On Libertarians

#5 in our ongoing series on contemporary ideological tendencies, by guest writer John Perich!

Thanks to John Perich of Disparaging the Boot for penning this outstanding guest entry. John, you’re a hero of the people and I have a medal that says so.

Social media has forced us all to confront the Geek Gatekeeper. This three-headed pup stands at the threshold of sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book properties, separating the ‘true fans’ from the latecomers. It has a lifetime of trivia at its fingertips, flung like poison darts at the unworthy.

You would think that the absolute, unquestioned dominance of nerd properties in pop culture—Star Wars movies, Marvel TV shows, Dungeons & Dragons podcasts, video game livestreams, e-sports tournaments, the Harry Potter extended universe, the Snyder Cut—would make Geek Gatekeepers happy. But it hasn't…and it can't! Why not? Two reasons:

1. At some foundational stage, usually adolescence, they decided that their fondness for geek properties elevated them above the madding crowd. Anyone can watch 9 hours of football on any given Sunday; only a connoisseur would binge the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. If the madding crowd is also, in fact, made up of huge fans of The Lord of the Rings, this shatters that self-perception.

2. They assumed that any world or demimond that valued geek properties would, therefore, convey status upon them. If Star Wars is suddenly cool, then knowing everything about Grand Admiral Thrawn must also make one cool. The fact that this hasn't happened yet is also an affront to them.

If you understand that mindset—the fringe fandom; the frustration at one's niche interests going mainstream; the insistence on purity as a defense mechanism—then you understand libertarianism. The rest is a footnote.

When I talk about libertarianism, I'm talking about the political philosophy championed largely, but not exclusively, by the Mont Pelerin Society from 1947 onward: a set of creeds and principles aimed at protecting private commerce from government regulation, framed as a defense of ‘freedom’. This is an important distinction to draw. In the 18th and 19th centuries, ‘libertarian’ would have been understood to mean ‘anarchist’, ‘socialist’, or at the very least ‘left-wing’. It meant freeing people from the bonds of landlords as well as kings, from bosses as well as barons. Thomas Paine, Henry George, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Errico Malatesta would find a chilly reception at the Mercatus Center or the Adam Smith Institute today. So, too, would Adam Smith, given his views on monopolists.

But I don't intend this to be a material history of libertarianism, of who developed it and how. Better writers than I have covered that ground. Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economist's Hour summarizes the arc of Milton Friedman's career, along with Arthur Laffer and other prophets of deregulation. Nancy Maclean's Democracy in Chains may oversell the conspiratorial elements of James Buchanan and the ‘Virginia School’ a bit, but she ably documents how their radical right-wing economics came from ideological rather than empirical grounds. Jane Mayer's Dark Money covers the role of the Olin, Scaife, and Koch fortunes in bankrolling these libertarian economists.

I'm not going to re-gloss material they've already covered. I mention them here to establish that 20th-century libertarianism's origins—as a reaction to progressivism first, as a body of policy second, and as a school of economics last—are conclusively documented. That said, I'm still going to address libertarianism at face value: as if it were a belief system arrived at by people liberating themselves from oppressive governments, rather than by oil billionaires liberating themselves from the capital gains tax. That's how most of its adherents arrive at it, after all.

Libertarians believe that the ideal world maximizes social and political freedom for each individual. They have this in common with their anarchist ancestors. And libertarians do land on the progressive side of a few civil rights issues. As a comrade pointed out to me years ago, libertarians have often been more consistent in defending sex workers than Marxists have. Radley Balko, an expatriate from the Cato Institute enclave, has been one of the most diligent investigators of police abuses in the American press, even prior to the Movement for Black Lives thrusting that conversation into the limelight. Libertarians have often (but not always) advocated the free movement of people across national borders. They decry the War on Drugs, eminent domain, and the racial impacts of gun control—all issues that a non-reformist Marxist could raise a beer with them over.

Modern libertarianism, however, derives not only the rightness, but the justice of its individualism from 20th century economic theories. In response to the communist claim that a centrally-planned, worker-run state was necessary for justice—and to John Maynard Keynes's attempts to modify capitalism in response—libertarians claim that a laissez-faire free market can deliver the fairest outcome for all participants. ‘Market forces’, in this worldview, can deliver justice in a way that central planners cannot.

This isn't to say that every libertarian is an expert on Pareto-optimal outcomes, the Arrow-Debreu model, or Von Mises's theory of the evenly rotating economy. For most of them, libertarianism originates from a conception of rights that every individual is entitled to. Many point to John Locke and his conception of "life, liberty, and property". Others trace their ideological lineage to the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But whether God is their reason or reason their god, the consumer-driven economy is their prophet.

The funny thing about "life, liberty, and property," though, is that somehow "property" always trumps the other two. The right of people of any sexuality to live as they choose is important; the right of homophobic bakery owners to deny them a wedding cake, however, cannot be contravened. Black people have just as much a right to life and liberty as white people do, but they have no right to sit at a lunch counter beside them. Your right to wander across my property ends where I've zeroed in my .30-06. And if it just so happens that most of the bakeries or lunch counters or households in your small town are owned by bigots…well, it sucks to be you. There is doubtless a ‘market-based’ solution to your dilemma, though. Perhaps some progressive entrepreneur will scrape together the down payment to start a business that doesn't discriminate on the basis of race or sex. Maybe, four or five generations from now, you'll enjoy the privileges the rest of us stumbled into. (This is not an exaggeration of the libertarian position on civil rights.)

Libertarians fear the stifling effects of government power—and not entirely without cause—but are silent on the effects of economic power. A public school imposing a ridiculous dress code on their students is an egregious restraint; a Walmart imposing a dress code on its employees is the ‘market in action.’ Point out Amazon's ability to muscle out smaller competitors and starve other employers in a small town, and they'll suggest that a new entrant might one day dislodge Amazon. As to how the rest of us are supposed to afford co-pays while waiting for Amazon to wither away, the Mises Institute remains silent.

This is a problem, because, as Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Keynes, Mills, Bookchin, and anyone who's ever opened a newspaper could tell you, economic power constitutes a power as real and as intractable as the barrel of a gun. If your income comes from wages, it can only scale as high as the number of hours you can work in a week. If your income comes from capital (returns on equity, rent on land, royalties on a copyright), there's no real limit to how high it might climb. You earn money while you sleep. This money compounds if reinvested, giving a person who owns capital a notable, accelerating advantage over anyone who doesn't. And if you can pass this compounding nest egg down to the next generation (as libertarians, stalwart opponents of the estate tax, insist you should be able to), you can give your children an insurmountable advantage over their playmates.

On top of this, holders of capital are not all free-thinking maverick trailblazers, despite the propaganda of Wired and Ayn Rand. No matter their industry, they have common interests as a class. They recognize that their investments only have power if they can keep their costs low and their order volume high. Adam Smith noted that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”. But it doesn't even need a conversation! Businesses may recognize that they're rivals with each other—Old Navy vs T.J. Maxx; restaurants across a major thoroughfare—but will keep their wages and prices roughly in line. They'd both rather have a reliable slice of the pie than risk losing it all by competing. This is called monopolistic competition. They teach it in those economics courses that libertarian commenters always insist we ought to take.

If I can buy up every acre of land around your home, and I don't offer you an easement, then I have power over you. If I own the only business in town that's hiring, and I don't choose to set a wage that'll provide you with shelter, medical care, and heat, then I have power over you. If I choose not to sell to you, and there's nowhere else within commuting distance that provides the goods or services you need, then I have power over you. And if I have more money than you, it doesn't matter how ‘economically inefficient’ my decisions are. The market can stay irrational, as Keynes put it, longer than you can stay solvent. 

As I said, this is obvious to anyone who looks at how actual markets actually work. Competition does not necessarily make the world freer, fairer, or healthier. But empiricism has always been a weak point for libertarian scholars. Von Mises and the Austrian School insisted that the rightness of their economic doctrine came from self-evident a priori laws about human nature, to be confirmed (if they feel like it) by economic observation after the fact. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's The Calculus of Consent based its interpretation of voters and legislators on rigorous armchair reasoning rather than actual studies of how legislation gets passed. Ask a libertarian for evidence that free markets deliver more just outcomes than planned economies, and they'll provide cherry-picked anecdotes about breadlines in Soviet Russia, shortages in Venezuela, or how great the iPhone is.

Of course, the biggest empirical failing lies at the core of libertarian ideology: the notion that the State and the Market are separate entities, existing in splendid isolation until the State breaches the peace. This is not true. It never has been. ‘Markets’, as formal recognitions of property and contract rights vested in individuals, have always required an armed hierarchy to enforce them. The idea that humans in the Lockean “state of nature” invented wages, job specialization, and the limited liability corporation is absurd. And yet, libertarianism can not survive without this absurdity! When left-wing columnist Elizabeth Bruenig debated libertarian economist Bryan Caplan at the 2018 LibertyCon, Caplan struggled with the question of "how does private property originate without a state?" He struggled with it because it's never happened.

To debate a particular regulation as efficient or inefficient, as just or unjust, is the work of policy. But to assume that ‘taxation is theft’, that the State has the power to enforce contracts but not remedy them, is to make oneself a sycophant to power. And, as Appelbaum, Maclean, and Mayer have documented, that's what libertarians are.

If this were their only problem, libertarians would merely be a quaint curiosity, like David Icke or the LaRoucheites. But libertarians aren't merely wrong about history and blinded by ideology. They're also the worst sort of sports fan: a poor winner.

In his column memorializing Milton Friedman, slouching reactionary William F. Buckley observed that the preceding 25 years had borne out the Chicago economist's views. Binyamin Appelbaum dates Friedman's ascendancy to the late Seventies, when deregulation and tighter monetary policy became fashionable rather than the province of cranks. Francis Fukuyama might place the free market apotheosis at the fall of the Soviet Union. But whenever you date it, one must concede that, even after 2008, the idea that markets could deliver more just outcomes than central planning had a comfortable seat in the halls of power. There was, per Margaret Thatcher, no alternative. From Bill Clinton gutting welfare in the name of ‘reform’ to Barack Obama proposing a generous subsidy to health insurers as a Rube Goldberg-esque alternative to universal healthcare to COVID vaccines being distributed by CVS and Walgreens rather than the National Guard or FEMA, we live in an era of market supremacy.

In the United States, we live in the most appealing era for libertarians since the Oklahoma Land Rush. One can free oneself of the ‘theft’ of taxation by incorporating in Delaware and booking one's entrepreneurial expenses as pass-through costs, or by converting one's holdings to a favorite cryptocurrency. Outside the major coastal and border cities, land remains cheap enough for every true John Galt to build a homestead all his own. Weed grows more accessible every day. Multiple states have legalized constitutional carry for guns. Libertarians should be frothing with delight.

Instead, like the Geek Gatekeeper watching the people who shunned him in high school squeal over Sebastian Stan's interpretation of the Winter Soldier, they're miserable. And they're miserable for the same reason that Geek Gatekeeper is miserable: The market doesn't want them. It never has.

Capitalists—the actual holders of capital—do not principally identify as libertarians. Capitalists, like everyone outside of George Mason University, hate capitalism. They hate competition; they hate lowering prices; they hate negotiating with workers; they hate marketing; they hate the Schumpeterian threat of ‘creative destruction’. If they could transform every industrialized economy into a network of petty fiefdoms, rather than a (supposed) laboratory for constant innovation, they would. They are trying to do so now. Witness how nakedly the largest employers violate labor law as their employees attempt to unionize; how they pit municipalities against each other in a bid for the rosiest tax dodges; how they incorporate in the state or country most favorable to their accounting, regardless of where they're actually headquartered. Even the few billionaires who do champion libertarian ideas—the Kochs, Mercers, Coors and the like—still bankroll Republicans rather than the collection of unblinking ghouls that the Libertarian Party nominates every four years.

Libertarianism took a brief swing at relevance in 2008, when dissatisfaction over the banks' role in the housing crisis made Ron Paul the outsiders' insider. But libertarians quickly realized that they weren't numerous enough to make a worthwhile constituency and that smarmy blog comments about ‘supply and demand’ were not a substitute for political organizing. All they managed to do was seed a blood-and-soil populism that bore fruit eight years later with the election of a game show host who actually spoke to America's terrified suburbanites and embittered entrepreneurs. Libertarians may have found Donald Trump distasteful, ignorant, and protectionist in his policies; but they couldn't full-throatedly condemn a man who stood against environmentalism and corporate taxation.

The last five years, and particularly the last two, have been something of a Dickensian Christmas Carol nightmare for libertarians. Climate change has caused enough damage to finally enter the political consensus. Libertarians have been forced to either modify their view—not climate denialism, per se, but a climate realism that asks if maybe we don't need to panic so much—or grow increasingly ostracized. On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the hard, fatal limits of rational individualism. To the crew that spent years claiming that “Facts don't care about your feelings,” one may now respond, “Germ theory doesn't care about your rights”.

Since the Mont Pelerin Society put forth a concerted effort to reintroduce Pareto-optimality-uber-alles into universities, think tanks, and op-eds, libertarianism has served primarily as a skunkworks for conservatism. Its most tempting ideas (supply-side tax cuts, slashing welfare, balanced budgets, charter schools, privatizing Social Security) get cherry-picked by Republicans looking for bold platforms. But as a coherent (so to speak) ideology, it remains on the fringe. And despite the ascendancy of its worst ideas, on the fringe it will remain. It has no natural constituency. It has no internal consistency or empirical warrant. And a genuine implementation of its central tenet—a laissez-faire market, with no structural barriers to any entrants—would require a revolution so total that even a committed Marxist might blanche.

But Leonard didn't give me this platform just to dunk on the hipsters of the right. In each of his prior installments, he's grappled with the question of what the socialist posture should be toward a given ideological tendency (liberals, fascists, etc.) And socialists, despite the growing unpopularity of capitalism, are not a power in themselves yet. We are as much on the fringe of the left as libertarians are the right. We're also cherry-picked for bold ideas and principled stands that a mainstream party can take credit for, water down, and then disregard. We're even likely to run into each other at some of the same protests and street fairs.

So what should socialists do with libertarians? I see three options:

1. Press them on the internal inconsistencies of their ideology. If a libertarian is genuinely motivated by freedom, justice, and a life without miserable wage slavery, they can not defend the market as it exists for very long. The evidence that unchecked neoliberalism will scour this planet grows like the peak temperatures in the Arctic Circle. This is a long game, and the prize may not be worth all the quarters you drop in the machine, but it can occasionally pay off. (As you may have guessed, this is how I got here)

2. Mock them pitilessly. Libertarianism thrives on the safe spaces constructed for it at small colleges, dark-money think tanks, and the worst alternatives to Twitter. Its cherished slogans are now the province of white nationalists, transphobes, and anti-vaxxers. They have not arrived at their position through reason or experience, so they do not deserve your rationality or your time.

3. Ignore them. Any libertarian idea worth addressing (the nature of the market to give each participant their just desserts; the right of individuals to live how they choose no matter who it offends) also exists in the mouths and minds of other parties with real power, conservative or liberal. Take it up with the conservatives or liberals when you find them. But someone who thinks their principled stand on marijuana legalization distinguishes them from the parties of Trump, Farage, or Le Pen isn't worth your time. That principled stand didn't stop the handmaidens of fascism from taking power. It never has, and it never will.