(Note: If you're in a hurry, the top half of this post is about fake libertarians (i.e., conservatives), and the bottom half, below the line, is about real libertarians.)As a writer, what do you think I do when I want to procrastinate from writing? Why, I write, of course! I just write on a different topic. Somehow that makes a difference.
One topic on my mind lately is libertarianism, lowercase-L. It’s an ideology which serves to remind us that the political universe has more than one dimension to it, even though one-dimensional,
spectrum politics happens to dominate the national discourse here and in many other countries. Lacking a strong organizational apparatus here and elsewhere, the libertarians are perennially a political sideshow, at best reduced to spoiler status, and at worst a nonentity altogether.
Libertarianism is a fascinating subject, but the reason it’s been on my mind lately is because I’ve noticed that one side-effect of the ongoing civil war in the Republican Party is that more conservatives are calling themselves libertarian. These are people whose ideology is such that to write them into the libertarian equation would be to render the term “libertarian” broad to the point of meaninglessness. A case in point is Peter Thiel, best known for creating PayPal, who
wrote an article earlier this year lamenting that:
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
That got a lot of play on the blogs, and is still getting around now: I just saw it on sci-fi website
io9.com yesterday. When I read the article, which culminates in Thiel’s renunciation of democracy and his assertion that libertarians must flee society and live either on the Internet, in space, or on the ocean, it struck me that this person isn’t a libertarian at all—not in the way that I understand libertarianism. His rant was that of an ideological laissez-faire capitalist.
There’s another word for people like that:
Ferengi.It was Thiel’s comment about female suffrage that hit the point home. When I read that, I immediately thought of how Ferengi society doesn’t even allow females to wear clothes, let alone wield any kind of meaningful power. I actually said to myself, aloud, “(That son of a bitch.) He’s a fucking Ferengi!”
Thiel, contrary to his rhetoric, is not particularly interested in freedoms and self-determination. He’s just another sour grapes Objectivist who wants more power and money for himself, and sees the public as an antagonist—especially when it comes to demographic groups outside his own. He’s nothing new, and in my personal opinion he poses no threat. The only thing that changed as a result of the article is my comfort level with using PayPal, since I have no interest in profiting people like him. (I’ll have to look into it more to see what his current financial relationship with the company is.)
Here’s why he got to write that opinion piece:
It wasn’t all that long ago that
BioShock came out. The political backdrop of this game was an oversimplified counterstroke against Objectivist ideals, which had the effect of putting Ayn Rand back in the public conscious, leading to a surge in the popularity of her books, which are the centerpiece of Objectivism.
Around the same time, the Republican Congress—which had overseen the biggest government in American history—finally collapsed due to corruption and rank incompetence, and the Bush administration found that most of his supporters were fair-weather friends who no longer wished to be associated with what they saw as a failed president. I smirk to this day at all those right-wingers who insist—
insist!—that Bush was not a “true” conservative, seeing as how he was
exactly a true conservative—a traditionalist ideologue who worked hard to preserve the existing social and economic order—and was supported as such in the first five years of his presidency. But of course nobody wants to admit that their ideology is a failure. It was not conservatism that had failed, the conservatives demanded: It was the Republicans who had failed conservatism!
Well, you can connect the dots fro mhere: Objectivism, which had always been popular among the corporate wing of the conservative movement, enjoyed a resurgence throughout the conservative movement, and all of these opinion articles and talking heads started cropping up in the media claiming that the Republican Party had lost power because it had strayed from the principles of capitalism and had instead embraced “statism”—a term used exclusively by right-wingers, to describe people like me who favor a strong central government and high public spending. This meme picked up steam as the economy broke down and the incoming Democrats chose to spend their way out of oblivion. The argument became that Republicans had become too much like Democrats, and that America’s political system had shut out the real conservatives entirely. Ayn Rand got even more play in the news, and a new fad sprang into being: the short-lived “Going Galt” movement, whereby prominent conservative industrialists urged one another to follow the lead of John Galt (from Rand’s book) and abandon society, and, in so doing, demonstrate that they were the real workers, the real earners, the real people who made society function, and that everyone else was just dead weight.
Not surprisingly, that little revolution never caught on, and Objectivism per se has crested as a media point of interest and has slowly been fading from the news. But the odyssey of conservatism continues. The factions of conservatism want to reform the Republican Party, or escape from it altogether, and the corporate conservatives are doing all that they can to win these fights and achieve dominance—or at least retain their considerable power under the previous order.
One outcome of their efforts has been the revival of the label of libertarianism among conservatives, which is why I have led you on this little contemporary political history walk. You may have noticed over the past two years or so that the number of people who identify themselves as Republican has gone way down. What are those people now calling themselves instead? A great many of them have flocked to the label of “libertarian.” Isn’t that neat! By their logic, it turns out that “true conservatism” is actually libertarianism.
You’ll have to forgive my eye rolling, since all of these newly awakened “libertarians” still monolithically vote Republican, and still believe in the principles of conservatism. All they did was change the title of their beliefs to something more palatable. They’ll be Republicans again as soon as that party’s fortunes are on the rise, but for now they’re bold, noble-minded independents who stand on principle and just want to get America back to its libertarian foundations. Ugh…
These people are not the ones who interest me. They’re opportunistic right-wingers: bitter capitalists, greedy corporatists, racists, rich snobs, and those who buy into the notion of small government without comprehending the implications of it—and often hold contradictory views on their preferred role of government!
Real libertarianism—the genuine article—is much more fascinating, and
that’s what’s been in my mind lately. So, everything up to this point was simply my account of
why the subject has been on my mind. How’s that for verbosity? Now I can finally get on to the actual subject of libertarianism…
Real libertarianism, in my view, is obsolete. I don’t mean that there aren’t people who still believe in it: I mean that it simply doesn’t work in a populous, prosperous, developed, and stable nation that has come to expect a certain material quality of life. Libertarians oppose a large, intrusive government, and yet what does such a thing consist of?
On one hand, there is the “large” aspect of it. Most of the
size of government comes from the staffing required to operate the government’s numerous programs. The question is what would happen to America if we ended these programs. I looked hard for an authoritative list of all the government’s funding outlays, and the best I could find was
this website, a private website whose information is several years out of date. If anyone has a better source, I’d like to see it for myself, but for the time being this list provides a good point of reference. You don’t have to read very far down the alphabetized list to see objectionable items—Item No. 8 is $41 million for abstinence education—but the vast majority of these items are conspicuous precisely because they are
not objectionable. Can anyone really look at that list and object to the
principle of most of these items? No doubt there are inefficiencies that result in money wastage, but that’s a very different argument than the one which contends these programs should most be canceled outright.
The thing about libertarians is that they
can object, usually on the assumption that whatever purpose a government program serves is either extraneous or can be better performed by people and businesses acting on their own volition. The reality is that this is not true: Much of what the government does is not going to be done by private businesses who are constrained by the profit motive, or by individuals who are constrained by a lack of capital, and would be sorely missed if the government closed up shop. Some of what the government does
would be undertaken by private interests, with results that would often be inconsistent or disturbing. It’s not a coincidence that the size of the government has expanded in conjunction with our quality of life. A massive contraction in government spending would result very quickly in breakdowns all across society, because our collective quality of life, and our stability as a nation, depends in large part on those very programs. Libertarians disagree, or would agree that our way of life depends on government as it exists now, but would disagree that our current way of life is beneficial to us as a society.
That last bit is a very troublesome problem indeed, because there are way too many people alive for us to revert to an earlier, lower quality of life, and espousing an anti-government ideology without accounting for this is a huge omission that cannot be similarly overlooked in practice.
What large government is
not is some huge office building full of bureaucrats who take long lunch breaks and generate paperwork for a living. I know at least as many people who work “for the government” in some fashion as who work for the private sector, and what consistently stands out to me in these public servants is the importance of the work they do, the passion they have for their field, and, not unrelatedly in my opinion, their awareness as human beings and their respect for others. I know that my observations are anecdotal and therefore not as compelling as they could be with better empirical data, but I am satisfied to my own high standards that the legend of government being inherently and hugely more wasteful than the private sector is a myth, and that government’s size is a function of our progress as a society.
Don’t get me wrong: There is definitely waste; there is waste all throughout the continuum of human endeavor. But as for the argument that government is a much worse offender…I don’t buy it. I’ve seen more waste in the corporate sector than I have from the government, including hundreds of dollars spent by Qwest over a ten-day period to diagnose and repair a faulty phone jack that had disrupted my Internet connection. Actual repair time: less than ten minutes.
I think the efficiency of a program comes down to the program itself, the people who run it, and the people they have to interact with. I think that’s true in business, and true in the government.
Then, on the other hand, there is the “intrusive” aspect of a large government. To some extent, the intrusiveness is a byproduct of all those government-funded programs I mentioned—i.e., a byproduct of the size of government. Much of it, however, is completely distinct: Here we’re talking about government legislation imposing restrictions and controls on our behavior as individuals. This is a
much more compelling issue for me than that of the size of government, because this side of the topic gets into some of my favorite questions about what people are likely to do on their own initiative, and what they
need to do (or not do) in order for society to remain stable. Ideally, people would be all-knowing and would exercise flawless judgment, in which case would not need any laws, but of course we are not ideal and therefore we need laws in order for society to function. More than that: We also need these laws to be widely if not universally obeyed.
The reason this stuff is so compelling for me is because I’m one of those people who lives at the end of the bell curve: I’m responsible, knowledgeable, prudent, and considerate, to a degree that many people are not—closer to the ideal. I don’t need as many laws as the next person, and the laws that I do need are not necessarily the same as those needed by the next person. When I was younger, I didn’t fully understand just how easy some things are for me when compared to others, and so my visions of a better society used me as the basic civic unit. That, obviously, was not representative of reality. My earlier visions of better societies would therefore clearly have failed.
Much of my political philosophy since then has been devoted toward building a better image of how a better society would actually work. You may notice that I talk a lot about influencing children; that’s because I’ve reached the conclusion that full-scale reeducation of adults en masse is not viable in our present society, and that
forcing behavior changes in adults would usually be counterproductive.
The vast majority of my common ground with libertarianism occurs here, in these questions of how to control people in order to produce a better society, because I generally prefer to allow people (adults, anyhow) to live freely, even if they choose to live poorly as a result of their freedom. I make many exceptions, such as my severe attitude toward opposing sexism, or, less ambiguously, my support for no-brainer controls like the seatbelt law, but on the whole I think it is healthier for a society not to micromanage its denizens’ behavior.
The specific areas of our concurrence—libertarianism and myself—are mostly limited to the social realm. I rapidly depart from the libertarians on issues like taxation and environmental stewardship, the former because of my view on the importance of government spending, and the latter because of the obvious environmental ruin that has occurred in the absence of strong government controls, which now threatens to become the most serious danger to civilization, and is already on the scale of an “extinction level event” with regard to life as a whole on this planet.
Bringing these two issues back together: There is plenty of room to argue legitimately over what government should be funding and what it shouldn’t. I would volunteer that there is nothing wrong with requiring a government program to demonstrate its effectiveness. Likewise, there is plenty of room to argue about how the government should be controlling our behavior. These debates are valid. The problem with libertarianism is that, valid though the debates may be, the libertarians are bound to lose most of them, because they insist that government should be as small as possible rather than as large as necessary, and most people disagree with the ultimate conclusions of that, especially as it pertains to our way of life: We’re all enamored of the idea of some pastoral utopia, which the libertarians are quick to associate with themselves, but the romance is a veneer and the history of our human tale presents itself readily when we ponder the possibility of regressing to an earlier state of civilization.
Is it possible for libertarianism to advocate moving
forward? Yes, it is, and it does: Progress through private innovation and free enterprise. However, this vision lacks the supporting structure that would make it viable. We’ve only gotten to where we are through extensive government manipulation of the human equation. Even that is a remarkable accomplishment, and many people died to win the freedoms we have today. Libertarianism proposes erasing our greatest ally: a public entity, the government, which is theoretically accountable to us in a way that corporations and wealthy individuals are not: and replacing it with what amounts to good intentions. That doesn’t work.
That’s why I said libertarianism is obsolete. There could have been a time when it would have worked, but society today is too complicated to function under a small government. This complexity is what enables us to live as well as we do. We’re not willing to give that up, and so libertarianism has faded as practical ideology.
One of my favorite bits about the subject of libertarianism is how sincere most libertarians are. (The real ones, that is; not those fake libertarians.) Many of them came into their ideology as a result of their upbringing: They grew up on a farm, or reading Heinlein (or both!). They have witnessed a dysfunctional, crime-ridden city center. They’ve gone through the hell of getting a city or a county permit. They’ve had to stand in line at the Department of Licensing (or the Department of Motor Vehicles if you’re not a Washingtonian). They pay their taxes, yet they still drive over potholes in the road and sit in traffic jams on the freeway. There’s so much in our lives which points to government incompetence. It’s easy and understandable for people to look at this and conclude that government just doesn’t work well, and shouldn’t be trusted to lord over us.
It’s one of those many occasions when the simple answer is the wrong one.
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