To say that this article is a mass of incoherence would be generous. It is an intellectual mess that displays the emotionalism and lack of thinking that passes for education on the left these days. What these authors really want and hope to accomplish with this column is to keep their readers ignorant regarding the true meaning of capitalism and statism. Let’s take a few points from the article and put them in their proper place.
Most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites: The first glorifies personal freedom. The second would obliterate it. Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images.
Simplistic thinking at best.
First, communism is one form of what we call statism or if you like, collectivism. This is the doctrine that society is best run by the state. The economy of a nation, its education system, its social institutions and organizations should all be either directly, or indirectly, under state control since this is the best way to organize society. So goes the basic argument. There have been many forms of statism, but they all have this basic outlook in common.
Second we have the view of conservatives and libertarians. While it is true that we need to have government in society, since humans are not perfect and cannot be made so, that government should be as limited and constrained as possible in order to maximize the freedom that the citizen should by right enjoy. A society functions best when the people have the most freedom possible consistent with the smooth functioning of society based on the rule of law. Under such a system, the people have rights, including free speech, freedom of association and ownership of property, that the government may not violate.
These views are not the same, regardless of what the authors would have us think.
Radical libertarianism, if ever put into practice at the scale of something bigger than a tiny enclave, would also be a disaster.
Well actually, for the first century and a half or so, we had a mostly free society as handed down to us by the Founding Fathers. That was a system of ordered liberty, as Mark Levin would describe it. And once we eradicated slavery in the confederate states, we moved even more so in the direction of freedom. During this time, America went from being a small former colony to being one of the major powers in the world, with military, economic and social institutions of considerable influence. Far from the disaster that the authors would have us believe.
A President Paul would rule by tantrum, shutting down the government in order to repeal laws already passed by Congress. A Secretary Norquist would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and progressive taxation, so that the already wealthy could exponentially compound their advantage, as the programs that sustain a prosperous middle class are gutted.
This is, of course, pure Marxism. The IRS and progressive taxation were, as a matter of historical record, put into place by the left in order to achieve the Marxist notion of re-distributing income from those who earned it, to those who did not. Income redistribution is a basic feature of all statist systems. Statism cannot allow the right of property, since it results in unequal outcomes.
In a free society where rights of the individual are respected, the differences in individuals will result in different outcomes. Different people are going to do different things. Some will be more successful than others. Some work harder than others. Some are more talented than others. The statist seeks to erase these differences by denying success to those who have more talent, ambition and drive. Thus we have the notion of income redistribution as provided by Marx and his followers.
As for the middle class, the authors fail to admit that the middle class is a feature of democratic capitalism and would not exist without it. Statist systems have two classes; the rulers and everyone else. And the rulers make sure that everyone else gets only the scraps from the table that ensure the continued existence of the ruling class. In America we don’t have a middle class because we have food stamps and welfare. We have one because we have had, up until recently, the right to property and freedom to pursue it.
If the U.S. is to continue to adapt and evolve, we have to see that freedom isn’t simply the removal of encumbrance, or the ability to ignore inconvenient rules or limitations. Freedom is responsibility. Communism failed because it kept citizens from taking responsibility for governing themselves. By preaching individualism above all else, so does radical libertarianism.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Wisdom. These are the Orwellian slogans of the Statist. But you don’t have to believe them. Statist system don’t fail because they keep citizens from taking responsibility. They fail because they are in violation of the basic facts about how the world actually works. Authors like Hayek and Ludwig von Mises have written many books on the subject describing how free society operates and why Statism always fails. Perhaps the authors should have taken some time to read them.
