How To Explain Things to Libertarians
Published by Chris Clarke February 23rd, 2007 in Conservatives Sure Are Funny, Libertarians
B. Kliban illustrates one method.
Eventually, it happens to all of us. You’ll be talking to someone, online or in person, who seems completely normal. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the person will say something really weird, like “You can’t fix a problem like underpaid public school teachers by just throwing money at them!” or “Why do they need tax-funded traffic lights at this corner? All the cross-traffic’s already stopped, which shows the Free Market works!” or “Hitler was a Communist! They called themselves the ‘National Socialists’ for a reason!”
You, my friend, have just made the unpleasant discovery that you’ve been talking to a Libertarian.
Now don’t get me wrong! Most smart people are, to a certain extent, libertarians with a lower-case “L.” We all like to be left alone to determine the course of our own lives without state intrusion. But Capital-L Libertarians tend to take those admirable sentiments to their logical extreme, wanting to shrink fire departments and public libraries and FEMA down to the size where they can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub, or, failing that, at least stabbed to death like Marat.
And some of them are smart people despite it all: they’ve just been sadly misled. I blame the proselytizers, who are every bit as creepily efficient as the Scientologists, if not quite as well regarded by society.* Young people, who from time immemorial have had to learn to find their way among varying political philosophies, come upon deceptive “political quizzes” left laying around on the internet like leg-hold traps in a beaver pond, designed to lure the unwary into the clutches of Official Libertarianism. The carefully designed questions display a subtle, nearly undetectable bias in favor of a Libertarian point of view:
Complete this sentence: “That government is best which…”
1) “…takes all the money out of my bank account.”
2) “…bludgeons cute little fluffy baby ducks to death.”
3) “…governs least.”
4) “…takes all the money out of my bank account and bludgeons cute little fluffy baby ducks to death.”
And after about 89 similar questions designed to pinpoint their opinons mathematically, the test-takers are told to plot themselves appropriately on a two-axis political graph. “If you land in the shaded area,” they’re told, “You Just Might Be A Libertarian!”
And they get sucked in from there.
Now most new Libertarians eventually, after repeated contact with
reality, temper their beliefs. This article is not about them, the
people who concede that some taxes are necessary to pay firefighters,
who recognize that their success as business people might just depend
on public education to give them a pool of potentially competent
employees, and so forth. These people are fun to argue with over beer,
once they get past the zealot stage. And it’s just possible that you
might be the person who provides that needed spark of thought, who
points out that, oh, I dunno, the government they decry for limiting
suburban construction in the old growth forest also paves the roads
that make housing developments in other places possible, or that their
popular Free Marketeer blog owes its existence to several decades of
government funding of ARPANET. If those don’t work, sometimes these
people are persuaded when it’s pointed out to them that back in the
late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian
state they now advocate, and a very few people got very wealthy while
the rest of us died of food poisoning or coal mine collapses or
shirtwaist factory fires. Or you can just give them a copy of Paulina
Borsook’s Cyberselfish.
With repeated exposure to reality, over time, the rational libertarian
will grant that absolutism is not very useful, usually at about the
same time they get their learner’s permit.
But there are some Libertarians who remain unswayed by such ugly facts. Whether through persistent ignorance or sociopathy or a mixture of the two, they hold as an article of near-religious faith that they derive no benefit from the modern regulatory apparatus that they could not duplicate on their own with the homebrew FDA they have in their garage. Or even worse, they manifestly hold the welfare of others as far less important than their own profit and comfort. (As an example of that last, witness this notable Bay Area Libertarian, a meat-packing magnate, who did not want the law to see how his sausage was made.) In a cutthroat economic free-for-all, with the mass of people on the bottom and a handful of ruthless Machiavellian princes at the top, each one of these goobers thinks it’s inevitable that he (gender specificity deliberate) will inevitably become one of the princes.**
You cannot argue these people into rationality, nor can you persuade them by logic to show compassion for their fellow humans. The best you can do is to make their heads explode with simple, fact-based declarative sentences. I’ve found a few reliable ways to do so, which I will describe here briefly. (You might know of others. Feel free to describe them in comments.) Using these sentences will cause Libertarian cultists to sputter, stammer, and occasionally start to think. Worst-case scenario: these sentences will usually at least cause them to shut up, and it’s hard to downplay the importance of that in making your typical day a bit rosier.
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #1: Mentioning Libertarian history.
Most American Libertarians have precious little grasp of the history of their political philosophy. They seem to think that the Libertarian school of thought sprang fully formed like Athena from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein as attending midwife. Libertarianism’s true origins, however, unsettle most Libertarians to the point where the mere acceptance of that history often starts those rusty old mental gears grinding again. To wit, and here is tactical nuclear sentence number one:
“Libertarianism originated in the philosophy of a left-wing French political philosopher who also influenced Karl Marx.”
The French Philosopher in question is, as some of you have guessed (and with whose description a few of you are no doubt ready to quibble), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously penned the Libertarians’ Sekrit Motto, “Property is Theft.” Of course unlike modern Libertarians, Proudhon meant that as a condemnation. Among the pre-Marxist political thinkers strongly influenced by Proudhon was Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who under the pen name Max Stirner wrote one of the first true capital-L Libertarian texts, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, which can be translated either as “The Ego and Its Own” or, more literally and more tellingly, “The Individual And His Property.” Stirner became a nucleus of a nascent school of political thought then called “individualist anarchism,”*** whose inheritance-tax-free heirs include Ludwig Von Mises, The Austrian and Chicago Schools, Murray Rothbard, Alan Greenspan, and so on.
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #2: Mentioning Libertarianism’s siblings.
But Proudhon (and to a certain extent, Stirner) also influenced a number of political philosophers and activists who extended the anarchist critique of power relations to the economic sphere: Bakunin, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Goldman, Malatesta, etc. The early twentieth century saw a mass Anarchist movement in the industrial world, and though that got pretty much squelched the philosophy lived on, to influence much of the modern progressive left. Despite the Libertarians’ historically illiterate insistence that socialism is synonymous with totalitarianism, much of current left thought is libertarian at its root, which provides us with the useful sentence:
“I’m a libertarian socialist.”
Of course, it’s easier to say that if you actually are one, but the definitions of both adjectives are broad enough to encompass a range of people from Noam Chomsky to Paul Wellstone. In fact, the boundary between libertarian socialist and liberal democrat is pretty much impossible to delineate with any kind of precision: people who are libertarian socialists in the long view are often liberal democrats in the moment.
What’s the more libertarian way of running the world? Coming up with ever-evolving procedures by which the largest number of people possible have the largest amount of input possible into the policy by which we run the world, moderated by recognizing certain expertise and the efficiency of delegating some decision-making — which is a bright-eyed and optimistic way of describing the mission of liberal democracy**** — or letting the people who are best at accumulating money bribe, bully, and blackmail their way into running huge sections of the world?
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #3: Mentioning Libertarianism’s blindspot.
That accumulation of serious political power is the end result of the Libertarian political wankdream, and yet somehow boss-based coercion escapes the Libertarian scrutiny to which municipal zoning boards and feminist bloggers with itchy banning fingers are routinely subjected.
Look at it this way: what would you call a political system that regulates its subjects activities on a minute-by-minute basis; that often requires of its citizens prior restraint on freedom of speech; that controls where its subjects go, what they wear, and who they talk to; that restricts online reading material in a Beijing-style manner; that has a rigid hierarchy to enforce edicts from the upper echelons and do routine surveillance of the rank and file; that denies its subjects privacy even to the point of demanding the right to examine their urine; and that punishes infractions by permanent banishment?
Some people would call it a dictatorship. But many of us call it “the workplace.” Somehow, Libertarians never seem to object to restrictions of Liberty done by The Boss. “You can always get another job,” they say, as if that answers anything, as if the class of people who can leave a job blithely isn’t the same class that’s most likely to be able to pick up and move away from a conventional, state-based dictatorship. And as corporations extend their control to people outside their employ, with DRM and increasingly prevalent, shameless propaganda and their own armed forces and even co-optation of the nominal forms of governmental authority, the truth of our next useful sentence becomes ever more manifestly clear, that sentence being:
“Corporations are governments.”
Which is, of course, the libertarian socialist criticism of Libertarianism in soundbite form. I’ve never known a Libertarian to be able to answer that one without changing the subject completely, usually to a defense of Guantanamo from a Libertarian POV. At which point they’ve been made incapable of influencing anyone who’s not a fellow Libertarian, which means you can get on with your life. Try it and see!
* And without the soup cans. And also without the practicing medicine without a license. Though the Libertarians would defend the Scientologists’ right to practice medicine without a license.
** This is, of course, known as the Renaissance Faire Fallacy.
*** And now called “classical liberalism”
**** And you can come up with all kinds of objections to that description, I know, and I’d agree with most of them. Give me a damn break. This is a polemic, not an operator’s manual.
Libertarian Cranial Detonation Technique #2: Mentioning Libertarianisms’ siblings.
Actually certain libertarians are wont to do this themselves: they’ll say “why do you liberals hate us — we’re the true liberals, not you big government phonies”, and they’ll cite these connections as proof even as they go about supporting the sorts of things about which every lefty (and even “classical liberals”) would be aghast.
Please be my best friend. We’ll have sleepovers. It’ll be great.
(the above exuberance brought to you by a week of battling MRA libertarian trolls)
THANK YOU. I cannot remember how many times I’ve had to tell people pining for the days of nights in shining and damsels in distress that they wouldn’t be either, that statistically, they’d be the peasant living in extreme poverty and dying in their 40s. Chances are they wouldn’t even get their own last name — they’d have to make due with their Lord’s, aka, the person who owned the land to which they belonged.
Knights. Ka-nig-ets. Not nights. Sorry.
I’ve noticed you’ve left those evil Hollywood bastards off this chart? Or are they under that mysterious pink X?
One of the most annoying people I knew at college was a Libertarian. He was one of those seven-year undergraduates who spent most of his time hanging out at the school paper. He occasionally wrote a headline or something, but his main function seemed to be arguing with anyone who would listen. He would argue the most preposterous points: For instance, he spent one evening loudly insisting that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust. His favorite tactic, when cornered, was to screech, “I don’t know what books you’ve read!”
I’m sure that by now, he’s a GS-11 or something, comfortably close to a government-funded retirement.
I dunno, Carl; if the night is shining, then the damsels wouldn’t be in such distress, would they? ;-)
I’ve come to the conclusion is a Libertarian (with the big L) is someone who has never had to live in the real world. Either because he is too young (pimply-faced 17 year old reading Ayn Rand) or because he is with enough money etc. to be shielded from the effects of any of his choices.
The third category (the majority, from what I’ve seen) are computer geeks in their early 20s who think DOOM and Mad Max are realistic and optimal descriptions of human interactions.
(My way of engaging Libertarians’ minds is to point out that there has never been a society which has not had taxation throughout history. Either you pay taxes to the gov’t, or “protection money” to the Mafia, and which would they prefer?)
honestly, I enjoy demonstrative brutal violence. as much fun as they have blathering about Randian Objectivism, it basically means “We get to use the government to enforce the power we like, but all other force isn’t FAAAAIR.” Which is why they want cops with guns to prevent people from robbing them. but a system rigged where they get rich at others expense, it’s “legal” so it doesn’t count.
they want rigged anarchy, and I shall have none of that. Gimme your beer money, or I’ll crack you in the head with a blunt object. It’s my will to power that grants me a right to swing my club, so you better give me a damn good incentive to take my crowbar and leave.
either EVERYONE gets a fair shake, or no one does.
Most hard-core “movement” libertarians are little more than cranks with very little real influence outside of Silicon Valley. BUT tragically some libertarian memes have creeped into common knowledge. These are the worst ones in my opinion:
“The problem with schools is the teachers’ union”
“We should privatize x because the government is inefficient”
“Social security is broken because I could do better investing the money myself”
“Regulation always causes problems”
“People want to go on welfare”
The first pisses me off because EVERYONE believes it. It drives me insane. As if all those broken inner city schools have qualified candidates breaking down the door to make $40k…
THANK YOU!
I get really annoyed by Libertarians that rave on about the “evils of government” and “just want one try” in order to prove that what they are suggesting will actually work … when you point out it’s been tried a few times in history and the results were HORRIBLE (and we’re not speaking mildly annoying here, we’re talking collapse of society horrible).
It basically comes down for me to the point of who would you rather have looking out for your best interests and those of minorities; a company whose bottom line is intrinsically profit, or government that is technically “by the people, for the people”?
I mean, the latter might be a tad ideal, but it still stands, and is fairly self evident the better solution.
[as a snark, my personal fav of the insanely funny morons are the Christian Conservative Theocratic Libertarians … it’s kinda like the mutant child of a porcupine and a spider crab; having you wince merely at the thought]
I am going to use the phrase “Renaissance Faire Fallacy” as many times as possible in the next week or so. Awesome.
I cannot remember how many times I’ve had to tell people pining for the days of nights in shining and damsels in distress that they wouldn’t be either, that statistically, they’d be the peasant living in extreme poverty and dying in their 40s.
White people who speak with dreamy appreciation of the Confederacy in particular and the antebellum South in general seem to have the same kind of fantasies, in my experience.
As do Randroids, although the fantasies are a little different. They tend to think extremely highly of their own abilities and have thoroughgoing contempt for everybody else.
what was it, libertarians are really just republicans with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?
someone posted a link to the ‘Libertarian FAQ’ the other day and that was on it. thought it was very descriptive.
If you just mention the word “externalities” to a libertarian, smoke comes out their ears. Luckily, this gives them the opportunity to complain about anti-smoking advocates, so they end up placated.
Am I the only person on earth who has read Ayn Rand and not been able to find a philosophy in it? Atlas Shrugged should be famous only for being the world’s worst porn.
Also, the last Libertarian I knew used to sit naked on the commons room couch and watch basketball. Do with that as you will.
These are excellent suggestions for dealing with the individual examples.
But what if you stumble into a nest of the beasts?
If you are ganged up on by Libertarians, the best thing to do is just remain silent. They’ll quickly start disagreeing on what “true libertarians” should believe, then the anarcho-capitalists will gang up on the synicalists, and you can just call in the disposal squad.
If you want to help it along, you can start it off by asking, innocently, if Hayek can be reconciled with Rand. Just be prepared to duck.
Carl Rennie, that was my first clue that maybe my first college boyfriend was not somebody I wanted to stick around for long. His confused indifference when I mentioned that his pre- (post-?) technological fantasyland would be maybe not so fun for the women in his life was Clue #2.
In a cutthroat economic free-for-all, with the mass of people on the bottom and a handful of ruthless Machiavellian princes at the top, each one of these goobers thinks it’s inevitable that he (gender specificity deliberate) will inevitably become one of the princes.**
Libertarians certainly do not see themselves as one of the princes. That would imply that they control others. One of the fundamental beliefs of libertarianism is that in order to be free from the controls of others, you must be willing to give up your claims to control others.
I think more of you all fall into that trap. You think that an all-powerful government can work as long as the “right people” are in power. And when you say “right people” you mean yourselves.
back in the late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian state they now advocate
Living in the late 19th century sucked ass compared to the way we live today, but it should be noted that living in the US was better than living anywhere else.
Really, I have no idea if Libertarianism would work in the 21st century. That is why I support the system the Framers envisioned–a weak federal government with states as individual “test tubes” of economic systems. New Hampshire and Wyoming could become libertarian, Massachusetts socialist and the lifestyle that people prefer would become evident pretty quickly.
tzs said:
My experience is similar, but the defining factor seems to be less their own circumstances than a lack of empathy and a blindness to privilege, especially structural. I’ve seen kids whose parents put them through good high schools, expensive after-school programs, and expensive colleges where they had their room and board, books and tuition fully paid for claim that they got where they were entirely on their own merit. They have a hard time imagining that someone without those privileges would find it more difficult to achieve on the same level.
Libertarians often deny that structural barriers to success even exist, and it’s mostly because they haven’t encountered them. I had one person argue with a straight face that a CEO really works 2000 times as hard as a janitor holding down two full-time jobs.
Blue Jean said:
I believe in a market-based approach to communication. If people want to see complete thoughts and proper grammar, and are willing to pay for it, then that’s what’ll win out in a truly free society.
Best. Sentence. Ever. I’m going to use it the very next time I argue with someone about Americans for Tax Reform, and watch the wingnut stumble around trying to remember his European history classes.
Not that I probably need to point folks around here to PZ’s place, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
I think everyone meets one of these guys (I say “guys” advisedly; in my experience, they’re almost universally male) at some point. My libertarian-crank cherry was broken by the VP of the forensics club in college, who (like Bitter Scribe’s acquaintance) was a perpetual undergrad. He was majoring in political science and international relations, and was frustrated that no one wanted to listen to his theories on how China could never be a real economic threat to the US.
The second one I met was a coworker a couple of years ago. He was an otherwise-sane Flash/Director programmer, who idolized not Ayn Rand but Neal Boortz. He actually said to me once, in a heated argument about social safety nets, that “if you can’t afford to buy food, you deserve to starve”.
My snarky, off the cuff, previously typed, definition of Libertarians; “People who talk about the ideals of freedom, but at the end of the day, can’t keep their fucking hands to themselves.”
*nods* ditto on that Carl.
I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist, that there is no social-cultural structural system in place, and that we are merely a collection of individuals. His evidence? He’s never seen a ’society’.
Did I mention he was a white straight guy?
I just sat there with my mouth open and then left. It was pointless, to go any further would be to cross over and get pulled into that singularity of insanity …
utsusemi said:
I know I long for the days when men were men and women all wore tight bodices and spoke in faux-Olde Englishe. I also have a strange craving for mead…
Why on Earth would you want to engage in discourse with these people? I’ve found that “go away” works fairly well, if said in the right tone of voice.
Over at the JREF Politics forum I frequent, they have a lot of intelligent people of different political stripes. They also have a capital-L Libertarian who basically believes that everything is the fault of the government, and if the government were to be shrunk to practically nothing, civilization would achieve utopia. You can’t really change his mind on these things, but trying to reason with him can be an interesting journey into the world of behavioral psychology.
The scary thing is the number of his posts you can read that sound perfectly rational, reasonable, and well-thought out before you hit nuttiness. Well-reasoned posts about privacy and government intrusion will then devolve into rants about how states have the legal right to secede and the evil of coming off the gold standard.
And what is really frightning to me is that this guy votes.
My libertarian-crank cherry was broken by the VP of the forensics club in college,
Q: How do you know if a person is a libertarian-crank-virgin?
A: If their Hayek is intact.
I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist
Hey, Maggie Thatcher said that too. Dunno if she was straight, but definitely white, and macho as they come.
Libertarin cranial detonation techniques 5 & 6:
5. “Libertarianism doen not solve the problem of the asshole.” There are always assholes who will game the system, and Libertarian markets don’t punish them, they reward them. e.g. Lee Raymond, Dick Cheney, Ken Lay, et. al.
6. “Shorter Libertarian dogma: Fuck the poor. They deserve their fate.” In order to believe in Libertarian dogma, you have to believe that all rich people are fundamentally superior to all poor people, and proportionately along the spectrum as well. This means Libertarians have to stipulate that Britney Spears is smarter (richer) than them, and high school science teachers are the moral inferiors of Larry Flynt.
Plus the fact that a real Libertarian society wouldn’t last more than one generation, if that much.
As has been pointed out by people much wiser than I, you’re not going to have very many people raising children–child-raising is totally the opposite to any ideal put out by Ayn Rand. (I also note that Rand did not have any children, nor do they exist that much in her novels.) Why would anyone, attuned to “selfishness” want to put themselves through the burden of raising children?
(This is in fact why I’m not into the “child-free” movement that much–I think the financial and emotional burden of raising children is hard enough already that I encourage any help people can get. And the whining about “property taxes going to SCHOOOOLS!” is silly. If it bothers you that much, move to an apartment.)
LOL, Carl!
Sarah in Chicago, if you ever run into that guy again, try saying “We’ve never seen oxygen either, yet we’d miss it in two seconds if it suddenly vanished.” Then watch his head explode.
Number 7: “Devil in the White City” That is all.
Allison- I read Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, AND The Fountainhead and found no philosophical or literary merit to any of them. Rand is morally bankrupt and she couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag if her life depended on it. I can’t really fathom why such a huge cult has developed around her; her work is drivel and, from all accounts, she was a really terrible person who no one should want to emulate.
tzs- As a current senior in undergrad, my experience with libertarians has been pretty similar to yours. In my time, I have encountered 3 key types of Libertarians:
1. Sheltered middle/upper class kids who never bothered to ask their parents how the family finances work who never read anything other than Ayn Rand. And yeah- a huge number of them are engineering/computer science/hard science students, probably because of the minute amount of time they spend in Humanities classes, which require some amount of critical thought.
2. Republicans who discovered that they like to get high/have consequence-free sex/insert anything else that the Republican moralists decry, but can’t be bothered to care about whether or not other people have access to it. They may be ferreted out by asking them who they voted for- nine times out of ten, they choose money over freedom (which fits right in with the class privilege inherent to that way of thinking),
3. Republicans who don’t want to admit to being reactionary, socially regressive asshats (and have a chance of scoring, ever). They can be spotted by asking them how they feel about abortion or feminism.
I don’t know; I kept falling asleep. Maybe if I kept reading that joyful prose, I could have zzzzzzz……
I love the traffic light analogy, hadn’t heard it before.
But I think you went too far with the Kliban picture. Pigs don’t deserve to be compared to Libertarians.
Very well put Chris, thank you. Although I must point out that Proudhon got taken to the woodshed once by Joseph Déjacque (who coined the term “libertarian”) for proposing that the patriarchy be a part of the anarchist society.
I’m kind of with Carl, it’s a lack of empathy or something that causes this. Perfectly sane, quite intelligent people who just don’t rate on the other mental axis: enlightenment. Which fits into my personal definition of Objectivist Libertarianism: it’s just enlightened self-interest without the enlightenment.
*nods* I have to totally agree with this … I’ve seriously had engineering students in their wonderful superiority sit down to tell me as a sociology phd candidate how society actually operates … I mean, I know wayyyy less than everything (WWAAYYYYY less) but I kinda felt like saying “you know, I kinda do this stuff for a living and all …”
I like to point out to Libertarians that neither government or business is always efficient, but with free elections you get to fire the government every few years. You can’t fire a giant monopoly.
Chris, you are so dreamy.
Oh, no, see… if you’ve ever read an Rand, there’s some sort of ridiculous stipulation that mere possession of money doesn’t make you a Prime Mover–you have to have money and be an emotionless sociopath. So, Britney isn’t a Prime Mover… but Dick Cheney would be.
I like to point out to Libertarians that neither government or business is always efficient, but with free elections you get to fire the government every few years. You can’t fire a giant monopoly.
Actually, you can fire any monopoly anytime you want. If you want to stop using MS Windows, no one forces you to. Forty-nine percent of the people cannot fire the government.
Partial cranial fracture at 4:53 pm.
I’ve used the “Corporations Are Government” argument a lot.
Uh, not using Microsoft Windows is just ignoring the monopoly, not firing it.
Whenever I get into it with libertarians I recommend that they read two books: Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But they always refuse to do all that reading, particularly the Engels book, Engels so notoriously being eee-vil.
Stafish Girl said:
Unfortunately, most of the engineering students I knew who took Humanties/sociology courses managed to get through them with their critical thinking faciilites turned off. I’ve heard “I got an A by just telling the teacher what they wanted to hear in my essays,” as if they’d gotten away with something. This always makes me angry — I just want to say, “congratulations, you’ve managed to spend 10 weeks in a class without learning anything.”
Sarah in Chicago said:
There’s a certain arrogance that comes built-in with being in a hard science. First of all, Barbie aside, math IS hard, and it’s a skill that isn’t widely spread. So people who are good at math tend to think of themselves as better than non-math-geeks, whether or not the feeling is justified (it’s not; lots of people are really really at ping-pong, too). There’s a widespread “understanding” that people studying soft sciences like psych and soc are doing so because they can’t hack it as a real scientist, and hence, as a real smart person.
I took computer science in college, but I almost switched to sociology my senior year — not because I was bad at computer science, but because soc is sooooooo much more interesting. Learning about social structure and interaction was pretty revelatory for me.
The people that crack me up the most are the economists. They’re essentially doing a narrowly focussed version of sociology — the Sociology of Money, if you will — but because they have a built-in system of numbers (money) they get to call it a hard science and most people buy into it.
I actually like Ayn Rand’s writing. I think many pimply-faced teenagers–those who purport to be well-read and intellectual–are attracted to Ayn Rand because public schools are so very socialist and anti-intellectual, and teenagers see Ayn Rand’s so-called philosophy as a way out of that unfairness. That is certainly how I discovered Ayn Rand. The problem, of course, is that libertarianism is ultimately a naive and immature worldview, and most people come to recognize that.
Well, there’s your problem right there. He was just a poser. A real Libertarian would bar the door of the commons room, claim it as his own, sell the couch on the black market, and set up a pay-per-view system for the TV.
True. And some theory types credit Stirner with paving the way for some left feminism, in that he promoted the truth of the individual’s existence over abstract absolutes, one of which absolutes the idea of immutable gender roles could be construed to be.
New Hampshire and Wyoming could become libertarian, Massachusetts socialist and the lifestyle that people prefer would become evident pretty quickly.
Heh. I love when Libertarians say, “Hey, let us take over the infrastructure that’s been built up in New Hampshire for the past 300 years and we’ll make it libertarian.”
Proving once again that Libertarians are parasites living off the body of a real society. When Libertarians manage to completely build a town from the ground up — sewer system, roads, electricity and all — then we can talk about it being a viable philosophy. But until that time, I know that when anyone who says, “I’m a Libertarian,” what they’re really saying is, “I shouldn’t have to pay my fair share to live in this country, because I’m special — Mommy told me so!”
Oh, and The Fountainhead sucks ass. Worst movie ever, and Ayn Rand wrote it her very own self.
I read The Fountainhead in high school (I’ll still read practically anything once). I found it interesting and oddly moving.
After I got a little older, I got curious about the philosophy advertised at the back of all Rand’s books, and started doing some research–and was horrified. The only upside was that this experience happened to me before I read anything by L. Ron Hubbard and got curious about his philosophy.
There is good, healthy, progressive stuff to take away from Rand’s books. Ambition isn’t evil; self-reliance isn’t evil; no one should be forced, out of fear or jealousy, to hide their brilliance. Rand is only a dollop of empathy away from Emerson, really.
Inasmuch as they might lead the impressionable towards progressive little-l libertarianism, and therefore away from the ascendant proto-fascism that currently dominates the right wing of American politics, maybe we shouldn’t rip on Rand’s books too much.
(I’m not going to deign to respond to Chris’ pun.)
Regarding Heinlein:
I once spent a lovely week with Heinlein’s wife, Virginia. I asked her about the Ayn Rand award he received and the ever-gracious lady responed with a rather disparaging series of remarks toward libertatians. Too many of Heinlein’s readers assumed that the political opinions he expressed in his books reflected his personal beliefs. A more careful reading of his texts show that he was fascinated by all the varieties of human politics (and the varieties of religions, sexual mores, etc.). Although certain aspects of libertatianism were certainly appealing to him, so were certain aspects of democracy, socialism, and all the other isms. And he was were aware of the excesses of each system! I’m a long time reader and fan of Heinlein (and Pandagon!), and when libertarians (or anyone else) assume that Heinlein (or any other human) was some sort of uber font of wisdom (or evil), then I know I’m talking to a zealot (aka:jackass).
And you’re right: it is fun to watch their heads explode!
I read Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, AND The Fountainhead and found no philosophical or literary merit to any of them.
I would recommend Anthem over any of those books. Less preachy and you can read it on a long lunch hour.
Uh, not using Microsoft Windows is just ignoring the monopoly, not firing it.
OK, fine, you can ignore a monopoly. You can’t really ignore the government.
Allison–her philosophy was in the very hackneyed, and badly-told story, with shades of the thrown in. Honestly, that woman was the queen of the run-on sentence, as well as the ten-page monologue.
BUT–Starfish Girl–she was apparently either very charismatic, was good at finding people who responded to her mercurial personality, or both, because she had quite the devoted and eggshell walking entourage.
As for the whole GUMMIT IS EVIL! EVIL I TELL YA! drivel, all I’ll say is this: I lived in England and Japan. Both places had public transportation systems that were a damn sight better than the MBTA in Massachusetts (and here I have to remind myself that in many places, they don’t have public transit at all). Here in the US, we’re convinced that government-run services are inefficient, corrupt, wasteful, and mismanaged. Not so in other places, where the expectations are high, and the service (such as public transport) lives up to it. I experienced one late train in Osaka in the three and a half years that I lived there. Here in the Boston area, it’s a coin toss when I’ll get to work.
Exactly Hava. And how many of us get to choose our electric or gas or water company. How about trying to find clothes that aren’t made in sweatshops. Even if the people who sew the clothes are treated well, often the people the wove the fabric are not. Christ, even my local co-op market has issues with busting union people. And short of purely electric cars, last time I checked all cars needed something from the oil industry. I don’t own a car, but everytime I take the bus I contribute to the oil industry.
So ya, you can’t fire giant monopolies unless you want to live naked in the woods. Call me a great big sell-out cause I like hot water, electric lights and not being cold and naked all the time.
They seem to think that the Libertarian school of thought sprang fully formed like Artemis from Ayn Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein as attending midwife.
Actually, you are thinking of Athena, there. Artemis was born on the Island of Delos, where she then turn around and served as midwife to her twin brother Apollon.
If the government spent a little more on public education, Libertarians might know that.
My favorite response to Libertarians is the “pay as you go” society:
You don’t want taxes, fine. Every road is pay-per-drive. Gonna take a plane? Dn’t forget the overcharge for airport support, control tower personnel, etc. Oh, and don’t forget the extra $2000 for the weather report before you take off. Etc.
Very quickly, they should realize that the “taxation” thing is the cheapest way to go.
I’ve run into some physicist-libertarians, but the really annoying libertarians seem to be, on the whole, computer geeks.
I think it has to do with the ability to make up things in your system with computers. Don’t like how your simulation is coming out? Just tweak the parameters!
With science, you WILL at some point run up hard against reality and have to Deal With It.
I would guess that the group least prone to libertarianism would be historians, since in general they’re the most cynical group of bastards around. Yet another utopian fantasy, they sigh and mutter under their breath:”not AGAIN….”
It’s funny you say that, because I originally went to college to do comp sci … switched really quick to astrophysics and got a degree in that before discovering sociology …
Yes, we make fun of economists here … there’s a joke about this that an economist, a physicist and an engineer are marooned on a desert island together along with a crate of cans of food. They are sitting around trying to think of how to get the cans open. The physicist comes up with a theoretically possible, but practically impossible solution, the engineer comes up with a practical solution that would destroy the cans … and then finally the economist comes up with an idea … they ask eagerly what it is, and he says “well, first, assume we have a can-opener ….”
It’s a good sign of who is a total geek if they get that :)
Thanks, Dorothy. Brain fart. Corrected.
Which puts her about on par with L. Ron Hubbard.
Hey, I’m sure Wyoming would do just fine without the money it currently receives from the Feds, most of which is generated by taxing the other 49 states.
There is a crazy woman from Manhattan (with a spectacular boob job) who has a site called Atlas Shrugs. She is the nearly the stupidest human being on the planet, second only to Michael Medved (and she ties with Hugh Hewitt). She calls herself a libertarian, yet is the biggest bootlicking authoritiarian I have ever had the displeasure of encountering. She absolutely does not see the cognitive dissonance between her desire to do away with all social programs, public schools, publicly funded emergency services, etc. and her competing desire to see this country ruled by jackbooted fascists who grind liberals into dust and protect ze homeland and ze “real Americans”.
I have never been able to understand these freaks of nature.
“So ya, you can’t fire giant monopolies unless you want to live naked in the woods. Call me a great big sell-out cause I like hot water, electric lights and not being cold and naked all the time.”
That’s why Theodore “UniBomber” Kaczynski was such an influential Libertarian. He showed us all how to throw off the constraints of government and live free!…
“There is good, healthy, progressive stuff to take away from Rand’s books. Ambition isn’t evil; self-reliance isn’t evil; no one should be forced, out of fear or jealousy, to hide their brilliance. Rand is only a dollop of empathy away from Emerson, really.”
I suppose I might have taken that message away from her books had they been written so as to take place in a world that could actually exist. As it was, I got a more realistic moral education from Gandalf.
“A real Libertarian would bar the door of the commons room, claim it as his own, sell the couch on the black market, and set up a pay-per-view system for the TV.”
cycles is my new best friend.
Geez, why the hate on engineers?
One of my co-workers is a Libertarian. A good guy, actually, and I don’t really have quite as much contempt for the species as a lot of other lefties I know. It’s always struck me that Libertarians at least try to be intellectually consistent, even if so many of their premises are indefensible.
(One point my friend was unable to answer in a discussion we were having on the nature of property rights was that whatever arguments you might have about whether property is inherently and intrinsically theft, it is an absolute historical certainty that the large majority of land in the United States was stolen from the various tribes. Stolen in direct violation of treaties that the thieves themselves had agreed to.)
Anyway, that wasn’t the point I wanted to make. The funny part is that the company where we work makes software that is used by local governments to run their cities. This means that my Libertarian friend’s salary ultimately comes from tax dollars. He has admitted to an occasional sleepless night over this.
Em said:
Because we’ve spent a lot of time with them?
Well, Em, if it makes you feel any better my least favorite Libertarian is a web-designer.
Stephen Stralka said:
Yeah, the problem isn’t so much in the logic, it’s in the assumptions. A lot of liberatarian philosophy is the very definition of begging the question.
chris says in the essay, ’sometimes these people are persuaded when it’s pointed out to them that back in the late 19th century, the US essentially was the Libertarian state they now advocate’.
when libertarians say that libertaianism has never been tried, i always say, ‘o contraire, look at the robber baron era: child labor, corporate corruption, tamany hall, monoploies, sweat shops, etc’.
and this year i have also pointed them to that miracle of freedom Russia, as well as Iraq, since after the fall of communism, libertarians rushed in to open wide the free market and the lawlessness that followed. in addition, when the US invaded iraq, libertarian capir=talism was the model the US govt imposed on the society and the market there….we see the joyful results each day, don’t we?’
‘I’ve seriously had a Libertarian tell me that society doesn’t really exist’
i have actually heard that from a number of libertarians…they simply refuse to acknowledge communal behavior. i wonder what they make of the family.
I may have all of you topped. I D-A-T-E-D a libertarian. A female, capital L libertarian!
But, when it came down to it, her philosophy came down to the following:
1. I don’t like to pay taxes
2. The world revolves around ME!
3. Though the prevailing evidence was to the contrary, she thought she was really smart and being a Libertarian, in her little world, was evidence of that intelligence. She was not smart.
4. She went to a private catholic school and thought that public schools should be dismantled.
I could go on. But Libertarians are really annoying, as they usually don’t have a clue.
It really came down to 1 and 2. She didn’t really have a clue as to true Libertarian thought. And not all libertarian thought is wrong. It was one of the few libertarian thinkers who came up with the idea of a guaranteed minimum to be paid out of (omg) taxes. From that concept, we came up with the Earned Income Tax Credit - which is a good idea, and has mostly worked well.
Well, thanks a lot, Carl. Fuck you too.
“But they always refuse to do all that reading, particularly the Engels book, Engels so notoriously being eee-vil.”
Anyone who refuses to educate themselves further about the topic in which they are passionately arguing (for or against) isn’t worth arguing with.
Oh, yeah–one can have a lot of fun with a plurality of Libertarians. I often post over at Reason, albeit under an assumed name, and once got quite a lot of flame going simply by asking them to define the basic tenents of Libertarianism.
The only thing they managed to agree on was they didn’t like paying taxes. No consensus on how to replace them.
Em,
some of my best frieI love some engineers dearly. My father-in-law is one, my spouse’s best friend another.But the profession does seem to carry with it the occupational risks of 1) a greater tendency toward Libertarian thought and b) making embarrassing public statements about intelligent design.
This almost certainly has more to do with certain types being attracted to engineering than with any common trait of all engineers. I mean, we’re probably talking a fraction of a percent of the total here.
Rand is only a dollop of empathy away from Emerson, really.
I’m with ya here on the comparison between Rand and Emerson. In High School, we had to read Emerson, Trudeau, et al. We became convinced that Transcendentalism was philosophical Onanism. Indeed, we had quite a bit of fun finding all the references to masturbation in Emerson, et al. … Transcendentalist literature is full of ‘em (or maybe just seemed so ’cause we were just a bunch of horny teenagers who weren’t actually getting any — if we took a more sour grapes attitude toward sex, maybe we’d have embraced the Transcendentalists for their ideas rather than rejecting them as something the English Dept. forced upon us?).
Corporations are governments. I can deal with that.
States are corporations, Mr Socialist Libertarian. (boom)
I’d disagree with those who claim that Libertarians are trying to be consistent–maybe more consistent than Republicans and Democrats, but that’s a pretty low bar to hop over. Those that do try to be consistent have my respect. Most don’t even try.
Anarcho-libertarians I have absolutely no sympathy for, mainly because none of them have ever managed to explain how present-day Iraq isn’t what their perfect society would quickly devolve into. “It’s a civil war!” they bleat. Yes, and the term “anarchy” means…..?
Em said:
Oh, come off it. I’m a (software) engineer, most of my friends are engineers. I am close to people pursuing PhDs in various branches of engineering, physics, biology, and psychology.
The longer answer to your earlier questions is that engineering skills are overvalued in our current society. This overvaluing of skill leads to an unreasonable estimation of intelligence, and in some cases, self-worth. You can still be a very good person with a very inflated opinion of your own intelligence, but it helps to try to keep a sense of humor and humility about it.
Jerry 101, you mean you actually dated Jacqie Mackie Paisley Passey?
You poor bastard…
My full comment got too long to inflict here, so I’ve posted it to my site.
The précis: My favorite anti-Libertarian example is phossy jaw.
People needed matches. Companies made matches. But the white or yellow phosphorus that they used to make matches gave the workers a terrible, disfiguring disease, phossy jaw, which rotted their jawbone until death or until the bone was removed.
Unfortunately, safer red phosphorus for match-making was more expensive, so most companies continued to use deadly white and yellow phosphorus until legislation outlawed its use in matches.
There’s no shortage of examples like this to use on Libertarians who blindly believe in an all-correcting “invisible hand.”
As for Ayn Rand, it’s instructive that her fictional world contains no significant references to the natural environment, children, elderly people, illness, or disability. Though of course even in a world where everyone is a clear-eyed, able-bodied adult, her system would still lead to the modern equivalents of phossy jaw.
I also love that Rand makes such a big deal out of lesser people’s inability to make decisions, unlike her decisive heroes. It takes the focus off the fact that the heroes would need all those lesser people to actually carry out the heroes’ boldly decided plans.
By privileging decision-making rather than action as all-important, Rand flatters do-nothing “managers” who like to pretend their TPM reports make them captains of industry.
Libertarian computer geeks and engineers probably see themselves as the John Galts of Rand’s capitalist utopia. But to a Libertarian CEO, an engineer is just another match girl.
Oh! Oh! I forgot to mention! Engineers (including me) often struggle socially, which leads to the wonderful “People Don’t Like Me Because They Don’t Recognize My Brilliance” fallacy, and the twin evils of arrogance and poor self-esteem. I’ve been there, man, I’ve been there.
Chris, I have honestly never experienced this. The primary trait I’ve noticed in engineers is the cliched social awkwardness. Of course, if I weren’t so awkward myself, perhaps I would have socialized enough with my fellow engineers to discover they secretly harbored libertarian tendencies (which probably would have horrified me to the point of never socializing with them again.).
There’s a certain arrogance that comes built-in with being in a hard science.
The arrogance comes from knowledge of objective truths. Scientific types feel superior because they can only claim things they know to be true, instead of things they feel to be true or want to be true. Can’t say they same for the “subjective” areas of study.
Grilltacular says:
It sounds nice, and yes, this is how people justify it, but it’s bullshit. The “facts” of hard science are outgrowths of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. The application of these “facts” to observed phenomena is necessarily limited by the ability to observe and the framework in which these observations are interpretted.
If anything, science makes you less prepared to deal with phenomena that’s not neatly observable, measurable, and predictable. Meaning that “hard” scientists are among the least qualified to talk about how society works.
Well, plus, if you run into a humdinger of an Engineer with Issues, you’re pretty much set with stories for the rest of eternity. Just one is all you need.
I have to admit that I have some pretty strong libertarian tendencies, though moreso when I was in high school. Yes, I was the pimply teenager who read Ayn Rand and a host of other works.
I realized I couldn’t be fully libertarian once I realized that corporations are out to screw the people over as much as humanly possible. I fully believe in non-coercion of individuals, but people must be protected from the evils of corporations.
Nowadays, I base more of my political philosophy on Daniel Quinn, and I’m a big fan of Penn and Teller. I’d hardly be called a “true libertarian,” and I still think tribalism is the best option possible for humans, though not workable with how many people we have.
As a libertarian (lite), I believe there is no one right way to live. And that your rights end where mine begin.
And you can’t fix the school system by simply throwing more money at it. Read John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down to see why. And because that’s all the NEA wants, they are a big part of the problem. A new approach needs to be created, one that allows many possible choices for education, one that is not controlled by the government (though funded by them). If you take a history of education class, you’ll quickly realize that our current factory style school system was created to make complacent, controllable workers. That, in my not so humble opinion, is deeply deeply wrong. And now, we’re having our little workers learning how to do nothing but take tests, and certainly not teaching them critical thinking or decent history.
For the record, I’m female, and a history student.
i once saw “a libertarian is an anarchist with money or a management level job.
an anarchist is a poor libertarian”
that said, anarcho-libertarianism or left libertarianism makes more sense than capitalist libertarianism…because it desires peaceful cooperative living as opposed to cut-throat competive individualism.
Grilltacular, are you an engineer or a scientist? I ask because most of the scientists I know are rather leery of throwing around terms like “objective truth” — they tend to be more aware than most of the limitations of any theory or or set of explanations.
In fact, the people who I know who use terms like “objective truth” are almost always Christians, for whom “objective truth” is what is revealed to us by the agents of God over an approximately 800-year span ending about two millennia ago.
You know when you were bullied in school and your mom told you, “That’s just because you’re better than the rest of them and they’re jealous”?
Libertarians were the ones who believed it.
Shorter Carl: Engineers are not sociologists. Engineers are arrogant. Now I, an engineer, will explain to you how engineers interact with society. This is not sociology, nor is it arrogant. I can do this b/c I am an Exceptional Engineer who Gets both Math and People.
Arrogance and poor self-esteem? Been there?–you’re clearly still there.
I am lucky enough to have met the rare female Libertarian–my favorite bit was when she complained about the new middle school built in town, saying it really didn’t need to be all that fancy, she didn’t want her tax money going to it, blah blah blah. Of course she sent her kid to a private school. So it’s not good enough for your kid, but too good for other kids? Fucking selfish asshole.
She then went on to complain about poor kids getting breakfast while they were in school.
Problems caused by starving the system of money can usually be at least ameliorated by putting some of that money back. Put down your book and visit an actual p