The Fond Fantasy of the Libertarian Right, or Yes, Ayn, There Really IS a Society

[seawasp]

Yet another in my series of discussions of the current political issues...




NOTE: my description below isn't just theoretical; I'm drawing from my own experience as a former Randian Libertarian.





The articles of faith (or, they will claim, the only rational positions to take) by the Libertarian Right (USA brand, the word means something else across the pond) include a number of assumptions, or assertions, that those on the Left will at best look at askance. These positions include:

• There is essentially nothing that can be done by government that can't be done better by privately run organizations.
• This is because government has no direct controls on it, by its nature, as opposed to private industry, which has customers to satisfy and real-world budgetary restrictions, as opposed to the (at least theoretically unlimited) ability of government to take other people's resources and even create money out of, effectively, nothing.
• Because of this, even if for some very narrowly defined purposes a government is necessary (generally, for external defense -- military -- and internal order -- courts) it is to be considered an essential evil and always cut down whenever possible, with any expansion of government authority or powers to be viewed with EXTREME suspicion.
• This is especially true if government is interfering in the free behavior of its people, as the individual is the "ultimate minority" to be protected; if the individual has no firm rights, then obviously no one else has any either.
  • This naturally extends to pretty much all manner of trade and business, because
  • Essentially all interactions are directly transactional: I am interacting with you because I get something out of it, whether that's the pleasure of your company or money or whatever.

Behind these positions are, however, assumptions that aren't articulated as often. These are:

• People do what they do on purpose. Anyone claiming not to know why they do what they do is lying.
• People all want to better their positions at all times. It would be irrational to do otherwise.
• Anyone who tries can be rational (by their standards) and will make rational decisions. Thus
  • People who seem to not be working to better their positions, or claim to disagree with your rational evaluations, are deceptive/lying
  • There must be a rational reason behind this behavior.
  • They therefore want someone else to better their position without them making the effort to do so

And behind much of THAT are some deeper assumptions:

• The world is fair, and SHOULD be fair.
  • Thus effort equals success.
  • Failure is thus due to lack of effort
  • Failure is thus deserved, because you didn't expend the appropriate effort.

These days there's also some really HORRID "religious" stuff mixed in, but that's not universally present, so I'll leave that for later.

From the above, you can see that in actuality, the foundation of all of these attitudes is, surprisingly, naive IDEALISM. In their hearts these people mostly DESPERATELY want to believe that the world isn't filled with random chaos, that there aren't people with inherent advantages and privilieges, and that therefore people absolutely DESERVE everything they work for, and since THEY work, they deserve everything they have. This is of course WHY a lot of them are easily captured by religious beliefs that complement this attitude. Religion by its nature implies an actual coherent order to the world, rather than just "stuff happens", and typical American "Christianity" has at least some implications of a form of fairness (for the people that follow the "right" path, anyway). 

It also reinforces itself whenever you fail, because you can ALWAYS find some way in which you either (A) didn't expend sufficient effort, or (B) were PREVENTED from succeeding due to unwarranted outside interference. 

The above, unfortunately, also shows why it's SO BLOODY HARD to change the mind of someone in this general mindset. The beliefs on which it's really founded tend to be almost down to the BEDROCK of a person's identity. Paradoxically, this means that "rationality" will twist itself around to avoid logical consideration of the various weak points of these beliefs.

And of course, there ARE a lot of weak points. The world is not inherently fair -- or unfair. It just... is. But that means that EVERYONE is unequal in one sense or another, whether that inequity is genetic (I'm nearsighted, you have good eyesight), resource related (I'm rich, you're poor), social (I belong to a group that's been historically favored and accepted, you belong to a group that's less favored), location related (I was born in a stable country, you were born in one undergoing revolution), education (I've been given extensive teaching by skilled educators in areas that are ideal for my profession, you never got through school) or others. 

The assumption of effort equaling success, of course, not only carries an assumption of basic equality, but also the assumption of INDEPENDENCE. That is, it's MY effort that makes me successful. YOU have nothing to do with MY success. 

In essence, it denies the existence of "society" as a thing. At best, "society" is a setting for carrying out your business, but more likely to be an impediment than an assistance.

This is, naturally, preposterous, and especially so in a civilization of complexity and great size. As I've pointed out before, no human being can even BEGIN to understand the consequences of their actions in the context of three hundred million people. Chaos theory and the butterfly effect make this an inarguable truth. You are a part of society; your choices affect it, and its choices affect you, in ways you can't even begin to comprehend -- but also in ways that are inherently obvious. 

In a civilization such as this one, every individual is inherently supported by the society to a great extent. I'm writing this post using a machine that took something like a hundred million people to make feasible, powered by an electric grid that must be constantly maintained by thousands upon thousands of people, made from materials from all over the world, in artificial light allowing me to work way past sunset, in a home heated by natural gas piped hundreds of miles through infrastructure built by many thousands of other people. 

A business owner, even one who invents some core innovation that makes the business work, isn't making the business work by themselves. They need customers, they need workers, they need the infrastructure of society that allows their business to be stable, and so on and so forth. 

In most cases, they need a COMPETENT workforce -- and having a large proportion of society educated gives them a pool of such candidates to draw upon. They need a HEALTHY workforce -- or they don't show up and work well -- and that requires a broadly available and capable medical infrastructure. And so on and so forth. 

But these people's basic belief system clashes with the idea that society is "a thing". 

 

Government's job, as I've noted elsewhere, is to do those things whose benefits are DIFFUSE -- widespread, but not obvious on the smaller scale of individuals or small groups. Because of their basic philosophy, unfortunately, they see these things as either (A) unnecessary, because people get what they deserve for their efforts, or (B)best supplied by private organizations. (B) is a fine ideal to have, but in the real world -- partly because of the actual VALIDITY of their observation about (many) people constantly seeking to (short-sightedly) better themselves -- private organizations will only perform these functions in limited areas, and only for so long as this doesn't interfere with more straightforward goals. 

Their own beliefs and actions have led to legal structures that CAUSE the failure of the very "private enterprise" solutions that they claim to want; for instance, as discussed in one of my earlier posts, modern corporate law actively DISCOURAGES a company from taking a long-term view of its business, or taking care of its employees and customers -- because the primary duty of a modern corporation is almost entirely focused on shareholders -- investors who have no stake OTHER than monetary in the company. 

This leads to the well-known "enshittification" of companies, social platforms, pretty much everything that ends up in the hands of corporate organizations -- even ones that honestly started with good intentions. 

This is even more true for those diffuse benefits that companies can't really make use of. Insurance companies don't provide healthcare; they were originally INTENDED to improve access to healthcare by spreading expenses widely, but once they became profit-oriented enterprises, their ACTUAL purpose became to squeeze money out of the industry; they are now, in effect, a BARRIER to healthcare, and an ACTIVE barrier at that, since they now HAVE to fight any attempt to bring universal healthcare to the masses; such an event would destroy the modern insurance industry quite handily. 

Thus, from a basic core of idealism, these people quite honestly support activities that deprive the disadvantaged of support, the sick from care, the general public from education -- and all to provide an "individual freedom" that they actually can never have. 

Note -- this DOESN'T address the people who fully understand what they are doing, and who are quite willing to allow millions to die for their own purposes. THAT is a seperate post indeed.
 

 

Comments

[autopope]

Shorter version:

Government's job is to handle externalities.

Business's job is to accomplish goals by ignoring externalities.

(Attack by a hostile state is an externality. Earthquakes are an externality. Public health -- such as preventing pandemics -- is an externality. And so on.)

(Employee isn't productive enough? Fire them, now they're an externality and can be ignored. Production process results in unwanted by-products? They're externalities -- get rid of them. And so on.)

You can't run a state like a business because the state has to deal with externalities.

And you can't run a business like a state because you'd go broke handling all the externalities.

[seawasp]

Part of the point, though, was that there's actually two separate groups of people we're dealing with, which look pretty much the same on the surface. One of them is driven by perfectly understandable idealism. The other's driven by greed and cynicism. It's important in the long run to know the difference, because the first group can possibly be awakened, the second is deliberately destructive. I have to describe the second group in a separate post.

[armiphlage]

Thank you, I shall save this for future reference.

[seawasp]

You're welcome.

[sturgeonslawyer]

1. I am totally reblogging this (meaning not "stealing it as mine" but "linking it from my blog").

2. One point of nuance -- you reference "American 'Christianity'" in a way that flattens it. Not all American Christian (or "Christian") sects promote the "prosperity Gospel" or neoPuritanism; and not all Americans-who-identify-as-Christian belong to American sects: many are Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, etc. If you take all the Evangelical sects and all the Baptist sects together, you only get a little over 40% of Americans-who-identify-as-Christian -- and those two groups are where you are mostly going to find neoPuritanism and "prosperity Gospel."

3. Notwithstanding that, you are absolutley right, in that passage, to put "Christianity" in scare quotes. People who call themselves Christian and absolve themselves of any responsibility for the weakest in society are (a) scary and (b) completely and willfully ignoring almost everything Jesus actually said.

[calimac]

Here from sturgeonslawyer.

Anyone who thinks that business is run efficiently because it has customers to satisfy has never read Dilbert or a plenitude of other things.

The idea that relationships are transactional, besides doing violence to the concept of relationships, ignores differentials of power in transactions, and these are not necessarily ones baked into society of the kind that libertarians traditionally ignore, but can be personal or idiosyncratic. For instance, if one person is in a hurry and the other has lots of time, the first person will be at a transactional disadvantage.

It has never occurred to the people who deify "making rational decisions" that doing so requires an immense investment in time, energy, and brainpower, and that it can be a rational decision (by a broader definition of rational) to ignore all that and expend your limited lifespan on more pleasant and interesting things.

[othercat]

I did not know there was such a thing as "left leaning" libertarians.

I have a friend (more like an acquaintance currently, we don't talk often because we both suck at social interaction and sometimes his beliefs piss me off beyond words) who is a libertarian. I have tried intermittently with explaining why his more naive opinions are kind of wrong. I point out that the reason why there are health inspectors for bakeries/restaurants is because businesses by their nature cut corners. When makes fun of label warnings, I point out that it's useful to know that something that has a lot of fumes should be used in a ventilated area. We have had arguments about unions and not even his working conditions (he works in IT and doesn't get a lot of rest) is not enough to convince him of the utility of an organization that advocates for workers vs. their employers--who are there to make a profit and pretty much don't care about working conditions or quality of life of their workers.

This is a very round about and long way of saying, "thank you for the step by step description of why right leaning libertarians drive me screaming bonkers."