The Ron Paul campaign has supposedly stirred up controversy between the paleoconservative wing (such as those at LewRockwell.com) and the so-called cosmopolitan wing of the libertarian movement. While I have my share of differences with the paleoconservatives, sometimes it seems like those "establishment libertarians" who move with the professional political scene are a big part of the problem. Paleoconservatives like Paul aren't afraid to challenge the key institutons of the state such as the income tax, the Federal Reserve, and the Pentagon. Too often, these Washington libertarians defend the coercive systems and exploitative institutions that libertarians should be attacking without hesitation.
This Drew Carey video for Reason.tv is a great example of this "vulgar libertarianism". While these beltway libertarians are by no means the exclusive purveyors of such opinions, they certainly play a major role in erroneously equating libertarianism with current involuntary power structures:
Sheldon Richman wrote the perfect article to answer Carey's glib apologism. Key excerpt:
What we have is corporatism, an interventionist system shot through with government-granted privileges mostly for the well-connected (yes, who tend to be rich). This system is maintained in a variety of ways: through taxes, subsidies, cartelizing regulations, "intellectual property" protections, trade restrictions, government-bank collusion, the military-industrial complex, land close-offs, restrictions on workers, and more. As a result, people can get rich at the expense of the government's victims. Even some who have prospered apparently by market means have actually done so through government intervention. Wealth can be transferred in many ways besides welfare and Medicaid, some of them quite subtle.
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Given the corporatist nature of the economy, it is a mistake -- as well as strategically foolish -- to say the government should do nothing when a recession might be coming on. There's much it should do -- or rather undo. Freedom's advocates must spell this out in detail, revealing how government policy harms the mass of people who have no political connections. In contrast, when an economist who proclaims his support for the free market says everything is fine and the economy will fix itself, he brands himself a defender of the statist quo and turns his back on the state's victims.
The freedom philosophy is a radical idea that looks ahead, not to some mythical golden era or Panglossian present. Every time we pass up an opportunity to make this point, we alienate potential allies who are concerned about those who are having a tough time of things. Yes, living standards have improved for decades and being poor in the United States is not what it used to be. That only shows that even a marketplace hampered by government privilege can produce astounding wealth. But to be satisfied with that is to be willing to trade freedom and justice for a mess of pottage.
This kind of attitude is one of the reasons that Reason and their like have never appealed to me. We don't need to defend the status quo, and we certainly should not do it in the interests of promoting liberty! Well said, Sheldon.
UPDATE: I just started reading Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism and was struck by how appropriate this passage from the forward is to this subject. He's looking at what we'd call "vulgar libertarianism" from a historical point of view, but his comments are very relevant to this post's topic:
The political or economic history of a single nation, especially during a specific, critical period which has a determining influence on the decades that follow, should be examined with provocative questions in mind. And there is no more provocative question than: Could the American political experience in the twentieth century, and the nature of our economic institutions, have been radically different? Every society has its Pangloss who will reply in the negative. But to suggest that such a reply is mere apologetics would be a fruitless, inaccurate oversimplification. Predominantly, the great political and sociological theorists of this century have pessimistically described and predicted an inexorable trend towards centralization, conformity, bureaucracy - toward a variety of totalitarianism - and yet the have frequently been personally repelled by such a future.
Fitting, no?
Read this article
