Libertarianism has grown in popularity over the last few decades, especially amongst educated young people. This is not to say that it is popular; libertarian parties and politicians get miniscule numbers of votes in Canadian and American elections, and they do even worse in Europe. Still, its ideas and echoes can be heard reverberating around our political discourse, and it has some very high-profile adherents, such as the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Theil. (In fact, Silicon Valley and its retinue of wealthy tech executives is a particular hotbed of libertarianism.) Other well-known libertarians are the infamous Koch brothers and podcaster and covidiot Joe Rogan.
In a nutshell, libertarians believe that individual freedom is the only value that should be considered in structuring societies. In economic matters, they adhere to the right, favoring very low, if not non-existent, taxes and regulation, and are for allowing markets and private contracts to structure most of the social interaction in society. On social issues, libertarians believe in letting people do whatever they want, as long as it does no direct, explicit harm to others. As such libertarians are generally for sexual and reproductive freedom, and against laws that prohibit or limit people’s choices on drugs, gambling, guns, etc. So what you would have is a ‘society‘ without any sort of social safety net in which all personal vices are free to run rampant. Every human interaction would be subject to market forces and as such everything and anything could be bought and sold, including - according to some libertarian writers - children and organs.
The notion that we should have more control over our lives is obviously appealing. I’m sure we all get tired of the myriad rules and laws – a few of which are completely nonsensical - that govern our daily lives. The amount of bureaucracy we deal with is ridiculous. (How much of your life do you think you’ve wasted filling out idiotic forms?) Libertarianism seems to offer a way past the endless red tape and stultifying regimentation of modern life. But the thing is, it really doesn’t. Libertarianism makes a couple of huge assertions that are simply not borne out by reality.
Under libertarianism, no one owes anything to anyone else, no matter what the circumstances, because morality is merely a personal, subjective choice. There is no right and wrong, there are merely lifestyle choices. You can’t be forced to do anything by society or government because everything must be completely voluntary. Therefore, it is difficult if not impossible to achieve the common good, which Aristotle defined as a good only attainable by a community. Communities are built on reciprocal obligations but under libertarianism, obligations simply don’t exist. To cite an extreme example, the philosopher Robert Nozick argued that there was no obligation to give starving people food. He knew if he conceded that there was an obligation, the whole philosophical structure of libertarianism would crumble.
The justification for this level of selfishness and indifference to others is muddled at best. I won’t go into too much detail here. Some libertarians believe in the philosophical concept of free will and cite this as the underpinning for their beliefs. But since free will has been pretty much destroyed by modern psychology, other libertarians simply rely on the abstract notion that all human beings are endowed with absolute freedom as a basic fact of existence. This seemed to be the general argument of the anti-vaxxers: no one should ever tell me what to do, and whatever happens to other people is just not my problem.
Unsurprisingly, the real world never lives up to libertarian ideology. Musk is a particularly bad poster boy. In justifying low taxes, he once said that the government was not “a good stewart of capital”, which is interesting since various governments have poured some 5 billion USD into his car company. In fact, Tesla wouldn’t have made it this far without government assistance. Nevertheless, Musk recently tweeted that the government should stop subsidizing electric car makers. Since he already climbed up the ladder, he now wants to pull it up behind him so no one else can. This sort of blatant hypocrisy is pretty much par for the course for the free market ideologues, whether they are libertarian or conservative.
Musk has also been a Covid denier, bashing lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. He tweeted in March 2020 that Covid cases would “drop to zero in a few weeks”. No one who is this spectacularly and moronically wrong about anything should still have people referring to them as a genius, but this is the world we live in. The Koch brothers have for decades funded think tanks that continually trumpet the benefits of tax cuts for business and high income earners, despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence that these tax cuts have actually damaged our economy and society. The only conclusion you can take from this is that they are simply dishonest and don’t give a damn about anything other than their own bank accounts.
We all want to believe that we can do everything on our own, that we don’t need help from others and that we don’t need the damn government bossing us around. Reality says otherwise. And even if you’re doing just fine, what about all those other people who screw up in large and small ways every day? What happens when your neighbor gets sick, loses his job, has a son hooked on meth? You can pretend that other people’s problems aren’t your concern, but living together in a community means it will still impact you, like it or not.
If most of the rules we have were removed, the only people that would truly benefit are those that have enough money to buy protection from the negative social consequences that untrammelled freedom inevitably creates. The more money you have, the more you can shelter yourself from other people’s bad luck and bad decisions. The rich have private jets, bodyguards, fenced-off compounds and separate entrances. They won’t have homeless people sleeping in their stairwell and increases in crime don’t really affect them. If Canada eliminated gun restrictions, you would probably worry about the safety of your kids at school, but the billionaire’s kids will be safely ensconced in some private school with guards and a high-tech security system. You might look over your shoulder when walking to your parked car at night; Musk will get his driver to bring the limo right up and have his bodyguards clear the way.
As we’ve seen with the pandemic, many people have a childish notion of what freedom entails. The anti-vaxxers demanded the right to go wherever they wanted without a care about other people who were at greater risk from Covid. Similarly, are you free if you are constantly afraid for your safety because everyone else owns a gun? The fact that freedom is a two-way street never makes it into the libertarian mindset. The simple reason for this is that libertarianism isn’t about freedom at all. It’s just a lame attempt to justify extreme selfishness.
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