Libertarian

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see 2

see also tag

capt 6/17

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Justin Raimondo Fellow at The Libertarian Institute

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450 pp of origin stories

I%20Chose%20Liberty%20Autobiographies%20of%20Contemporary%20Libertarians_2

[### I Chose Liberty

Mises Institute

https://cdn.mises.org › ...](https://cdn.mises.org/I%20Chose%20Liberty%20Autobiographies%20of%20Contemporary%20Libertarians_2.pdf)

PDF

Foreword ix. 1. On My Becoming an Advocate of Free. Markets and Limited Government. James C.W. Ahiakpor. 1. 2. My Life as a Libertarian. D.T. Armentano.Read more

446 pages

AN 9 24

alternet-no lnx

Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push

In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.

As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37

Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.

The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.

Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:

“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.

“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38

Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.

Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.

Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:

“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39

The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”

For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”

“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40

This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.

If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.

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https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-6-2023/

04.06.23 - 10:00AM

The Century Long PR Campaign to Connect Capitalism to Democracy

Guest: Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Her books include, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, and her latest with historian of science and technology Erik Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

child labor pew sunoco NAM dupont paid for von mises and hayek to come to US u chic; the free mkt pjt blueprint (rewrite road to serfdom, milton does it; lect series wm volker fdn)

little hse on prairie

xian econ, norm v peale; billy g; $ sign of god favor (recycled the gospel? of wealth); commies are godless, thus god likes capitalism

hollywood  no more grapes of wrath motion pix assoc w ayn rand; wrote censorship codes not crit bank rich ppl; [sinclair EPIC? ]; CoC

RR: ike ltr to bro sec secure ~ sm# and stupid; GE NY (convicted rig elec mkt) , horatio alger, very pop pgm; RR sends the speech to nixon; libtard bk list ; RR unites social and fiscal conservatives? xian?

1929 ~ libtard

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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/excerpt-from-naomi-oreskes-the-big-myth/

excerpt:

this is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of “the magic of the marketplace.”

Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Soros popularized the name we find most apt: market fundamentalism. It’s a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs — whether economic or otherwise — is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat “The Market” as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they “distort” the market and prevent it from doing its “magic.” In the late 20th century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the 20th century.

Classical liberal economists — including Adam Smith — recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early 20th century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased — and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former — any compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?

Market fundamentalism is not just the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. It is the belief in the primacy of economic freedom not just to generate wealth but as a bulwark of political freedom. And it is the belief that markets exist outside of politics and culture, so that it can be logical to speak of leaving them “alone.”

We are all familiar with the idea that, as Soros has summarized, “the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” That’s the core argument Adam Smith made in 1776 and contented capitalists have accepted ever since. Market fundamentalists, however, depart from Smith by insisting there is no “common good,” merely the sum of all the individual private goods. For this reason, they reject government’s claims to represent “the people”: there are only people — individuals — who represent themselves, and they do this most effectively not through their governments, even democratically elected ones, but through free choices in free markets.

Milton Friedman, America’s most famous market fundamentalist, went so far as to argue that voting was not democratic, because it could too easily be distorted by special interests and because in any case most voters were ignorant. But rather than consider how special interests might be mitigated or how voters could be better informed, he maintained that true freedom was not expressed in the voting booth. “The economic market provides a greater degree of freedom than the political market,” Friedman said in South Africa in 1976, as he encouraged the citizens of that country not to fuss over apartheid, but to preserve and expand their market-based economy.

Friedman’s argument works when we are talking about the freedom to buy, say, shoes of any type. But it fails when we consider the larger picture, including deceptive advertising, aggressive and misleading PR campaigns, and what economists call “external costs”: costs that are invisible to or misunderstood by the shoe buyers, or that accrue to people who didn’t buy those shoes at all. Pollution is an external cost. What happens when the shoe manufacturer dumps toxic chemicals behind the plant and hides that fact from its workers, investors, and customers? Friedman downplayed the problem by giving it the friendly label of “neighborhood effects,” and claimed that any remedy would almost always be worse than the disease, because of the loss of freedoms or compromises to property rights typically associated with government regulations. In some cases, he may have been right. Regulations do compromise someone’s freedom in order to protect the freedom (and welfare) of others. When it comes to pollution, the “freedom” of factories to dump toxic wastes has been rightly rejected. When it comes to climate change, the “freedom” of corporations to sell oil, gas, and coal jeopardizes the rest of us. This creates a fundamental dilemma for the fundamentalists. But rather than rethink their arguments, market fundamentalists protect their worldview by denying that climate change is real or asserting that somehow “The Market” will fix it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Friedman held that capitalism and freedom are two indivisible sides of the same coin, but this “indivisibility thesis” predates him by decades. In the early 20th century, it was promoted in the United States by a group of industrialists working under the umbrella of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). NAM and its allies used the thesis to argue against political reforms that today we take for granted, such as laws limiting child labor, establishing workers’ compensation, and creating the federal income tax. In the 1930s, they aligned themselves with the electricity industry and used the thesis to argue against the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other elements of the New Deal. Mostly they lost these fights, in part because the thesis suffered a fatal flaw: it wasn’t true. Electricity was a case in point. Markets had failed to bring electricity to millions of Americans who wanted it, but the government had succeeded, and rural Americans were better off economically and no less free. Indeed, they were arguably freer than before, because they now had electrical appliances that reduced manual labor and electric lights to lengthen the usable day.

Because the indivisibility thesis had so little foundation in fact, American business leaders needed to find other ways to shore it up. One way was propaganda. In the 1920s, the National Electric Light Association (NELA) launched a massive campaign that included, among other things, the hiring of academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula to promote pro- market, antigovernment perspectives in emerging business schools and economics programs across the country. They also recruited experts to “prove” that private electricity was cheaper than public electricity, even when the available facts showed otherwise. In the 1930s, NAM reprised the effort, with a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince Americans that business and industry were working just fine, and that the real causes of the Great Depression were unionized labor’s unreasonable demands, coupled with the government’s excessive interference in business affairs and federal taxation that starved industry of the monies it needed to expand productive capacity. Well into the 1940s, NAM produced books, pamphlets, radio programs, lecture series, and documentary and feature films (and later television programs) designed to influence what newspapers had to say about the economy and American life, what teachers taught in the classroom, and, above all, what the American people believed.

Another strategy was to recruit sympathetic intellectuals to help give the myth credibility. For this, American businessmen relied on imports: the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, leaders of the Austrian school of economics. In the 1940s, a group linked to NAM paid for Mises and Hayek to come to America, arranged for them to be hired at New York University and the University of Chicago, respectively, and worked assiduously to promote the economists’ ideas, both in business circles and among the American people generally. This included publishing a dumbed-down version of Hayek’s famous book “The Road to Serfdom” in Reader’s Digest and a cartoon version of it in Look magazine. In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan would encounter that Reader’s Digest version; decades later “The Road to Serfdom” would be promoted by right-wing radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and touted by influential Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and House leader Paul Ryan.

Businessmen helped create America’s first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), established in 1946 by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce manager Leonard Read to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology. They also funded the Hayek-aligned Mont Pelerin Society, a cadre of mostly European economists, cultural commentators, and political theorists promoting a renewed commitment to free-market principles under the aegis of what became known as neoliberalism. And they would help Milton Friedman write his most influential book, “Capitalism and Freedom” — essentially a restatement of the indivisibility thesis — which would dramatically reshape the American cultural conversation in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1988, Reagan would award Friedman both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Few of Friedman’s readers knew that the book’s success was not the product of open competition in the marketplace of ideas: “Capitalism and Freedom” had been financed and nurtured by American businessmen, and it was the most public part of a much larger project. Reader’s Digest notwithstanding, the people who had brought Hayek to America had quickly concluded that his approach was too intellectual and too European to break through to the public.

Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reagan was an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screen career was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation (GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show “General Electric Theater,” where each week his voice and face reached into tens of millions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism and free enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country on behalf of GE — visiting factories, making speeches at schools, and doing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence — promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion and antigovernment vision.

Reagan’s mentor in this work was GE executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, whose antiunion tactics were so extreme they earned a name: Boulwarism. (They would also earn GE several indictments for federal labor law violations.) And while Reagan helped GE promote the ideology of free markets and free choice, the company conspired to rig electricity markets (an offense for which it would be successfully prosecuted in the 1960s). Boulware’s influence transformed Reagan’s politics. He went into GE a New Deal Democrat and came out an antigovernment conservative Republican. GE transformed Reagan’s political fortunes as well; he emerged from his time there with powerful backers in corporate America who helped him launch his career in elected office.

Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, and the success of American market fundamentalism was ultimately a triumph of public relations: its advocates built a myth and persuaded Americans of its truth. By the 1970s, what had begun as a self-interested defense of business prerogatives — one that was factually dubious and characteristically supported by gross distortions and misrepresentations of history — had been transmogrified into a seemingly intellectually robust body of thought. 

Meanwhile, a network of libertarian think tanks, heavily funded by industries selling dangerous products including tobacco and fossil fuels, had been established to promote these views in schools, in universities, and in American life writ large. Among other things, these think tanks distributed free of charge millions of copies of Hayek’s and Friedman’s (and Ayn Rand’s) books. Meanwhile, progressive foundations mostly focused on specific issues — like saving whales or expanding access to education — not realizing that a larger ideological battle was under way. The myth spread, influencing American presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, most recently, Donald Trump.

Americans in the early 20th century were largely suspicious of “Big Business” and saw the government as their ally. By the later decades of the century, this had flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” and believed it made more sense to count on the “magic of the marketplace” to solve problems than to engage government. Many Americans saw government as dead weight, taxation as unfair or even a form of theft. That they accepted these claims is proof of this story’s importance: propaganda and persuasion had worked. The people involved in this project were intellectually diverse and geographically dispersed, but they were also in important (and sometimes startling) ways interconnected. Theirs was not a conspiracy, but it was a network of people who knew each other, supported each other morally and financially, and used this mutual support to promote a singular myth.

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180?!  3/20

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/galt-underwater.html

Leading libertarian intellectuals are now disavowing the label (Tyler Cowan says he's now a "State Capacity Libertarian") thanks to the total failure of libertarianism to cope with climate change.

John Quiggin (previously) explores how, at the start of the climate debate, libertarians advocated for "market based" solutions, like tradeable emissions credits, something dubbed "free-market environmentalism." The model had been used successfully to fight acid rain, and it was appealing to libertarians as it "would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions."

Climate activists weren't fond of the idea, favoring instead a limit on pollution itself (this traces a similar arc to the debate on smoking, which started with "sin taxes" on tobacco but really only made progress when these were augmented with absolute prohibitions on smoking in most places and strict curbs on the sale and marketing of tobacco products).

But once emissions credits became a reality, libertarians almost unanimously rejected them, and switched from "free market environmentalism" to straight-up climate denial. As Quiggin says, the problem with tradeable emissions is that it rebuts the core tenet of libertarianism: John Locke's idea that property rights arise spontaneously from nature, rather than being created by governments hoping to achieve specific policy goals.

But more deeply, "Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning."

This created a steady-state in which the climate steadily worsened and libertarians steadily denied that their cities were underwater, on fire, or gripped by pandemics, repeating expensive talking points about solar cycles or crooked scientists who were hoping to dismantle capitalism (IOW: "Reality has a well-known leftist bias").

But Trump disrupted the steady state. When he took office, the libertarian frontrunners abandoned any pretense of commitment to anything except more power and money for people who were monied and powerful, leaving the few standards-bearers for the movement with no way forward. Even as the Cato Institute abandoned its climate denial stance, it still argued that the climate crisis couldn't be averted by state intervention, despite the fact that markets had totally failed to come to grips with it.

Quiggin reckons with the incoherence of markets-only thinking in his masterful 2019 book Economics in Two Lessons, which explores the power, limitations and dangers of using markets to solve our problems in a thoughtful and clear way.

Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.

Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.

Libertarians Can’t Save the Planet [John Quiggin/Jacobin]

CAP-AND-TRADE / CATO INSTITUTE / CLIMATE / CLIMATE CRISIS / DENIALISM VS NIHILISM / FREE MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM / LIBERATARIANISM / PEAK INDIFFERENCE / REALITY HAS A WELL-KNOWN LEFTIST BIAS / STATE CAPACITY LIBERTARIANS

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ref

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/libertarianism-climate-change-environment-private-property

The decline of libertarianism — also known as propertarianism — has inspired a lot of discussion in the past couple of years. The economist Tyler Cowen recently disavowed the label, affirming his commitment to a modified version of the philosophy that he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism.”

Cowen’s defection continues the exodus of intellectually serious figures from the libertarian milieu, most notably to the so-called liberaltarian Niskanen Center. Both Cowen and the Niskanen cohort have stressed the failure of mainstream libertarianism to formulate an honest response to the climate crisis.

Free-Market Environmentalism: Theory and Practice

When the issue of climate change first received serious attention in the 1990s, for a time it looked set to establish common ground between environmentalists and libertarians. There was much interest in the concept of “free-market environmentalism” or FME,drawing upon the work of British economist Ronald Coase, who had suggested that environmental problems could be resolved through the proper allocation of property rights. Terry Anderson of Montana State University exercised a strong influence in these debates.

FME’s key proposal for addressing climate change was the creation of tradable emissions permits, a model that had been successfully deployed in the case of sulfur dioxide emissions. According to this view, a market in permits would supply incentives to find the most cost-effective path toward reducing emissions, as long as there were appropriate limits on the volume of permits.

Most environmental activists greeted the idea of “rights to pollute” with suspicion: they argued for more direct controls, as part of a broader shift away from mass consumerism. But many were won over by the prospect of forming an effective coalition to press for decarbonization. By the time of the Kyoto conference in 1997, support for carbon prices as the most cost-effective long-term solution, to be implemented through internationally tradable permits, had become the dominant view. Twenty years later, this vision is finally being realized in the European Union, where high permit prices are driving coal-fired power out of existence.

Trading Places

But a funny thing happened on the way to Kyoto. Propertarians, who had often been keen on tradable permits as long as environmentalists opposed them, now rejected the idea with near unanimity, along with the rest of the political right. Since then, we have faced a paradoxical situation where they consider any kind of market-based solution to climate change unacceptable. Why did this happen?

The problem was to some extent philosophical. Propertarian thought relies heavily upon the Lockean fiction that property rights arise naturally, before the emergence of a state (defined broadly to include any kind of authority within a group, tribe, or nation). Obviously, no such rights could have existed when it came to the atmosphere, so emissions permits would have to be the creation of national governments working through global agreements. Admitting that states define and enforce property rights was too big a pill for many propertarians to swallow.

But the cultural barriers standing in the way of free-market environmentalism were even greater. Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do are by far the most important constituency for libertarianism. Such men would consider it a dreadful imposition to have to pay, whether directly or indirectly, for the right to drive a car or use air conditioning. Environmentalists who insist that untrammeled individualism of all kinds has malign consequences lie at the opposite cultural pole.

However, this created a dilemma for propertarians. Having rejected both state- and market-led solutions to climate change, their only remaining option was to deny that the problem existed at all. This required tremendous intellectual dishonesty, supplied in large measure by hired guns who had won their spurs in earlier fights over passive smoking and the ozone layer. This didn’t trouble the libertarian ground troops, who clung tenaciously to their baseless self-image as the smartest guys in the room. Lacking any scientific, economic, or statistical knowledge to back up their opinions, they seized upon the innumerable talking points that the denial industry churned out.

All-In for Trump

Then Trump came along. He grasped — indeed, embodied — the reality that abstract notions of personal liberty were not what really appealed to the conservative base. Rather, it was the conviction that well-off white men should be free to think, speak, and act as they pleased, while the state clamps down on everyone else when they step out of line.

At the same time, two decades of climate change denialism fostered a nihilistic and crudely partisan attitude toward basic questions of truth or falsehood among conservatives. Trump substituted barefaced lies for the ponderous apologetics of the intellectual right, starting with the claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s.

After Trump’s election, the “libertarian moment” so widely touted just a few years ago gave way to a sudden collapse, with most of the movement’s intellectual leadership shifting in the opposite direction. Republican politicians seen as potential leaders of the future, such as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, went all-in for Trump, along with advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. The only exception was Michigan’s Justin Amash, who quit the Republican Party in 2019 and now faces almost certain defeat, sharing the fate of a handful of state-level Republicans who departed to join the Libertarian Party.

The remnants, clustered around the much-diminished Cato Institute, have no obvious way forward. The institute finally abandoned climate denialism last year, but it still has no answer for the climate crisis. The last remaining cheerleader for the “libertarian moment,” Nick Gillespie, offered a rather slippery response to Tyler Cowen’s criticism:

Whatever your beliefs and preferences might be on a given issue, the scale (and cost) of addressing, say, climate change is massive compared to delivering basic education, and with the latter at least, there’s no reason to believe that more state control or dollars will create positive outcomes.

On close inspection, Gillespie is just restating the standard libertarian view on education, while saying nothing at all about climate change, other than to acknowledge that it is a massive problem. He neither denies that “more state control or dollars” are needed, nor offers any alternative.

Having abandoned intellectual credibility in the fight to stop climate action, libertarianism has no future as a movement. Trumpism will soon swallow up what’s left of its organizational structure. Individuals have a number of choices available, from Niskanen-style “liberaltarianism” to the fantasy of “going Galt.” But the libertarian moment is well and truly over.

Global warming is the ultimate refutation of Lockean propertarianism. No one can pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while leaving “enough and as good” for everyone else. It has taken thirty years, but this undeniable fact has finally killed the propertarian movement in the United States.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Quiggin, an Australian economist at the University of Queensland, blogs at Crooked Timber.

no lnx

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http://www.alternet.org/culture/deep-roots-left-vs-right

...

The tension is built right into the name of our nation. “United states” is an oxymoron. Which are we, a “union,” a constraining marriage for better or worse, or loose and free individual states? Both, of course, and in tension, at multiple hierarchical scales from individuals to families, neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, the whole country and the whole world.

There’s little hope that we could ever reorganize the parties to represent cleanly this distinction, for example, the left always advocating for freedom and the right always advocating for constraint. If we could, maybe they would recognize how much they depend upon each other, or maybe they would just bicker as they currently do as though their hyperbolic half-answers were the whole answer.

Still, getting back to basics can help us get beyond just such half-truth hyperbole. Lots of political actors these days talk as though they’re arguing from first principles, as though the answer is indeed always freedom or always constraint.

Libertarians pretend that more freedom always solves everything.Social conservatives argue as though constraint solves everything. They don’t mean it. Libertarians don’t seem to care much about other people’s freedom, just their own. They’re like the flailing dancer crowding everyone into the corners of the dance floor with their self-infatuated “dance of personal freedom for all.”

And social conservatives aren’t really all about constraint. They want the freedom to never have to be constrained by the presence of other people’s values. In the end they're both authoritarian. They have the winning formula, whatever it is. Their way trumps all other ways.

Remembering that what we’re all really negotiating—the right balance of constraint and freedom, security and liberty—may make us more receptive to negotiation, and smarter negotiators too, not taken in by hyperbolic half-truths about the one true way.

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On Friday, the Seasteading Institute—a non-profit group cofounded by Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman (grandson to Ronald Reagan advisor Milton Friedman)—successfully closed itsIndiegogo campaign to design “the world’s first floating city” for “pioneers who wish to demonstrate new ways of living together.”

The campaign exceeded its $20,000 goal, raising $27,082 in tax deductible funds from 291 donors: a sum that will be matched, dollar-for-dollar, by the Thiel Foundation, the philanthropic organization best known for keeping kids out of school.

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Thiel has personally backed this kind of matching funds arrangement for the Seasteading Institute before. However, Friedman, a man the New Yorker once described as an elfin “free-love libertarian,” was compelled to put some distance between himself and his billionaire patron a couple years back. In 2011, Friedman stepped down as CEO of the Institute just before a*Details* profile of Peter Thiel that quoted the following tweet from Friedman: "Explored BDSM in SF w/big group of friends tonight."

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Facebook Billionaire Splits from his Libertine Pinup

They were going to build a fantasy island together, a floating libertarian utopia where outsiders…Read more :{gawker.​com}:

This Indiegogo campaign makes it seem like the dinner party companions are as united as ever in their aquatic cause. For example, the highest category of donor (“Dolphin”) handed over $1,000 to win a conference call “or dinner if able to meet near San Francisco” with Friedman, who still serves as the Institute’s chairman of the board, as well executive director Randolph Hencken, an activist in the drug policy reform movement “since his early 20s, when he used ibogaine to kick heroin."

But this secessionist daydream isn’t just for Silicon Valley’s fringe players!

During the keynote speech at Google I/O in May, CEO Larry Page described a similar hope to “set apart a piece of the world” as a safe space for technologists—a Google Island, if you will—“where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society,” unencumbered by outdated laws on technology.

In an n+1 article this summer, Friedman delineated the Institute's ultimate goal:

“If we can solve the engineering challenges of Seasteading, two-thirds of the Earth’s surface becomes open for these political start-ups,” explains Friedman, a self-styled cult leader who’s known to the community as just Patri. The Seasteaders have chosen as their motto “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom’—an apparent spin on “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,” a Maoist policy which encouraged dissidents to speak out and then used their views as a pretext to jail them.

Like so many technocratic pipe dreams these days, the Institute’s grand plan hinges on a pretty big “if.” Back in 2008, Friedman himself estimated that it could cost hundreds of millions to build a seastead for just a few thousand people. Now, seven years later, the proceeds from amateur investors who backed this crowdfunded campaign are going towards a white paper exploring “feasibility” of the idea—with any leftovers allocated toward "diplomacy" with countries that might "consider hosting a seastead within their territorial waters, while still granting the city substantial autonomy."

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The lack of tangible offerings didn’t stop the Seasteading Institute from taunting idealistic donors on Indiegogo to “put skin in the game”:

Becoming a "seasteader" means that you not only yearn for a better future for humanity, but are also willing to put skin in the game to demonstrate what a better future could look like. Giving to this campaign shows that you are above partisan bickering about how government "should be," and are ready to lead by example.

If this far out brand of futurism sounds foolhardy, well that only motivates Thiel. According tothe *New Yorker*:

Thiel is never happier than when others scoff at his ventures, but he’s prone to the mistaken belief that the contrarian view is always right. He defended the indefensible after the Rabois incident, in part, because it was a case of one against all. His dislike of George W. Bush didn’t soften until his poll numbers hit rock bottom, and the same is now true for Barack Obama. During the financial crisis, Thiel lost billions of dollars because he refused to behave like the rest of the world. If artificial intelligence and seasteading are our only hope, it isn’t because politicians and professors mock and fear them. Nor is it at all clear how much hope Thiel’s utopian projects really offer.

It’s hard to believe a white paper backed by the wisdom of the unaccredited crowd will make things any clearer.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

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http://valleywag.gawker.com/peter-thiel-s-dream-of-a-lawless-utopia-floats-on-1368141049

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/its-bizarre-libertarians-are-clueless-about-free-market-they-worship

http://www.alternet.org/youre-not-boss-me-why-libertarianism-childish-sham

Libertarians believe themselves controversial and cool. They're desperate to package themselves as dangerous rebels, but in reality they are champions of conformity. Their irreverence and their opposition to “political correctness” is little more than a fashion accessory, disguising their subservience to—for all their protests against the “political elite”—the real elite.

Ayn Rand is the rebel queen of their icy kingdom, villifying empathy and solidarity. Christopher Hitchens, in typical blunt force fashion, undressed Rand and her libertarian followers, exposing their obsequiousness toward the operational standards of a selfish society: “I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”

Libertarians believe they are real rebels, because they’ve politicized the protest of children who scream through tears, “You’re not the boss of me.” The rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability to do whatever they want, is not rebellion or dissent. It is infantile naïveté.....

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iccc2

Robert "Bob" Armstrong

Day Job: Writes for his own website, CoSy.com, and calls himself "a bleeding heart Libertarian with particular understanding of the nonscience of the CO2 global warming fraud."

Industry Ties: Heartland

Climate Expertise: None

He said it:"The eco-Nazis are willfully, consciously guilty of Crimes against Reality."

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koch 130 mojo

Libertarian Roots

Fred Koch, the family patriarch, staunchly opposed big government. His worldview colored by his experiences working in Josef Stalin’s USSR, Koch was an avowed conservative who backed the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater and was a leading member of the anti-Communist John Birch Society. Deeply influenced by the political views of their father, Charles and (later) David Koch grew deeply involved with budding libertarian movement (David Koch even ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980). Though the Kochs would later be known as Republican kingmakers, their prolific giving to libertarian causes helped launch libertarianism into a mass movement. Charles Koch was funding so many libertarian operations at some point that an activist dubbed his many-tentacled operation the “Kochtopus.” Here are a few of the organizations the Kochs sponsored to get the libertarian movement off the ground.

Dollar figures show the amount each group has received from key Koch organizations.

Click a group for more details.

• Center for Libertarian Studies
• Foundation for Economic Education
• Inquiry
• Libertarian Party
• Libertarian Review
• Students for a Libertarian Society
• Council for a Competitive Economy
• Freedom School
• Cato Institute:{: $3,785,750:(style="box-sizing:border-box;color:#777777;"):}:
• Institute for Humane Studies:{: $15,613,336:(style="box-sizing:border-box;color:#777777;"):}:

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http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/how-pikettys-bombshell-book-blows-libertarian-fantasies

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

How Piketty's Bombshell Book Blows Up Libertarian Fantasies

April 28, 2014 |

Libertarians have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either to deny that it’s a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the market will wave a magic wand to cure it. Then everybody gets properly rewarded for what he or she does with brains and effort, and things are peachy keen.

Except that they aren’t, as exhaustively demonstrated by French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 700-page treatise on the long-term trends in inequality, Capital In the 21st Century, has blown up libertarian fantasies one by one.

To understand the libertarian view of inequality, let’s turn to Milton Friedman, one of America's most famous and influential makers of free market mythology. Friedman decreed that economic policy should focus on freedom, and not equality.

If we could do that, he promised, we’d not only get freedom and efficiency, but more equality as a natural byproduct. Libertarians who took the lessons from his books, like Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose(1980), bought into the notion that capitalism naturally led to less inequality.

Basically, the lessons boiled down to this: Some degree of inequality is both unavoidable and desirable in a free market, and income inequality in the U.S. isn’t very pronounced, anyway. Libertarians starting with these ideas tend to reject any government intervention meant to decrease inequality, claiming that such plans make people lazy and that they don’t work, anyway. Things like progressive income taxes, minimum wage laws and social safety nets make most libertarians very unhappy.

Uncle Milty put it like this:

“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.… On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”

Well, that turns out to be spectacularly, jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly wrong. The U.S. is now a stunningly unequal society, with wealth piling up at the top so fast that an entire movement, Occupy Wall Street, sprung up to decry it with the catchphrase “We are the 99%.”

How did libertarians get it all so backwards? Well, as Piketty points out, people like Milton Friedman were writing at a time when inequality was indeed less pronounced in the U.S. than it had been in previous eras. But they mistook this happy state of affairs as the magic of capitalism. Actually, it wasn’t the magic of capitalism that reduced inequality during a brief, halcyon period after the New Deal and WWII. It was the forces of various economic shocks plus policies our government put in place to respond to them that changed America from a top-heavy society in the Gilded Age to something more egalitarian in the post-war years.

As you’ll recall, if you watched the movie Titanic, the U.S. had a class of rentiers (rich people who live off property and investments) in the early part of the 20th century who hailed from places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia.They were just as nasty and rapacious as their European counterparts, only there weren’t quite so many of them and their wealth was not quite as concentrated (the Southern rentiers had been wiped out by the Civil War).

The fortunes of these rentiers were not shock-proof: If you remember Hockney, the baddie in James Cameron’s film, he survives the Titanic but not the Great Crash of ’29, when he loses his money and offs himself. The Great Depression got rid of some of the extreme wealth concentration in America, and later the wealthy got hit with substantial tax shocks imposed by the federal government in the 1930s and '40s. The American rentier class wasn’t really vaporized the way it was in Europe, where the effects of the two world wars were much more pronounced, but it took a hit. That opened up the playing field and gave people more of a chance to rise on the rungs of the economic ladder through talent and work.

After the Great Depression, inequality decreased in America, as New Deal investment and education programs, government intervention in wages, the rise of unions, and other factors worked to give many more people a chance for success. Inequality reached its lowest ebb between 1950 and 1980. If you were looking at the U.S. during that time, it seemed like a pretty egalitarian place to be (though blacks, Hispanics, and many women would disagree).

As Piketty notes, people like Milton Friedman, an academic economist, were doing rather well in the economy, likely sitting in the top 10 percent income level, and to them, the economy appeared to be doing just fine and rewarding talents and merits very nicely. But the Friedmans weren’t paying enough attention to how the folks on the rungs above them, particularly the one percent and even more so the .01 percent, were beginning to climb into the stratosphere. The people doing that climbing were mostly not academic economists, or lawyers, or doctors. They were managers of large firms who had begun to award themselves very prodigious salaries.

This phenomenon really got going after 1980, when wealth started flowing in vast quantities from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10 percent. By 1987, Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan had taken over as head of the Federal Reserve, and free market fever was unleashed upon America. People in U.S. business schools started reading Ayn Rand's kooky novels as if they were serious economic treatises and hailing the free market as the only path to progress. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged(1957), captured the imaginations of young students like Paul Ryan, who worshipped Galt as a superman who could rise to the top through his vision, merit and heroic efforts. Galt became the prototype of the kind of “supermanager” these business schools were supposed to crank out.

Since the ‘80s, the top salaries and pay packages awarded to executives of the largest companies and financial firms in the U.S. have reached spectacular heights. This, coupled with low growth and stagnation of wages for the vast majority of workers, has meant growing inequality. As income from labor gets more and more unequal, income from capital starts to play a bigger role. By the time you get to the .01 percent, virtually all your income comes from capital—stuff like dividends and capital gains. That’s when wealth (what you have) starts to matter more than income (what you earn).

Wealth gathering at the top creates all sorts of problems. Some of these elites will hoard their wealth and fail to do anything productive with it. Others channel it into harmful activities like speculation, which can throw the economy out of whack. Some increase their wealth by preying on the less well-off. As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized. (Piketty, and many other economists, count the increase in inequality as one of the reasons the economy blew up in 2007-'08.)

By the time you get to 2010, U.S. inequality, according to Piketty’s data, is quantitavely as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. He predicts that inherited property is going to start to matter more and more in the U.S. as the supermanagers, the Jamie Dimons and so on, bequeath their gigantic hordes of money to their children.

The ironic twist is this: The reason a person like the fictional John Galt would be able to rise from humble beginnings in the 1950s is because the Gilded Age rentiers lost large chunks of their wealth through the shocks the Great Depression and the deliberate government policies that came in its wake, thus loosening their stranglehold on the economy and society. Galt is able to make his fortune precisely because he lives in a society that isn’t dominated by extreme concentrated wealth and dynasties. Yet the logical outcome of an economy in which there is no attempt made to limit the size of fortunes and promote greater equality is a place in which the most likely way John Galt can make a fortune is to marry an heiress. So it was in the Gilded Age. So it may be very soon in America.

Which brings us back to Friedman’s view that people naturally get what they deserve, that reward is based on talent. Well, clearly in the case of inherited property, reward is not based on talent, but membership in the Lucky Sperm Club (or marriage into it). That made Uncle Milty a little bit uncomfortable, but he just huffed that life is not fair, and we shouldn’t think it any more unjust that one person is born with mathematical genius as the other is born with a fortune. What’s the difference?

Actually, there is a very big difference. It is the particular rules governing society that determine who amasses a fortune and what part of that fortune is passed on to heirs. The wrong-headed policies promoted by libertarians and their ilk, who hate any form of tax on the rich, such as inheritance taxes, have ensured that big fortunes in America are getting bigger, and they will play a much more prominent role in the direction of our society and economy if we continue on the present path.

What we are headed for, after several decades of free market mania, is superinequality, possibly such as the world has never seen. In this world, more and more wealth will be gained off the backs of the 99 percent, and less and less will be earned through hard work.

Which essentially means freedom for the rich, and no one else.

See more stories tagged with:

alan greenspan [4],

america [5],

ayn rand [6],

boston [7],

capitalism [8],

Distribution of wealth [9],

economic inequality [10],

economics [11],

Egalitarianism [12],

europe [13],

income distribution [14],

john galt [15],

Lucky Sperm Club [16],

milton friedman [17],

Milty [18],

new york [19],

occupy wall street [20],

paul ryan [21],

Person Career [22],

Person Location [23],

philadelphia [24],

Quotation [25],

Social philosophy [26],

Socioeconomics [27],

Thomas Piketty [28],

titanic [29],

US Federal Reserve [30],

united states [31],

wealth concentration [32],

academic economist [33],

economist [34],

federal government [35],

happy by-product [36],

head [37]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-pikettys-bombshell-book-blows-libertarian-fantasies

Links:

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AlterNet [1] / By Richard Eskow [2]

5 Obnoxious Libertarian Oligarchs Who Earned Fortunes from the Government They'd Like to Destroy

February 5, 2014 |

The cult of the libertarian-minded ultra-weatlhy would make an intriguing anthropological case study. But it would be a case study with a twist: its research subjects increasingly control our economy, our politics, and even our personal lives.

We’re dealing with a cohort of highly fortunate, highly privileged and highly unaware individuals who have been inappropriately lionized by society. That lionization has led them to believe that their wealth and accomplishments are their own doing, rather than the fruits of collaborative effort – effort which in many cases was only made possible through government support.

But instead of thanking the government and the taxpayers for their good fortune, they’ve allowed their own good press to go to their heads. And they’re biting the hand that feeds them, attempting to shut down the system of taxpayer support and government action which created their world.

Our money-obsessed society gives them far more praise and then they deserve. Our corrupted political system gives them far more influence than we deserve. And, slowly but surely, they are now turning their considerable resources to dismantling government’s role in society.

Call them the “cool tycoons of libertarianism.” They have neat ideas (when they’re not talking about government or the economy, that is). They have neat toys and neat houses. But what they would do to our society isn’t neat at all.

Here are five of them.

1. Tom Perkins

Perkins has already received well more than his deserved 15 minutes of fame. But, while he’s been appropriately reviled for his infamous “Kristallnacht” comment, comparing the treatment of America's 1% to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, too few people have taken him to task for the depth of his ignorance on economic issues.

That ignorance was in full display when he went on Bloomberg television to “apologize” for his Nazi reference – an occasion in which he spent far more time defending his ugly worldview than he did apologizing.

In his original comments, Perkins compared “the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich’” with Nazi persecution of Jews. But as we first reported [3], much of the “persecution” which triggered Perkins’ outrage involved his ex-wife’s hedges; it was a one-paragraph item in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing author Danielle Steele's landscaping. It wasn’t a progressive critique; it was an aesthetic one.

Nobody’s criticizing all wealthy people, of course. In fact, a number of them showed uncommon good sense during the Perkins kerfuffle. The investment firm which Perkins cofounded tweeted that “We were shocked by his views … and do not agree.” Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen [4] called him an unprintable name. (Well, okay: it isn’t unprintable. Andreessen called Perkins an “asshole.”)

Perkins’ defense of his initial comments on Bloomberg betray the shallowness of his libertarian thought. He insisted that his fellow tycoons are “job creators,” despite the fact that they’ve been paying very low taxes for more than a decade – and there are no jobs!

Perkins also insisted that society should “let the rich do what the rich do” and enjoy the expanded job opportunities that will flow from that. But on Wall Street the rich were allowed to do what the rich do and it robbed the economy of millions of jobs and trillions in wealth. Apple and other big tech manufacturers were allowed to “do what they do” and hundreds of thousands of jobs were shipped overseas.

Perkins defended the incivility of the San Francisco tech crowd by saying that “maybe have to put up with some techno-geek arrogance to get those sorts of folks thinking.” But what, exactly, are these geeks thinking about? One of the most stunning things about Silicon Valley triumphalism is the way it celebrates itself for what are, after all, a very mediocre set of inventions.

Truly smart tech companies are few and far between. Facebook? An accidental discovery by two guys who thought they were creating a college students’ app and still can’t design a decent user interface. Uber? An obvious idea with a nice user interface. Zynga? The less said the better.

Nor was Perkins himself the winner of some Darwinian free-market competition. He made his money the old-fashioned way: by meeting two brilliant guys named Hewlett and Packard and getting them to hire him. Perkins himself [5] was never the entrepreneur or the innovator at Hewlett-Packard. He ran the research department, then became general manager of its computer division.

Hewlett-Packard itself would never succeeded without Uncle Sam. As Bloomberg News has reported [6], “Defense contracts spurred the growth of the instrument-maker Hewlett-Packard not long after its founding.”  (Today HP is one of the nation’s largest defense contractors [7].)

But guys like Tom Perkins don’t know how to say “thank you.” Instead, when they’re asked to people like him live in a “bubble,” they tend to answer as Perkins did, by claiming that it is “a bubble that has changed the world.”

Actually the government changed the world. So did brilliant inventors like Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Guys like Tom Perkins, while they may have been smart and/or hard-working, mostly caught a lucky break. But they’ve managed to rewrite their own histories as a libertarian fantasy, a Victory of the Supermen upon which all others must gaze in wonderment and awe.

And don’t forget to say nice things about the hedges.

2. John Mackey

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, is one of the nation’s most visible “free-market libertarians.” Mr. Mackey said this about government, and specifically about Obamacare, last year on NPR [8]:

“In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production but they do control it and that's what's happening with the health care program with these reforms and so I'd say the system is becoming more fascist.”

Presumably that means that the privatization of government services – an effort which includes every major defense contractor in this country – is a “fascist” scheme. We haven’t heard Mr. Mackey make that argument, however.

The “fascist government Mackey despises provides a number of services which have helped make him become very wealthy. The USDA, for example, certifies that the food sold in his stores is organic. Without that certification, Whole Foods customers would have no way of trusting Mr. Mackey’s claims about his food. His business probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without it.

And that’s not all. Government built and maintains the roads and rails which bring Mr. Mackey’s goods to each of his far-flung stores.  Government regulators ensure that his stores’ food is grown, prepared, packaged, and shipped in a manner that is safe and disease-free.

Without government, John Mackey would still be running a little hippie store in Austin.

Mr. Mackey believes that business, not government, is best suited to addressing society’s ills. He points to his corporation’s own health plan as proof, claiming that it’s superior to Obamacare. Actually, it’s quite similar to Obamacare. Like the president’s plan, Mackey’s offers employees a choice of private-sector insurance options.

But the benefits are much worse in Mackey’s program. As Consumer Watchdog points out, Whole Foods employees have “astronomical” deductibles and copayments. If corporations can do the job better than government can, why is Mackey’s plan so much worse?

While government is evil in Mackey’s eyes, he’s a great believer in the existence of “heroic business [9].” And yet, Mr. Mackey doesn’t exactly practice what he preaches. Consider this quote from Mackey: “Business is based on cooperation and voluntary exchange. People trade voluntarily for mutual gain. No one is forced to trade with a business.”

Really, Mr. Mackey? Whole Foods is well-known for buying out all its competitors in a city or region. Some of the competitors it closed down this way include Wild Oats, Wellspring, Bread & Circus, Mrs. Gooch’s, Food for Thought, and Fresh and Wild.

A former Whole Foods employee described what happened [10] after Mackey’s corporation shut down the competing Wild Oats store or in his town: “Within one year of this merger … prices on many items went up by 15-20%.  At the time our cat food was $13.59 a bag, today it is $16.59 and mostly due to the lack of competition in the market (another nearby WFM in another region has a lot more competition and the food is at its original $.59).”

For a believer in the “free market,” Mr. Mackey certainly seems to do everything he can to suppress it. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission was forced to step in on antitrust grounds over Whole Foods handling of Wild Oats stores. Whole Foods finally settled [11]and agreed to sell off the remaining Wild Oats locations, but by then the damage to the “free market” had already been done.

Mr. Mackey, who is 60 years old and has no children, reportedly views himself as a “daddy [12]” to his employees. If so, he can be a Scrooge-like one. Despite the corporation’s PR campaigns claiming otherwise, Whole Foods pays at or near the minimum wage for many positions in its stores.

Among other things, that means that this anti-government zealot is being subsidized by government programs so that he can keep underpaying his employees. Here’s howthat works [13]: Anyone who earns 130 percent of the Federal poverty line or less (currently about $25,400 for a three-person household) is eligible for food assistance. That’s $12.21 per hour for a full-time employee.

The employment website Glassdoor.com [14] lists salaries for a number of Whole Foods positions. Jobs that start in the $8/hour range or below include assistant bulk buyer, cashier’s assistant, bakery assistant, cashier, customer service representative, and associate. There are dozens of jobs whose average pay is less than that.

Why don’t both parents work? Sometimes it’s because there’s only one parent at home, with two kids to raise. That’s no way to treat the grandkids, Pop.

One more thing: Mackey doesn’t think the climate change is real, either. So he doesn’t just think he can do government’s job better than government can. He also thinks he knows more about science than scientists do. Sounds more like an ego problem than a difference in ideology.

3. Peter Thiel

Whatever his shortcomings, John Mackey can also be an engaging and interesting personality. Internet tycoon Peter Thiel, on the other hand, shows all the signs of being a rather unpleasant individual. He doesn’t think women or minorities – excuse me, I mean “welfare beneficiaries” – should be allowed to vote, for one thing. Since 1920,” Thiel fulminated in an essay [15], “the extension of the franchise to (these two groups) have (sic) turned ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron."

Give him points for honesty: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” writes Thiel.  That’s not an unusual point of view in one strain of libertarian thinking. But it’s unusual to hear it stated so plainly.

In his rather comically grandiose essay, Thiel compares the criticism his undergraduate newspaper received at Stanford to the “carnage” of “trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I.” Thiel, who made his fortune at PayPal with Elon Musk, has shown none of his former partner’s genius for technological and business creativity.

And speaking of grandiosity, Thiel tells us that “the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution” – and presumably controlled instead by the likes of Peter Thiel. He waxes equally excessive about Facebook and other Internet companies, touting their inability to overthrow democracy and replace it with a newer and “freer” (at least for Peter Thiel) digital regime.

But Thiel’s expansive vision doesn’t end with regime change. “By starting a new Internet business,” he writes, “an entrepreneur may create a new world.” (By now, Star Trek fans may be noticing a growing resemblance between the essay’s author and a certain semi-omnipotent recurring character [16].)

Thiel is honest about one thing, if only inadvertently, when he writes that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed.” That’s true. His brand of politics is extremely unpopular with the general public. But he fails to take that thought to its logical conclusion: democracy is the free market of governance. When Thiel rejects its judgment he contradicts his own political philosophy.

But Peter Thiel has a much bigger problem than that. He clearly believes that he and his fellow Internet success stories are a brand of Nietzsche ubermenschen.  “The fate of our world,” he writes, “may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

In other words: there’s an app for that.

But Thiel, along with the other boys in his treehouse, made his millions by relying on taxpayer-funded and democratically-managed assistance every step of the way.  Like Facebook and the other big tech corporations, PayPal was built on the government-created Internet. It is accessed by computers whose core technology was funded by government research. The vast majority of its customers are able to read its instructions because of government-funded education.

4. Elon Musk

As the old brain-teasers used to say, “one of these things is not like the others.” Elon Musk differs from the other people on this list in one very important way: He’s a smart guy who actually invents things. They are real things, useful things, tangible things. Where the other Silicon Valley libertarians merely imagine they’re real inventors like Ford and Edison, while doing nothing more than making trivial front-ends for existing technology, Musk really seems to be what he appears: an inventor and entrepreneur in the old-school style.

Unfortunately, he also hangs around with the wrong crowd. Some of their silly ideas seem to have rubbed off on him. We don’t know if that happened when he was working on PayPal with Thiel, or even earlier when they were part of the same conservative circle as undergraduates at Stanford.

Whatever it was, the tendency for ideologically-based hypocrisy has not entirely eluded Musk. As Mother Jones reports [17], Musk was able to save Tesla Motors – and his sizable ownership stake in it – with a low-interest government loan. “Shortly after paying off his $465 million loan,” Josh Harkinson writes, “Musk proclaimed that government should no longer provide such assistance.”

A carbon tax would have been better, Musk argued (ignoring the fact that such attacks appears to be politically impossible right now). The market, Mosque then tweeted, “will achieve best solution.”

Unfortunately for Musk, a market-driven economy have never invested in the pure research necessary to develop personal computing technology and the Internet. And without those two platforms, Musk would never have had the financial resources to launch Tesla. So, when Musk tweeted that “"Technically, I 'got rich' from Zip2 & PayPal w zero govt anything,” he wasn’t demonstrating anything except his own ignorance of the economics and history of his own field.

I met Musk once and was quite impressed with his brilliance. Unfortunately, brilliance too easily leads to hubris. It’s like the old saying goes: it’s not what you don’t know that takes you down. It’s what you don’t know you don’t know. Silicon Valley libertarians, take note.

5. Jeff Bezos

And speaking of hubris: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and told the country that in a few years his corporation will deliver its products by drone. All that claim did was reinforce the stereotype of the Silicon Valley libertarian as someone who doesn’t understand the social realities of the world around him.  

Anyone who thinks an unmanned aircraft filled with valuable goods will routinely survive a descent path into the most heavily-armed nation on Earth has got another think comin’.

For some people, the drone claim was a surprise. But it was part of what has become a routine pattern for the admittedly brilliant, if ruthless, leader of Amazon: allow the taxpayers to develop a costly new technology (first computers, then the Internet, then drones), adopt it for your own profit-making ends, then cling to a belief system which says that government played no part in the success of people like yourself.

Much of Bezos’ libertarian worldview has been a matter of private speculation rather than public advocacy, noted in biographical profiles but much less visible in public donations and proclamations. The one exception is education, where Bezos has invested large sums of money in libertarian and neoliberal efforts to replace public education as we know it with a privatized, for-profit, anti-union nexus of corporations.

Whether or not Mr. Bezos is aware of it, the fundamental pattern undermining our educational system is a simple one: first, starve school districts of needed funds. Second, lament their declining performance. Third, claim that something called the “free market” can bring the innovation necessary to rescue it. Fourth, make greater sums of money available for private corporations than you were willing to do for public education.

It’s not clear how much of this Mr. Bezos understands. But, as Lee Fang reported [18] in The Nation, he has aggressively pushed a destructive privatization agenda on our educational system through the Bezos Family Foundation.

Bezos also put a capstone on his hypocrisy by donating $100,000 to defeat an initiative which would have imposed a mild additional income tax on high earners. The computing technology which is made Mr. Bezos wealthy was developed using taxpayer funding which began in the 1950s, when the top federal income tax rate was 93 percent. Today it is 39.5 percent.

Where will the innovations of the future come from if the government doesn’t have the resources needed for investment – either in new technologies, or in the bright young minds of the future who will someday invent them? Government is how we create a better world, Mr. Bezos. It won’t just be delivered to our doorstep by a drone.

See more stories tagged with:

libertarian [19],

rich [20]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-obnoxious-libertarian-oligarchs-who-earned-fortunes-government-theyd-destroy

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-eskow

[3] http://ourfuture.org/20140127/a-billionaires-nazi-rants-secret-roots-in-landscaping

[4] https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/427548069320617984

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Perkins_(businessman)

[6] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-11/silicon-valley-s-long-history-of-government-codependence.html

[7] http://defensesystems.com/articles/2010/05/27/top-20-defense-contractors.aspx

[8] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/01/16/169413848/whole-foods-founder-john-mackey-on-fascism-and-conscious-capitalism

[9] http://www.quoteswise.com/john-mackey-quotes.html

[10] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/08/13/766208/-The-view-from-a-former-Whole-Foods-employee-Updated

[11] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/06/us-wholefoods-ftc-idUSTRE5253AL20090306

[12] http://www.theguardian.com/business/us-news-blog/2013/jan/18/whole-foods-john-mackey-fascist

[13] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2226

[14] http://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Whole-Foods-Market-Hourly-Pay-E422.htm?sort.sortType=BP&sort.ascending=true

[15] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)

[17] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/tesla-motors-free-ride-elon-musk-government-subsidies

[18] http://www.thenation.com/blog/175627/jeff-bezoss-other-endeavor-charter-schools-neoliberal-education-reforms#axzz2btD3gKk7

[19] http://www.alternet.org/tags/libertarian-0

[20] http://www.alternet.org/tags/rich

[21] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

==

AlterNet [1] / By CJ Werleman [2]

Why Atheist Libertarians Are Part of America's 1 Percent Problem

December 3, 2013 |

In the days running up to Thanksgiving, Walmart urged its workers to donate food to their most in-need colleagues. You know, instead of Walmart having to pay said workers a livable wage. When people ask me what libertarianism looks like, I tell them that. By people I mean atheists, because for some stupid reason, far too many of my non-believer brethren have hitched their wagon to the daftest of all socio-economic theories.

It doesn’t help when atheist luminaries publicly extol their libertarianism. Penn Jillette writes, “What makes me a libertarian is what makes me an atheist—I don’t know. If I don’t know, I don’t believe….I’ll wait for real evidence and then I’ll believe.”

Well, the only excuse Jillette has for his breathtaking ignorance is that he earns his living performing as a Las Vegas magician. Also, he graduated from a clown college.

Famed science author and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer says he became a libertarian after reading Ayn Rand’s tome Atlas Shrugged. Wait, what? That’s the book that continues to inspire college sophomores during the height of their masturbatory careers, typically young Republicans (nee fascists). But unless your name is Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), most people grow out of the, “Screw you, I have mine” economic principles bestowed by the Russian-born philosopher by the time they’re legally old enough to order their first beer.

Atheists like to joke that faith makes a virtue out of not thinking about things, but the belief in libertarianism is an act of faith given libertarianism has not only never been tried before anywhere, but most of the world’s leading economists denounce it as a folly that would exacerbate the central economic challenges we face today—most significantly, wealth disparity.

When I hear an atheist say he is a libertarian, I know he's given absolutely no thought to it other than the fact that he likes the sound of no foreign wars and no drug laws. The aphorism that libertarians are Republicans with bongs is just about spot-on. Thinking Ron Paul is a genius because he’s anti-war and anti-drug laws is like thinking a Big Mac is good for you because it has lettuce and a pickle.

Atheists who embrace libertarianism often do so because they believe a governing body represents the same kind of constructed authority they’ve escaped from in regards to religion. This makes sense if one is talking about a totalitarian regime, but our Jeffersonian democracy, despite its quirky flaws, is government by the people for the people, and it was the federal government that essentially built the great American middle-class, the envy of the world. In an op-ed titled “Abject Failure of Reaganomics,” [3] Robert Parry writes, “From the New Deal policies of the 1930s through other reforms of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, from Social Security to Wall Street regulation to labor rights to the GI Bill to the Interstate Highway System to the space program’s technological advances to Medicare and Medicaid to the minimum wage to civil rights.”

But then came the period of Reagan’s holy trinity: privatization, deregulation and free trade. Now here we are today, facing the largest economic crisis since the 1930s. Libertarianism will serve only to replace government with a feudal serf model, which is what corporations are pushing so hard to achieve. In short, libertarianism can be described as anti-communism or "capitalism with the gloves off." With communism, property is theft; capitalists are thuggish villains; workers rule; the poor are oppressed. With libertarianism, property is sacred; all governments are bad; capitalists are noble heroes; unions are evil; and the poor are pampered good-for-nothings.

Libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments because there are no facts to support their arguments. Atheists love facts, so I don’t understand why so many are libertarians. I guess they viewed a YouTube documentary on how the Federal Reserves is the source of all evil, and yelled, “Uh huh!”

Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired Right is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. He writes:

“In reality, the 'free market' is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on. These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t 'intrude' on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t 'free' of rules; the rules define them.”

When it comes to wealth disparity and income inequality, America is facing its greatest moral crisis since the Civil Rights movement, and its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. We are here today because of the influence of Wall Street when it comes to economic policy; the destruction of labor; the serf-level minimum wage; and the deregulation, monopolization and privatization of industries. Libertarianism will not only push us deeper into becoming a winner-takes-all society, it will help religious organizations fill the vacuum created by the destruction of government.

Ultimately, atheist libertarians are not part of the solution; atheist libertarians are part of the problem.

See more stories tagged with:

libertarian [4]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/belief/why-atheist-libertarians-are-part-americas-1-problem

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/cj-werleman

[3] http://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/17/the-abject-failure-of-reaganomics/

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/libertarian-0

[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

==

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

Libertarians in 2013: The Even Whiter, Wealthier, WASPier Bastion of Republican Party

October 29, 2013 |

You could call it the wealthy white fratboy wing of the GOP. Or perhaps its masters-of-the-universe subset, as exemplified by Wall Streeters who regularly rank private profits above the common good and whose credo is “get government out of my way.”

Libertarians make up a small but enduring slice of the Right, a nationwide study [3] by the Public Religion Research Institute confirms. Of course, they have their own party that nominates presidential candidates—like the Greens. But, practically speaking, libertarians line up with Republicans most of the time.

They are the economic conservatives and privacy rights adherents that existed before the Tea Party emerged in 2010, PRRI finds, and today—as in years past—they split with the religious right on regulating morality, and they are not always Tea Party fans.

PRRI’s “2013 American Values Survey [4]” is the latest reminder [5] from respected pollsters that “committed libertarians”—who comprise seven percent of all voters, with another 15 percent leaning their way—have an out-sized influence. Libertarians feel that there is almost nothing good that government can do for them personally or for society, PRRI reports. In contrast, the GOP’s evangelical wing wants government to ban abortion, reject same-sex marriage and bar assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

According to PRRI, a room full of libertarians would be overwhemingly young, male and white. “Nearly all libertarians are non-Hispanic whites (94 percent), more than two-thirds (68 percent) are men, and more than six in 10 (62 percent) are under the age of 50,” they report. Libertarians tend to be WASPs—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (27 percent)—or religious agnostics (27 percent), but a few are Catholic (11 percent) and amazingly “no libertarians identify as black Protestant,” PRRI said, without offering an explanation.

It would one thing to dismiss libertarians as a fringe movement, as “only 12 percent of self-identified Republicans are libertarians, compared to 20 percent of Republicans who identify with the Tea Party, [or] 33 percent who identify with the religious right.” But with benefactors such as the Koch brothers channeling [6] more than $250 million into the 2012 election for campaigns targeting Democrats and unions—and continuing today by leading attacks on Obamacare and trying to discredit [6] climate change—it is important to know what they believe and how they differ from others on the Right.

On economic issues and social safety nets, PRRI reports they are old-school economic conservatives. Two-thirds oppose raising the federal minimum wage, which now is $7.25 an hour. Nearly all (96 percent) have “an unfavorable view of the 2010 health law [Obamacare], compared with 83 percent of white evangelicals.” Seventy-three percent oppose stronger environmental laws.     

Economic and religious conservatives have always occupied conflicting corners of the GOP—and that continues, as libertarians disagree with the religious right on culture war issues. “Nearly six-in-ten (57 percent) oppose making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, a proportion identical to the general population,” PRRI said. Seventy percent favor lethal injections by physicians for the terminally ill—nearly twice the rate of other Republicans. Seventy-one percent favor legalizing pot, compared to 59 percent of Tea Partiers. In contrast, 69 pecent of “white evangelical Protestants oppose legalizing marijuana,” PRRI found.  

One area where libertarians are less liberal is LGBT issues—though they are more open-minded than much of the GOP. “While a majority (59 percent) of libertarians oppose same-sex marriage, they are significantly less opposed than Republicans overall (67 percent) and than other conservative-leaning groups such as Tea Party members (73 percent) and white evangelical Protestants (80 percent).”

When it comes to the intensity of their political beliefs, PPRI found that libertarians dislike Democrats more fervently than they like Republicans—who they have a hot-and-cold relationship with. Fifty-seven percent “have a favorable view” of the GOP, “but a substantial minority (40 percent) have an unfavorable view,” the survey said. That may be why they are less likely than Tea Partiers to vote in GOP primaries, PRRI found. When it comes to Democrats, 89 percent "have an unfavorable view" and 64 percent "have a very unfavorable opinion of the party." 

Libertarians name Sen. Rand Paul as their first choice for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nominee, with Tea Party darlings Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan following in descending order. But the PRRI survey offers no explanation about why one candidate would be more popular than another. Of course, there is a Libertarian Party, which has nominated its own national candidates in the past, such as Texas congressman Ron Paul—Rand Paul’s dad.

On other issues, their platform includes a strong aversion to the government’s domestic spying, an isolationist foreign policy, and reluctance to use military force. On economic growth, they favor lower taxes and do not support public programs to help people get ahead. That survival-of-the-fittest, hands-off mindset includes opposing gun control laws, as well as censoring online pornography.

Libertarians tend to register to vote at a slightly higher rate (80 percent) than the national average (76 percent), PRRI found. And the survey finds that they follow politics more than most Americans. “Libertarians are much more likely than Americans overall to pay attention to what is going on in government and politics,” it said. “Fewer than four-in-ten (38 percent) Americans report paying attention… Among libertarians, a majority (56 percent) report that they pay attention to politics always or most of the time.”

Americans who identify as firm libertarians might only be seven percent of the electorate, but with some of the deepest pockets in America backing their beliefs—particularly on economic issues and the role of government—they remain an outsized political force. They certainly are an enduring part of the Republican Party, even if they have been eclipsed by Tea Partiers—such as during the recent government shutdown.

See more stories tagged with:

libertarian [7]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/libertarians-2013-whiter-wealthier-waspier-bastion-already-white-republican

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld

[3] http://publicreligion.org/research/2013/10/2013-american-values-survey/

[4] http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2013.AVS_WEB.pdf

[5] http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/954/dcor%20rpp%20fg%20memo%20100313%20final.pdf

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/secret-quarter-billion-dollar-koch-brothers-political-operation-revealed

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/libertarian-0

[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

==

http://www.alternet.org/print/tea-party-and-right/libertarian-writings-read-comic-books

AlterNet [1] / By Paul Buchheit [2]

Libertarian Writings that Read Like Comic Books

September 15, 2013 |

Free-market libertarians go to outrageous exremes to convince themselves and others of the infallibility of the market. Even when opposing evidence smacks them in the face, they conjure up sound bites that seem vaguely convincing but are in reality meaningless. Here are some examples.

1. A Free Market is Good for Everyone.

Milton Friedman [3] was a magician with words, making reality disappear: "There is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people [than] the free-enterprise system...The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people."

The Cato Institute [4] added their own banality: "Free markets create a future promoting integrity and trust."

2. The Market Works. It Just Doesn't Feel Like It.

The Wall Street Journal [5],the Heritage Foundation [6], and The Economist [7] have teamed up to try to convince us all is well. The Wall Street Journal[8]exclaims, "Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before." Perhaps the Journal staff should compare notes. Their own writer tells us [9] that "the middle class...has shrunk considerably over the past few decades."

The Heritage Foundation contends [10] that "In reality, the living conditions of poor Americans have shown significant improvement over time." Heritage may equate living conditions with TV sets and window air conditioners, but for the rest of us many [11] studies [12] show [13] the relationship [14] between poverty and ill health -- chronic diseases, depression, and a slew of other physical and emotional maladies.

Finally, The Economist [15] states: Before the 1960s...most blacks were poor, few served in public office and almost none were to be found flourishing at the nation's top universities, corporations, law firms and banks. None of that is true today. But much of that IS true today. According to Pew Research [16], median wealth for black families in 2009 was $5,677, compared to $113,149 for white families. Meanwhile, Blacks and Hispanics, with 29% [17] of the population, are severely under-represented in both the corporate boardroom [18] and higher education [19].

3. Why Can't You Be a Successful Individual Like Me?

The Wall Street Journal published a remarkably self-congratulatory article [20] that is, once again, short on facts and high on emotion. "The American dream," trumpets the author, "has traditionally been one of individual success that is rewarded and admired." Perhaps he's not aware of the recent Executive Excess study [21] that found "Nearly 40 percent of the CEOs on the highest-paid lists from the past 20 years were eventually 'bailed out, booted, or busted.'" And how about that "individual success" part? The fact is that the richest 10% own almost 90 percent [22] of stocks excluding pensions, and the stock market has historically risen three times faster [23] than the GDP itself. Success comes easy when you can make money just by going to bed at night.

The author goes on to announce, "In Silicon Valley, the rich commonly reinvest their wealth close to home...I have reinvested most of my net worth in 8.5% of the shares of my own company." Good for him. But Over 90% of the assets [24]owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), the stock market, and real estate. Business startup [25] costs made up less than 1% of the investments [24] of high net worth individuals in North America in 2011.

Perhaps, instead, they're building businesses on their own? No. Only 3 percent of the CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals were entrepreneurs [26] in 2005, even though they made up about 60 percent of the richest .1% of Americans. A recent study [27] found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. They come from the middle class.

4. If You're Not a Successful Individual, You Must Be Lazy.

The Cato Institute claimed [28] that "Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour."

Both the Economic Policy Institute [29] and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [30] discredit the claim, noting that, contrary to Cato's implications, hardly any families receive multiple benefits at the same time. Furthermore, the benefits do not replace work. Many employed families are simply not making enough to survive. Over 83 percent [31] of all benefits going to low-income people are for the elderly, the disabled, or working households.

5. If I Accomplish Everything on My Own, Why Should I Pay Taxes?

Using their pet buzzwords 'capital' and 'mobility,' the Wall Street Journal came to the roundabout conclusion [32] that a lower capital gains tax rate would end up causing higher-income taxpayers to pay more taxes. The logic is too elusive to explain here.

The Journal also attacks [33] the Financial Transaction Tax, calling it a "sin tax" that will "punish sinners" to raise revenue for the U.S. Treasury. Never mind that the current sales tax on financial transactions is ZERO.

Robert Reich recently noted [34] that people without arguments often resort to personal attacks. They also resort to pleasant-sounding nonsense.

See more stories tagged with:

libertarian [35],

tea party [36],

right wing [37]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/libertarian-writings-read-comic-books

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/paul-buchheit-0

[3] http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5001.Milton_Friedman

[4] http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/2011/5/cj31n2-1.pdf

[5] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122628284072412565.html

[6] http://www.heritage.org/about

[7] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-0

[8] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578249723138161566.html

[9] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/08/22/lost-decade-for-shrinking-middle-class

[10] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty

[11] http://www.apa.org/about/gr/issues/socioeconomic/unemployment.aspx

[12] http://www.pfeef.org/research/Financial-Wellness-and-Health-Care-Costs.pdf

[13] http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/ph/2012/483432/

[14] http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/addressing-health-inequalities-with-targeted-welfare-policies-and-programs-by-johan-p--mackenbach

[15] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21576658-first-three-pieces-race-based-preferences-around-world-we-look-americas

[16] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/

[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity

[18] http://theabd.org/ABD_datasheet.pdf

[19] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_328.asp

[20] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578630461045403872.html

[21] http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive-excess-2013

[22] http://epi.3cdn.net/2a7ccb3e9e618f0bbc_3nm6idnax.pdf

[23] http://www.forbes.com/2005/03/29/cz_0329oxan_equity.html

[24] http://articles.marketwatch.com/2011-06-24/commentary/30753798_1_hedge-fund-assets-total-wealth

[25] http://paulcollege.unh.edu/sites/default/files/2011_analysis_report.pdf

[26] http://web.williams.edu/Economics/bakija/BakijaHeimJobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf

[27] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/05/pdf/middleclass_growth.pdf

[28] http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-welfare-trade

[29] http://www.epi.org/blog/cato-study-distorts-truth-welfare-work/

[30] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4004

[31] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3677

[32] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577305302658158454.html

[33] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204224604577029793292855040.html

[34] http://www.nationofchange.org/beware-capitalist-tools-1378904434

[35] http://www.alternet.org/tags/libertarian-0

[36] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tea-party-0

[37] http://www.alternet.org/tags/right-wing-0

[38] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

===

http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/libertarians-are-cult-members

Salon [1] / By Michael Lind [2]

Why Libertarians Are Basically Cult Members

June 11, 2013 |

My previous Salon essay [3], in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has infuriated members of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard.

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

Another response to my essay has been to claim that a libertarian country really did exist once in the real world, in the form of the United States between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Robert Tracinski [4] writes that I am “astonishingly ignorant of history” for failing to note that the “libertarian utopia, or the closest we’ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can’t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.”

It is Tracinski who is astonishingly ignorant of history. To begin with, the majority of the countries that adopted the “libertarian” gold standard were authoritarian monarchies or military dictatorships. With the exception of Imperial Britain, an authoritarian government outside of the home islands, where most Britons were denied the vote for most of this period, most of the independent countries of the pre-World War I gold standard epoch, including the U.S., Germany, France, Russia and many Latin American republics, rejected free trade in favor of varying degrees of economic protectionism.

For its part, the U.S. between Lincoln and FDR was hardly laissez-faire. Ever since colonial times, states had engaged in public poor relief and sometimes created public hospitals and asylums. Tracinski to the contrary, there were also two massive federal welfare programs before the New Deal: the Homestead Act, a colossal redistribution of government land to farmers, and generous pension benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War and their families.  Much earlier, the 1798 act that taxed sailors to fund a small system of government-run sailors’ hospitals [5] was supported by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton alike.

State and local licensing rules and trade laws governed economic life in detail, down to the size of spigots in wine casks, in some cases.

It was precisely these state and local regulations that the Supreme Court struck down, in Lochner v. New York (1905) and other cases, to promote the goal of creating a single national market. At the same time, sharing their racism with most white Americans, federal judges in Tracinski’s “libertarian” America permitted the most massive system of labor market distortion of all: racial segregation, which artificially boosted the incomes and property values of whites.

The single national market that Lochner-era courts sought to protect from being Balkanized by state and local regulations (other than racial segregation) was walled off by the highest protective tariffs of any major industrial nation. The U.S. government between Lincoln and FDR engaged in a version of modern East Asian-style mercantilism, protecting American industrial corporations from import competition, while showering subsidies including land grants on railroad companies and using federal troops to crush protesting workers.  This government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it was hardly libertarian.

High tariffs to protect American companies in Tracinski’s alleged Golden Age of American libertarianism were joined by racist immigration restrictions that further boosted the incomes of white workers already boosted by de jure or de facto racial segregation. The 1790 Naturalization Act barred immigrants from becoming citizens unless they were “free white persons” and had to be amended by the 1870 Naturalization Act to bestow citizenship on former slaves of “African nativity” and “African descent.” Although the Supreme Court in 1898 ruled that the children of Asians born in the U.S. were citizens by birth, Tracinski’s libertarian utopia was characterized by increasingly restrictive immigration laws which curtailed first Asian immigration and then, after World War I, most European immigration.

Calvin Coolidge, the subject of a hero-worshiping new biography by the libertarian conservative Amity Shlaes, defended both high tariffs and restrictive immigration. Here is an excerpt from President Coolidge’s second annual address in 1924 [6]:

Two very important policies have been adopted by this country which, while extending their benefits also in other directions, have been of the utmost importance to the wage earners. One of these is the protective tariff, which enables our people to live according to a better standard and receive a better rate of compensation than any people, any time, anywhere on earth, ever enjoyed. This saves the American market for the products of the American workmen. The other is a policy of more recent origin and seeks to shield our wage earners from the disastrous competition of a great influx of foreign peoples. This has been done by the restrictive immigration law. This saves the American job for the American workmen.

In 1921 then vice-president Coolidge wrote an article entitled “Whose Country is This?” inGood Housekeeping, in which he declared:

“Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” (Amity Shlaes’s hero evidently believed racist pseudoscience about dangerous and inferior “half-breeds”).

Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the U.S. as it existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the Founding to the present.

See more stories tagged with:

libertarian [7]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/libertarians-are-cult-members

Links:

[1] http://www.salon.com

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/michael-lind

[3] http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/the_question_libertarians_just_cant_answer/

[4] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/06/06/three_challenges_to_libertarian_populism_118709.html

[5] http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/01/21/thomas-jefferson-also-supported-government-run-health-care/

[6] http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3807

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/libertarian-0

[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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The Mercatus Institute, a libertarian-oriented — and Koch brothers-affiliated — think tank based out of George Mason University (a public university, for whatever that’s worth), regularly releases its ranking of American states in terms of “Freedom.” Their definition of “freedom” largely adheres to the standard American libertarian conception of “liberty,” which is to say it is oriented almost entirely around private property ownership and low taxation. As a result,  America’s freest state this year turns out to be North Dakota.

North Dakota has also been in the news for another reason recently. What was it, again? Oh, right,  it passed the most restrictive antiabortion laws in the country. Including a law specifically aimed at shutting down the state’s lone abortion provider. It passed this law knowing it was unconstitutional.

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The William Volker Fund was active from 1932 to 1965, and was the only libertarian fund with any money during this period [1].

Under the administration of Willam Volker's nephew Harold Luhnow from 1942 onwards, it pursued a number of strategies for increasing the acceptance of Hayekian libertarian thought in the USA. The fund was instrumental in bringing Friedrich Hayek to the University of Chicago, and supported many other libertarian scholars who at the time could not obtain positions in American universities (including Ludwig von Mises and Aaron Director).

The fund helped the then small minority of libertarian scholars to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas. Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Leoni's Freedom and the Law, and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty all evolved from such meetings.

Volker put up the funds that enabled the North Americans to have such a strong presence at the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting in 1947.

Under the directorship of 'master recruiter' F. A. Harper, the fund also directed itself towards the systematic recruitment of young libertarian scholars, work which Harper was to continue at the Institute for Humane Studies after Luhnow fired him in 1962. Harper was replaced by Ivan Bierly, an ex-Foundation for Economic Education senior staffer, who in turn hired Rousas J. Rushdoony.

Through its front, the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund gave away libertarian books, such as Böhm-Bawerk's, to college libraries. Writing book reviews for the Fund were Murray Rothbard and Rose Wilder Lane.

It also helped fund the formation of various complementary institutions, including:

• the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), later renamed Intercollegiate Studies Institute;
• the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE);
• the Earhart Foundation
• the Reim Foundation

According to John Blundell, the Volker Fund's strategic successor on its expiration was the Institute for Humane Studies. The fund itself was replaced by the short-lived Center for American Studies (CAS). A decade later, the Volker Fund's money ($7 million) went to the Hoover Institution. [2]

Staff included

• Loren Miller
• Leonard Liggio
• Herb Cornuelle (left the Volker Fund to work for the Dole Corporation in late 1953)
• F. A. Harper
• Ivan Bierly

References

• Gary North, It All Began With Fred Schwarz, autobiography, lewrockwell.com, accessed January 2004
• John Blundell, Waging the War of Ideas, speech to the Heritage Foundation, January 1990