Alex Hiatt
Picture this scene: it’s 3 a.m., it’s been a long day, and you’re driving home. You are stopped at a red light for what seems like forever. You imagine it might be harmless to sneak through; no cars or cops or pedestrians in sight. But breaking the law doesn’t seriously cross your mind. You take this reasonable enough attitude a step further: you don’t let your silly little thought experiment balloon until its perverse logic dominates your personal political philosophy.
First, I want to solve a misconception shown in last week’s article “In defense of libertarianism.” Martin Luther King Jr. was not a libertarian in the modern sense of the word, nor did he practice “libertarian activism,” whatever that means. He employed nonviolent civil disobedience to win codified rights for African Americans. He fought for new laws, not for limiting government intervention. It was lack of government intervention that allowed structural and legal inequalities to persist in the first place (and many persist still). And though this may surprise you, MLK was in fact quite a leftist by today’s standards. He was in favor of public investment, arguing “we must develop a federal program of public works, retraining, and jobs for all,” as many social democrats argue today. Furthermore, King strongly distrusted the free market: “there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” Doesn’t sound very libertarian to me. Maybe we should define libertarianism before projecting it onto our idols.
But back to real talk: industrial civilization in this century is a complex beast. Our era is inundated with crises large and small. In the coming years and decades, the United States will need to get its act together and deal with the following: anthropogenic climate change; the depletion of resources and arable soils that could lead to “peak” catastrophes; an unsustainable debt-based bubble economy perpetually on the brink of further collapse; the breakdown of public infrastructure; the withering quality of education at all levels and the skyrocketing costs and debts that are accompanying it; the ongoing flight of industrial jobs from the country to sweatshops in Asia, creating post-industrial urban wastelands that will never recover on their own; the mass exclusion of people from the middle class economy due to ever increasing structural inequalities; the assault on democratic lawmaking by corporate tyrannies. And so on.
Well, libertarians, what’s your plan? If you want to be taken seriously, please suggest something other than “limited government,” or at least explain to me what you mean when you say that.
As far as I can tell, and correct me if I’m wrong, the libertarian plan is this: “Pull the plug! The market will sort it out!” Which, of course, is flatly insane, not to mention shallow and dangerous. Libertarians seem to want to take austerity politics to their logical/illogical conclusion: rather than “tightening our belts,” they want to make sweeping cuts across the board, to dismantle social safety nets, to privatize public services, to gut the commons. How will all this solve any of the problems I pointed out above? How will this program accomplish anything besides sending the United States to an anarcho-capitalist hell?
No one likes the drug war, the military industrial complex, or pushy cops either. But there is more to freedom than “getting the government off my back and out of my wallet,” and there is more to the world than what you consider freedom. It’s grown-up time: solutions to complex real world problems require coordination, planning, and common investment, and libertarianism will not deliver when it counts.