem. This is what they’re saying, whether or not they care enough to realize that this is what they’re saying. And what they’re saying is indefensible and abysmally stupid. slacktivist ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
