Freedom and Society, the Libertarian Example

In my last post I argued that absolute freedom was the freedom of the jungle, in which the top predators deprived the rest of the jungle's inhabitants, including humans, of their freedom through fear and death and that humans banded together to create their freedom. However, some may say that we humans are now the dominant predator and therefore we no longer need to band together. In this simple observation a good deal of our social and economic behavior is encapsulated. Our technology has increasingly allowed us to be independent of each other or seemingly so. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, has pointed out some of the social consequences of this phenomenon.

However, we still have the dominant predator to fear, it is us or at least some of us. As an example let us consider libertarianism as a philosophy of predation.

Libertarians would have us believe that freedom is an individual right and, ironically, that society should guarantee it, which is obviously another way of saying society bestows freedom upon us. This appeals to the American mindset which tends to be simplistic and given, more than some other societies, to ideological solutions to complex problems. However, as in the jungle, the freedom of the powerful is obtained at the expense of the freedom of the less powerful. A recent and glaring example is the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are humans and can use their massive wealth to pursue their political objectives.

The Internet is replete with articles associating Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas as well as Alito with libertarianism. I found the following quote in an article on theses allocations titled The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court. The quote gives some historical and philosophical scope to the libertarian misrepresentation of freedom: "There are two dimensions to the gun lobby's individual right to gun ownership. One is the libertarian fantasy that we reverse the process described by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government, declare individual sovereignty, dissolve political community, and return to the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The libertarian fantasy mixes with other political ideologies, across the political spectrum, and expresses a defeatist retreat from political life." The complete article can be found at http://www.potowmack.org/997cthom.html. One consequence of libertarian influence is thus the legal baptism of corporate personhood and the unleashing of corporate wealth to subvert the democratic process.

Libertarian influence on our economic policy has been profound. Milton Friedman was the father of trickledown economics in which the rich get the economic benefits first and the rest of society get whatever trickles down after their orgy of greed. Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago (think Obama?), was an economic advisor to Peruvian dictator August Pinochet, and a mentor of Alan Greenspan, a fellow libertarian.

Greenspan expressed "shock" when our Great Recession occurred because he expected the market to correct itself as Friedman had taught him. This is what happens when ideologues address the real world with all its variables. The "law" of the self-correcting market is analogous to Marx's necessity of history in its blind adherence to doctrine. If there is one pronounced tendency in human affairs it is applying certainty, whether of the arbitrariness of morality (think the politics of values) or the arbitrariness of ideology to the vicissitudes of reality. It is a recipe for disaster, human suffering and death. This is the ultimate folly of libertarianism as it was for Soviet communism.

Bob Newhard