Outing the L-Word Part I

Ayn Rand, patron saint, of respectable egoism and its business incarnation, capitalism.

By Andrew S. Taylor

There are few “third party” philosophies at the edges of America’s visible political spectrum that have a greater philosophical influence than Libertarianism, and by “few” I do, in fact, mean “none.” To my knowledge, the Libertarians have yet to send a single offspring from their brood into Congress. Perhaps they do not need to, since their intellectual masterminds are in the payroll of the three of the most prominent conservative think-tanks in the nation (AEI, Heritage, and Cato Institute), their philosophy has infiltrated both the mainstream of the Republican and Democratic parties alike, and they have seen former Ayn Rand disciple and rockin’ clarinetist Alan Greenspan run the U.S. Treasury for nearly two decades, through the terms of four U.S. presidents. While one might quibble that neither the red nor the blue of the political mainstream are actually proposing the radical near-elimination of government and unfettered free-market capitalism as would befit the Libertarian platform, there is no lack of competition between the parties to appear the more capitalistic and business-friendly. Nor can we overlook that both parties have shifted so far to the right on fiscal matters in the past three decades that the Republicanism of Eisenhower and Nixon seem to us now more like some Swedish daydream than an actual historical reality.

Libertarianism and its requisite conceits - the inherent rationality of the business model, the metaphysical gropings of Smith’s “invisible hand,” and other popular Zen tautologies - is not going away any time soon. As Republicans and Democrats continue to actively prove by example that the government can do no right, and Americans become increasingly fed up with bipartisan failure, this philosophy is only going to seem more appealing. And here is why we must be careful. For while “big L” Libertarianism seems to present a benevolent “live and let live” philosophy, what it serves is a desire to preserve an aristocratic power structure and a ruling elite. (Let me note here that, when I speak of “big L” Libertarians, I am referring specifically to the radical anti-government, laissez-faire capitalist libertarians who first made the little “l” big and turned “libertarian” from an adjective into a noun. I am not referring civil libertarians, left libertarians, anarchists, or what have you.)

There are essentially two main strands of Libertarian thought, which I will hereby characterize as the Deistic and the Atheistic. These appear more often in combination than they do alone, but they are distinct and their differences are important. The former and the earlier form, the Deistic, is the Libertarianism of old, the kind of free-market Panglossian positivism that long preceded the Libertarian party proper. This is the intellectual strain that gave us Adam Smith’s aforementioned “invisible hand”, as well as the Protestant work ethic and subsequent elevation of capitalists into a culture of capitalism. It is in some sense a mystical belief system, in that its primary conceit, the very bedrock upon which is all its philosophical tenets rest, is the premise that capitalism is actually an extension of natural law. It is no wonder that Social Darwinism so greatly appealed to those thinkers at the end of the 19th century, for here we witness the Enlightenment-lite on steroids. It is science and philosophy in action, and its truths were deemed unassailable and self-evident. It was true because what it claimed to be true was ever revealed to be true, endlessly. The rich deserved to be rich because they were rich, and the poor deserved to be poor because they were poor. Anyone poor who didn’t deserve to be poor could become rich, and if they didn’t succeed they can’t have really deserved it. It never seemed to occur to anyone that this is precisely what the word “tautology” was invented for.

The latter, the Atheistic, is the modern Libertarian response to Marxism and Existentialism. This is the Libertarianism that was built anew after God died. For the cutting-edge Libertarian of the twentieth century, it was not enough to rely on pseudo-religious allegories and outmoded mystical beliefs. In an age that had given us Marx, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, etc., Smith and Mill were not only un-sexy - they were epistemologically outdated. All of these brilliant questioners and doubters had to be answered. Thus, we have von Mises, Friedman, Hayeck, and, most audaciously, Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. While these thinkers varied from one another in a number of significant ways, one common factor, particularly among the latter two, was to wed their economic philosophers to detailed theories of knowledge. In other words, while the Deistic Libertarians of yore posited Capitalism as an extension of the natural world, the Atheistic Libs see it as an extension of the essential human impulse to survive and progress on one’s own terms, and according to one’s own means.

None of this, of course, changes the fact that the latter form of Libertarian thought - pants-down and pagan-friendly - is still essentially a rationalization of a fundamentally mystical psychological stance. The original capitalists were the early Protestants, for whom the accumulation of wealth was actually taken as a sign of divine grace. In this scheme it was natural and expected that all men and women were damned and that only a chosen few could escape perdition. Accumulated wealth was a sign that you might be off the hook. It is my proposition that, in America, this fundamental psychological relationship to money has not changed. We Americans merely have new names, hip and pseudo-scientific, for the old angels and demons that haunt us still.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this view of money as a god-fetish persisted. The robber-barons of the post-Reconstruction era were not necessarily sadistic people. Some of them were, no doubt, but then there are sadists everywhere. However, most of them believed in a moral universe as well-defined and unassailable as the Ptolemaic star system and Aristotle’s physics. The poor masses that manned their factories and writhed at their feet could not be helped. It was a perversion of God and nature to think otherwise. Such men believed themselves to be the most moral of all men, because only moral rectitude can lead to the accumulation of wealth. They were wealthy, so they believed, because God smiled upon them with the blessed face of Archangel Mammon.

(Permit me this digression. It seems to me that our Christian culture has managed to glorify - not simply permit, but actually actively promote via Biblical language and fable - every single human vanity and weakness that Christ expressly condemned. There is not a single one of his teachings that we do not proudly trample into the dirt by way of a longstanding tradition of anti-Christianity in Christ’s name. Pride, murder, nationalism, money lending, even family values - every pillar of American culture and economics is anathema to Christ’s teachings. And now, with all of this sinning, it makes sense that there are so many Christians here. Feeling guilty, folks? In need of forgiveness? The irony is that a truly Christ-like society would never know His name. They would have no need of Him.)

Many have observed that Soviet Russia was an “atheistic” society in name only. With its own party mythology, sacrificial Judas-Trosky, closed priesthood of unassailable intelligentsia, paranoia of unbelieving infidels, etc., it took the form of a theocratic state in every important manner. That it called itself an atheist/materialist state is something of a sick joke, for it is the emotional relationship of the individual to society that counts, and in the Soviet Union, that relationship was clearly mystical in the extreme.

The modern American Libertarian who fancies himself a creature of Reason and Science is in much the same ill-trimmed boat as the Soviet “materialist.” He pays lip-service to science and modernity, but in his heart, he yearns for the spiritual grace of that uniquely American inner-glow that makes even the most petty of windfalls invigorating. There is furthermore, in all of us, that innate emotional stance - unbidden, unasked for - which fills us with a sense of “rightness” when our wallets are full and brings us shame when the bank book is empty. This is not a product of inherent human nature; for most of the eons in which humans walked this earth, such a fiercely emotional relationship to tiny man-made tools of convenience would have been impossible to conceive, except perhaps as evidence of insanity. However, in the present day, we Americans have not reached the stage of cultural introspection whereat we recognize money as the convenient fiction that it is - we still think it is as real and natural as the flesh on our bones. We think that it is “ours” in the same way that our limbs are ours. It is the Libertarian for whom this stance remains not just an unexamined artifact of historical psychology, but an explicit tenet, and it is the Libertarian who perpetuates this most harmful aspect of the American mythos and impedes our progress (The Fruit of our labor is ours, and many rights follow naturally from that - I will explain this proposition more thoroughly in part 2).

In any form, Libertarianism is nothing if it does not argue on behalf of the inherent rationality of the marketplace. The Deistic thesis is this: people who are free to use their god-given reason free of state coercion will make rational self-interested decisions, with their own human drives as their primary moral guideposts and social reciprocity their primary inhibitor against unethical behavior. The tautology that “product x has a value of y because someone paid y for it,” or that “executive q deserves salary z because someone was willing to pay them that” is a common theme even among conservatives who make no claim to be Libertarians. Even our Democrats now publicly treat taxation as a dangerous-but-necessary evil, the language that describes it as a moral imperative for a society based on reason is long lost to them.

In the Deistic Libertarian stance this argument at least has the benefit of being internally consistent. And, so long as one accepts certain precepts - that God exists, that he operates invisibly but perceptibly through natural law, that morality and wealth balance out a single equation much like energy and mass, and so forth - the argument has a genuine logical tightness. Certainly, it is tight enough that it is more easily refuted by assaulting one of its pillars than by demolishing it from within on its own terms (and this has been borne out by history, as it was in fact the erosion of strong Deism and the rise of skeptical empiricism that led to the old Libertarians’ demise as intellectual heavyweights).

The atheistic Libertarian thesis has a more difficult time, because it must reconcile the unbridgeable gap between its rationalist propositions and its hungry heart by more duplicitous means. I’m not saying here that the Big Names in 20th century libertarianism were bad philosophers. I will say on record that they were brilliant. But even the most audaciously “rational” of them, Ayn Rand, could not relinquish the hold of money-worship (which in Rand’s case was quite literal - a large dollar-sign was displayed over her funeral casket). The problem with believing that money and labor are metaphysically indivisible entities is that there are certain implications which cannot be avoided; for instance, that any taxation of the individual must be seen as outright theft, and any business venture that thrives as a result of government privileges or infrastructure (roads, bridges, government-funded research, government funded public education, government-funded law enforcement, little things like that) is a beneficiary of this theft, and that any profit earned by said venture is at least in part stolen property, and that therefore the profits of any business in a mixed economy are therefore owed in part to the public (preferably in the form of corporate taxes). Of course, you could save time and witness that money and labor are perfectly divisible at the outset, but that would undermine the money-mystique and might allow too much rational conversation to occur in public, where it might be accidentally overheard by children.

There is another problem with this inextricable money-labor meld, one of much greater philosophical import. And that is that it overlooks the totally artificial nature of money. Standardized currency does not exist in nature, and has no natural value in the same way that food, water, and shelter do. There are many social conditions, particularly among smaller populations, in which money has no meaningful value or purpose. Money, in fact, is a proxy for other things, a socially agreed-upon means of keeping track of who has done how much of what. In a very simple and small economy, currency might be rightly understood to closely parallel the objective value of the goods it purchases. This might even allow those who spend the ability to entertain the temporary fiction that the money has objective itself. But even here, it must be remembered that the money in one’s pocket represents the following statement: “I performed the following measure of work-value, as calculated by the wage-value of the work multiplied by the time spent doing it.” Money is a record of work that will be accepted by people who don’t necessarily have reason to know you and trust you, and therefore do not know that what you plan to take from society is of equal value to what you have given. If nobody lied, we would probably not need money. The dollar is essentially a standardized narrative unit, a record of something that occurred (work you did) that most people in society have not directly witnessed.

But our economy does not run on simple currency, which directly parallels objective value. It runs on interest, speculation, and credit, all of which are open to severe manipulation and distortion of actual “value.” It is not my contention that, in a mixed economy, there is no relationship between money and objective value. But I do claim that the more “fictional” money becomes - the more severely displaced from its immediate relationship to a closed economic system in which the social pyramid has a modest peak - the less it is a direct analogue of objective value. The $5,000 in interest that Bill Gates earns on one of his investments in the time it takes me to inhale surely has some meaningful relationship to his labors, but it is just as surely not the same relationship to the $5,000 it once took me three months to earn lifting boxes and sweeping floors. Put simply, the ability of money to buy more money radically alters the objective meaning of money. The labor-value relationship distorts like the passage of time at near-light speed. (Or think of it in other cosmological terms. A red dwarf and a black hole both begin life as stars. The historical difference that turns a star into a black hole is merely its greater mass - a simple abundance of quantity that leads to a completely different physical outcome, with its own physical laws). Surely, the money that one earns on interest, or by running a corporation, is not detached from labor altogether. But how much of it can fairly be called an analogue proxy of your labor?

But the Libertarian will have none of this. Money is money, even if you can earn gobs of it by pushing buttons for fifteen minutes a day.

How does this play out? Witness the debates commonly seen on TV between Republicans and Democrats when debating what they each plan to do with “your money.” There are no Libertarians present here, but because their egg-heads are working Oz-like behind the scenes to fashion the next revolution (and because they love money, the boffins at Cato or Heritage have no problem with distributing a few of their more fashionable memes to the mainstream pundits). This is why the Republican will tell you that he or she believes that you should be able to keep your money, rather than giving it to the government, which is only going to spend it putting homosexual cartoon bears on public television. “Keep your money,” says Lord Redstate, “and by ‘keep your money,’ I mean invest it in my frat brother’s brokerage firm.” This politician is peddling, not actual freedom, but the illusion of control, an emotional stance that make you feel enraptured in the divine promise of monetary grace, with interest. He does not, of course, believe that your money is yours. Should you decide that you do not want your money to pay for daisy cutters or prisons, and stop doing so, you will very quickly discover how little of what you thought to be yours is actually yours. I hope your prison-cell suits you. But notion that the government respects “your” money is popular enough that Democrats are loath to challenge it, and at best will only speak of alternate, perhaps more egalitarian investment plans. This is social pragmatism disguised as ideology at work, though it is pragmatism that benefits the aristocracy - the libertarian sugar-coating is what helps us swallow the false-freedom drug.

Please remember this: the only reason they don’t take more of your money is that they are afraid of pissing you off. That’s it.

Next witness, if you’re feeling classy, the Catos and the Brookings have it out on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Here, the opposite occurs. The appeal to populism is dropped. You watch News Hour because you are a rational person, right? The drug of the intelligentsia is ideology disguised as pragmatism. The libertarian engages the Social Democrat on pragmatic terms. Here, the Libertarian is already an abject hypocrite, because he is pretending to defend a principle which his core philosophy requires him to reject with every fiber of his being (social pragmatism). But this does not stop him from arguing every Libertarian policy on pragmatic grounds. Look how our data shows that decreased taxes actually increase revenue! Observe how cutting welfare benefits actually helps the poor! Caution, friends - that proposal on corporate ethics may create joblessness and actually make environmental regulations too difficult to manage! And so on. This is just a guesstimate, but I’d wager that when even the most ardent Libertarian appears on television, he spends about 80% or 90% of his airtime pretending to be an arch-pragmatist, rather than the anti-pragmatist, money-worshipping, moral absolutist that he actually is. He defends his policies on grounds (environmentalism, narrowing the race-class gap) that in fact are most likely of no concern to him, but which are most certainly of concern to those whose sympathies he wishes to arouse - i.e., the viewer, and his center-left opponent across the table, next to Gwen Iffil. In many cases, he may never say a word about his actual political agenda at all. This is because, exposed to the light of day, the actual Libertarian agenda is most likely unpalatable to most viewers.

I’ve experienced this duplicitous tactic first hand. A writer who shall remain nameless penned an article about budget cuts in higher education loans on a popular pro-Libertarian website. He works for the Cato institute. His thesis in a nutshell was that college kids should quit complaining about their losses - they are small after all, and since so many kids seem to be able to own personal stereos and laptops, and have 50 bucks a week on average to spend freely, they must be doing okay. He had some data to back this up. I emailed him, and challenged him with some other data. To his credit, he responded quickly, and addressed my points respectfully and thoroughly. We traded a few emails, looking at our respective data. We discussed means versus medians. This was all fine and dandy, but just when I thought I was really working up to a devastating analysis of the lowest income-quartile of the college-going population that would finally rip his mathematics to shreds, he jumped track, and showed his true colors. “Ultimately, what right do we have to ask that someone subsidize the education of someone else’s children?” Oh…is that what we were talking about? Because that was not the subject of his essay, or so I thought. I thought the thesis of the essay was that “the cuts will not adversely affect the college population.” In fact, the argument was, “they shouldn’t get a bloody penny - let them pay their own way.” Silly me.

But the Think Tank libertarian without reams of data and the semblance of benevolent pragmatism will never get a shot on News Hour, will never be able to peddle pieces of the Libertarian whole to professional politicians.

To fully grasp the hypocrisy at hand here, it should be understood that “pragmatic Libertarianism” is an oxymoron. Pragmatism is, by definition, a violation of the Libertarian definition of freedom and ethics. A true Libertarian would reject any social spending projects that relied on involuntary taxation even if it were proven that such projects were beneficial. This is because he believes in the primacy of the individual and, by extension, said individual’s accumulated wealth, above any consideration of social benefit. This does not stop ideological Libertarians from pretending to speak “our” language of pragmatism in public debates, nor does it prevent conservatives or “small government” policy-makers from appropriating Libertarian arguments and language (i.e., “your money” arguments) when it suits them, even though they would never follow the implications of a particular argument all the way to embrace true Libertarianism. This makes strange bedfellows of two radically divergent (and clearly hypocritical) pundits. And it is mutually beneficial arrangement. Conservatives and Republicans get the benefit of the Libertarian’s intellectual heavy-lifting, along with its requisite lexicon (Virtually every Republican heavyweight from Reagan onward has cited a Libertarian economist or philosopher as a fundamental influence), whose employment in public debate allows them to seem like a pro-freedom party while they pursue fundamentally regressive policies of wealth re-distribution and radical social engineering. Libertarians benefit because they have mainstream pundits recklessly tossing about their favored memes, which slowly-but-surely become embedded in the public consciousness, where they eventually take root. As long as Republicans succeed with Libertarian-sounding soundbites on economic policy, the more Democrats must respond on like terms - and hence the more the mainstream in general debates politics around a central axis whose position is ever-drifting in the Libertarian direction on economic matters. This benefits Republican and Democratic politicians in the short term, and the Libertarian agenda in the long-term. If you doubt this, consider how many decades have passed since a discussion of raising federal taxes - payroll or corporate - has not died and disintegrated upon the grace of the first beam of daylight.

Let’s step back and summarize. The Deistic Libertarian had a divine mandate. The Atheistic libertarian must replace metaphysics with scientism, but supply “proof” in the form of data where once faith sufficed. The latter chips away at the managed economy by bits and pieces, methodically assaulting its intellectual infrastructure with little calculated bombs of doubt. He does not reveal that his true agenda is the collapse of the building entire (flash quiz - what do Osama Bin Laden and Fountainhead hero Howard Roark have in common?) But neither renounces the fallacy of money worship.

What, then, is money? And what is its true relationship to labor in a complex economy? How do we achieve a codified means of recognizing individual rights, while resorting [to] an objective understanding of money and social value?

This will be discussed in Part II

This essay originally appeared on Oni-Goroshi’s Bleeding Heart