Shilling for plutocrats

It is frequently charged that libertarians are shills for plutocracy because they oppose the taxes and government regulation which keep criminals, corporations, and other problems in check. Some of these criticisms are not only entertaining, they are valid and enlightening: wishing for a world in which large multinational corporations are unfettered by regulation is not only inconsistent because corporations rely on the state for their existence, but also dangerous precisely because it fails to recognize the source of their size and scope. A more consistent approach would start with the recognition of the problems created at the state-corporate nexus and then proceed to dismantle it and them. The libertarians who criticize government without this recognition are labeled "vulgar libertarians" by Kevin Carson, and rightly so. The rest of us classical liberals should be as much opposed to them as to the anti-libertarians.

Although anti-libertarians' claims of shilling by libertarians are generally strawmen, there is an element of truth to them both because of the vulgar libertarians and because of the plutocrats who don liberal clothing [1]. I offer as a typical example this essay. In comments on various blogs, the author has been making the claim that because Charles Koch supports the GMU Economics program, then they must be shilling for him. Among other unsupported (and mostly unsupportable) assertions, the author has also been lumping libertarians in with neo-cons and Objectivists and claiming that the super wealthy are libertarian.

I'm not going to make a point-by-point refutation to his numerous claims. I have long been fascinated by the belief that libertarian=rich and vice versa. I'm sure Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Ted Turner would be surprised to hear about their libertarian leanings. Further, there is a high correspondence between voting patterns and the areas in which wealth congregates (New York, California). Yes, there are contrary claims, but the point is that "libertarian" and "wealthy" are not synonymous. Further, an unusually high number of classical liberals are academics, further disrupting the wealth link, but most academics are not libertarian.

Many such anti-libertarians have a strange propensity to vigorously defend even the most indefensible government policy. The only point of contention seems to be whether a "D" or an "R" should follow the name of the Chief Executive. Whether Charles Koch has any real power is a matter of debate; whether the government has any power is not. So I'm pretty sure that defending every action of the government is the definition of "shilling for plutocracy".

Beware when you see statements like this:

The simple fact is that iodized salt has been known to solve goiter for decades, but that's not enough for markets to solve the problem. Why? well, we can speculate a whole bunch, but frankly I'd just point out that it's a historical fact that markets don't solve certain problems well, and that government solves those problems better. Defense, roads, iodization, social insurance, etc.

Note the list at the end, which smuggles plutocratic policies in the same package with public goods. Defense is a clear public good, one that even anarchists will agree is a tough problem [2]. Roads were once provided privately, but in the state-capitalist era they have become publicly provided. The need to do so is dubious; it is largely an populist over-reaction to the excesses of previous eras of such tinkering and in part a subsidy to the oil, trucking, and automobile industries. Iodized salt has been privately provided for nearly a century in the developed world and for decades in parts of the developing world. In some cases it has been prescribed by state authorities, in others it has been over-prescribed. In India, state mandates concerning salt are very controversial due in part to the inherent symbolism of tyranny. In other places, the "market" consists of a state-granted monopoly to manufacture salt. Claiming that "government solves those problems" is a substantially oversimplified and mostly incorrect statement, failing to recognize the complex legal, economic, and social environment in which government policies are carried out. Social insurance is a mixed bag, though it mostly does not benefit plutocrats directly. However, the fact that the government is involved does not mean that private social insurance never existed. It could be argued that the government does a better job now than they did then, but that does not mean that the private institutions that it has displaced would not have improved. A serious comparison will show that private poverty relief programs, being less bureaucratic and more personal, will be better suited to a wide variety of problems. The quoted list discusses none of these issues in the hopes that the reader will accept the idea that since the government claims to deliver those goods, that it (1) does, and (2) should. Beware of such lists being used to smuggle invalid conceptual frameworks under the cover of scoring minor debate points. Remember what they are implicitly arguing for as well as what they are arguing against.


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[1] "Liberal" in all of its senses: the powerful can show sympathy with all manner of politics in order to get where they are going, whether that be to the boardroom, the White House, or the dacha. That doesn't mean that they are actually progressives or classical liberals.

[2] That doesn't mean that the existing military-industrial complex is actually a defensive system.