Anyone who reads my Twitter round-ups knows I have a weakness for the thoughts of Dave Roberts, who writes for Vox and used to write for Grist. Climate change and renewable energy are his beat, but long before that, he was a philosophy major. His talk with Chris Hayes on the "Why Is This Happening?" podcast about our country's epistemic crisis remains one of my favorites.
Yesterday, while waiting for his frozen pizza to bake, he put out a 33-tweet thread about libertarianism worth reading in its entirety. The gist is that the interactions of different people acting freely create externalities (like pollution!), which need to be managed by some entity, but libertarians pretend that inconvenient things like that don't exist. With freedom of speech,
If I'm on top, "everyone's free to do/say anything" sounds great to me. If I'm suffering from entrenched power relationships, the appeal is rather diminished. I can say whatever I want, but I could be risking my job, physical safety or tenuous social position. And I have no access to any microphones or op-ed pages anyway. The freedom is notional.And later in the thread,
Powerful incumbents are heavily incentivized to view their own power as a result of merit. This is why every rich person is convinced their wealth is a result of their cleverness and hard work alone. The same is true of powerful demographics. History is packed with dominant groups justifying their dominance as natural and proper -- then it was divine right of kings, now it's free markets. But true democracy, much like a truly competitive market, is anathema to incumbents! A truly level playing field terrifies them.This thread reminded me of some posts I've read over the years by Matt Bruenig, and it looks like I have scattered links to a few of them here and there on this blog but not all, so here's a more concise list:
If you want to maximize freedom in a democracy (or competitiveness in a market), then no freedom can be absolute. Maximizing total freedom always involves *balancing* freedoms, with everyone agreeing to some constraints and sacrifices for the larger good.
Absolute freedom is an illusion of power, a notion that's only plausible to someone observing the world atop a mountain of accumulated privilege. This is why 99.99% of libertarians are upper middle class white dudes. (Don't they ever wonder why that is?)
If you already have power, "leave me alone" sounds like freedom. If you suffer under a grinding legacy of historically entrenched structural disadvantages, "leave me alone" sounds like "leave me alone to suffer and die in powerless silence."...
[Libertarianism] says, "shrink government and leave me alone to enjoy my power." It is a defense of power masquerading as procedural neutrality.
This entire thread also serves as an explanation for why the GOP has drifted so far away from its "small government" quasi-libertarian rhetoric. When white male patriarchal Christian culture was firmly at the top of U.S. culture, "leave us alone," as a philosophy, appealed. But when culture and demographics started reducing the primacy of white male patriarchal Christian culture, the language of procedural neutrality declined and white supremacy rose to the surface -- because social/political/economic dominance was always the real motivation.
In a pluralistic, multiethnic, multicultural society, maximizing the freedom and welfare of the most people requires active government and active measures to reduce entrenched privilege. Passive, hands-off government appeals to those who'd just as soon hang on to those privileges.
- Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology
- Capitalism Whack-a-Mole
- Real life capitalism Whack-a-Mole
- How did private property start?
- Sorry, John Stuart Mill was not a Libertarian
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