Please, please, please don’t be a libertarian.There are 2 types of Libertarians. The “classical” type believes that the mass of people should not be dependant on or subject to the effects of a wealthy elite searching for profit at any cost, or the repressive state that betrays the people it claims to represent and acts only in the interests of the powerful. They believe industry should be democratised to serve the millions not the millionaires, and government should be heavily federalised rather than centralised and controlled by direct, rather than representative, democracy ensuring the government is controlled from the bottom up and is never separate to the people. Nowadays, the above people call themselves “Anarchists” or “Libertarian Socialists.” These guys are alright. I consider myself one.
However, there is another more recent kind of Libertarian that appropriated the name of the anarchists-probably because it sounds rebellious and appeals to the youth. (just look at the amount of people on facebook claiming to be libertarian without actually knowing what it is) These believe that:
-Only private schools can be allowed.
-Only private hospitals are allowed.
-Roads should be privatised, and their owner can charge people who use them as much as he likes.
-Unemployment benefits should be abolished.
-State pensions should be abolished.
-Employers should be allowed to legally discriminate on age, sex, or race as they please.
-Minimum wage should be abolished. Employers can pay as little as they like.
-Employers can fire workers for no reason.
-Legalisation of private mercenaries. (some believe mercenaries should replace the police and military)
-No council housing for the homeless.
-Businesses should not be legally obliged to protect the environment.
-Essential goods which are too expensive for some people to afford should not have their prices lowered by government subsidies.
You might wonder why anyone would possibly think this is a good thing, or anything to do with “freedom.” This is because Libertarians have a very perverted view on freedom; freedom is associated entirely with property, and you can do anything you want with your property providing you don’t do something with anyone else’s property; in their view, if someone has to work in a sweatshop or Dickensian workhouse it’s a mutually beneficial deal between the millionaire employer and the poverty stricken worker and perfectly sound. This ideology sees things purely from the perspective of a wealthy capitalist, and equates a free society only with the freedom of the capitalist; freedom to do what you like with your property is the only freedom, and being free to use healthcare, get an education, have housing and have a job doesn’t register on their view of freedom. They say paying taxes to fund education and healthcare is theft, but what about profit? Ultimately, profit comes from paying the workers less than the value they produce for you. Even if you don’t accept Marx’s Labour Theory of Value, you can see clearly that low wages=high profits and high wages=low profits. In the mind of the Libertarian, this is ok because the worker can choose to work for the capitalist and agrees on the conditions. In reality, the worker must choose between taking the job or starving to death so in practise this theory doesn’t really work. (neither do they mention the violence and coercion that was involved in creating a property-less working class open to exploitation)
Libertarians justify this with an unshakeable religious conviction in the powers of the free market as a natural force, a bit like the Qi of Chinese mythology or the Force in Star Wars, that binds society together in harmony and only disruptions in the mystical power of the market caused by things like legally required minimum wage or paying taxes to fund pensions and healthcare can possibly make anything go wrong in society. If only the government reduced its role to simply defending the property of the wealthy and stopped giving concessions to the poor, a truly free utopia would emerge.
Ha. Ha.
Libertarianism in Action.I have 2 points to make in this section; first, their faith in the market is silly and secondly the only form a “libertarian” society can take is that of a totalitarian military dictatorship.
Pinochet’s Libertarian Despotism in Chile was brought into power through a coup plotted by commercial and political elites in the USA and in Chile who were concerned that Chile, which had recently elected a socialist as president, would become inhospitable for business interests. This coup also brought to power the sinister “Chicago Boys,” free market economists educated by Milton Friedman himself, the grand old man of Libertarianism who was also an advisor and admirer of Pinochet. Pinochet and the gang of Chicago Libertarians started their work by banning trade unions and rounding up dissidents in the Santiago Stadium, where bags were placed over their heads and floodlights shone upon them perpetually with periodical arbitrary executions, while 28,000 other dissidents were kidnapped and tortured with a further 3000 being executed. All this was necessary to terrorise the population into accepting Chile as a laboratory for Friedman to test out his economic theories, as no sane working man or woman would ever vote for a Libertarian party. With the populace too terrified to resist, they went on to remove the minimum wage, privatised the pension system, state industries and banks, and slashed taxes on income and profits.
So what was the effect? The quadrupling of foreign debt; epidemics of typhoid fever and hepatitis because no-one could afford healthcare; the poverty rate doubled; the GDP dropped to almost a quarter of the Latin American average; unemployment went from 4.3% to 22%; real wages declined by 40%; and those without adequate housing went from 27% to 40%. The only thing that prevented the economy from complete economic collapse was that Pinochet neglected to privatise the copper mines that Allende had previously nationalised and were virtually the only source of steady income.
So how do Libertarians respond to this? There are 2 responses. The first one claims that Pinochet did not privatise enough and taxes were not slashed enough. The second response disassociates itself with Pinochet, saying a dictatorship is incompatible with Libertarianism so it’s nothing to do with them.
Clearly, the first response isn’t worth dealing with and someone who insists that is clearly too deluded to bother arguing with. The second response however is more interesting to discuss; it’s obvious Libertarian claims that a truly free market would give workers higher wages is complete idiocy, so to keep back minimum wages and wage increases (that interfere with the market magic) making trade unions illegal is completely necessary. And to ensure wildcat strikes don’t take place instead, the right to organise is therefore necessarily removed.
Furthermore, Libertarian policies are so insane no-one would want them apart from corporate elites and their military friends who profit. Therefore, they can only ever be enforced by a state made up of an alliance between military and business, with no democracy involved. Not only that, but Libertarian ideology is inherently undemocratic. They believe that capitalists should not be obliged to act in a socially responsible way; any plans to make the rich and powerful act in a way that benefits society is a whole is denounced as “collectivism” and infringing on the individual rights on those poor, oppressed millionaire entrepreneurs. But isn’t democracy an inherently “collectivist” system? The individual must compromise with what the mass of people want, which is exactly what the Libertarians hate.
Their contempt for democracy is even seen in their tactics; Nigel Meek from the think-tank “Libertarian Alliance” discusses at
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn022.pdf the failure of Libertarians to perform well at elections and says;
“…the authors of Strategy and Purpose of the Libertarian Alliance surely had it right all those years ago: it will take a great deal of time, direct appeals to the ordinary electorate are wasteful, and we need to concentrate our efforts towards the key opinion-formers in areas such as the media, politics, industry, organised labour, academia, and the arts.”Essentially, Libertarians know that they will never win substantial support from any sector of society other than the elite; their tactic is to win the support of the elites who are capable of bringing in a Libertarian society without having to win any elections.
And this is why Libertarianism is dangerous; it has a contempt for social responsibility, democracy, and freedom for anyone but the most privileged, but most dangerously it has powerful friends who could bring it into action. It is no more than an expression of the interests of wealthy capitalists who are interested only in increasing profit at any human cost and all notions of “individual freedom” is only a means of the capitalist morally justifying his position to himself.
