Early Days and Libertarian Love

It is early, but already we see the shape of the next few years. It’s going to be ugly. Trump’s cabinet is taking on the look of an antithetical. Practically every choice so far turns out to be a near negation of the mission of the department they are nominated to run. And if not a negation, then they are a mockery. The choice of Price to oversee health matters is particularly striking: he has a long history of opposition to anything remotely social. Libertarians everywhere, no doubt, will love him as he smashes away at Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid. After all, as our dear leader Margaret Thatcher so famously said: there is no such thing as “society”.

Ah those libertarians.

For them there is no such thing as society — it smacks of the horrors of socialism, which is of course communism, which is of course Marxism, which is of course the Soviet Union, and we all know how that worked out. As Hayek famously taught us: to put even a single toe in the waters of social action is to slide, inevitably, down the slope to totalitarianism.

But whereas the collective known as society is non-existent, the collective known as the “market” lives strong and free in the minds of the libertarian right. Or should I say righteous libertarians, since their beliefs are articles of faith not grounded in empirical reality but in the supernatural of a highly specific form of liberty. So it is not an objection to collectivism that so vexes libertarians, but any form of collectivism that has something called “planning” in it.

This is deeply Hayekian.

That early twentieth century influx into the west of Austrian thinkers, refugees from the collapsing Hapsburg Empire and the far right politics and the wickedness of racial and discriminatory oppression that followed in its wake, has had a profound impact on subsequent thought. It has denuded much social thought of a recourse to social cooperation. It has put upon an unwarranted pedestal the so-called efficacy totally unplanned and highly decentralized action. Why? Because all those refugees piled the blame for their native home’s chaos on either the impossibility of the promises made by leftist politicians or on the unsuccessful and meddlesome intrusions of the declining autocracy they left behind.

So either the erstwhile planned efforts of the leftists, which ran afoul of events, or the brutality of government, whose ineptitude caused those events, was to blame for the loss of civil society and prosperity those refugees experienced firsthand. These survivors of that collapse spent their lives building dreamworld schemes that needed neither planning nor government to produce peace, prosperity, and the lifting of all citizens to better lives. They, more than anyone else, produced the heritage that we now experience as neoliberalism and the canard that “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

Their thinking is irrefutable within the limits of its own walled in assumptions and worldview. The libertarian pipe dream seduces even the most sophisticated thinkers. And it provides a useful elixir with which to intoxicate voters.

What the libertarians omit from their thinking — deliberately I ought add — is the concept of democracy. Democracy, that is, as an organized social expression of citizenship and collective responsibility. That is to say there are responsibilities that go with those vaunted rights the libertarians so ardently advocate.

Liberalism — and I count myself as a liberal — used to combine a healthy skepticism of government with an equal amount of advocacy of egalitarian social thought. We liberals advocate for the rights of all. Not just for a few. But the modern roots of liberalism are to be found in the turmoil of the 1600’s and 1700’s, before modern democracy was a method for expression of those rights. The Austrian thinkers were simply late to the table. Their homeland had not yet caught up with the liberalism if other western nations and, indeed, its decay came exactly at a time when much of the intellectual premiss of liberalism was under attack: the Great Depression, the Great War, and the rise of the Soviet version of authoritarian Marxism all seemed to be existential threats to western liberalism. The Austrian led counter-attack, which really took hold only after World War II, and which found its most fertile home here in the US, was founded on a peculiar mix of anti-democratic thought and neoliberal adaptation of the old school liberalism that had already been surpassed in the west.

Surpassed by what?

By a more socially aware democracy.

The steady incorporation of working people into the voting class, and the extension of the franchise which was painfully slow in even the most liberal of nations, saw the development of precisely the counterpoint to the old nemesis of autocratic government that the libertarians so desired. Yet they missed it altogether. Instead they conflated all forms of government into one: the evil version they wanted to eliminate. So libertarians have never been able to separate autocracy from democracy. In their minds government is government, no matter what ground it sits on.

So when voters elect governments to redistribute a nation’s wealth in order to preserve a semblance of egalitarian citizenship old time liberals once idealized — read the literature of America’s founding fathers for their opinions on how more equal society was so worth their praise — libertarians are reduced to a dogmatic objection: since all government is a form of oppression in their minds, they have no tool to ensure egalitarian citizenship. They deprive the voters of a voice. They stifle an essential freedom in pursuit of a more abstract version. And they signal a deep resentment towards democratic government.

Why is this important?

Because contemporary economic theory sits squarely on a libertarian foundation. It begins with a set of assumptions that denigrates government, a priori, as in inefficient intrusion. What the voters want is of no interest to economists. What the market wants is all that matters. This is because economists have so constructed their theories that market activity is always going to prove to be better than any other. The theory is rigged to ensure that outcome, because it suits the deep intellectually contrived worldview that infected economics way back when. Yet this so-called “proof” is so empirically laughable that no respectable science would advocate it. The contortions necessary to arrive at the “correct” result — i.e. that markets are superior to all other forms of resource allocation devices — are so wild and ridiculous that no one operating in the real world could sensible believe them. The disproof of economics is all around us: as Coase noted long ago, all business firms are centrally planned economic activities and thus deny by their very existence economic theory. Yet it plods along spreading its pernicious anti-democratic viewpoint and provides a cover for the libertarian attack on the provision of social services and corrections to the extreme consequences of unbridled market action.

Hence we now arrive in a political moment that has many scratching their heads: how come liberal democracy is such a tizzy? How is it that our military institutions are adored, yet our civil institutions are so despised? How is it that so-called “strong man” politicians can rise to power? How is it that governments everywhere are falling into the hands of people who so dislike government?

Because it has become second nature on the political right to hurl abuse at government, society, civil action, and all forms of liberal democracy. It began in earnest with Reagan. It has reached fever pitch with Trump. The straight line of libertarian utopian nonsense underlies the whole process.

Yes, I call myself a liberal. Yet I see libertarian idealism for what it is. I understand the profound ability of democracy to express the will of the people on an equal footing with the expression of those same people in market activity. Neither one nor the other ought dominate. Our future resides in learning the art of balancing the two: market action sufficient to generate wealth; social action sufficient to prevent the dominance of one class of citizens over another.

Modern liberals comprehend the need for that balance. Modern liberals advocate freedom as expressed in the marketplace and as at the ballot box. Indeed, from my point of view, being able to so advocate is the logical end result and the triumph of centuries of liberal advance.

Trump is a denial of all that.

As I said, its going to be rough few years.