Originally posted on my blog Sloth And Dignity on 10/22/13 @ 07:47 pm.

October 22, 2013
Governmental overreach and the “nanny state” are as big a concern for me as anyone, have been for a long time. I think that people will generally rise or fall to meet expectations, and therefore, treating a population like children teaches them to be childlike. I do think if things like that little story about the school lunch (which, if you research, turns out to be the claim of two 4 years olds on one single day at one single kindergarten, and not even conclusively shown to really have happened; hardly representative of this nation, more like a puff of hot air repeated breathlessly across the right wing blogosphere) [* see note at bottom about this. —Mike, 2023] were any more than just outliers being exploited for political gain, we’d be in a lot of trouble.

At the same time, capital-‘L’-Libertarianism is just a gateway drug to the very tyranny Libertarians claim to want to avoid.

Well, almost the same: under a Libertarian state, runaway privatization would ensure that our Constitutional rights, which protect us only from governmental tyranny, are rendered totally moot. Freedom of speech only applies in public spaces… once all space is privatized, and all media is privately owned, all speech can be legally suppressed at will of the owners. [** see note at bottom with further information on this. —Mike, 2023] The Constitution becomes simply irrelevant. Which is exactly what some of the folks behind popularizing “Libertarianism” want. Power abhors a vacuum, and that holds true for a symbolic power vacuum as well as a mechanical one. As the prophet said, truly: you’re gonna have to serve someone. It may be the devil, or it may be the lord, but you’re gonna have to serve someone. Once the government of the people, by the people, and for the people has been successfully neutered, and public commons where our rights are guaranteed have become a thing of the past, there will be nothing left in control but the corporate chiefs, stomping with impunity on whoever they want. That includes the less ruthless corporate chiefs, until finally, only the most ruthless remain in charge.

By and large, in my experience, people who gravitate towards capital-‘L’-libertarianism tend to be intelligent, and most of the time, their heart is thoroughly in the right place. My concern, though, is that most of the time, they don’t follow their own reasoning quite all the way to its logical conclusion.

They follow it until it gets where they want to go, and then they stop, and say, “And thus we have arrived at societal perfection, and evermore shall it be so.” And, I believe, a few cynical people who actually know better that to think that exploit that tendency in everyone else.

Look, nobody likes being told what to do. I’ve always said, “I think every intelligent has a little streak of Libertarian in them. But, for god’s sake, no more than that.” People throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The central fallacy of free-market mythology is that a chaotic system, left on its own, will settle towards the most equitable mean. That’s a very nice theory, and a total mistake when misapplied. In actual reality—”you can do the experiments yourselves that show this—”individual multivariate chaotic systems tend towards extremes over time, not towards the median. In libertarianism, you would end up at one of the two extremes: power would get concentrated in the hands of an ever-diminishing group of the most ruthless winners; or, alternatively, society would be reduced to uniform savagery, with nobody coming out on top at all.

I firmly believe that if we lived in a true Libertarian state, it wouldn’t be long at all before nobody would have time any more to kick their heels up and talk about how great being a libertarian is, because they’d be too busy fighting to survive.

The best thing I’ve ever read about Libertarianism is from John Scalzi: “I really don‘t know what you do about the ‘taxes are theft’ crowd, except possibly enter a gambling pool regarding just how long after their no-tax utopia comes true that their generally white, generally entitled, generally soft and pudgy asses are turned into thin strips of Objectivist Jerky by the sort of pitiless sociopath who is actually prepped and ready to live in the world that logically follows these people‘s fondest desires. Sorry, guys. I know you all thought you were going to be one of those paying a nickel for your cigarettes in Galt Gulch. That‘ll be a fine last thought for you as the starving remnants of the society of takers closes in with their flensing tools.”

He really nails it for me. As I said up top, I agree with some of the very basics of Libertarianism, but the problem is it’s a fantasist’s political philosophy. I like the “Rent Is Too Damn High!” guy, also; but I’m not going to vote for him, either. He’s right, but he’s a crackpot, too.

Speculation aside, we’ve already seen corporate moves to stifle speech that they don’t agree with; there have been several court cases at this point over telecom companies blocking messages that conflict with their interests, which the telecoms prevailed, because they were successful in arguing early on that digital media, like email and even digital voice transmissions, are “information”, rather than “communication”. And so AT&T gets to police the content of your text messages, allowed by law. As the public square is reduced, look for those sorts of erosions of our rights to become much more common. There are no checks and balances on privatized power, none, for anyone who doesn’t sit on the board of directors.

I’m not saying the government hasn’t gotten equally tyrannical. It has, I think everyone here knows it. Bush and Obama have been despots, full stop [remember, this was written in 2013 —Mike] and it’s only getting worse. We’re instituting programs that become their own reason for being, and which suck up trillions of dollars in tax money to go directly to defense contractors, agribusiness, the media conglomerates, and whoever else can afford to make bottomless political contributions. This is, in fact, Libertarianism at work, in the form of deregulation. There’s no guard rails preventing it.

But we have a lot of protections from government tyranny. And as I said, power abhors a vacuum. So who would you rather have in power, making the decisions that affect your life? Someone you can elect and/or vote out of office, and whom the Constitution guarantees you limits on the power of; or someone whose name you don’t even know, hidden behind some boardroom door, ensconced there for life, to whom you have no redress or appeal whatsoever if they are acting against your interests?

I do disagree, by the way, with treating government as some sort of oppressive “other”. The paper says we have “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” If that’s not true anymore, do something to fix it. But don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Some additional notes and references, 2023:

I’ll be back at a later date to amplify more constructively about how I think the question of individual rights & freedoms vs the needs of a cooperative society can be weighed, rather than just by complaining about one existing take on it without proposing any alternative, as I have done here.

References:

*Looking at this 10 years later, I do not remember what the school lunch issue was about. I did some research and apparently school lunch was a hot story back then but I couldn’t find a specific scandal I might have been referring to.

**A reader (my dad. Thanks, Dad!) pointed out to me that I haven’t adequately supported “once all space is privatized, and all media is privately owned, all speech can be legally suppressed at will of the owners” here. That’s true, I didn’t substantiate it. But this isn’t a statement of my opinion, but one of legal fact. It’s been litigated already. Don’t take my word for it—in 2019 the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that “The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment prohibits only governmental, not private, abridgment of speech.” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-1702_h315.pdf, a case which specifically found that private media, such as a privately-owned Public Access cable channel, is not subject to the 1st Amendment. And here’s Harvard Law saying it, too, in an article talking about free speech on college campuses: https://journals.law.harvard.edu/crcl/first-amendment-on-private-campuses/ “The Bill of Rights does not apply to actions taken by private institutions”.