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RedStripe
04-24-2009, 07:21 AM
I want to explain my reasons for becoming a left-libertarian. I believe that the true roots of libertarianism are in the left, as Murray Rothbard explained, and that our "alliance" with the right is a relatively recent and potentially dangerous development.

For example, the recent tea party protests (which I fully support and applaud - anti-government protests of all stripes are awesome), illustrated the way in which establishment conservatives and 'beltway-libertarians' have begun to gravitate towards the message of less government, yet I fear that they may pervert our message and fundamentally undermine our purposes by not embracing the truly radical and anti-establishment nature of libertarianism.

Their talking points are limited to what I perceive to be a half-sincere call for limited government that is a veil for a quasi-free market, big business sympathy. Their opposition to economic interventionism and regulation barely scratches the surface, and thus has the two-fold effect of potentially empowering big-business as well as alienating a vast quantity of Americans who feel that "capitalism" is a flawed system that does need restraints, a social safety net, etc.

The fact is, while social welfare programs and things designed to help the poor are often ineffective and wasteful (and mostly bad b/c it makes the lower class dependent on and loyal to the state), at least they do put some money in the pockets of the poor (or in the case of labor standards, give wage-laborers a better bargaining position from the law). This is why Ron Paul always states that he's immediate concern is not cutting out the welfare apparatus that the poor/elderly are dependent on. There are MUCH bigger monsters to slay in the Federal budget.

Programs and regulations designed to help the poor, protect the consumers, and reduce massive wealth disparity do miss the point for the most part (band-aids and blood-letting to 'cure' an open wound), but they ARE designed to fix a truly artificial and unjust set of inequalities created by a rigged economic system that favors the rich (aka, State-Capitalism; economic interventionism for the benefit of the wealthy).

THAT must be the primary target of reform/abolishment: the tax code, property law - both intellectual and real, corporate 'personhood', tariffs, subsidization of communication and transportation infrastructure, direct corporate welfare such as the bailout, and, most important, a monopolized monetary system that benefits the biggest firms. But the mainstream defenders of the 'free market' (vulgar libertarians) turn a blind eye to these the most damaging and unfair interventions.

Focusing on 'deregulating' businesses who have a blank check from government and a multitude of special privileges built into the system is only going to amplify the effects of the rigged system. We need to focus on deregulation that has the effect of increasing competition and removing the special privileges before we go hog wild on 'deregulating' businesses in the sense that these faux free marketers (vulgar libertarians) advocate. It's no different than arguing for 'deregulation' of welfare benefits - saying that the government should just send people checks with no strings attached, no requirement to look for work, no proof of need, etc. It's just as irresponsible to let banks, which are, in all practicality, a fourth branch of the government, go crazy with the "alcohol" that the Fed/Government has handed them (to use Peter Schiff's analogy).

We are so far from a true free market that some defenders of free market principles confuse the supposed "capitalists" on Wall Street and in corporate executive boards with people who legitimately earn their wealth via free market competition. In doing so, they become apologists for big business and a system of State-Capitalism, and lose a lot of credibility with the average person who can smell a rat and intuitively knows that there is something deeply flawed and rigged about our system.

Favoring a free market instead of economic intervention does not mean defending the American system, for we have almost NEVER had a truly free market. Instead, it means being radically opposed to some of the most basic aspects of our society (such as extremely large, hierarchical corporations and massive wealth disparity) which are, like malinvestment and speculation, the result of artificial economic conditions created by more subtle interventionism. To the extent that America does enjoy a relatively prosperous middle class, high standard of living, sometimes-strong local economies, and a multitude of small businesses, we can thank our relatively free market economic system. But if we want to defeat those on the left and right who believe in interventionism, and more important, if we want to be honest with ourselves, we must root out and expose even the most fundamentally-flawed aspects of our system. If we can show the left (greens, in particular) that the inequalities and other things they despise and have failed to cure are the result of the state, we can undercut their entire argument for more government solutions to what are government-created problems.

Please keep this in mind next time you hear some CATO spokesperson calling for less taxes on corporations while ignoring things such as corporate personhood (CATO is not terrible, but they are 'meh' in my book). Please check out http://all-left.net (http://all-left.net) and Mutualism in particular.

Any thoughts on this? I know the distinction between left and right libertarianism isn't extremely clear, but I think it has more to do with visualizing the true impact of interventionism and how the government does far more in favor of the rich than the poor. It's possible to be a libertarian and detest corporations and the corporate culture, especially when you realize they would not exist but for the government's intervention in the market. I think it's really important to talk about this because I fear as though "libertarian" as a label is going to be more and more rejected by the left/progressives/greens if it gets co-opted by big business apologists.

weslinder
04-24-2009, 07:36 AM
Much, much, much more corporatism has been passed in the name of protecting consumers than in the name of protecting businesses. Corporate farming came to dominate agriculture because of food safety laws. Fascism came to power in Europe, especially Italy and Spain, in the interest of protecting the little guy. The world's most popular current Fascist, Hugo Chavez, comes at it from the left.

It should be noted that while corporate rights are a product of the state, corporations have existed in all of the most free societies of the world throughout history. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them. There is an inherent desire to have a company that will outlast its owners, and that desire is met by corporate rights. Just because corporate power grows with government doesn't mean that corporations are inherently evil.

RedStripe
04-24-2009, 10:21 AM
Much, much, much more corporatism has been passed in the name of protecting consumers than in the name of protecting businesses. Corporate farming came to dominate agriculture because of food safety laws. Fascism came to power in Europe, especially Italy and Spain, in the interest of protecting the little guy. The world's most popular current Fascist, Hugo Chavez, comes at it from the left.

I agree that a lot of the overt corporatism has come about in that fashion - i.e. purportedly for the benefit of consumers and the poor. Ultimately, however, I believe that these are just "surface level" subsidies, and that corporatism rests on a deeper foundation of flawed economics. Many of the things that I'm referring to were not enacted "in the name of" protecting either big businesses or consumers. Many of them are just arbitrary lines drawn in the sand by our legal system, or interventions whose long-range effects have not been fully considered by so-called defenders of the free market (when in fact, a true free market would, over time, result in a radically different social structure and economic system).

I think it is pure mythology that the super-rich got that way via simple "competition" in the free market (even where no direct subsidies are visible). Ironically, it's a myth shared by both the mainstream right (who defend this system as if it is a mostly free market) and the mainstream left (who attack this system as if it is a mostly free market).

The super rich aren't THAT much smarter, more productive, or "lucky" than the average worker that earns MUCH MUCH less than these people. A superior explanation, in my opinion, is that provided by the left-libertarians who argue that even in the absence of outright subsidies, wealth re-distribution, health and safety regulations, and other 'well intentioned' interventions that actually benefit the big corporations in many cases, there are much deeper flaws that have unfairly allowed wealth to accumulate in the hands of a few and which push up the optimum or most efficient firm size to a level that a true free market would never allow. This should be no surprise to us as libertarians. Most "problems" including wealth disparity and excessive centralization of wealth and corporate power (and I do view that as a negative for many reasons) are the result of government to begin with. The social safety net and consumer protection are just governments attempting to address problems created by a deeply flawed "state-capitalist" system that existed well before the creation of the welfare and regulatory nanny state. They aren't "problems" created by "freedom" as the left claims, and they aren't "normal and acceptable byproducts" of "freedom" as the right claims. It's the result of interventionism.

Without a heavily subsidized railroad, highway, airline, and shipping industries (subsidies in the broadest sense including tax incentives, and other seemingly minor legal distinctions) for example, it would be much more difficult for business to grow to a national scale (and compete effectively against local businesses that are less reliant on large scale transportation and communication networks).

Just as the Austrian economists argue that there are unanticipated consequences of economic interventionism, I would argue that many of the interventions we recognize as significant as well as those which seem rather insignificant, have impacts far beyond the most obvious industry that has benefited from them. In aggregate and over hundreds of years they have created an extremely artificial distribution of wealth and economic system as a whole, and artificial conditions even in markets where there is no directly observable intervention.

For example, any and all laws relating to land-use, the formation of businesses, liability, the monetary system, intellectual property, tariffs, taxation, health care, insurance, labor, and many others that in any way makes it more difficult for someone to be self-employed acts as a subsidy to every firm that relies on wage labor because it artificially increases the supply of people who need to sell their labor to others in order to survive. The aggregate effects of this subtle reduction in competition for labor, like the reduction in competition that occurs as a result of intellectual property, tariffs, and many other aspects of the legal system, is enormous. Then also consider the effects of such a system over hundreds of years, as the wealthy are quietly handed a subsidized labor force that hardly anyone recognizes as such.

The result is our present economic order, which many so-called free market advocates defend or apologize for. Every dollar earned by the owner of a firm that employs wage labor in a market where the labor supply is artificially increased due to a variety of seemingly minor or unrelated interventions has essentially earned part of that dollar via government coercion, although you certainly cannot see that with the naked eye. Like poison in a well, even a small amount of government intervention in the market can taint the entire process and produce results that should not and cannot be defended as products of the free market. The vast majority of these interventions ultimately aid the wealthy and the big businesses, and the thin layer of interventions intended to cure the perverted economic system that results is in many ways a distraction from the underlying inequities.



It should be noted that while corporate rights are a product of the state, corporations have existed in all of the most free societies of the world throughout history. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them. There is an inherent desire to have a company that will outlast its owners, and that desire is met by corporate rights. Just because corporate power grows with government doesn't mean that corporations are inherently evil.

Government violence has also existed in "all of the most free societies of the world throughout history," yet I don't think that is a reason to defend government violence. There is also something fundamentally wrong about corporations: they aren't created by individuals alone, they are chartered by the state. You can create an organization that will outlast its founders without creating a corporation, simply by creating a series of contractual rights (with some limitations, just like corporations of course).

Instead, a corporation is a chartered entity created by the government that is treated as if it is a person in the legal system. This is totally arbitrary. A legal system should deal only with real people and the contracts and interactions between them - not fictitious beings conjured up by the state. How can you create a contract with a fictitious being? Libertarianism is founded largely on the importance of contract law in determining the relative rights and duties that individuals have to one another. Contracting with a corporation is as silly as the "social contract" with a government - you can only contract with actually existing people and their duly appointed agents.

It shouldn't be a surprise that corporations and the state go hand-in-hand. Both are fictitious legal entities founded on monopolization of the legal system. Both have hierarchies, presidents, bloated bureaucracies, and an insatiable appetite for power/influence. Now, I'm not saying that corporations are as bad as governments, or that all corporations are "bad" relative to everything else going on in society. Many corporations are really just partnerships or sole proprietorship in which the corporate veil has been adopted for the legal advantages that come with it. These are merely small businesses that are seeking to survive in an economic system that has been corrupted by government intervention to the core. Corporations, fortunately, also don't have access to the means of brute force like the government does, and this also limits their ability to do harm (they just rely on their creator, the state, to do that for them).

Many many many libertarians defend corporations in theory and unfortunately, sometimes in practice as well. But under both forms of analysis we should oppose them because they are not products of the free market.