Against Libertarianism

Class, Race and Corporate Power Volume 2 | Issue 2 Article 3 2014 Against Libertarianism Ronald W. Cox Florida International University, DOI: 10.25148/CRCP.2.2.16092113 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Cox, Ronald W. (2014) "Against Libertarianism," Class, Race and Corporate Power: Vol. 2 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. DOI: 10.25148/CRCP.2.2.16092113 Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol2/iss2/3 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts, Sciences & Education at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Class, Race and Corporate Power by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact . Against Libertarianism Abstract This essay argues that libertarianism operates as a corporate ideology in the neoliberal age. Keywords Libertarianism, Corporate Power, Libertarian Critique Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This perspectives is available in Class, Race and Corporate Power: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol2/ iss2/3 The ideological orientation of libertarians is highly instructive: They overwhelmingly align with market forces against the “state” and that means a robust critique of the problems and limitations of the national government. To the extent that they accept a public sector at all, it is a very limited and constrained public sector (what some have called a “nightwatchman”) that regulates the outer boundaries of market competition in order to (theoretically at least) safeguard property rights and to promote capitalist competition. The anti-statist ethos of the libertarian movement is sometimes embraced by young people looking for an ideology that can empower them to oppose US wars and occupations, as well as violations of civil liberties that are a product of a steady expansion of the US surveillance state. It is often the absence of a coherent left perspective on these issues that leads younger activists to admire libertarian politicians and activists who take an unequivocal position against US militarization and wars. Libertarians who have spoken out against US militarization, including Edward Snowden, can be favorably contrasted with the policies of the Obama administration, which has worked to expand US militarism by supporting a military surge in Afghanistan and a military intervention in Libya while giving itself an expanded authority to assassinate US enemies through drone strikes. The dramatic expansion of the Joint Special Operations command by the Obama Administration gives further credence to those in the libertarian movement who criticize the concentration of power within the US state. Under Obama, US special operations forces are at work in more countries than was the case under George W. Bush. The Obama Administration has also sought prosecution for more executive branch whistleblowers than all other administrations combined in US history, further concentrating executive power and privilege in an effort to discourage dissent. Yet, despite these libertarian critiques of US militarism, the libertarian position operates in practice, regardless of the intentions of its proponents, as corporate ideology that promotes the concentration of corporate power and profit in the neoliberal age. While libertarians are quite clear in their critiques of US militarization, they are quick to embrace the “self-regulating” market as their cure-all for capitalism’s problems. In the libertarian worldview, the problems with capitalism can always be solved by more capitalism. For libertarians, it is state power that has to be curbed. Market power should be allowed to flourish, even if it means the concentration of power by corporate monopolies, which in the libertarian worldview are temporary aberrations in capitalism. For libertarians, capitalist monopolies or oligopolies are best contained by allowing the marketplace to create the conditions for greater competition and consumer choice. If this means that wealth gets concentrated in fewer hands, then libertarians are all in favor of such an outcome. Libertarianism is fundamentally in favor of private market power against any efforts to make states more accountable to the broader public interest. For libertarians, there is no broader public interest, only private interests. As such, libertarianism operates as a corporate ideology that has helped promote and expand the policies of neoliberalism, or an expansion of private sector and corporate power and a weakening or subordination of public institutions to corporate profit. Fundamentally, then, libertarians are anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian. Efforts to regulate the market on behalf of the public are to be opposed, and concentrations of wealth in the marketplace are a representation of the fact that some individuals are simply better than others, and should reap disproportionate rewards. Libertarians claim to favor a truly free market society in which no one market player can exert their domination. Therefore libertarians should in fact be critical of the corporate domination of markets. But in actual practice, libertarianism is an ideology that supports and encourages maximum freedom for market players, including corporations, based on the underlying premise that the market is always more capable than government in sorting out winners and losers in society, even if the market is constructed by the powerful who set the rules for how the market will operate. The belief in the market as a positive, driving force for change has often reached ludicrous heights when it comes to libertarian interpretations of civil rights history in the U.S. For example, libertarians typically argue that the market, not the federal government, was the best mechanism to end slavery in the U.S., despite the rather overwhelming scholarly consensus that market trading in slaves was incredibly lucrative and showed no signs of abating prior to the Civil War.1 Libertarians view President Abraham Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War as a proactive attempt by the President to expand the power of the national government, which libertarians equate with a violation of “states’ rights,” an interpretation that is hard to separate in practice from the racist defense of slavery and Jim Crow Laws. In the libertarian interpretations of the Civil War, there is no such thing as agency for African Americans, whose mobilization proved crucial both politically and militarily in ending slavery. Instead there is consistent denunciation of federal government action to end slavery as a violation of liberty and “state’s rights.” For libertarians, the market, if left to its own devices, was better equipped to eliminate racism than the government or “the public sector,” a term which li (...truncated)