Libertarianism is feudalism
I’ve long said that libertarianism is the political philosophy of middle school boys and arrested development, the apotheosis of solipsism. Libertarianism holds that property rights are the only rights that matter, and that in any conflict the marketplace, not the state, must and can resolve conflicts between interests.
That, my friends, is feudalism. And feudalism, like the socialism that libertarians so fear, is and has always been coercive.
“If you take seriously the premise that property rights are inviolable and that democratic constraint on property is illegitimate, you cannot avoid the concentration of power in private hands. You cannot prevent the emergence of hierarchy. You cannot maintain anything resembling equal liberty for all.
“The libertarian response has always been: “But the market will prevent that! Competition will discipline power!” But this is faith, not argument. History shows us repeatedly that markets, left unconstrained by democratic governance, produce monopoly, oligopoly, and systematic advantage for those who already have power. The invisible hand doesn’t prevent domination—it enables it.”
*snip*
“When your philosophy about freedom leads to feudalism, when your theory about liberty produces hierarchy, when your commitment to voluntary exchange results in systematic domination—it’s time to admit the framework is broken.”
So what is to be done?
“. . . if your instinct about human freedom was right, if your commitment to individual dignity was genuine, if your suspicion of concentrated power was well-founded—then you don’t have to abandon those values. You just have to abandon the philosophy that betrayed them.
“The classical liberal tradition is still here. It’s still alive. And it offers what libertarianism promised but could never deliver: a framework that actually protects liberty for ordinary people, not just for those who own property.
“Classical liberalism understands that freedom requires democratic institutions, not their absence. That rule of law protects liberty precisely by constraining what the powerful can do. That property rights serve human flourishing when embedded in frameworks of mutual obligation and the common good. That government isn’t the enemy of freedom but its foundation—the means by which we collectively secure the conditions that make individual liberty possible.
“This isn’t compromise. It isn’t settling for less freedom. It’s recognizing what freedom actually is and what it actually requires.
“When you say you value liberty, ask yourself: liberty for whom? Just for those with enough property to live independently. Or liberty for everyone, including those without inherited wealth, those without perfect health, those without the advantages that compound over generations?”
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Libertarianism is feudalism
One thing that many people don’t know about the pure free market economy that actually fulfills all the conditions necessary (e.g., everybody knows everything that is known, including that everybody knows everything that is known, including that everybody… in an infinite regress – so much for advertising, the legal system, most of the medical profession, education, …) is that there are multiple optimal solutions. One is the “happy world” solution, but another is the “jungle economy” (it’s really referred to as such,) in which everything is owned by the person with the highest “power rating”, except for the stuff they don’t want, which is all owned by the person with the second highest power rating, and so on. That’s much closer to what we actually see in places like Yemen, Somalia, the drug-lord controlled areas of Central and South America, etc. I have a couple of libertarian friends who don’t talk to me about libertarianism anymore after I suggested they move to Yemen to find their “happy place” and explained why.
A pure free market economy is anarchy …
The mystical faith that “Competition will discipline power” is not only wrong, it is in clear violation of simple mathematics. Anyone who has studied elementary probability will have seen that “random walk with absorbing walls” implies that concentration of money and power is inevitable, in spite of neutrality and freedom of contracts and exchange.
about right
I may be misinterpreting the OP, but he seems to be saying “socialism… is and has always been coercive.” Which is nonsense. All governments impose regulatory structures on markets and other things, but these are necessary; under feudalism they are always coercive, under socialism they are not.
@Bob,
LOL!
If you don’t believe socialism is coercive, you don’t understand how socialism works. I’ve known people who lived under socialism in the GDR, the USSR, the PRC and Poland before the wall fell. All of them would laugh out loud if you told them socialism isn’t coercive. I’ve read plenty of histories of socialism that confirm their experiences. What’s nonsense is believing that socialism *isn’t* coercive.
All systems of government are coercive. That’s the definition of government. Even anarchy winds up being coercive. Arguing, as you seem to be, that because some socialist countries are less free than others makes socialism bad, is not a good argument. By modern standards, the US in the 1950s was socialist, but it was still freer than other socialist countries like the USSR.
@Kaleberg,
“Arguing, as you seem to be, that because some socialist countries are less free than others makes socialism bad, is not a good argument.”
I never made that argument. What I wrote is that the feudalism of libertarians is coercive just like socialism. While The Farm in Summertown TN, a hippie commune founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin shared characteristics with socialism, I can’t think of a single example of socialism at the national level that wasn’t coercive.
Anyone who thinks the US of the 1950s was socialist understands neither socialism nor the US of the 1950s. US of the ’50s was certainly freer for white heterosexual males than the USSR. Having grown up in the south at the end of American apartheid, I suspect many African-Americans didn’t feel especially free.
Socialism is a form of government in which the state owns the means of production. The closest thing to socialism in the US is the military.
Your definition of socialism is laughably bizarre. You would exclude Bernie Sanders and AOC. But you would include Ceaușescu, or Stalin, or the GDR, because they claimed to be “socialist.”
@Bob,
My definition is Marx’s definition. Whether Marx was laughably bizarre or just obtusely wrong is a matter of taste, I suppose.
Neither Sanders nor AOC are socialists in the Marxist sense of advocating that the government own the means of production. Which companies or industries have Sanders or AOC proposed to expropriate and nationalize? While the Trump GOP brands them as Marxists and socialists, they use those terms as epithets, not as descriptions of socioeconomic systems. I don’t blindly accept their laughably bizarre accusations. YMMV.
Ceaușescu’s Romania, Stalin’s USSR and the GDR were certainly socialist. Socialist dictatorships. What they weren’t was communist.
Go learn about the Holodomore and the state-imposed collectivization of farms and factories under Stalin. It was the very definition of coercive socialism. I don’t find it laughable. YMMV.