A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds that “the top 0.1% of [American] families now own roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90%.” Furthermore, the study shows that the “recovery” we keep hearing about hasn’t reached the middle class, with only those atop the economic pyramid seeing its benefits.
With a narrow sliver of the populace hoarding so much of the country’s wealth, policy wonks and academics busy themselves pointing fingers and proffering solutions. Predictably, free markets come under fire as the source of widening inequalities of wealth and income. As exponents of deregulation and free markets, libertarians frequently find ourselves charged with living in a fantasy world, tuning out problems of inequality.
We libertarians do it to ourselves: When the subject inevitably comes up, too many of us become palpably uneasy, defensively insisting that inequality just isn’t a problem, that what we ought to look at is standard of living or some other metric. “Capitalism is great for the poor — we swear it!” Libertarians must accept the cold fact that inequality is a very big problem indeed.
But we needn’t regard inequality as a weak point in our arguments for economic freedom, or as an issue on which we simply cannot win. Existing economic relations are not the product of freedom of exchange or legitimate private property. Libertarians actually hold the high ground on the inequality issue. Liberty and equality in fact complement and reinforce one another, the former naturally resulting in the latter.
Individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner held that “extremes in both wealth and poverty” resulted from “positive legislation,” substituting arbitrary laws for natural laws and “establish[ing] monopolies and privileges.” In capitalism, Spooner argued, the owners of capital receive special power in the economy — power having nothing to do with simple freedom of production, exchange, and competition. Considered holistically, state intervention redounds to the benefit of the rich and politically connected, economic elites with special access to those who write and implement the rules we are all forced to live by.
These interventions are not perfect, and certainly the country’s system of monopoly capitalism is overlaid with a veneer of measures ostensibly intended to protect workers, consumers, and the poor. But no such measure ever compromises the fundamental purpose of state intervention — to dispossess rightful owners, putting the multitudes at the mercy of employers. The historical purpose of the state, in short, is permanent class war, the use of state power to insulate a socioeconomic nobility.
The political left is thus quite right about inequality, even while tending to be quite wrong about freedom, individual rights, and markets. Market anarchists favor both freedom and equality, espousing a stateless society in which the ultimate law is equality of freedom and authority.
Genuine open competition is a dissolving and dispersive force. Libertarians should stop making apologies for today’s staggering inequalities as if we arrived at this place via laissez faire and sovereignty of the individual.
Citations to this article:
- David S. D'Amato, The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism, Florence, South Carolina News Journal, 11/18/14
- David S. D'Amato, The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism, Before It’s News, 11/15/14
Inequality is a fabricated problem. No one worries about it on sports fields or at sports arenas and attempting to do something about it leads to tyranny (just read Orwell's Animal Farm).
On the contrary, anyone concerned with sports DOES worry about ARTIFICIAL inequality. Bribing the players (remember the Black Sox scandal?) or referees, for example.
This doesn't seem to be an especially controversial matter — "right-wing" libertarians hit on it too. I've seen a couple of articles in the last week or so at the Ludwig von Mises Institute pointing out the Federal Reserve's role in creating wealth inequality by using state power to direct wealth to the rich at the expense of the poor.
The controversy between "right" and "left" libertarians on the subject concerns whether or not the actual existing economic system creates far more wealth/income inequality than a free market would.
And that in turn places lots of "right" libertarians in the camp that Kevin Carson calls "vulgar libertarians" — defending existing economic success stories AS IF they had occurred in the context of an actual free market when they didn't.
I personally don't see wealth or income equality as a value per se. But I do see a large proportion of the existing wealth and income inequality ratios as resulting from state action and coercion, and believe that a free market would at least somewhat "flatten" the trend. More people would be more wealthy than are now; fewer people would be a lot more wealthy than most other people than are now. That's not a value judgment of wealth inequality, it's a prediction of what a free market would result in.
Athletic competition is for fun. Economic competition is for survival, for those of us near the margins of solvency. For those well above that margin, who are in a position to pit the rest of us against each other, I suppose it could be seen as some kind of entertainment of the blood sport variety.
Thomas L. Knapp sells egalitarianism short by framing the problem as ARTIFICIAL inequality. Left-styled libertarians are always oh-so-careful to put qualifiers on whatever left-leaning tendencies they wish to emulate. Left-styled libertarians are to left-anarchism as DLC Democrats are to populism. They go to great lengths to reassure libertarians that left-styled libertarianism is consistent NAP-friendly, so the left-styled parts of it always come with ample qualifiers, while the NAP is held as inviolate. Like the DLC's, their rightist rivals (teatards in the case of DLC's, ancaps in the case of LSL's) give them no credit for moderation, and shout them down with with red-baiting slogans, egalitarianism=Stalinism, etc. The whole cluster of egalitarianism-eliminationist ideologies (libertarians, tea partiers, Birchers, small-government conservatives, etc.) reminds me of the sheep in Animal Farm: "Public sector bad! Private sector good!"
In the economics arena, the enemy is "inequality without adjectives." There is no sportsmanship in the practice of competitive economics.
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