On a recent segment of Sam Seder’s The Majority Report, he featured an interview with a prominent libertarian, and from listening to that sequence, I believe that I understand the basic libertarian credo, which can apparently be summed up in the following statement: No one has a right to the fruits of my labor, I have no right to the fruits of someone else’s labor, and everyone must be responsible for himself/herself and the consequences of his/her actions.
I thought Sam did an excellent job of questioning his guest about the possible legal logistics that might be necessary to establish ownership rights under the libertarian vision, and his guest could not fill in very many of the fuzzy edges, which I didn’t find surprising, but given the preceding summation of libertarianism, a couple of other, even simpler, questions came to my mind.
If a libertarian handed me the statement above, I would have to ask the speaker if he/she really meant to suggest that, in the absence of any centralized authority capable of holding the rich and powerful accountable in any way for their misdeeds, the rich and powerful would simply act in a more responsible manner? Any sort of affirmative reply would then lead me to argue that the entirety of human history would say otherwise. I learned the phrase Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely at a very young age, and whatever else I might have gotten right or wrong on my history tests, I always saw quite clearly the embodiment of that phrase in the darker chapters of every era since our early ancestors started writings things down.
My other potential question to the libertarian philosopher would be to ask what, in the absence of any centralized authority that could redistribute wealth in a more equitable way across society, would prevent the rich and powerful from naturally accruing an ever-increasing share of society’s resources, to the point where any semblance of democratic representation would effectively disappear, leading to the eventual collapse of the entire societal structure when it passes the point of sustainability due to its top-heavy aspect. In the U.S., previous generations have struggled against oligarchy to varying degrees, and that struggle continues to the present day. At the moment, the oligarchs are winning, but if we wish to have a future for our democracy, then the people will have to turn that struggle around at some point, just as previous generations in our country have done.
During my HS days, 50 years ago, I questioned Marx’s class-struggle hypothesis, but then, over the decades, I came to see the reality of that theory, although I would qualify the basic concept with the caveat that the rich and powerful, just as every other segment of society, are not monolithic, but rather, the one percent includes kind and generous types as well as the greedy and heartless jerks of various shades. The greedy heartless ones may even be a minority of the one percent, but they exert outsized influence in the service of their greed, with their money talking loudly as they try to drown out all dissenting voices that might disagree with them.
In light of this conversation about money, libertarianism looks to me like the tool of a group of one percenter greedheads, designed for the purpose of intellectually disarming a portion of potential dissenters who might otherwise pay more attention to injustices perpetrated by those greedheads. Despite its claims to Reason, libertarianism doesn’t seem to stand up well to questions of rational functionality, as Mr. Seder’s recent interview segment would appear to indicate, but to my mind, I see it resting on a foundation of pure fantasy that ignores the entirety of human history. Maybe a few of those greedy one percenters have convinced themselves that they really believe it, but even if they are fooling themselves, they’re not fooling me.