Where the Libertarians Went Wrong

When good ideas go bad … in the extreme

Liberty

Liberty is good. I have always taken that as an axiom, although others have tried to ‘prove’ it by referring to higher values such as Life or God. (The argument by God goes something like this: God gave man free will so that he might choose the good and thus enjoy virtue. Men thus ought to be free to choose good or evil, and urged to choose good. The argument by Life goes something like this: The life of an individual is his highest value, and hat supports life is good, and what kills life is bad. Freedom supports life and slavery of any kind, be it physical, mental, moral, or spiritual, kills life.)

In my own case I guess I liked liberty out of a quirk in my own makeup. Although I can’t prove this, I think many philosophers reach the ‘conclusions’ for their studies based on what their own quirks were from the time they were children. I was always a rebel of a kid. I never liked being told what to do or being forced down any road. When I was a young teen, this quirk ran at its strongest in me, and it happened this was a time of rebirth in the political philosophy of Libertarianism. So I clung to it and worshiped it and came to the conclusion that liberty must be the highest civic good.

Libertarianism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s two social movements came together to underpin the modern libertarian movement. First in the late 1950s Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged. This was a dramatic, Romantic, and hugely popular novel that exalted the individual, and it spoke plainly of the need for the least government possible, a state needed only to guard the liberty of its individual citizens. The novel, and subsequent classes, lectures, and essays put out by Rand and her followers, foremost of them Nathaniel Branden, made for a movement that went far beyond what any novel on its own might make. It was above all strong on college campuses, where the other movement rose up to redeem Libertarianism.

This was a resistance against the Old Guard in society, on many fronts. First was resistance against the Vietnam War and the military draft the war had come to depend on. Young men didn’t like being forced at gunpoint to go around the world to die for something that had nothing to do with their lives or country. Beyond the war, the young defied the racist Old Guard to fight for equality and civil rights, and they rebelled against the moralizing Old Guard to practice freedom of sex and recreational and spiritual drugs, as well as to choose their own fashions and ways of life.

These two movements took in also those of an independent streak, the loners and outcasts who have always stood out in American society, and who had been abandoned by the old men running the Democratic and Republican parties, who between them rule America. The thinkers of the movement looked back to the Enlightenment of the 18th as well as the Anarchists of the 19th century, and sought the best way for all men in the world to be free.

In the end two camps sprang up. There were the minimalists who said that though the State was evil, some level of the State must be maintained, although it ought be the smallest size of State that would uphold order and guard the borders. There were also the anarcho-libertarians, who pointed out that the state is in fact evil, and no state has ever existed that did not seek to enlarge itself in reach and rule. Therefore any State, no matter how small, would end as Leviathan, the totalitarian State. The only path to be free was thus to abolish the State once and for all.

The error that I want to point out in Libertarianism applies as well to both these camps.

One for All or One for Himself?

All the thinkers of the libertarian movement look back to the great minds of the Enlightenment, most of all the English political philosophers.

I want to point out here, by the way, two salient features of those English philosophers: first that they were bourgeois in class and outlook, and second that they were early bourgeois thinkers who took for granted features of their societies that the full onslaught of bourgeois thought and deed would later wipe out. These thinkers also show us how their conclusions match and don’t dispute their own individual quirks, and this includes the quirks of their class.

As bourgeois these men rebelled against the God-granted right of the aristocrat to lie idle and gather rents from fields, and they praised the industrious merchant and proclaimed his right to make goods and trade them. The political-economic child of the rising middle class was capitalism, and the twins of bourgeoisie and capitalism would go on to destroy every facet of traditional thought and life. And this means also traditions that go back in us for millions of years, since long before men were men.

In short, the individual they exalted, and the groups, the collectives, the classes, they dismissed. They did not consider man as a part of a larger social whole. They thought only of the works and lives of individual men. (I can not claim for sure that this is the full thinking of these 18th-century minds. It does represent how their thoughts have been preserved in modern libertarian beliefs.)

But man is not and never has a creature capable of living or thriving as an individual. It takes two adults to create a human child, and once born that child is not for some years able to stand alone. Man has always lived in groups, and if we take our cousins the other apes and primates as a guide, we lived in groups before we became men.

Atoms Molecules & Matter

So we could call the individual the atom of mankind, and the molecule is the mother-child diatom, and the group (call it clan or tribe or village or commune or what have you) is the matter.

The libertarians think only of the atom, the one the individual. They grant him all rights, and few if any to the mother over the child or child over the mother, and none at all to the group.

I will have more to say about all this, but here we can trace the root of where the libertarians went wrong. Their ideas rest on a conception of society that does not reflect reality.

You can see the worst fruit of this mistake in libertarian attitudes toward the commons, most of all the environment.

I will write more on this another day. But for now I leave you with this horrifying outcome of the mistake. Not long ago, on the respected libertarian website http://www.lewrockwell.com I read an essay on the environment by one of the contributors, and in this essay the author defended as proper conduct a man who would dump poison in a river and kill every plant, animal, and person who lived down stream.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 02 February 2008)