Libertarians are hypocrites

Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers.

First, some background. There is a kind of libertarianism that’s nothing more or less than a strain in the American psyche, an emotional tendency toward individualism and personal liberty. That’s fine and even admirable.

We’re talking about the other libertarianism, the political philosophy whose avatar is the late fiction writer Ayn Rand. It was once thought that this extreme brand of libertarianism, one that celebrates greed and brutality, had died in the early 1980s with Rand herself.
Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of Utopian ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted real-world behavior anywhere. That’s why, reasonably enough, the libertarian movement evaporated in the late 20th century, its followers scattered like the wind.

But the libertarian movement has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, and there’s a simple reason for that: money, and the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it; and exists only because in political debate, as in so many other walks of life, cash is king.

The Koch brothers are principal funders of the Reason Foundation and Reason magazine. Exxon Mobil and other corporate and billionaire interests are behind the Cato Institute, the other public face of libertarianism. Financiers have also seeded a number of economics schools, think tanks, and other institutions with proponents of their brand of libertarianism. It’s easy to explain why some of these corporate interests do it. It serves the self-interest of the polluters, for example, to promote a political philosophy which argues that regulation is bad and the market will correct any ill effects. And every wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich. What better way to justify that than with a philosophy that says they’re rich because they’re better than you...


The only problem is with the Libertarian ideology is: It’s complete fantasy! At no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism’s delusional mythos claims that it’s more realistic than other ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth. The slope from that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery, steep—and easy to identify

No single Libertarian is more "out there: than Peter Thiel, who made his fortune with PayPal. In one ludicrous diatribe, Thiel whined that allowing women, and people he describes as "welfare beneficiaries” (which might be reasonably interpreted as “minorities”) to vote. “Since 1920,” Thiel bloviated, “the extension of the franchise to (these two groups) have turned ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron."

With this remark, Thiel let something slip that modern conservative libertarians prefer to keep quiet: A lot of them don’t have much use for democracy. In their world, democracy is a poor substitute for the plutocratic rule of wealth, administered by those who hold the most of it.

Thiel is not a hypocrite on this point. He’s willing to freely say what others selfish bastards only think: Democracy should be replaced by the rule of wealthy people like himself.

But how did Peter Thiel and every other Internet billionaires become so wealthy?

They hired government-educated employees to develop products protected by government copyrights. Those products used government-created computer technology and a government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in government-protected banks—after which they began using that wealth to argue for the elimination of government.

By that standard, Thiel and his fellow “digital libertarians” are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion.

Many libertarians pontificate by saying that government has only two legitimate functions: to protect the national security and enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two? If the mythical free market can solve any problem, including protecting the environment, why can’t it also protect us from foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these libertarians wealthy?

For that matter, why should these libertarians be allowed to hold patents at all? If the free market can decide how best to use our national resources, why shouldn’t it also decide how best to use Peter Thiel’s ideas, and whether or not to reward him for them? After all, if Thiel were a true Randian libertarian he’d use his ideas in a more superior fashion than anyone else—and he would be more ruthless in enforcing his rights to them than anyone else.

“Libertarians believe that people will be both freer and more prosperous if government intervention in people’s economic choices is minimized,” says the Cato Institute.

But victims of illegal foreclosure are neither “freer” nor “more prosperous” after the government deregulation which led to their exploitation. What’s more, deregulation has led to a series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder fraud and investor fraud.

The bankers who collude to deceive their customers, as US bankers did with the MERS mortgage system, were permitted to do so by the unwillingness of government to regulate them. The customers who were the victims of deception were essential to the production of Wall Street wealth. Why don’t libertarians recognize their role in the process, and their right to administer their own affairs?

Because the label "Libertarian" is just a less truthful and more polite way of saying "Selfish Bastard".