Time to annoy the samizdata.net crowd by linking to Mark Rosenfelder’s newly-revised What’s wrong with libertarianism.
Admittedly, it’s really an attack on hardcore anarcho-capitalism rather than on the entire spectrum of libertarianism thought. He explicitly excludes ‘small government conservatives’. It’s also rather focussed on American politics, even though libertoids exist in other English-speaking countries.
He does make the point that Libertarians’ claims to be “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” is a big lie.
The [american] Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There’s the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).
I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.
The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition.
Quite. I notice that British libertarians utterly loathe the socially-liberal Liberal Democrats, tend to back the socially-authoritarian Tories (the party of Ann Widdecombe), and have even been known to endorse crypto-fascist loons like the UKIP.
He gives some examples of the practical consequences of libertarian policies in practice, including the era of the robber-barons, Pinochet’s Chile (the fact that some libertarians are fans of someone known for attaching electrodes to the genitals of his political opponents speaks volumes about where their priorities lie), and post-Communist Russia.
I think he may be attacking some straw men in one or two places, but his characterisation of the attitudes of many Internet Libertarians seems to me to be pretty much on target.
Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.
First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else– love, humanity, justice.
(And let’s not forget that lurid fascination with firepower– seen in ESR, Ron Paul, Heinlein and Van Vogt, Advocates for Self-Government’s president Sharon Harris, the Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell’s site, and the Mises Institute.)
I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don’t need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don’t need a cheering section; they are– by definition– not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It’s the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.
His next point puts the boot in, but does seem an apt description of many of the trolls I run into on assorted Internet fora:
Second, it’s the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who’s read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.
Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.
