Libertarians have become pawns
of the progressive Left in America, and in an ironic twist, both of them have
been co-opted by globalist corporate interests. When everything is privatized,
rationed and metered, corporate rent seekers gain new revenue streams.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish
fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a
childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its
unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled
adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves
orcs.”
– John Rogers, “Ephemera 2009,” Kung Fu Monkey
– John Rogers, “Ephemera 2009,” Kung Fu Monkey
Libertarians are
handing America over to socialists. That’s not what they want, but that’s
what’s happening. How can this be? After all, if you want limited government,
you’re a libertarian. So where’s the problem?
The problem, as
John Rogers suggests in his unforgettable quote, is with the “real
world.” In the real world, America is a two party system, and if a strong
libertarian candidate shows up, he take votes away from other candidates who
also—despite all their other impurities according to libertarian lights—oppose
socialist candidates.
When the anti-socialist vote is split, the socialist
wins.
In the real world, we have nations so that people with a
common culture and heritage can govern themselves. This necessitates the
existence of governments, laws, regulations, taxes, public spending, and a host
of other things libertarians may consider nasty. To oppose overreaching laws,
bad regulations, high taxes, excess spending, wasteful spending, or
inappropriate spending, is the duty of any fiscal conservative. But the role of government is to protect a national
culture, not to just get out of the way so corporate multinationals can
commoditize the world.
This ought to be embarrassingly self-evident, but
libertarians don’t seem to understand the implications of these real world
constraints on their ideals.
Thank God the libertarian presidential candidate in 2016
was a befuddled stoner. And pray to God their presidential
candidate in 2020 is equally problematic.
Libertarian Influence is Harming America
The Libertarian Party hasn’t yet swung an American
presidential election, but the influence of libertarian orthodoxy is felt
everywhere. And while their overall message—limited government—is far better
than its opposite, in its extreme that message can also cause grievous harm.
One glaring example concerns the interdependent politics of immigration and
welfare.
Libertarians, along with plenty of Republicans who are
influenced by them, are fond of quoting Milton Friedman, who once said, “You can’t have free
immigration and a welfare state.” Yet libertarians, if they are true to their
principles, favor open borders. All the while, they insist that of course
they’re also opposed to state welfare.
To-date how many
Republicans in the House of Representatives, influenced by libertarian donors,
have resisted legislation that would enforce America’s borders, whether through
sanctioning employers who hire illegal aliens, or by funding more effective
border security?
Other glaring examples include opposition to the war on
drugs, where libertarians tend to think it’s just fine to let an entire
generation of Americans marinate themselves in a pharmacological stupor, and
foreign policy, where wishful thinking libertarians reject the reality of
rising nations filling the vacuum wherever Americans withdraw.
When it comes to trade, powerful libertarian donors actually have worked
to destroy Republican incumbents who recognize that selling America to the
Chinese because that’s “free trade” is a recipe for national destruction, and
if tariffs are the only way to get their attention, so be it.
And shall any of these issues be discussed openly on the
most powerful means of communication ever known, the internet? Well, maybe. But
not too openly. Progressives run the companies that monopolize the online
platforms for search and social media, they exercise blatant censorship of views that threaten
the progressive narrative, and libertarians applaud.
The Unwitting Libertarian Support for Unpleasant, Unaffordable
Housing
Moving beyond the obvious, libertarians also exert a
destructive influence in the area of housing and infrastructure development.
The influence of libertarians in these areas is hard to see at first, but it is
causing even greater long term damage to America.
It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that libertarians
are against a free market where land developers can easily navigate their way
through a streamlined, discounted permitting process so more homes can go onto
the market which will lower prices. And indeed, libertarians are calling for
those sorts of reforms. But these libertarians are ignoring the most critical
variable—expanding the footprint of cities.
Instead of recognizing that housing cannot possibly
become affordable unless new construction spreads outside the boundaries of
existing urban centers, libertarians, by default, are joining with progressives
who want to stack and pack all new residences into already established
neighborhoods. The implications of this policy are cruel and far reaching.
Not only is it much harder, if not impossible, to
increase the supply of homes enough to lower prices if the only new homes
allowed to be built have to be constructed inside existing cities, but when
that happens the quality of life in these cities is tragically diminished. In
Oregon, new legislation now permits multi-family
dwellings to be constructed in any residential neighborhood, regardless of
current zoning laws, in any city of more than 25,000 residents. Similar legislation is pending in
California.
It may not be a “libertarian” concept to have zoning
laws, but they exist for a good reason. People invest their life savings into a
home purchase, relying on zoning laws to ensure the neighborhood where they
expect to spend the rest of their lives is going to stay reasonably intact.
Clearly this can’t always be the case, sometimes neighborhoods get in the path
of dense urbanization, but it is a principle worth defending.
This nuance—how cities are permitted to increase their
population—is far more profound than it may appear at first glance. As America’s population grows from an
estimated 334 million in 2020 to an estimated 417 million by 2060, the
progressive vision is to cram nearly all of those 83 million new Americans into
existing cities. They want to do this despite the fact that the lower 48 states
in America are only 3.7 percent urbanized, and despite the fact
that such a policy will make a detached single family home with a yard
unattainable to all but the most affluent Americans.
The libertarian
position on urban containment is similar to their position on immigration. Just
as they effectively support immigration but ineffectively oppose the welfare
state, they effectively support making it easier to get permits to build homes
but ineffectively oppose urban containment. The problem, again, is that
accomplishing one out of two is worse than nothing.
The de facto result is libertarians are offering
substantial support to the progressive goal of turning American cities and
suburbs into socially engineered, unaffordable, extremely high-density warrens.
Libertarians Prevent Vital Enabling Infrastructure
In a perfect libertarian world, every time you set foot
off your personal property onto so-called public space, the meter starts
running. The principle at work here is that you only pay at the rate you
consume, rewarding the private interests who constructed—presumably at lower
cost—social amenities such as roads.
Unfortunately, this sort of thinking plays into the
hands of progressives who want to monitor and ration everything, at the same
time that it benefits the high-tech companies and manufacturing corporations
who sell “connected” appliances that are overly complex, high maintenance,
expensive, and rarely perform as well as legacy products. But start the meter.
Let the market work.
If forcing consumers to pay the government and their
private partners for every vehicle mile traveled were the only innovation where
progressives and libertarians affect infrastructure, that would be bad enough.
But libertarians often oppose new roads from even getting built, regardless of
the funding model. Instead of just letting the government blast new interstate
highways and connector roads into rural areas where spacious new cities could be built, some
libertarians have begun reflexively to oppose these projects because they don’t
want taxpayers to “subsidize the automobile.”
And yes, in the drive to no longer “subsidize the
automobile,” there is a whiff of “climate change” hysteria beginning to emanate
from more than a few establishment libertarian think tanks.
What libertarians ought to be doing with respect to
roads and other enabling infrastructure is fighting to reduce the regulations
and environmental legislation that, at the least, has more than doubled the
price and more than quadrupled the time it takes to build public infrastructure.
Instead they fight against any new infrastructure that might consume public
funds, playing into the hands of the progressive environmentalists who don’t
want to build any new infrastructure, anywhere.
Libertarians have become pawns of the progressive Left
in America, and in an ironic twist, both of them have been co-opted by
globalist corporate interests. When everything is privatized, rationed and
metered, corporate rent seekers gain new revenue streams.
When progressives put punitive regulations onto
virtually all forms of land and resource development, existing holders of those
resources enjoy artificial asset appreciation at the same time as emerging
competitors lack the financial depth to survive.
In cities densified by urban containment, land values
and rents soar to stratospheric levels, driving out independent businesses and
turning every commercial district into a generic multinational corporate slurb.
And of course, when progressives cheer as hordes of
unskilled immigrants pour across the U.S. border, libertarian donors applaud
the free movement of people and goods—while paying impotent lip service to
welfare reform.
The Libertarian Party
has never been a serious contender in American politics. But their influence
should not be underestimated, nor their role in tilting the political balance
in favor of the progressive agenda across a host of important national issues.
The value of libertarianism is to remind us that the
private sector performs most functions in a society more efficiently than the
government, while preserving more individual freedom. But that’s as far as it
goes. The real world is complicated, and culture is not a commodity.
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