A Critique of Libertarianism

For years, my experiences with libertarianism was mostly unpleasant. They are an energetic bunch of folks who are rock solid certain that their ideology is best and if anyone disagrees, they usually get viciously attacked. That’s why I stopped trying to communicate with that scintillating community years ago. Each brief step back into that rigid ideological world, to test for changes indicated that the old, nasty status quo is still alive and nasty. Those folks are still right and the rest of us are idiots or worse.

Over the years, I came across things that describe most libertarians. This is a good time to put them together in one happy place for posterity’s sake.

Here’s why libertarians are right and you are wrong

This is how a prominent libertarian, Michael Shermer, describes the workings if infallible libertarian ideology:

“Ever since college I have been a libertarian—socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility. I also believe in science as the greatest instrument ever devised for understanding the world. So what happens when these two principles are in conflict? My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts. This is called motivated reasoning, in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true. 

Take gun control. I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals. Then I read the science on guns and homicides, suicides and accidental shootings (summarized in my May column) and realized that the freedom for me to swing my arms ends at your nose. The libertarian belief in the rule of law and a potent police and military to protect our rights won't work if the citizens of a nation are better armed but have no training and few restraints. Although the data to convince me that we need some gun-control measures were there all along, I had ignored them because they didn't fit my creed. 

My libertarianism also once clouded my analysis of climate change. I was a longtime skeptic, mainly because it seemed to me that liberals were exaggerating the case for global warming as a kind of secular millenarianism—an environmental apocalypse requiring drastic government action to save us from doomsday through countless regulations that would handcuff the economy and restrain capitalism, which I hold to be the greatest enemy of poverty. Then I went to the primary scientific literature on climate and discovered that there is convergent evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that global warming is real and human-caused: temperatures increasing, .... 

The clash between scientific facts and ideologies was on display at the 2013 FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas—the largest gathering of libertarians in the world—where I participated in two debates, one on gun control and the other on climate change. .... In the climate debate, when I showed that between 90 and 98 percent of climate scientists accept anthropogenic global warming, someone shouted, “LIAR!” and stormed out of the room.”

Philosophers speak

From the philosophy world come these salty comments: “Libertarian solutions favored by the political right have contributed even more directly to the erosion of social responsibilities and valued forms of communal life, particularly in the UK and the US. Far from producing beneficial communal consequences, the invisible hand of unregulated free-market capitalism undermines the family (e.g., few corporations provide enough leave to parents of newborn children), disrupts local communities (e.g., following plant closings or the shifting of corporate headquarters), and corrupts the political process (e.g., US politicians are often dependent on economic interest groups for their political survival, with the consequence that they no longer represent the community at large).”

Martha speaks

And finally, this is how political philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes flawed libertarian thinking:

“Even the minimal libertarian state has its own characteristic culture of emotions. Libertarians sometimes suggest that it is an advantage of their ideal that they do not need to rely on extensive sympathy. They can use human nature just as it is, relying on acquisitiveness, Hobbesian fear and limited sympathy to propel the machinery of competition. By contrast, liberals, they allege, want to engage in intrusive and uncertain projects of improvement. There is less to this contrast, however, than meets the eye. Even libertarians are opposed to force and fraud. .... Competitive acquisitiveness and the desire to rise above others can upset even that type of state, causing it to degenerate into lawless tribalism. .... Furthermore, proponents of the libertarian state typically assume, and do not argue, that their claims about “human nature” are true apart from culture. .... And yet history indicates that people’s capacity for extended sympathy varies greatly in accordance with the culture in which they live, as do their desires to outdo others in rank and status, or to dominate other racial or ethnic groups. .... we must pay attention to the facts of human psychology, insofar as these are at all understood, and we must not ask of people what they cannot deliver, or can deliver only with great strain. .... Take antidiscrimination laws. All the just state needs to do is to remove artificial barriers to trade, minority hiring, and so forth. Employers, being rational, will quickly see that hiring minority workers is in their interest. Libertarian thinkers argue that these laws are unnecessary because, discrimination is economically inefficient. .... They will not be held back by entrenched hatred, disgust, or, again, the desire to humiliate through segregationist practices. All are understood, moreover, to have a nondeformed view of the potentiality of African Americans, rather than a view deformed by racist stereotypes, whether those impute laziness, low ability or criminal propensity.  .... Libertarian politics is naïve, because people are just not like that. .... And as John Stuart Mill observed, the most ubiquitous and enduring exclusion of all, the exclusion of women from employment opportunities and political participation, is a bizarre policy for a utility-maximizing society, and one that could be held in place only by irrational prejudice.” (emphasis added)

And the libertarian has no grip on reality - don't vote libertarian

Conclusion

Together, those comments nicely describe what it is about libertarianism that has never had any personal appeal. It took others to articulate it for me, but this is basically it. This seems to explain why criticism of libertarianism and its beliefs are sometimes met with such ferocious, often vulgar push back. Libertarian ideology strikes me as one of those logic-proof compartments that Edward Bernays described way back in 1923 in his masterpiece on the staggering power of propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion: “Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view. . . . We find here with significant uniformity what one psychologist has called ‘logic-proof compartments.’ The logic-proof compartment has always been with us.”

Fun fact: The GOP has been taken over by very wealthy, powerful radical right libertarians including the Koch Brother’s organization and money. Their vision for government is exactly as described in the condensed party platform shown above and in the delightful poem. They are dead serious about those things and they tolerate no dissent from GOP politicians to their vision for a new American tyranny.