American Libertarians Aren't Capitalists, They're Ignorant, Gullible Self Centered Pigs Slopping At The Trough

[#BeamMeUpScotty]

11 questions to see if libertarians are hypocrites
Eleven questions that expose their contradictions and faulty
logic

Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but
died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by
billionaires and corporations that found them politically
useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led
to its disappearance from the public stage, before its
reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make
any sense.

They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories
that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that
selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history
shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical
“free market” is better at everything than the government is,
yet when they really need government protection, they’re the
first to clamor for it.

That’s no reason not to work with them on areas where they’re
in agreement with people like me. In fact, the
unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be
among this nation’s most forthright and outspoken advocates for
civil liberties and against military interventions.

Merriam-Webster defines “hypocrisy” as “feigning to be what one
is not or to believe what one does not.” We aren’t suggesting
every libertarian is a hypocrite. But there’s an easy way to
find out.

The Other Libertarianism

First, some background. There is a kind of libertarianism
that’s nothing more or less than a strain in the American
psyche, an emotional tendency toward individualism and personal
liberty. That’s fine and even admirable.

We’re talking about the other libertarianism, the political
philosophy whose avatar is the late writer Ayn Rand. It was
once thought that this extreme brand of libertarianism, one
that celebrates greed and even brutality, had died in the early
1980s with Rand herself. Many Rand acolytes had already gone
underground, repressing or disavowing the more extreme
statements of their youth and attempting to blend in with more
mainstream schools of thought in respectable occupations.

There was a good reason for that. Randian libertarianism is an
illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of Utopian
ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted
real-world behavior anywhere. That’s why, reasonably enough,
the libertarian movement evaporated in the late 20th century,
its followers scattered like the wind.

Pay to Play

But the libertarian movement has seen a strong resurgence in
recent years, and there’s a simple reason for that: money, and
the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it.
Once relegated to drug-fueled college-dorm bull sessions,
political libertarianism suddenly had pretensions of
legitimacy. This revival is Koch-fueled, not coke-fueled, and
exists only because in political debate, as in so many other
walks of life, cash is king.

The Koch brothers are principal funders of the Reason
Foundation and Reason magazine. Exxon Mobil and other corporate
and billionaire interests are behind the Cato Institute, the
other public face of libertarianism. Financiers have also
seeded a number of economics schools, think tanks, and other
institutions with proponents of their brand of libertarianism.
It’s easy to explain why some of these corporate interests do
it. It serves the self-interest of the environmental polluters,
for example, to promote a political philosophy which argues
that regulation is bad and the market will correct itself. And
every wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich.
What better way to justify that than with a philosophy that
says they’re rich because they’re better—and that those tax
cuts help everybody?

The rise of the Silicon Valley economy has also contributed to
the libertarian resurgence. A lot of Internet billionaires are
nerds who suddenly find themselves rich and powerful, and
they’re emotionally and intellectually inclined toward
libertarianism’s geeky and unrealistic vision of a free market.
In their minds its ideas are “heuristic,” “autologous” and
“cybernetic”—all of which has inherent attraction in their
culture.

The only problem is: It’s only a dream. At no time or place in
human history has there been a working libertarian society
which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes
libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism’s
self-created mythos claims that it’s more realistic than other
ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth. The slope from
that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery,
steep—and easy to identify.

The Libertarian Hypocrisy Test

That’s where the Libertarian Hypocrisy Test comes in. Let’s say
we have a libertarian friend, and we want to know whether or
not he’s hypocritical about his beliefs. How would we go about
conducting such a test? The best way is to use the tenets of
his philosophy to draw up a series of questions to explore his
belief system.

The Cato Institute’s overview of key libertarian concepts mixes
universally acceptable bromides like the “rule of law” and
“individual rights” with principles that are more
characteristically libertarian—and therefore more fantastical.
Since virtually all people support the rule of law and
individual rights, it is the other concepts which are uniquely
libertarian and form the basis of our first few questions.

The Institute cites “spontaneous order,” for example, as “the
great insight of libertarian social analysis.” Cato defines
that principle thusly:

“… (O)rder in society arises spontaneously, out of the
actions of thousands or millions of individuals who
coordinate their actions with those of others in order to
achieve their purposes.”

To which the discerning reader might be tempted to ask: Like
where, exactly? Libertarians define “spontaneous order” in a
very narrow way—one that excludes demonstrations like the Arab
Spring, elections which install progressive governments, or
union movements, to name three examples. And yet each of these
things are undertaken by individuals who “coordinated their
actions with those of others” to achieve our purposes.

So our first hypocrisy test question is, Are unions, political
parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples
of “spontaneous order”—and if not, why not?

Cato also trumpets what it calls “The Virtue of Production”
without ever defining what production is. Economics defines the
term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology. That
was easier to get away with in the Industrial Age, when
“production” meant a car, or a shovel, or a widget.

Today nearly 50 percent of corporate profits come from the
financial sector—that is, from the manipulation of money. It’s
more difficult to define “production,” and even harder to find
its “virtue,” when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily
leads to the creation of jobs, or economic growth, or anything
except the enrichment of a few.

Which seems to be the point. Cato says, “Modern libertarians
defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn,
against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would
seize their earnings to transfer them to nonproducers.”

Which gets us to our next test question: Is a libertarian
willing to admit that production is the result of many forces,
each of which should be recognized and rewarded?

Retail stores like Walmart and fast-food corporations like
McDonalds cannot produce wealth without employees. Don’t those
employees have the right to “coordinate their actions with
those of others in order to achieve their purposes”—for
example, in unions? You would think that free-market
philosophers would encourage workers, as part of a free-market
economy, to discover the market value for their services
through negotiation.

Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who
bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are
also employing market forces?

The bankers who collude to deceive their customers, as US
bankers did with the MERS mortgage system, were permitted to do
so by the unwillingness of government to regulate them. The
customers who were the victims of deception were essential to
the production of Wall Street wealth. Why don’t libertarians
recognize their role in the process, and their right to
administer their own affairs?

That right includes the right to regulate the bankers who sell
them mortgages. Libertarians say that the “free market” will
help consumers. “Libertarians believe that people will be both
freer and more prosperous if government intervention in
people’s economic choices is minimized,” says Cato.

But victims of illegal foreclosure are neither “freer” nor
“more prosperous” after the government deregulation which led
to their exploitation. What’s more, deregulation has led to a
series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder
fraud and investor fraud. That leads us to our next test of
libertarian hypocrisy: Is our libertarian willing to admit that
a “free market” needs regulation?

Digital Libertarians

But few libertarians are as hypocritical as the billionaires
who earned their fortunes in the tech world. Government created
the Internet. Government financed the basic research that led
to computing itself. And yet Internet libertarians are among
the most politically extreme of them all.

Perhaps none is more extreme than Peter Thiel, who made his
fortune with PayPal. In one infamous rant, Thiel complained
about allowing women and people he describes as “welfare
beneficiaries” (which might be reasonably interpreted as
“minorities”) to vote. “Since 1920,” Thiel fulminated, “the
extension of the franchise to (these two groups) have turned
‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

With this remark, Thiel let something slip that extreme
libertarians prefer to keep quiet: A lot of them don’t like
democracy very much. In their world, democracy is a poor
substitute for the iron-fisted rule of wealth, administered by
those who hold the most of it. Our next test, therefore, is:
Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain
what’s wrong with governments that regulate.

On this score, at least, Thiel is no hypocrite. He’s willing to
freely say what others only think: Democracy should be replaced
by the rule of wealthy people like himself.

But how did Peter Thiel and other Internet billionaires become
wealthy? They hired government-educated employees to develop
products protected by government copyrights. Those products
used government-created computer technology and a
government-created communications web to communicate with
government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for
themselves, which was then stored in government-protected
banks—after which they began using that wealth to argue for the
elimination of government.

By that standard, Thiel and his fellow “digital libertarians”
are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion. Which leads us to
our next question: Does our libertarian use wealth that
wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against
the role of government?

Many libertarians will counter by saying that government has
only two valid functions: to protect the national security and
enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two? If
the mythical free market can solve any problem, including
protecting the environment, why can’t it also protect us from
foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these
libertarians wealthy?

For that matter, why should these libertarians be allowed to
hold patents at all? If the free market can decide how best to
use our national resources, why shouldn’t it also decide how
best to use Peter Thiel’s ideas, and whether or not to reward
him for them? After all, if Thiel were a true Randian
libertarian he’d use his ideas in a more superior fashion than
anyone else—and he would be more ruthless in enforcing his
rights to them than anyone else. Does our libertarian reject
any and all government protection for his intellectual
property?

Size Matters

Our democratic process is highly flawed today, but that’s
largely the result of corruption from corporate and billionaire
money. And yet, libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence
of big money. No wonder, since the same money is keeping their
movement afloat and paying many of their salaries. But, aside
from the naked self-interest, their position makes no sense.
Why isn’t a democratically elected government the ultimate
demonstration of “spontaneous order”? Does our libertarian
recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?

We’re told that “big government” is bad for many reasons, not
the least of which is that it is too large to be responsive.
But if big governments are bad, why are big corporations so
acceptable? What’s more, these massive institutions have been
conducting an assault on the individual and collective freedoms
of the American people for decades. Why isn’t it important to
avoid the creation of monopolies, duopolies and syndicates that
interfere with the free market’s ability to function?

Libertarians are right about one thing: Unchecked and
undemocratic force is totalitarian. A totalitarian corporation,
or a totalitarian government acting in concert with
corporations, is at least as effective at suppressing the
“spontaneous order” as a non-corporate totalitarian government.
Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a
threat to our freedoms?

Extra Credit Questions

Most libertarians prefer not to take their philosophy to its
logical conclusions. While that may make them better human
beings, it also shadows them with the taint of hypocrisy.

Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent of good works, writing that
“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is
a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.”
That raises another test for our libertarian: Does he think
that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that
historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?

There’s no reason not to form alliances with civil
libertarians, or to shun them as human beings. Their erroneous
thinking often arises from good impulses. But it is worth
asking them one final question for our test.

Libertarianism would have died out as a philosophy if it
weren’t for the funding that’s been lavished on the movement by
billionaires like Thiel and the Kochs and corporations like
ExxonMobil. So our final question is: If you believe in the
free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the
judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the
free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?Libertarians have a
problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the
mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and
corporations that found them politically useful. And yet
libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its
disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by
people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.

They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories
that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that
selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history
shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical
“free market” is better at everything than the government is,
yet when they really need government protection, they’re the
first to clamor for it.

That’s no reason not to work with them on areas where they’re
in agreement with people like me. In fact, the
unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be
among this nation’s most forthright and outspoken advocates for
civil liberties and against military interventions.

Merriam-Webster defines “hypocrisy” as “feigning to be what one
is not or to believe what one does not.” We aren’t suggesting
every libertarian is a hypocrite. But there’s an easy way to
find out.

The Other Libertarianism

First, some background. There is a kind of libertarianism
that’s nothing more or less than a strain in the American
psyche, an emotional tendency toward individualism and personal
liberty. That’s fine and even admirable.

We’re talking about the other libertarianism, the political
philosophy whose avatar is the late writer Ayn Rand. It was
once thought that this extreme brand of libertarianism, one
that celebrates greed and even brutality, had died in the early
1980s with Rand herself. Many Rand acolytes had already gone
underground, repressing or disavowing the more extreme
statements of their youth and attempting to blend in with more
mainstream schools of thought in respectable occupations.

There was a good reason for that. Randian libertarianism is an
illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of Utopian
ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted
real-world behavior anywhere. That’s why, reasonably enough,
the libertarian movement evaporated in the late 20th century,
its followers scattered like the wind.

Pay to Play

But the libertarian movement has seen a strong resurgence in
recent years, and there’s a simple reason for that: money, and
the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it.
Once relegated to drug-fueled college-dorm bull sessions,
political libertarianism suddenly had pretensions of
legitimacy. This revival is Koch-fueled, not coke-fueled, and
exists only because in political debate, as in so many other
walks of life, cash is king.

The Koch brothers are principal funders of the Reason
Foundation and Reason magazine. Exxon Mobil and other corporate
and billionaire interests are behind the Cato Institute, the
other public face of libertarianism. Financiers have also
seeded a number of economics schools, think tanks, and other
institutions with proponents of their brand of libertarianism.
It’s easy to explain why some of these corporate interests do
it. It serves the self-interest of the environmental polluters,
for example, to promote a political philosophy which argues
that regulation is bad and the market will correct itself. And
every wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich.
What better way to justify that than with a philosophy that
says they’re rich because they’re better—and that those tax
cuts help everybody?

The rise of the Silicon Valley economy has also contributed to
the libertarian resurgence. A lot of Internet billionaires are
nerds who suddenly find themselves rich and powerful, and
they’re emotionally and intellectually inclined toward
libertarianism’s geeky and unrealistic vision of a free market.
In their minds its ideas are “heuristic,” “autologous” and
“cybernetic”—all of which has inherent attraction in their
culture.

The only problem is: It’s only a dream. At no time or place in
human history has there been a working libertarian society
which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes
libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism’s
self-created mythos claims that it’s more realistic than other
ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth. The slope from
that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery,
steep—and easy to identify.

The Libertarian Hypocrisy Test

That’s where the Libertarian Hypocrisy Test comes in. Let’s say
we have a libertarian friend, and we want to know whether or
not he’s hypocritical about his beliefs. How would we go about
conducting such a test? The best way is to use the tenets of
his philosophy to draw up a series of questions to explore his
belief system.

The Cato Institute’s overview of key libertarian concepts mixes
universally acceptable bromides like the “rule of law” and
“individual rights” with principles that are more
characteristically libertarian—and therefore more fantastical.
Since virtually all people support the rule of law and
individual rights, it is the other concepts which are uniquely
libertarian and form the basis of our first few questions.

The Institute cites “spontaneous order,” for example, as “the
great insight of libertarian social analysis.” Cato defines
that principle thusly:

“… (O)rder in society arises spontaneously, out of the
actions of thousands or millions of individuals who
coordinate their actions with those of others in order to
achieve their purposes.”

To which the discerning reader might be tempted to ask: Like
where, exactly? Libertarians define “spontaneous order” in a
very narrow way—one that excludes demonstrations like the Arab
Spring, elections which install progressive governments, or
union movements, to name three examples. And yet each of these
things are undertaken by individuals who “coordinated their
actions with those of others” to achieve our purposes.

So our first hypocrisy test question is, Are unions, political
parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples
of “spontaneous order”—and if not, why not?

Cato also trumpets what it calls “The Virtue of Production”
without ever defining what production is. Economics defines the
term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology. That
was easier to get away with in the Industrial Age, when
“production” meant a car, or a shovel, or a widget.

Today nearly 50 percent of corporate profits come from the
financial sector—that is, from the manipulation of money. It’s
more difficult to define “production,” and even harder to find
its “virtue,” when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily
leads to the creation of jobs, or economic growth, or anything
except the enrichment of a few.

Which seems to be the point. Cato says, “Modern libertarians
defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn,
against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would
seize their earnings to transfer them to nonproducers.”

Which gets us to our next test question: Is a libertarian
willing to admit that production is the result of many forces,
each of which should be recognized and rewarded?

Retail stores like Walmart and fast-food corporations like
McDonalds cannot produce wealth without employees. Don’t those
employees have the right to “coordinate their actions with
those of others in order to achieve their purposes”—for
example, in unions? You would think that free-market
philosophers would encourage workers, as part of a free-market
economy, to discover the market value for their services
through negotiation.

Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who
bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are
also employing market forces?

The bankers who collude to deceive their customers, as US
bankers did with the MERS mortgage system, were permitted to do
so by the unwillingness of government to regulate them. The
customers who were the victims of deception were essential to
the production of Wall Street wealth. Why don’t libertarians
recognize their role in the process, and their right to
administer their own affairs?

That right includes the right to regulate the bankers who sell
them mortgages. Libertarians say that the “free market” will
help consumers. “Libertarians believe that people will be both
freer and more prosperous if government intervention in
people’s economic choices is minimized,” says Cato.

But victims of illegal foreclosure are neither “freer” nor
“more prosperous” after the government deregulation which led
to their exploitation. What’s more, deregulation has led to a
series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder
fraud and investor fraud. That leads us to our next test of
libertarian hypocrisy: Is our libertarian willing to admit that
a “free market” needs regulation?

Digital Libertarians

But few libertarians are as hypocritical as the billionaires
who earned their fortunes in the tech world. Government created
the Internet. Government financed the basic research that led
to computing itself. And yet Internet libertarians are among
the most politically extreme of them all.

Perhaps none is more extreme than Peter Thiel, who made his
fortune with PayPal. In one infamous rant, Thiel complained
about allowing women and people he describes as “welfare
beneficiaries” (which might be reasonably interpreted as
“minorities”) to vote. “Since 1920,” Thiel fulminated, “the
extension of the franchise to (these two groups) have turned
‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

With this remark, Thiel let something slip that extreme
libertarians prefer to keep quiet: A lot of them don’t like
democracy very much. In their world, democracy is a poor
substitute for the iron-fisted rule of wealth, administered by
those who hold the most of it. Our next test, therefore, is:
Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain
what’s wrong with governments that regulate.

On this score, at least, Thiel is no hypocrite. He’s willing to
freely say what others only think: Democracy should be replaced
by the rule of wealthy people like himself.

But how did Peter Thiel and other Internet billionaires become
wealthy? They hired government-educated employees to develop
products protected by government copyrights. Those products
used government-created computer technology and a
government-created communications web to communicate with
government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for
themselves, which was then stored in government-protected
banks—after which they began using that wealth to argue for the
elimination of government.

By that standard, Thiel and his fellow “digital libertarians”
are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion. Which leads us to
our next question: Does our libertarian use wealth that
wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against
the role of government?

Many libertarians will counter by saying that government has
only two valid functions: to protect the national security and
enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two? If
the mythical free market can solve any problem, including
protecting the environment, why can’t it also protect us from
foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these
libertarians wealthy?

For that matter, why should these libertarians be allowed to
hold patents at all? If the free market can decide how best to
use our national resources, why shouldn’t it also decide how
best to use Peter Thiel’s ideas, and whether or not to reward
him for them? After all, if Thiel were a true Randian
libertarian he’d use his ideas in a more superior fashion than
anyone else—and he would be more ruthless in enforcing his
rights to them than anyone else. Does our libertarian reject
any and all government protection for his intellectual
property?

Size Matters

Our democratic process is highly flawed today, but that’s
largely the result of corruption from corporate and billionaire
money. And yet, libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence
of big money. No wonder, since the same money is keeping their
movement afloat and paying many of their salaries. But, aside
from the naked self-interest, their position makes no sense.
Why isn’t a democratically elected government the ultimate
demonstration of “spontaneous order”? Does our libertarian
recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?

We’re told that “big government” is bad for many reasons, not
the least of which is that it is too large to be responsive.
But if big governments are bad, why are big corporations so
acceptable? What’s more, these massive institutions have been
conducting an assault on the individual and collective freedoms
of the American people for decades. Why isn’t it important to
avoid the creation of monopolies, duopolies and syndicates that
interfere with the free market’s ability to function?

Libertarians are right about one thing: Unchecked and
undemocratic force is totalitarian. A totalitarian corporation,
or a totalitarian government acting in concert with
corporations, is at least as effective at suppressing the
“spontaneous order” as a non-corporate totalitarian government.
Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a
threat to our freedoms?

Extra Credit Questions

Most libertarians prefer not to take their philosophy to its
logical conclusions. While that may make them better human
beings, it also shadows them with the taint of hypocrisy.

Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent of good works, writing that
“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is
a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.”
That raises another test for our libertarian: Does he think
that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that
historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?

There’s no reason not to form alliances with civil
libertarians, or to shun them as human beings. Their erroneous
thinking often arises from good impulses. But it is worth
asking them one final question for our test.

Libertarianism would have died out as a philosophy if it
weren’t for the funding that’s been lavished on the movement by
billionaires like Thiel and the Kochs and corporations like
ExxonMobil. So our final question is: If you believe in the
free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the
judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the
free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?