The Libertarian Party Platform is clear and concise. Principle among The Libertarian’s concerns is the establishment of a “free and competitive market.” Under the heading “Economic Liberty,” The Libertarian Party Platform states that “a free and competitive market allocates resources in the most efficient manner.” Libertarians oppose “government subsidies to business, labor, or any other special interest.” This would include kickbacks to institutions like AIG, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, who receive an annual subsidy from the public amounting to 83 billion dollars, yet remain completely unprofitable.
The Libertarian Party Platform also lists a social agenda that - on the surface - appears to be in relative harmony with the principles upon which The United States Constitution was founded. Libertarians are staunch defenders of a person’s right to privacy, of free speech, and they believe the government has no right to discriminate based upon a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Perhaps the most contentious issues outlined in The Libertarian social program can be found under the headings of “Self-defense” and “Abortion.” On the subject of self-defense, The Libertarian Party Platform states, “We oppose all laws at any level of government requiring registration of, or restricting, the ownership, manufacture, or transfer or sale of fire arms or ammunition.” I don’t think a compromise can be struck nor a middle-ground established in the ongoing debate between advocates of gun rights and advocates of gun control. If heavily urbanized polities and rural communities instead joined together in a spirit of cooperation, the rhetoric surrounding the “gun debate” would likely diminish. Ideally, there would be sensible laws that protect the rights of a gun owner in a small town in Kansas, yet curb the preponderance of gun-related deaths in cities like Chicago.
In regard to abortion, The Libertarian Party Platform states, “We believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.” I agree, but I also recognize that a significant percentage of the American public disagrees, and I’m not about to tread into Bible country and start pontificating on street corners about a woman’s right to choose. When religious activists from out-of-town are carted in by the bus-load to parade down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile carrying images of aborted fetuses, preaching to Chicagoans about the sanctity of life, they accomplish nothing short of the antagonization of those who already disagree with them.
Despite The Libertarian Party’s staunch advocacy of the first, second and fourth amendments, despite its acknowledgment and subsequent disapproval of discrimination based upon gender-preference and sexual orientation, despite its professed support of a “free” and “competitive” market, it provides tacit approval for a host of supragovernmental activities that would lower the standard of living in this country to fourteenth century conditions. The Libertarian advocates for an abolishment of public education, public lands, the minimum wage, Social Security, universal healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid, and most troubling of all, he or she stakes his or her reputation on a promulgation and intensification of the same economic policies that have mired the country in some of the worst financial crises in American history, including a return to the gold standard, austerity (or sequester) and total deregulation.
Some folks may be asking themselves, “Well, what’s the problem? Isn’t a deregulated market a ‘free market?’”
Let’s unpack that question and conduct a full examination of its underlying assumptions. If The Libertarian Party Platform were fully realized, America would be writing a blank check endorsing the most corrupt financial practices and institutions that have plagued the country for the last thirty years - or since its founding - many of which are the product of deregulation (regulation in favor of private or corporate interests), an unrealistic tax code and a blatant lack of oversight combined with brutal budget-slashing policies. The resulting economy would closely resemble the economy we have today: the stock market would rise while wages stagnate, jobs are lost and prices soar.
Both Republicans and Democrats may be surprised to learn that two of the most egregious examples of deregulation were signed into law by Bill Clinton: The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed large monopolies to devour local media outlets, reducing the number of media companies from 50 to 6 in the span of 15 years, and The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. Signed into law in 1999, The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act repealed Glass-Steagall, a bill signed into law in 1933 that separated commercial and investment banking to address the underlying causes of The Great Depression. President George W. Bush further deregulated the energy industry when he signed The Energy Policy Act of 2005 into law, which provided sweeping exemptions for hydraulic fracturing from The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and CERCLA. Even The Supreme Court had its hand in deregulation. When the decision of the court favored the Republican political nonprofit, Citizens United, it effectively normalized the bribery of public officials.
If The Libertarian Party Platform were fully realized, these deregulatory policies would continue and nothing would stop vulture capitalists from buying, manipulating and dismantling struggling companies for profit, nothing would stop financiers from using exorbitant interest rates to extract money from the poor, nothing would prevent companies from outsourcing all of their manufacturing to China, India and Indonesia under the auspice of “free trade.” If Libertarians were to abolish public land holdings, who do you think would buy the property? Your children? Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Walmart, monopolies and the elite who own those monopolies would buy that property, and after they buy your congressman, they’ll buy your homes, your schools, your laws, your parks, your food, your water, and if the people demanded affordable, healthy food, drinkable water and representation, the companies would shrug their shoulders and say, “Call your Congressman.” It would make no difference to the company CEO and his shareholders that the people’s lawmakers were mere pawns in the hands of moneyed interests. There would be no incentive - no profit - in reforming the puppet Congress they helped to create, and if the people rebelled, if they robbed for food and occupied unused, foreclosed homes owned by bloated financial entities, their “government” would reserve the right to extricate the people by whatever means necessary.
The Libertarian Party Platform reads, “Where property, including land, has been taken from its rightful owners by the government or private action in violation of individual rights, we favor restitution to the rightful owners.” Accordingly, since corporations are considered “persons,” and since Libertarians seek to “divest government of all functions that can be provided by non-governmental organizations or private individuals,” which includes just about anything depending upon your point-of-view, including the “function” of policing, the oligopoly could take whatever action it deemed necessary to safeguard its property, whether that be food or some ramshackle building, the value of which would be measured not by its ability to feed and house the homeless, or a family, but by its profit-margin. Does that sound like a “free market” to you? If so, you ought to reevaluate the meaning of “freedom.” Libertarians argue that a“free market” (and by “free market,” they mean “deregulated” or “regulated in favor of private and corporate interests”) is magically endowed with its own set of checks-and-balances called “supply and demand,” but demand can be fabricated (it’s called “marketing”) and supply can be withheld (it’s called “monopoly”). Libertarians suffer from a debilitating naivete that links survival to some abstract “lone wanderer” archetype - a do-it-yourself, pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality - an incredulous notion refuted by a library of historic and scientific evidence that paints a rather clear picture of the story of human perseverance: humans survive in a group, a community, or tribe.
In its Preamble, The Libertarian Party Platform states “As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.” What does that mean, “No one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others?” It means that no one is subject to any social contract that would bind the hopes of one man to the dreams of another. Is that really the world you want to live in?
What if you and your neighbor purchased adjustable-rate mortgages from a smooth-talking salesman (who, arguably, is also your neighbor) with no down payment, and what if you were both forced to foreclose on your homes because the mortgages were leveraged to purchase securities in an artificial market predicated upon an entirely subjective - and by “subjective,” I mean “unfounded” - concept of value? What if - one day - after rousing yourself from bed and rubbing the sleep from your eyes, after a shower, a shave and your morning cup o’ joe, on your way to work as you pass beneath the crumbling viaducts, as you pass boarded-up windows and empty lots strewn with debris, or as you drive into the heart of your city, now a ghost town, you are struck by the disconnect between the reality in which you live and the successes lauded upon our economy by news anchors who muddle over the minutia of the stock market? What if - one day - you realize the stock market is nothing more than a measurement of profit that intentionally omits the origin and destination of those profits? What if your son arrives home in a casket after fighting for his country in a war that was fueled by profits accrued by defense contractors and energy moguls who hired scores of lobbyists to bribe your congressmen? What if your neighbor is the subsidiary of one of those energy moguls, a company that pumps the earth full of chemical slurry to extract the shale deposits below your land, and what if they poison your drinking water in the process?
These examples, which I’ve borrowed from events that have occurred in the last fifteen years, are the byproduct of regulation in favor of private and corporate interests and a lack of oversight. The market principles Libertarians idolize are neither “free” nor “deregulated.” They propose a platform that advances regulation in favor of private and corporate interests over the interests of the public while propagating the fallacy that the “government of the people” is divorced from the people. Certainly, our government is corrupt, yet corruption in any democratic institution is the result of a lack of public oversight.