THE LIBERTARIAN OUTLOOK: WHAT IS IT REALLY?

THE LIBERTARIAN OUTLOOK: WHAT IS IT REALLY?

Cultures, Economics, Politics

            Many who favor laws that prevent communities or counties from governing themselves and their enterprises as they see fit call themselves “Libertarian.” The word has a nice ring, doesn’t it? But most who use it have not considered the fact that it has three radically different meanings. As a result, it’s all too easy to slide back and forth among them as if they’re all the same thing. The three are:

Individual Libertarian. This means that every person is free to do as they wish as long as they’re breaking laws against physically injuring people or property –or not “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. In a true individual libertarian regime a person can drink booze, smoke weed, fuck anybody who is willing, have total control over their own bodies and reproduction or non-reproduction, or earn their living as a sex worker. Reasonable regulation includes such items as limiting the right to drive after drinking alcohol, and requiring sex workers to have a weekly physical exam to make sure they’re not passing on diseases.

            Some apologists for corporate brutality, intimidation, deception, or other misdeeds claim that really they’re doing good because philosophically they’re “libertarians.” Confusing such a viewpoint with an individual libertarian one is like a shell game in which everyone is tricked into thinking the bean is under a different shell than it really is. An individual libertarian philosophy holds that government has no business telling us how to live our lives as long as we don’t harm others people or living beings. For example, “Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater was a very strong advocate of women’s control over their own bodies and reproductive choices. That’s an individual libertarian position.
         But a Big Business Libertarian outlook is different. It holds that a corporation or other business can or ought to be able to do as it pleases with no oversight or regulation by the community, the city, the state, or anybody else. How strange, since many who hold that view also lobby constantly for government contracts, subsidies, tax incentives, land grants, and anti-labor and union-busting laws. Many actively seek government regulations that will give them a competitive advantage or wedge of entry into some market. An attorney friend of mine who works with vampire corporations and the ultra-rich says, “Their lobbyists are like a plague of locusts. No matter how many subsidies, tax breaks, and concessions they get, every day they’re over at the state capital asking for more –and more—and more.”

         The big business libertarian view holds that Wall Street, the big banks, other global corporations, and “the invisible hand of the market” will look out for ordinary people’s interests. Really?

The grain of truth in a business libertarian view (not just big business) that is that even small mom and pop businesses are too often hobbled by an excess of rules, regulations and forms to fill out that don’t help anybody anywhere. The longer a government or business exists, the more of these there tend to be. It’s useful to have periodic reviews to scrap those no longer needed, clean up the rest, and make sure they are all written in language anyone can understand.

Realistic freedom for businesses includes freedom from intimidation by other businesses as well as from unneeded busybody government interference. That’s where preventing monopolies and ensuring competition comes in. And a socially conscious business libertarian view ensures competitive bidding and no sweetheart deals like those that are so common in matters like weapons system procurement. History tells us that this is likely occur only when there is an outside overseer who enforces it.

A third variation is a Plutocratic Libertarian view. This is valuing liberty for the wealthy and powerful above all, clearing the way for them to do anything they please regardless of how greatly it impoverishes or injures others or nature’s other beings. A plutocratic libertarian system tends to give lip service to the idea that everybody is equally free, while it actually enacts all kinds of restrictions on those who happen to be poor and powerless. Such as, for instance, laws against “loitering.”

Today’s hard-right ideologues who call themselves libertarians tend to be of the second and third kinds. Very few are genuine individual libertarians. Why does this matter? Because if a corporate giant and an individual are both free to do as they please, the former usually has the resources to crush any individuals who get in the way—often using government as its tool.

            The ideology that underlies big business and plutocratic perspectives is the idea that everybody will make the “best” possible decisions for themselves that they can, and that will result in the best collective outcomes. That’s true — IF the only thing we care about is making AMMAP (As Much Money As Possible) and care little or not at all about any other ethics or values. Or about who benefits much, who just a little, and who gets royally screwed..

Consider this: Most economists have pretty good jobs and make enough to live fairly well. Their personal experience has a major effect on their theories. Such as making big decisions about whether to use their available funds for a new Lincoln or a new Lexus. Then we can look at someone who is clinging to survival by the fingernails. An economist is likely to watch with detached interest as to whether that person will use his or her very limited funds for healthy organic non-GMO food instead of cheap food grown with heavy use of herbicides and pesticides, or instead goes to a dentist to get decaying teeth made bad by cheap food filled or pulled. That’s the kind of “freedom of choice” that billions of people in the world face.
            Or step back and look at the international scene. Todays so-called “free markets” are, in large part, arrangements agreed on by attorneys for big business (often that’s the case even when they are negotiators serving at the behest of government) that are really not free at all. A large share of international finance and commerce, for example, is tightly regulated by global and regional bodies like the World Trade Organization. As a result, “free trade” is often trade governed by rules devised by giant multinational corporations. The corporations don’t want countries, states, or communities making any rules that interfere with their ability to do whatever they please, however harmful to people, other living beings, and ecosystems it might be. And they ask legislatures to pass laws that keep countries, states, or communities from passing regulations that stop Vampire Capitalist corporation from bleeding them dry. The only “freedom” they want is for themselves. They certainly don’t want others to see and hear their negotiations with each other, since those are almost always carried on behind closed doors with no representatives of the press of the public present. Whose liberty is that?

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© 2021 by Victor Daniels. You may distribute this wherever and however you wish so long as it’s free. Any use in a manner that directly or indirectly earns compensation requires consent of the author.

HOW THE WORDS “CONSERVATIVE” AND “LIBERAL” MISLEAD US

HOW THE WORDS “CONSERVATIVE” AND “LIBERAL” MISLEAD US

Cultures, Politics

The terms “conservative” and “liberal” often confuse and conceal more than they reveal. Odd as it may sound, often they imply the very opposite of what they actually mean in a given situation. For example, when big banks and construction companies band together with their friends in government to ram an oil pipeline through farms and ranches of families who are totally opposed to it and who want to keep their land in agriculture like it has always been, they like to call themselves “conservatives.” But actually that’s just about as radical as you can get. The farmers and ranchers who want to protect their land are the ones who want to conserve the integrity of their land as it is. The big business interests try to tar them with the label “radical” because they oppose “progress” –i.e. having their land torn up by giant earth-moving machines they don’t want there—and they call themselves “conservative” even though they want to change everything around in dramatic ways.

What’s going on there, anyway? How can people be using labels that turn everything upside down and backwards so that anybody who’s not there but just hears someone’s report about the situation can so easily end up easily deceived and befuddled about what’s happening?

Actually it’s pretty simple. Especially with the term “conservative.” Two things are happening. One is that the word is being used in three different ways.

One of these is the historic way that means what most people tend to think it means. That is, keeping and preserving what’s valuable in our past ways. Many in this group, whom I call “true conservatives,” think that our most valuable traditions involve a combination of freedom and respect. That is, each person’s freedom to determine how he or she lives his or her own life, and respect for other people’s choices about how they live theirs. Of course there’s some wiggle room in that definition, since different people have different ideas about “what’s valuable.” No label is a prefect reflection of the reality it represents. But we can do our best to make our labels as clear and accurate as we can.

A second major meaning of the word is the idea that those who have the money and power ought to be able to make the political and economic decisions about what goes on in society. In the U.S. there are quite a few “think tanks” that spend most of their time and effort trying to channel all the power to the big business and investment decisionmakers—especially through “campaign contribution” payoffs that buy the legislators’ votes. And quite a few big businesses that move in with enormous machines that so totally transform a landscape that it ends up with no resemblance at all to what it looked like previously. And that, we’re called, is “conservative.” That’s part of the way the term is usually used in the media. I call that “so-called ‘conservative.’ My logic is that a word ought to suggest what it really means—not its opposite.

Finally, in its third major meaning the word is synonomous with “right wing.” That includes the idea that some people can tell others what to do. It’s a little tricker to define precisely, but everybody knows what it is. There’s a kind of hard cold “get out of my way, asshole, or I’ll punch your fucking face in,” attitude to it. And also, “the facts are what I say they are. My opinion is what counts, so shut up and listen.” There’s a clear authoritarian bent to that, just as there is with the second meaning above. Many conservatives of the first kind above, who are the only ones I regard as true conservatives rather than “card carrying conservatives,” are quite frankly horrified by this third group. I think it makes much more sense to call the third group simply “right wing,” since almost everybody knows what that means and there’s very little misunderstanding about it. In fact, if you look at right-wing rhetoric and behavior in places like Texas and Alabama and Georgia, I think the term “cold hard right” is the best description of many in this group. In short, as often as not so-called conservative means “rule by the rich,” “rule by a powerful leader or a powerful few,” or “male dominance,” or all of the above. Sometimes the cold hard right swings a radical wrecking ball at things real conservatives value.=

In short, an accurate use of the word “conservative” is moderate, restrained, and the preservation of what’s best in our traditions.

On the other side of the increasingly hostile political great divide, so-called liberal sometimes hides such meanings as “indulgent,” “anti-traditional,” “hostile toward any authority,” “unrealistically compassionate without reason or considered thought,” “wishy-washy,” or all of the above. It ought to mean free, open-minded, tolerant and responsible.

The root of the word, however, is “to liberate.” That points us toward asking “liberate whom?” “In what ways?” “Under what circumstances?” Historically, the answer has been “to liberate those who have been oppressed. But that can be pretty tricky too. For example, President Andrew Jackson portrayed himself as a champion of the common people, but only some common people. He was the most vicious and brutal president in the nation’s history in his treatment of American Indians. The notorious “removals” such as the Trail of Tears were most intense on his watch. And there is no compelling evidence that liberals have been any better than anyone else when it comes to imperialism and war: Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s war, even though Nixon expanded it.

In recent years “liberal” has somewhat fallen out of style and given way to “progressive,” which usually means openheartedness and compassion balanced by reason. But there too not everything is clear, since some progressives advocated unlimited immigration while others think that leads to housing shortages that push people into homelessness on the streets. And sometimes self-styled progressives seem to advocate more regulation and government red tape than necessary in order to achieve the goals they seek.

Finally, using those kinds of global labels for ourselves and others, and especially the media’s use of them and rabble-rousing demagogues’ of all kinds of political persuasions use of them seems to be contributing to the atmosphere of political antagonism and even hatred that is causing many people’s thinking to be muddy and confused and poisoning public discourse in our time.

So what should we do instead? I’d say, to the degree that we can, forget the labels. Forget which “movement” we belong to. In most cases, realize that any variety of of self-centered “I’m better than Them Others” thinking on any side of the political spectrum tends to lead us into generalizations that are shadowlands of deception. We need to have a clear sense of what we value, be truthful with both ourselves and others (not so easy, since it’s so common to lie to ourselves in order to protect our self-images, which often include self-deception as we tell ourselves that we’re real hot stuff and ‘them others’ are bad. For the most part more precise, specific terms and designations, based on careful observation of what’s going on in this situation serve us better.

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1207 words, 1-16-21