{"id":41112,"date":"2013-06-12T08:27:24","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T07:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-libertarians-are-basically-cult-members\/41112\/"},"modified":"2013-06-12T08:27:24","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T07:27:24","slug":"why-libertarians-are-basically-cult-members","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-libertarians-are-basically-cult-members\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Libertarians Are Basically Cult Members"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 11, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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My\u00a0previous Salon essay<\/a>, in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has\u00a0infuriated members of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard. <\/p>\n

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored. <\/p>\n

Another response to my essay has been to claim that a libertarian country really did exist once in the real world, in the form of the United States between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Robert Tracinski<\/a>\u00a0writes that I am \u201castonishingly ignorant of history\u201d for failing to note that the \u201clibertarian utopia, or the closest we\u2019ve come to it, is America itself, up to about 100 years ago. It was a country with no income tax and no central bank. (It was on the gold standard, for crying out loud. You can\u2019t get more libertarian than that.) It had few economic regulations and was still in the Lochner era, when such regulations were routinely struck down by the Supreme Court. There was no federal welfare state, no Social Security, no Medicare.\u201d <\/p>\n

It is Tracinski who is astonishingly ignorant of history. To begin with, the majority of the countries that adopted the \u201clibertarian\u201d gold standard were authoritarian monarchies or military dictatorships. With the exception of Imperial Britain, an authoritarian government outside of the home islands, where most Britons were denied the vote for most of this period, most of the independent countries of the pre-World War I gold standard epoch, including the U.S., Germany, France, Russia and many Latin American republics, rejected free trade in favor of varying degrees of economic protectionism. <\/p>\n

For its part, the U.S. between Lincoln and FDR was hardly laissez-faire. Ever since colonial times, states had engaged in public poor relief and sometimes created public hospitals and asylums. Tracinski to the contrary, there were also two massive federal welfare programs before the New Deal: the Homestead Act, a colossal redistribution of government land to farmers, and generous pension benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War and their families. Much earlier, the 1798 act that taxed sailors to fund a small system of government-run sailors\u2019 hospitals<\/a>\u00a0was supported by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton alike. <\/p>\n

State and local licensing rules and trade laws governed economic life in detail, down to the size of spigots in wine casks, in some cases. <\/p>\n

It was precisely these state and local regulations that the Supreme Court struck down,\u00a0in Lochner v. New York (1905) and other cases, to promote the goal of creating a single national market. At the same time, sharing their racism with most white Americans, federal judges in Tracinski\u2019s \u201clibertarian\u201d America permitted the most massive system of labor market distortion of all: racial segregation, which artificially boosted the incomes and property values of whites.\n<\/p>\n

The single national market that Lochner-era courts sought to protect from being Balkanized by state and local regulations (other than racial segregation) was walled off by the highest protective tariffs of any major industrial nation. The U.S. government between Lincoln and FDR engaged in a version of modern East Asian-style mercantilism, protecting American industrial corporations from import competition, while showering subsidies including land grants on railroad companies and using federal troops to crush protesting workers. This government-business mercantilism was anti-worker but it was hardly libertarian. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 11, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. My\u00a0previous Salon essay, in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has\u00a0infuriated members of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41112","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}